Actually, it wasn't so bad, or maybe I should say it was bad but I wasn't in good enough shape to appreciate it.  You'd think a sick man - well, a man just recovering from sickness - would be easier to break down than a well one, but this time, at least, it worked the other way.  I still hadn't come back to full reality after my recent brush with death.  This was just one more chapter in a long, hazy, continuing hospital nightmare, and I was getting pretty hardened to hazy hospital nightmares.

They let me think it over for a whole night and day, plus one more night.  I spent most of that time in bed, mostly sleeping.  Any fool could figure out what was going to happen when they started asking me urgent questions about an airplane jockey I couldn't remember.  Why borrow trouble by brooding about it in advance?

The second evening, the buildup started.  They prepared me as if for an operation: the clean-you-out pills, the nothing-to-eat-and-drink edict, and in the morning, further unpleasant precautions against my messing up their pretty torture chamber under stress, followed by a shot.  In a real hospital, it would have been a preliminary sedative or anesthetic, but here I thought it was probably a cooperation injection of some kind.  Scopolamine?  The word popped into my mind from somewhere, but I rejected it.  It was my impression - gained where, I didn't know - that scopolamine was considered pretty corny and old-fashioned nowadays.  A place like this probably had better truth juices available.

Dr. Caine administered the injection.  I was put into a wheelchair - the blond orderly named Trask did the honors here - and rolled to the main building, where Dugan opened the back door to admit us to the Torquemada room.  I'd seen a few people, well bundled up, strolling aimlessly under the trees of the big fenced estate.  They'd paid no attention to me.  Maybe I wasn't really there at all, I reflected; maybe I was back in the Prince Rupert Hospital having a highly colored dream.  Here I was being transported quite openly to the chamber of horrors, and none of my fellow-patients would even acknowledge my existence by a glance.  Actually, I had a hunch they were quite aware of me; they simply didn't want to seem rudely curious about the poor violent case locked up in high-security Hyacinth, now scheduled for desperate treatments to restore his sanity.  I mean, it would have been impolite to stare, don't you know?

Trask turned me over to Dugan, who rolled me inside to where the horror lady herself awaited me.  Dr. Albert had faded at the door; apparently he was okay with the needle but he had no stomach for the heavy work with the electrodes and rheostat.  We started in the chair with questions.  We continued in the chair with electricity.  Then the electric treatments were continued on the table, with interesting variations.  As I said, I was pretty used to institutional nightmares by now.  I knew how to escape them.  All I had to do was move off into a corner of the room and watch the fun.  I was acquainted with the guy in the chair, or on the table, and I thought they were treating him badly and it was a real shame, but when you came right down to it he wasn't a fellow who meant a great deal to me....