"There," said Garten with deep satisfaction, "He did do it."
Viola sighed, smiling. "Darling! He did! It worked just the way you said it would. But I'm still not sure I quite understand why—or how."
"It doesn't really matter. But—you noticed he quit taking the anti-hypnotic pills after the first week?"
"Yes. Did that make any difference? The satellite worked, didn't it? And everything else went just the way he wanted it. It all seemed perfect—for him."
"Sure it did. And that was what he couldn't face losing."
"Hmm?"
"Well, it seemed that everything went exactly the way he imagined it would. The satellite worked. The people followed him. Everything. But maybe we all only imagined it. How can we be sure? After all, those things—plus our purely personal concerns that he was far too busy to take any note of—"
Viola blushed, quite charmingly for a plain, mousy little woman.
"—were what we were expecting too. How can we know, for sure, what was real and what was illusion?"