Looking at Comstock, Pat felt fear like a live thing. There was no intelligence on his soft face. None at all. His eyes were unfocussed, his breathing very slow. His arms were hooked around his knees which were drawn up towards his chest. He had fallen over on his side.
Luckily Pat had no idea of what the foetal position looks like or she would have been even more frightened than she was.
Pat asked hesitantly, "Will you tell me the answer so that I can help him come back?"
Then the madman threw his lean face back and howled.
Wringing her hands, Pat wondered what had come over the man who such a short time before had told her wonderful things of which she had never dreamed.
When he was strangling with his own mirth, the man gasped, "My dear, I would gladly give the answer ... that's what I devoted all my life to searching for ... but the humor of it all is that there is no answer."
Then another paroxysm of laughter swept through him.
Deep down inside Comstock's brain in the never-never land to which the last philosopher's question had driven him, Comstock was dully aware that his body was being stroked. It felt nice and he made an animal sound deep in his throat. But the action did not serve to revive him any more than Pat's anxious voice which was shouting in his unhearing ears.
He never heard her say, "Darling, you must come back! The R.A.'s are coming."
Comstock never knew when a squad of R.A.'s surrounded the car, and by means of a frightening array of stun-guns forced Pat to help them carry first the tied-up lunatic and then the unresisting body of the man she loved into the car in which they had driven onto the scene.