A man is getting ready for bed. He takes off his shoes, then his socks.
He looks idly at his feet. Hmmm.
They are feetlike, ordinary. They do not look interesting, but they look tired, and it is time to wedge them down between the sheets to the bed's own foot, where they will wiggle a bit and then fall dormant. The man lifts his feet into bed, but as he does, he feels the tingle of a half-formed thought. Oddly, it is about umbrellas. Something about umbrellas getting mixed up in restaurants. It is not the dazzling sort of thought that stings the thinker into wakefulness, and the man does not follow it to its conclusion, if there were any. Soon he is asleep.
Next day the man goes to his office, hangs up his coat and sits at a typewriter. Time passes. No typing occurs. The man's natural optimism wilts. He is vacant of ideas, except for one that grows progressively more attractive: this, finally, is the day for throwing himself out of the office window.
But, hark! A thought! It concerns, let's see, umbrellas, and—what's this?—feet.
Of course. The logical connection is clear.
The man's face takes on a look of confidence, and he begins to type. "The world is as follows," he writes. Nice, crisp beginning, no fooling around. He continues:
"Upon removing his shoes at bedtime, P.B. Sykes observes that the feet inside his socks are not his feet, but quite obviously someone else's feet. His wife, noting an unusual expression on his face, inquires if something is wrong. 'No,' says Sykes, quickly dousing the light."
The man, who is tall, high-shouldered and middleaged, and who seems sober, gets up from the typewriter and paces about the room. Time passes again, this time into the end zone. Is the writer faltering? No! He finds the thread, and hurriedly types: "Next morning he finds the strange feet still there. 'How's everything, P.B.?' a dozen people ask him before lunch. To each, Sykes replies, 'Fine.' He telephones a doctor. A receptionist says the next available appointment is three months distant. Sykes says he has an emergency. 'What seems to be the trouble?' asks the woman. Sykes cannot tell her the truth, for he is certain she is incapable of believing that feet can be switched like umbrellas traded in a restaurant mixup, and will think him mad and dispatch him to psychiatry."
By now the man is typing at great speed. Sykes never does find his own feet, but at a party one day he confides his loss to an editor, who signs him to a three-book contract. The surrogate feet become television celebrities, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star in the movie version of Sykes' life, and he goes off to make a television commercial for corn plasters.
There he meets Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another celebrity, who is making a commercial for Russian dressing in spray cans. The man's typescript concludes: "That is what the world is like."