“Having done what for a hundred and seventy some years?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Incidentally, I don’t doubt that this is George Vine’s body, and with it I inherited his knowledge—except his personal memories. For example, I knew how to handle his job at the newspaper, although I didn’t remember any of the people I worked with there. I have his knowledge of English, for instance, and his ability to write. I knew how to operate a typewriter. My handwriting is the same as his.”
“If you think that you are not Vine, how do you account for that?”
He leaned forward. “I think part of me is George Vine, and part of me isn’t. I think some transference has happened which is outside the run of ordinary human experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s supernatural—nor that I’m insane. Does it? ”
Dr. Irving didn’t answer. Instead, he asked, “You kept this secret for three years, for understandable reasons. Now, presumably for other reasons, you decide to tell. What are the other reasons? What has happened to change your attitude?”
It was the question that had been bothering him.
He said slowly, “Because I don’t believe in coincidence. Because something in the situation itself has changed. Because I’m tired of pretending. Because I’m willing to risk imprisonment as a paranoic to find out the truth.”
“What in the situation has changed?”
“Yesterday it was suggested—by my employer—that I feign insanity for a practical reason. And the very kind of insanity which I have, if any: Surely, I will admit the possibility that I’m insane. But I can only operate on the theory that I’m not. You know that you’re Dr. Willard E. Irving; you can only operate on that theory—but how do you know you are? Maybe you’re insane, but you can only act as though you’re not.”
“You think your employer is part of a plot—ah—against you? You think there is a conspiracy to get you into a sanitarium?”