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the central switchboard for all the head,” was the next instruction.
    After he had been trying with his teacher’s help to get himself by the scruff of the neck, he was told to work first with his hands in front of him: “Get the movement there and then translate it back.” But he still didn’t, evidently, do it right.
    To his surprise, and somehow quite considerable pleasure, the masseur—there was only one now—suddenly turned his back to the bed, knelt down, and said, “Look here, put your hands on my neck and that will show you. I’ll be able to tell you how to do it; best that way.”
    They had several lessons in that method and he learned to feel his way along the nerves and muscles and see where the tensions lay and smooth them out. Then he could put his own hands and fingers on his own neck almost as aptly. The work interested him, too, quite apart from the relief. He had been so long without anything to do that his hands, just as had his flesh, seemed to be craving to get to work, to live again in action. But as soon as he had learned that, he saw his friend—as already he had begun to think of this strange, masked masseur—no more. The life kept on its nightmare quality of irrelevance. For, a day after the massage lessons stopped, he was told by the invisible voice to come along. He was sitting on the edge of his bed after putting on the two-piece suit in which he spent his time when not in bed. He rose uncertainly, and as he did so a small section in the wall, just enough to let a man through, opened. He stepped out into a passage faintly lit through its plastic wall. It went straight for perhaps a hundred yards, then turned right and seemed to end after hardly more than fifty feet. But when he was within arm’s length of the terminating wall, it slid aside. He stepped through and he could just hear the panel slip back into place behind him.
    He was in a bare room, but it had one reassuring feature—an ordinary, obvious door was at one side of it and, even more reassuring, the door was ajar, while from the other side of it a loud, unguarded voice, full of careless inflection, called out, “Come in, come along.” He stepped across and looked in. That room was larger and full of reassuring things—it was a big kitchen and at the farther end its cooking ranges glowed cheerfully. The man who had called to him again shouted, “Come in” over the noise of an egg beater which he was using.
    He was told he could help. He found this, his second teacher, gay, amusing; and learning with him became interesting. He was taught all sorts of cookery by one who was evidently an enthusiast. The hours were not long and the drudgery was off their hands: for all the soiled things simply were put into a transit-duct and the clean utensils were returned by another. In between as they ate their meals—or rested (they seemed to be cooking for not more than half a dozen persons or a few more, beside themselves)—the cheery chef would talk vivaciously and amusingly. But all his life and anecdotes circled round his profession; where he had led it and why he had come here, there was never a hint of such things.
    Wearily the captive reflected, this is probably one of the top men, who just chooses to act the part of a chef the better to observe me when relaxed. He himself was too old a hand at secret-service work not to know that vivacious type which is bubbling over with a talk which, like a thick foam, hides the deep, watching mind far better than any smooth stillness. But all that he learned was cookery, and that he learned thoroughly. If this, his new jailer, was an actor, he was the most thorough he had ever met in a profession which puts the highest premium on three-dimensional, all-the-time acting.
    After what he was pretty sure was six weeks or two months—for he was told he was an apt pupil—he was told he knew enough, unless he wanted to become a