One of the normals jerked the binder from before my mouth and I coughed out the cotton without hindrance. From this floor, no shout could escape; nor could a shot be heard outside. They watched me but let me alone. I sat on the edge of a desk and looked about at them. Just now, they were doing nothing. It was plain, of course, that they had complete control of this empty plant. Probably Stamby-Temke had a watchman but the normals either overpowered him, terrorized him or bought him over. Perhaps he was one of them, who had applied for the job for the purpose of obtaining these buildings for their use. Evidently they were quite at home here. They were so at ease, indeed, that they must be sure that no one would disturb them. I attempted a pose “at ease” but with my hands tied back of me, and more particularly with the feeling I had, I certainly made a poor pretense at it. Something was going to happen to me here, I knew; and I was going to have nothing to say about it. The occurrence would be of that sort which precedes the finding of a body in a deserted building. You’ve read in the papers, as I had, how the vice-president of the John Doe Company, making an inspection of a disused building prior to reopening it, was shocked to come upon the body of a man, evidently dead for some time. His clothing and so on; marks of identification and so on. The police state that the man undoubtedly met a violent end and prior to his death and so on. It is evident that the man was brought there by several others who used the building for--well, here I was to find out for what these normals used this building. The elevator, which had descended after depositing us, reappeared with another group of normals and with a girl. Doris! Yes; there she was! If they had tied and gagged her while bringing her here, they had loosed her again; she stepped off the elevator and moved a little away from the normals. Not even her hands were tied; but she was in the same fix I was; that was clear. They were letting her go to see what she would try to do, as they had let me. I got up from my seat on the desk; she came toward me. “Hello,” I said; and she said the same and sat in a chair near me. I slumped down again on the edge of the desk. There was an average of eight of the normals about us in that big office; some kept sifting in and out, from and to a farther room, where there appeared to be somebody or something particularly important. Doris glanced that way several times and they watched her; I watched her, too. She appeared alert and on edge with eyes bright and with lips thin and tight; but she didn’t show fright. I’m not sure what I showed but I know what I felt. I was dull, not alert like her. One sort of nature seems to dull itself when in for what it can’t prevent; that was mine. I guessed that the “glass room” was over in that farther end of this floor.