"I see."
"Ergo, Doc, what I say is this: You are to hypnotize me. You are to give me a post-hypnotic suggestion that I am to forget the error in my calculations, that I am to recheck them carefully and completely, without knowing that some factor in them is in error. Then and only then can I locate it; as soon as I locate this error, I am to remember everything."
"Supposing your mathematics is not in error but is entirely correct—suppose no error truly exists?"
"There is that possibility; but if the paradox is true, I will have at least been forced to forget that I once believed an error existed. But I must check this math as a competent and unbiassed observer."
"That can be done."
"Good; now let's get going and let's have no more nonsense about my glands."
"This I can do; I will help you."
Maculay relaxed while the doctor produced his hypnoscope and set it up on the table. With Maculay's cooperation, he was in the hypnotic trance in a matter of seconds.
Doctor Hanson looked at the man. This was probably the first time that the entire man had relaxed, mind and body, in years. But Hanson did not see the point: Maculay may have run into a mathematical paradox, but it was not of honest mathematics. Figures do not lie, but liars can figure; it is more than possible that a brain will introduce an error in order that the facts of the case be unrecognized. Hanson nodded quietly. Man was mind and glands and body and appetite, bones, hide, and ulcers. If a sick mind can produce a sickness of the body, the reverse is true. Cliff's error was not in his mathematics; it was in his life.