A dozen minutes passed in silence.
The silence was outward: there was no quiet in the adventurer's head. He could not stop the sharp remorseless voice which kept sounding in his brain. Its pitiless words flailed him unceasingly with their stinging taunts. "You—you whom they call the Hawk," it would say; "you, the infallible one—you, so recklessly, egotistically confident—you have brought this to pass! Not only have you allowed yourself to be trapped, but Eliot Leithgow! He is out there now; and soon his brain will be condemned forever to that which you have seen! The brain that trusted you! And you have brought this to pass! Yours the blame, the never-failing Hawk! All yours—yours—yours!"
A voice reached him from far away. A soft negro voice which said, timidly:
"They're beginning, suh. Captain Carse? On the screen, suh; they're beginning."
That was worse. The real ordeal was approaching. True, he might have thrown himself on the coolie-guards who had just left—but his death would not have helped old M. S.
Friday spoke again, and this time his words leaped roaring into Carse's ears. He raised his head and looked.
The tubes behind the screen were crackling, and the screen itself had come to life. He was looking at the laboratory. But the place was changed.
What had before been a wide circular room, with complicated machines and unnamed scientific apparatus following only its walls, so as to leave the center of its floor empty and free from obstructions, was now a place of deep shadow pierced by a broad cone of blinding white light which shafted down from some source overhead and threw into brilliant emphasis only the center of the room.
The light struck straight down upon an operating table. At its head stood a squat metal cylinder sprouting a long flexible tube which ended in a cone—no doubt the anesthetizing apparatus. A stepped-back tier of white metal drawers flanked one side of the table, upon its various upper surfaces an array of gleaming surgeon's tools. In neat squads they lay there: long thin knives with straight and curved cutting edges; handled wires, curved into hooks and eccentric corkscrew shapes; scalpels of different sizes; forceps, clasps, retractors, odd metal claws, circular saw-blades and a variety of other unclassified instruments. Sterilizers were convenient to one side, a thin wraith of steam drifting up from them into the source of the light.