doctors, the surgeons, if such they were, the scientists, and Marian Slade!

Yes, Marian Slade was the name of the nurse, and she was about the prettiest young woman—too young for me, in fact—I had ever seen. When I was introduced to her, I said:

"Oh, yes, Dean Hale murdered you, cut you into small pieces, and thrust you into a sewer."

Her face was impassive, her eyes did not flicker or show alarm. She only said, quite calmly,

"Yes, Mr. Hale, I remember every detail. Now, be good enough to follow me."

I was being treated like a maniac who might become violent. This nurse, with the name of a murdered woman, was coddling me, treating me gently, so I wouldn't erupt! Jan Rober left me with her and was gone, and in my imagination I could hear the rustling of bills of large denomination. I never expected to get out alive. I didn't much care.

Marian Slade took me to a room, told me what to do with the roomy garments she gave me. I found myself, shortly, in a kind of nightshirt, standing on the threshold of a room of gadgets. Yes, I must be a doctor, or some sort of scientist, for I recognized many of the gadgets there. This room was an up-to-date surgery. It had everything.

It had everything including the pygmy cyclotron, set in the mathematical center of the room. Marian Slade didn't introduce the men in white to me. I was never to know their names. She told them I was Dean Hale though Jan Rober must have told her I wasn't. She needed a handle by which to identify me, and the police had called me that for days.

I wondered idly how Jan Rober would explain my "escape" to his colleagues, unless all of them were in league with The Lab to produce "willful missin's."

In the room were great oxygen tanks, trays behind glass filled with surgical instruments, operating tables, X-Ray machines, a fluoroscope, pale screens against a far wall—screens against which, well, just what sort of strange pictures might not be shown?

My eyes kept returning to the cyclotron. It fascinated me. If it worked it was a masterly thing. Cyclotrons took up a building in themselves. How did I know that? The question flashed through my mind, and the answer, if any had been hovering on the verge of my consciousness, vanished into the general blur of all my yesterdays, my passing hours.

Near the cyclotron, if that's 

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