After swooning away in the Ventilation Office, I remained unconscious for a long while—so I was afterwards told. When I came to myself again, it was after a period of blankness, varied by nightmares in which I saw Loa bending over me solicitously, her milky face more wrinkled than ever, her fat form bulging until she resembled a monstrous dumpling. Awakening from a long-protracted dream of this character, wherein I fled down endless labyrinths in the vain attempt to elude the enchantress, I found myself in a place so mysterious that I cried out involuntarily in my bewilderment.
I was lying at full length, in a sort of bed or couch, with a sheet drawn over me up to the neck; and I was conscious that all my clothes had been removed, except for a single shirt-like covering, and that my head was swathed in bandages. To my right rose a bare wall, and above me, at a height of three or four feet, stared a blank ceiling; while to the left, across an aisle little more than a yard wide, I beheld a sight that gave me the confused impression that I was back again in the Overworld, in a Pullman car. In neat rows of berths, arranged one above the other, three tiers high, dozens of men were reclining, one to each cot, all of them buried up to the neck beneath the sheets!
Where was I? In prison? In a ward for the insane? In a death-cell, awaiting execution by some new device more terrible than the violet ray?
As these questions, and others equally frightening, rushed across my mind, I began gradually to observe other details. I saw the wires, with pulley-like attachments, which ran through minute holes in the ceiling to each of the berths and carried little rattling cars no larger than a small ink bottle; I saw the vials and tubes, filled with variously colored liquids and powders, which stood on a neatly numbered shelf just above my head; and I noted that a copper wire, attached to my left wrist, ran the length of the bed and out through an opening in the wall, and that similar wires led to each of the other berths.
Although the suspicion came to me that these might be intended for the simultaneous electrocution of us all, I was so weak and weary that even the dread of imminent death could not disturb me for long; I sank back upon a pillow composed of some straw-like substance, closed my eyes, and fell into a refreshing slumber....
From this sleep I was aroused with a start by the sound of someone talking in a voice of thunder. How my heart hammered as I awoke from that pleasant doze! How I shuddered! What chills crept up and down my spine! In my bewildered state of mind, it took me a minute to discover that there was no speaker visible, and that the voice—transmitted by radio—issued from a huge horn projecting from the ceiling behind me.
Unfortunately, I had missed the first words of the talk; but, judging from what I later heard, I believe I can reproduce it fairly accurately.
"Mechanical Hospital Number 807 QL. Third Class! It is now precisely fifteen minutes and eleven seconds after the start of the wake! Time to take your morning tonic! This you will find on the shelf above you: Number 36 A, in the blue vial. Dissolve two pellets in the distilled water which you will find in Number 36 B. Drink slowly, and finish with an ounce of the liquid in 36 C. Then recline, and return to sleep. Our next announcement will be for the mid-morning repast!"
With an uncanny suddenness, the machine snapped into silence, while the occupants of all the other berths, rising slightly out of bed, reached for the indicated vials and consumed the contents as the voice had directed. For my own part, however, I was too sick and too bewildered to seek to follow instructions; I merely sank down into bed again, thinking that if this were a hospital, certainly it was the queerest I had ever viewed.
But still stranger experiences awaited me. The very next moment I unwittingly made a blunder that led to new discoveries. Finding that the wire about my wrist irritated me, since it dug into the flesh and checked the circulation, I pulled at it viciously, and succeeded in removing it. But no sooner had I disentangled the obstruction than I was shocked by hearing a bell clanging just above my head, reminding me of a burglar-alarm. And, from the radio-speaker on the ceiling, a voice bawled reprovingly.