And he felt so strange ... a peculiar feeling of detachment, a dead non-feeling; like the first awakening moments from a sleep of hazy dreams, as if he were still in that half-world of mysterious insensibility, his mind awake but his body and all its physical consciousness yet unaroused from the deep, lethargic coma of abeyance. Rod felt no awareness of his body; only his mind seemed alive. As though he were entirely apart from all commonplace sensations of embodiment, his brain utterly cut off from all external senses, he possessed no feeling of concrete existence and from the room about him there emanated no semblance of reality. It stood distant from him and he felt nothing, merely saw with numb objectivity that it was there.... He raised a hand to his face--he thought the movement with no deliberation of will but the thought burst upon him with frantic helplessness when there was no response. His hand did not raise. As in a stupor, his whole body paralyzed and free of his will, he could not move. Rod glanced down at his body. _There was no body!_ He sank sickeningly within himself and a wave of cold fear swept over him. A barrel-like thing of metal covered his body. And falling to new depths of swift panic, he saw that the container was much too small to hold the six feet, four inches of him.... He struggled to move about in the barrel. He was stuck there tightly; he could not budge. Examining the thing, he saw it was a smooth, seamless cylinder about three feet high. It was shiny black in color and mid-way on opposite sides were circular openings covered with a screen of microscopic gauze. But how could he see outside if he were _in it_? It was as though he were standing above the object, looking down upon it from a cycloidal distance. From the center of the cylinder's flat top, attached to a sort of socket, projected a snaky, black cable. It ran upward, and following its spindling curve, Rod was astonished to observe that he could not see its other end. He craned his neck upward--the cable moved. It was alive! He recoiled in unreasoning fright. The wiry thing followed. He shook his head wildly. And the cable persisted in an imitation of his movements. He ducked his head down beside the barrel and the black strand--as much of it as was visible--came after him. His brain was hot with insane fear. He dashed madly about his limited sphere of movement. His mind whirled and an unrequited nausea darkened his consciousness. Rod fainted. * * * * *