"In other words, Mr. Flynn," I observed, "You can't win against the Cops. Anything to keep their job. Okay, I know when I'm licked. I'll leave town and I'll even beat you to the booby-hatch. If this is sanity, I _want_ to be locked up."
Chief Flynn hunched his shoulders and scowled at me.
"Yes," I told him, "I'll check myself with the psychiatrists."
"Mr. Tompkins," Flynn remarked quietly, "the more I see of you the more I feel that you ought to have immediate medical attention."
He lifted his telephone and began dialing a number.
"And won't that look swell on your record," I said, "when President Truman gives me a citation for the Order of Merit the same day that Chief Flynn locks me up as a threat to the President."
"Oh!" Flynn laid down the receiver and looked at me with dawning respect.
"Oh! is right," I replied, and left the room.
Nobody tried to stop me as I walked out of the Treasury but I knew that I must take no more chances. From now on it was a race to the alienists, and the best hope for continued liberty lay with my getting there first.
I hailed a taxicab. "Drive me to the Phipps Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital," I told the driver.
"You are absolutely right," I told him, "and it's fifty bucks for you if you get me there inside the hour."
I sank back on the cushions of the rear seat. I had come out of the Washington rat-race worse off than when I had entered it. Then it was merely a question of my liberty. After three days it had become a matter of my sanity.
The white-coated medical man--he said that he was associate psychiatrist at the Phipps Clinic--beckoned me to follow him into a side-room. He waved me to be seated and closed the door.
"You see, Mr. Tompkins," he told me, "everybody's crazy."
There is no point in recounting the stages which had converted my panic flight from the wrath of the Secret Service into this interview with one of Johns Hopkins psychiatric staff, except that I had been amazed by the ease with which he had drawn me aside shortly after I had sat down in the waiting-room.
"Of course I realize, doctor," I replied, "that everyone must be abnormal since that is how you establish an average normality. My case is so peculiar, though, that I'd like to have you check on me."