“You mean, go in as a guard or something?” Candler said, “Something.”
“Oh.”
He got up out of the chair and walked over to the window, stood with his back to the managing editor, looking out. The sun had moved hardly at all. Yet the shadow pattern in the streets looked different, obscurely different. The shadow pattern inside himself was different, too. This, he knew, was what had been going to happen. He turned around. He said, “No, Hell no.”
Candler shrugged imperceptibly. “Don’t blame you. I haven’t even asked you to. I wouldn’t do it myself.”
He asked, “What does Ellsworth Joyce Randolph think is going on inside his nuthouse? It must be something pretty screwy if it made you wonder whether Randolph himself is sane.”
“I can’t tell you that, Vine. Promised him I wouldn’t, whether or not you took the assignment.”
“You mean—even if I took the job I still wouldn’t know what I was looking for?”
“That’s right. You’d be prejudiced. You wouldn’t be objective. You’d be looking for something, and you might think you found it whether it was there or not. Or you might be so prejudiced against finding it that you’d refuse to recognize it if it bit you in the leg.”
He strode from the window over to the desk and banged his fist down on it.
He said, “God damn it, Candler, why me? You know what happened to me three years ago.”