The face was pale, very pale, and without expression. The lips were tinged with blue. Wet hair was plastered against the cheeks. A thick lock crossed one eye socket, like a curtain half drawn, and curled down toward the throat, where it merged with a strand of seaweed. The dull eyes stared at him, without sign of recognition. And no hand moved up to brush the lock of hair away. From the hem of the skirt, water was dripping. The lips parted. The voice had the monotonous murmur of water. "You were too late," the lips said. "You were a minute too late." XI. For a third time their exchange of conversation had come back to the same question. He had the maddening sensation of following a robot that was walking in a huge endless circle and always treading on precisely the same blades of grass as it retraced its path. With the hopeless conviction that he would not get any further this time, he asked the question again: "But how can you lack consciousness, and at the same time _know_ that you lack consciousness? If your mind is blank, you cannot at the same time be aware that your mind is blank." The hands of his watch were creeping toward three in the morning. The chill of night's lowest ebb pervaded the dingy hotel room. Tansy sat stiffly, wearing his bathrobe and big fleece-lined slippers, with a blanket over her knees and a bath towel wrapped around her head. They should have made her look child-like and perhaps even artlessly attractive. They did not. If you were to unwind the towel you would find the top of the skull sawed off and the brains removed, an empty bowl--that was the illusion Norman experienced every time he made the mistake of looking into her eyes. The pale lips opened. "I know nothing. I only speak. They have taken away my soul. But my voice is a function of my body." You could not even say that the voice was patiently explanatory. It was too utterly empty and colorless even for that. The words, clearly enunciated and evenly spaced, all sounded alike. They came with the regular beat of a machine. The last thing he wanted to do was hammer questions at that stiff pitiful figure, but at all costs he must awaken some spark of feeling in the masklike face; he must find some intelligible starting point before his own mind could begin to work effectually. "But, Tansy, if you can talk about the present situation, you must be aware of it. You're here in this room with me!" The toweled head shook once, like that of a mechanical doll. "Nothing is here with you but a body. 'I' is not here." His mind automatically corrected "is" to "am" before he realized that there had been no grammatical error and shuddered at the implications of the trifling change in a tiny verb. "You mean," he asked, "that you can see or hear nothing? That there is just a blackness?" Again that simple mechanical headshake, which carried more absolute conviction than the most heated protestations.