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annals of Antarctic exploration. ‘But I don’t know that such an error would be a hallucination,’ Merryweather went on. ‘A fellow is hallucinated when he believes something – or somebody – to be there that isn’t there at all. It’s always been my guess that the albatross in the poem fills the bill. I can’t remember whose poem, but it made a tremendous impression on me as a kid. Started me off, really.’ Merryweather, who was about seven feet tall, and broad in proportion, suddenly blushed like a girl – being moved to indict himself, it was to be supposed, of egotistical interruption. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But interests me, rather. Happened to me. Suddenly a third fellow tugging the sledge. Useful – if he’d really been there. Unnerving, since he certainly wasn’t.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ the judge said, ‘this unfortunate patient of Tim’s had an experience of that kind. Tim, what about that? Might he have miraged up a second man, tugging at the ropes with him ?’
    ‘Nothing’s more probable.’ Budgery nodded appreciatively. ‘His brother, you know, Colin Buzfuz’s brother Adam.’
    ‘And now let me go on.’ Professor Budgery had the art of smoking a cigar as he talked, but had paused briefly to give a critical eye to it. ‘Our distressed mariner was immediately hospitalized, and I soon heard enough about him to take over his bed myself. For days we monitored him – my two housemen, my registrar and I – pretty well round the clock. I tell you, I sat by the fellow myself for an hour at a time!’ Budgery chuckled. ‘And the others shared out the remaining twenty-three hours between them.’
    ‘Capital!’ Mr Justice Somebody said. ‘But it wouldn’t work on the bench.’
    ‘I suppose not. The chap in the dock would object, eh? But now I’ll tell you. Colin Buzfuz’s was an astonishing case of intermittent retroactive amnesia. He had a memory on which the curtain went up and down much as in the theatre at the end of a pantomime. It eggs on the audience to applaud, doesn’t it? We were almost applauding ourselves.’
    ‘This was simply the result,’ Merryweather asked, ‘of his having had a thin time?’
    ‘It was obviously more than that. The aetiology, when we untangled it, was fairly complex. There was the hunger and thirst and exposure – which must have counted for a good deal. But he’d been clipped on the head when his mast came down. Or so he said. There was no physical sign of it by the time we examined him. But then a quite surprisingly long period of time was involved. Months had passed – months, I tell you! – since his first disaster had overtaken him. There’s always something honestly physiological at the bottom of those capers of the mind, if you ask me. A trauma, in the only exact sense of the word. Not that his immaterial part hadn’t been under stress as well. His brother Adam had been killed before his eyes – and when they were bang in the middle of the Pacific, and a thousand miles from anywhere.’
    ‘When that mast came down?’ Appleby asked.
    ‘It seemed to have been then – and his own clip on the nut as well. He was left in a bad way, but managed to step the jury-mast, and just went on sailing. He remembered clearly – in moments when he remembered anything clearly – that he’d twice got into regular shipping routes, and actually been hailed on several occasions. There must have been craft that would have been glad enough to pick him up and turn an honest penny on him. But he sailed on like the Flying Dutchman.’
    ‘Wasn’t there a lookout for him by that time?’ Merryweather asked curiously. ‘All that sort of thing is very well covered nowadays, so far as the high seas go. A fellow has to make for my old haunts if he wants to remain unpestered. Even quite small craft with nothing but corpses aboard can be quite a hazard. So Flying Dutchmen aren’t encouraged.’
    ‘Perhaps not. But that sort of crazy traipsing round the seven seas