When he looked up again, the door had opened the slightest crack. Damn, he thought, this job is going to drive me whacky yet. He recalled an episode of a few weeks earlier. He didn't want to, but the thought came just the same. Some of his patients had delusions so logical and systematized it was hard to prove to them that they were wrong. Sometimes it was hard to prove to yourself they were not right after all.
The woman from Mars, for example. She had actually believed that she was from the fourth planet, was really a Martian stranded here unaccountably. She had told a good straight story, but he had managed to convince her that she was not from Mars. He had persuaded her that she was an Earthling like everybody else, and that space travel of any sort was utterly impossible anyway.
He had been about to prove that there was probably no such planet as Mars when she'd decided not to come back. That was close to the time the meteorite landed a few miles away, the one that had never been found. After all, while not a usual occurrence, over-developed lungs and six fingers on each hand didn't mean—
The door edged open slightly, and an eye peered fearfully into the room. Then it swung wide, and the young man standing in the doorway let out a blastfurnace sigh that could be heard in surrounding offices.
"Come in, Mr. Moore," the psychiatrist said, "come in, close the door, sit down."
Mr. Moore did all these things with normal speed and in the proper order, but he did have a tendency to sit on the edge of his chair, as though he were sitting on a cliff and might topple over at any moment. The psychiatrist doodled on his pad impatiently.
"Well now, just what seems to be the trouble?"
Mr. Moore wet his lips. His face was white. He said, "I'm a mathematician. I work at the University."
"Oh," the other said, bringing to voice facts he'd read a few minutes before. "You're that Charles T. Moore, the one whose picture was in the paper a short time ago. Something about mathematics, I remember."
Moore nodded.