"See?" I yelled again. "Look at that fan!"
Their eyes showed their astonishment. The smoke began to disappear in the stillness. "What about that? Now do you believe me?"
Maybe they did. No one said anything. They took me back to my room. About an hour or so later they came after me again. The chair felt no more comfortable than it ever had, though it was beginning to shape itself to my seat. The same faces were there, but the air was a little different this time. On the desk, where I had seen sit no one but J. Edgar Hoover were a half dozen fans, plugged to an extension cord that snaked away and lost itself in a dark corner. My ears twitched hopefully. Maybe this was going to get me out of here. One of the younger men spoke up.
"Mr. Miller," he said briskly, "can you stop these fans as you did, apparently, the other?"
I started to tell him that "apparently" wasn't the right word. One of the older men broke in.
"One moment," he said. "Can you stop any one of these fans, or all of them? Any particular one, and leave the rest alone?"
I thought I could. "Which one?" There were five fans whirring silently away.
"Well ... the one in the center."
The one in the center. One out of five. Hold your breath, Peter Ambrose, hold it now or you can hold your breath the rest of your natural life and no one will ever know, nor ever care. The fan in the center began to smoke and the blades choked off abruptly.