Dismissing these thoughts from my mind, I lay down on the couch. Then Doggo was relieved as sentinel by a new ant-man, who carefully and inquisitively inspected me, but from a safe distance. This guard, too, was without any green weapon.
Finally the two lights went out, and I slept, my last thoughts being to wonder what was in store for me, and what was the significance of the couch and the strange blue-and-white article of clothing.
As I slowly awakened the next morning, I vaguely remembered a terrible nightmare of the night before.
But no, it was no dream, for I opened my eyes upon the same plain concrete room with its slit windows. I was lying on the same couch. The same strange ant-man was standing guard at the door. During the night some one had placed over me a blanket of some sort of light fleecy wool felt.
As I lay in bed I studied the walls of the room and noticed, what I had not seen before, three dials sunk in the opposite wall close to the ceiling. Each dial had twelve numbers or letters around the edge, and also a single pointer. The pointer of the right dial was slowly revolving left-handedly; the pointer of the middle dial was turning even more slowly; while that of the left dial appeared motionless. Absent-mindedly I started to time the right-hand pointer.
“One chim_pan_zee. Two chim_pan_zee. Three chim_pan_zee,” I counted in sing-song; that being a formula which I had been taught as a child, to count the time between a lightning flash and the resulting thunder, in order to estimate the distance of the stroke.
For, if carefully done, each chim_pan_zee equaled one second of time, and each second meant one quarter-mile of distance. Of course the real object of the game was to distract the child’s mind from his fear of the lightning.
I now found that it took about fifty chim_pan_zees for the right pointer to move one of the twelve graduations. This fact I verified by several trials.
I fell to wondering what the device was for.
It looked and acted like a gas meter or electric meter.
Then I dismissed the meter from my mind, and considered my predicament. For some reason I thought of my father, Alden Cabot, now many years dead. The old man had been a stern puritanical character, abhorring sloth and frivolity.