Then he opened his mouth and screamed - screamed as impressively as he could with the hoarse throat and miserly breath that were all he had to scream with - and collapsed on the floor of his cell.
He had let himself fall as gravity took him; but he had also relaxed in falling, so that the impact upon the bare concrete floor was not as painful as it might have been. Once down, he lay absolutely motionless, and set about doing a number of things to himself internally that either Walter or Malachi had at different times taught him to do.
As individual exercises, most of these were not difficult; and they tended to reinforce each other in the effect he needed. Slowing his respiration was in any case part of the techniques for slowing his heart rate and lowering his blood pressure. These latter two, in turn, helped him achieve the more difficult task of decreasing his body temperature. Taken all together, they decreased his oxygen need, thereby easing the task of breathing with his secretion-choked lungs; and gave him the plausible appearance of having passed into a deep unconsciousness. At the same time the state they helped him achieve made it possible for him to endure without moving the long wait that he expected - and was not disappointed in having - before those watching him finally became convinced enough to send a guard to his cell to see if something had indeed happened to him.
In the end, he lay where he had fallen for over three hours. A small part of his mind kept automatic track of the passage of that time, but the greater part had withdrawn into a state of near-trance; so that he was very close to being honestly in the condition in which he was pretending to be. When his guards finally did reach the point of checking on him, he was only peripherally aware of what was happening. He lay, hearing as if from another room, as the first guard to come into the cell and examine him relayed his conclusions over the surveillance microphones; and after some consultation at the other end, a decision was made to get him to a hospital.
There had been a certain delay, the small, barely interested, watchdog part of his mind noted, resulting from the fact that Barbage was not on duty and his inferiors fretted, caught between their fear of the lean captain's displeasure if they did anything unjustified for the prisoner and their awe and fear of Bleys' reaction if anything happened to Hal. In the end, as Hal had gambled it would - even if Barbage himself had been present - their respect for Bleys' orders left him no choice but to get Hal to someone medically knowledgeable as soon as possible.
It seemed that there had also been another reason for their hesitation, having to do with conditions outside the building; but what this was, Hal could not quite make out. In any case, he eventually found himself being lifted onto a stretcher and carried out of the cell and along corridors to a motorized cart. This took him - now buried under a pile of blankets - for some distance until they passed finally through a tall pair of doors into cold, damp air. He was lifted off the motorized cart onto another stretcher, which was then carried into some sort of vehicle and suspended there, in a rack against one of the vehicle's sides.
A door slammed, metallically. There was a momentary pause, then blowers came to life and the vehicle took off.
Heavily depressed as his body now was, it resisted his efforts to wake it. The resistance was not active but inert, of the same sort that makes an unconscious man harder to lift than a conscious one. The near-trance in which he had put himself had shut out all the pains and struggles of the last few days; and his present comfort drew him the way a drug draws its addict.
It was only by remembering the structure of understanding that he had finally put together in his mind, and its importance, that he was able to rouse himself to push back the torpor he had created. But once he managed to lift the effect slightly, his work became easier. He felt a touch of relief, momentarily. He did not want to bring his body all the way back to normality too soon, in case he should find himself in competent medical hands before he had a chance to take advantage of being out of his prison. There was too much danger of being turned around and sent directly back to his cell.
On the other hand, he needed to be alert enough to take advantage of an opportunity to escape if one should come up. He went back to rousing himself with his original urgency, therefore, toward the point where he believed he would be able to get to his feet and move if he had to; but he could feel that his pulse remained in the forties and his systolic blood pressure was probably still only in the nineties; and his original concern returned. His body was lagging in its response to his efforts to wake it.
With all this, however, he was still becoming once more able to pay attention to what was going on around him, although his emotional reactions to what he saw and heard remained sluggish. He saw that he was alone in the back of what was obviously a military ambulance capable of transporting at least a dozen stretchers hung three-deep along its two sidewalls. A couple of enlisted Militiamen were occupying the bucket seats before the controls up front in the open cab area.
A band of windows ran along each side of the vehicle in the stretcher area; and beside him as he lay on a top-level stretcher the upper edge of the window glass was just below the point of his shoulder. He lay on his back. By turning his head only a little, he could get a good view of the streets along which they were passing. Although it would be early afternoon by this time, no one was to be seen in the streets; and the small shop fronts he passed were closed tight, their display windows opaqued.
It was a dull, wet afternoon. It was not raining now; but the street surface, walkways and building fronts glistened with moisture. He caught only an occasional glimpse of a corner of the sky between far-off building tops when the ambulance passed through the intersection of a cross-street; but it seemed uniformly heavy and gray with a thick cloud cover. After a little while, he did indeed see one pedestrian who turned his head sharply at the approach of the ambulance and ducked up an alley between two shops.
There was tension in the cab of the vehicle. Now that his senses, at least, were working normally, his woodswise nose could catch in the still, enclosed air of the ambulance, the faint harsh stink of men perspiring under emotional stress. They were also directing the vehicle oddly, travelling only a few blocks in a straight line, pausing at occasional intersections for no visible reason, then turning abruptly to go over several blocks to the right or left before returning to their original direction of travel, as furtive in their movements as the first foot traveller he had seen.
As they went on, their progress slowed, almost as if the man controlling the vehicle had lost his way. Now, they began to see more pedestrians, all in a hurry, nearly all going in the same general direction the ambulance was following. At last, Hal's dead-seeming body was beginning to respond, although it still felt as though it weighed several times its normal amount. He faced the fact that, far from being in danger of recovering too soon, he had underestimated his exhaustion and the effort it would need to lift himself from the attractive state of near-unconsciousness. Elementally, his body was desperate for the rest it felt it needed to survive; and it was resisting being forced back to a higher level of energy-expenditure.
In his concern to get himself back to a state in which, if necessary, he could stand and walk, Hal all but forgot the vehicle around him and the streets through which it was passing. He was barely aware that they were proceeding more and more cautiously; and that more and more often the ambulance halted briefly. Slowly, his stubborn body was returning to life; and at last he was beginning to have confidence that he could raise and move it for a short distance, at least. He lay under the blankets, clenching and unclenching his hands, flexing his arms and legs, shrugging his shoulders and making every movement that was possible without unduly risking the danger of attracting the attention of the two men up front.