disappeared.
I stared after him and fought back my sudden nausea.

How long, then, lying there before a key-box hummed again? I didn't know. My time sense had been dulled. Even the pain was dull now; it was something that had always existed.
I looked at the shining ceiling.
The glowlights began to dim and I supposed that since my arrest in the park another day had passed.
Most of all, I wondered. Something had happened to me, something that I could almost feel as a physical change, but I didn't know quite what it was. I knew its results. I knew that I was no longer standard, no longer conformal, no longer well-behaved and moral and an efficient, useful citizen of the State. I hated the State. I hated all States. I hate all efficiency and common sense and hate.
It suddenly came to me that I didn't care whether I was in Southem or Northem, or which of them ruled the world.
I lay there.
And presently a key-box hummed and I didn't even look that way. The stink of my own burning flesh still clung to my nostrils, the dull pain was still with me, but I didn't care. It was too much. When horror becomes too great, it stops being horror. The mind is smart. It doesn't believe; it doesn't register. The curve of sensation flattens out, stops, almost.
When such horror looms, you go on doing whatever you are doing.
I was lying there, so I went on lying there.

"Don't speak," whispered a voice. "Don't ask questions."
Something fumbled at the straps. I turned my head, and two people were in the room. They were thin, and their eyes were overlarge and they were naked and covered with bruises. The fugitives of the park last night!
"What are you doing here?"
Finger to the lips. That was the man. He was taking the straps from my legs. The woman was releasing my arms and shoulders.
"But--"
"Sh!" That was the woman.
In a moment they had me free. I started, confidently, to rise, and the pain streaked through me like a powder rocket. They helped me. I stood there, amazed that I could stand. They helped me go forward. I took several dizzy steps, and after that it wasn't as bad. We moved through the doorway; there was no force screen. The man held the key-box. He pressed it as we moved away, to bring the force screen into place once more.
I said, "Where are we--?"
I was shushed again. We went on through the corridors. Dead oyster white corridors. I walked as through a sea of marshmallow. Time sense was gone again and we were pushing on and on and there was no end in sight and we had already forgotten the beginning.
We took an automatic shaft to another level and walked more corridors.

Once we passed an opening and tunnelcars filled with 

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