But in all his moods, sane or insane, intolerant or stoical, he never really doubted this:  that the machine held him as light and as hopelessly as he had from his birth been held by the hopeless cosmos of his own creed.  He knew well the ruthless and inexhaustible resources of our scientific civilization.  He no more expected rescue from a medical certificate than rescue from the solar system.  In many of his Robinson Crusoe moods he thought kindly of MacIan as of some quarrelsome school-fellow who had long been dead.  He thought of leaving in the cell when he died a rigid record of his opinions, and when he began to write them down on scraps of envelope in his pocket, he was startled to discover how much they had changed.  Then he remembered the Beauchamp Tower, and tried to write his blazing scepticism on the wall, and discovered that it was all shiny tiles on which nothing could be either drawn or carved.  Then for an instant there hung and broke above him like a high wave the whole horror of scientific imprisonment, which manages to deny a man not only liberty, but every accidental comfort of bondage.  In the old filthy dungeons men could carve their prayers or protests in the rock.  Here the white and slippery walls escaped even from bearing witness.  The old prisoners could make a pet of a mouse or a beetle strayed out of a hole.  Here the unpierceable walls were washed every morning by an automatic sluice.  There was no natural corruption and no merciful decay by which a living thing could enter in.  Then James Turnbull looked up and saw the high invincible hatefulness of the society in which he lived, and saw the hatefulness of something else also, which he told himself again and again was not the cosmos in which he believed.  But all the time he had never once doubted that the five sides of his cell were for him the wall of the world henceforward, and it gave him a shock of surprise even to discover the faint light through the aperture in the ventilation tube.  But he had forgotten how close efficiency has to pack everything together and how easily, therefore, a pipe here or there may leak.

Turnbull thrust his first finger down the aperture, and at last managed to make a slight further fissure in the piping.  The light that came up from beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect; it seemed to fall from some hole or window higher up.  As he was screwing his eye to peer at this grey and greasy twilight he was astonished to see another human finger very long and lean come down from above towards the broken pipe and hook it up to something higher.  The lighted aperture was abruptly blackened and blocked, presumably by a face and mouth, for something human spoke down the tube, though the words were not clear.

“Who is that?” asked Turnbull, trembling with excitement, yet wary and quite resolved not to spoil any chance.

After a few indistinct sounds the voice came down with a strong Argyllshire accent: