Ballroom of the Skies by John D. MacDonald

left-handed, had been trying awkwardly to snip off a hangnail on the middle finger of his left hand. Dake had volunteered help, which was gratefully received. The nail had been split a bit, and so he had pared it down carefully. That was the day before yesterday. Yet right now the nail was fully as long as the others. It could not possibly grow that fast. Dake knew he had not imagined the incident. It
had
been the left hand. He reached out and took the cool slack hand.
    “Please don’t touch the patient,” the nurse said sharply.
    He released the hand, stood up and bent over to stare more closely. He looked at the slack face, comatose, dying.
    “What’s the matter?” the nurse demanded.
    Dake glanced at her. He knew at once how far he’d get if he tried to tell her this was not Darwin Branson. They’d have him in the next room down the hall. He sat down slowly, hoping that his emotions did not show on his face.
    “Dake, I believe a fiddle-playing gentleman once commented that after you have ruled out all the impossibilities, that which remains is the solution. By the same token, if after all of the impossibilities have been ruled out, you have nothing left, then you have made a mistake in classification. You have overlooked a possibility by labeling it impossible. Like a man with a pocket lighter captured by aborigines. The wise man of the tribe says that it is impossible that there is lightning captured in that silver box. He says it is impossible that there is a tiny man in there, rubbing sticks together. He says it is impossible that fire can be made by any other than those two methods. So he falls down and worships, because he finds himself in the presence of the impossible. It was his third supposition that needed reclassification.”
    “Darwin, how about wrongly classifying the impossible as possible?”
    “Men have tried to trisect the angle because that is an impossibility that
looks
possible. Conversely, man has never tried teleportation seriously. How do we know that may not merely be a possibility which happens to
seem
impossible, and would yield to sustained attack?”
    “Pulse thirty-eight,” the nurse said softly.
    Dake looked at the yellow-gray face. “God help me to think this out as you would have, Darwin,” he said to himself.
    He had classified as “possible” Branson’s sellout. But, knowing the man, it could more correctly be classified as impossible. Branson had been the man who said good-bye to him when he went to collect Smith. So the man to whom he brought Smith back was not Branson. And, if the charts were right, not even human. A doll. A toy. A clever thing wound up and set in motion at a critical juncture in history for the purpose of substituting—ormore correctly, sustaining—chaos in the place of possible peace and order.
    Next step: Was any world power capable of creating this man-thing?
    No. Reasoning: If so, the technique would have been used for greater selfish gain, and were this the first trial attempt it would have been highly unlikely that Branson would be selected.
    If the pseudo-physiology of this man-thing is beyond human abilities, then the only place of origin is extra-terrestrial.
    But, to assume that means also to assume that there is some valid reason for the maintenance of world disorder. He caught the error in his own logic. He was trying to judge the validity of extra-terrestrial motivations on a human basis. He could almost imagine his skull swelling with the pressure of new concepts, new modes of thought.
    Okay then. Assume that interference isn’t in the form of a mile-high spaceship that sits down in the front yard. Assume it is something that comes delicately, insidiously. Unnoticed. What about duration? New, or has it been always with us?
    He had an answer to that which was more instinctive than logical. More Fortian than objective. Because it solved, with one swift answer, the great dismal riddle of how man—basically a creature capable of