"Very much so," Lee dryly remarked. He continued to watch the behavior of the car with some misgivings. The controls appeared to be functioning smoothly enough and after a minute or so the brake pedal came down all by itself. Lee, with a breath of relief, saw the speedometer recede to zero.
But the doors would not open from the inside and as he tried them he found that they were locked. "What's the idea," he asked, "I thought you said we would be examined at this spot?"
"Bet they're at it right now," the chauffeur grinned. "I wouldn't know how they do it, but they get us photographed inside and outside, what we have in our pockets, what we had for breakfast this morning and the very bones of our skeletons. I pass through here maybe half a dozen times a day, still they will do it every time: take my likeness. Makes me feel like I was some darned movie star."
To Lee it felt uncanny to sit trapped and blindfolded in this "Black Maria" of a car while unseen rays and cameras went over him. He could hear a faint noise of steps, and muffled voices.
"Who are they?" he asked.
"Oh, that's only some boys from Intelligence or whatnot; that's nothing, that isn't The Brain. It will be all over in a moment—see—there we go again. Now we're entering the Labyrinth."
"The Labyrinth?"
Reticent as he had been in the beginning, the chauffeur now seemed to like Lee; he was proud to explain. "Queer, isn't it? They've got the damnedest names for things down here. Take them from anatomy, I understand. The Labyrinth is supposed to be inside the ear; it leads inside in a roundabout way; it's the same here, it's a tunnel—see—down we go."
The soft swoosh of the gas-turbine turned into a muffled roar. The car accelerated at a terrific rate and from the way it swayed and dived it was clear that the tunnel spiralled downwards in steep serpentines. Lee gripped the holding straps; his every nerve was on edge and those edges were sharpened by the ominous fact that all the instruments on the dashboard had stopped functioning so that he couldn't even read the speed.
As if to make things still worse, the chauffeur had abandoned his post altogether. Stretching his legs across the front seat he reclined as if enjoying his easy chair at home by the fire place.