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watch.
    Twenty minutes to five. In the morning? I held the watch to my ear, and it was ticking. I’d been unconscious nearly seventeen hours. No wonder I was so hungry.
    I dressed with a great deal of difficulty. Not only did my head wince at every careless movement, I had a lot of trouble getting any useful assistance from the fingers of my right hand. They jutted from the cast, but didn’t want to work well. Zipping my trousers was bad enough, but tying my shoelaces was very nearly impossible, and when I finally had loose sloppy knots done on both, the headache was with me full-strength. I sat in the chair at the writing desk a few minutes, till I felt a little better, and then got up to finish dressing.
    A shirt was impossible, so what I finally did was put on the tops to the pajama bottoms I’d awakened in, leaving the right sleeve dangling empty and buttoning the buttons awkwardly with my left hand.
    I had brought a small pencil flashlight, and this I tucked into my hip pocket before leaving the room. It was quarter past five when at last I opened the hall door, it having taken me over half an hour to get dressed.
    The corridor lights were on. I shut the room door behind me and stood listening to the silence a moment. The echo was muted late at night, but it still existed, vibrating far away out of sight, as though some tiny bird were caged in the attic.
    I found the staircase this time with no false turns. It was empty, silent, enclosed, with lit ceiling globes at top and bottom. I took out my pencil flash, awkwardly sat down on the top step, switched on the flashlight, and carefully examined the baseboard on both sides. I could see nothing at all on the left, but on the right I could just barely make out the small hole where a nail or tack of some kind had recently been.
    So my guess was probably right. He had stretched some sort of wire or string across the top of the stairs, just at ankle height. I distinctly remembered the feeling that something had caught my ankle.
    He’d been taking quite a chance this time. He’d set the trap in broad daylight—it hadn’t been there when Jerry Kanter and I had come upstairs—and then he’d had to wait nearby until someone was caught, so he could quickly go and remove the evidence, the wire and tacks.
    This was his fifth booby trap, and he hadn’t yet repeated himself. The first had been a table that had collapsed in the dining room, bruising the legs of the two people sitting there and burning them both with hot coffee. The second was when a resident opened a seldom-used storage closet and a six-foot-long metal piece of bed frame which had been leaning against the door on the inside fell out and hit him in the face, cutting his mouth and chipping two of his teeth. The third was the collapse of a small terrace outside a woman resident’s room while she was standing on it to watch a touch football game on the lawn below, the result being that she was now in the local hospital with a broken neck and three broken ribs, among other injuries. And the fourth was a ladder rung that had given way while a resident was doing some work on the gutters, so that he fell and broke his leg.
    It was the ladder accident that had tipped his hand, since another resident, in putting the ladder away, had seen that it was partly sawn through, and had taken the evidence to Doctor Cameron. They’d checked the terrace and found that that had been tampered with also. There was no way to prove the bed frame had been left dangerously against the door on purpose, and the collapsed table had long since been thrown out, but the evidence of the third and fourth accidents was enough to force Doctor Cameron to take action. The action he had chosen to take was me. I had agreed with great reluctance to come up here and pretend to be another resident while trying to find out who was causing these injuries, and I had promptly become victim number five.
    My only consolation was that so far no one had been