ply--with rubber between. He can't tear his way out with a
stick, he says. And small wonder. Talk about strait-jackets!"

"But--but why doesn't he take off the helmet?"

Peters stared unseeing at the packet in his hand, and his face was
saturnine.

"By Joe, what a mess!" he murmured. "What a beau-ti-ful mess! Look
here--d'y' know a diver's outfit? First he wears a solid
breastplate--see?--that sets about his shoulders. Then the helmet fits
on that with segmental neck rings and screws hard down with a quarter
turn to a catch. Aye, there's a catch to snap it home.... And where is
that catch? Why at the _back_! No diver was ever intended to take off
his own helmet!"

We could only blink at him dumbly.

"Albro couldn't reach it. Of course if he should manage to rip away the
cloth from the eyelets he'd be all right--he'd simply shift the whole
upper works. But them eyelets, now, they lock down all around through a
vulcanized collar. He couldn't reach more'n two of them either."

"There's the glass--"

Peters offered the diary.

"What does he say himself? There's only one removable glass to a helmet
and that's in front--an inch thick and screws tight in a gun-metal
socket. It's guarded with a gridiron of bars--same as the two side
glasses. He wants to break it, but he can't. He wants to unscrew it, but
he can't. He wants to cut himself loose, but he has no knife. Do you see
him--by Joe!--do you see him twistin' and writhin' and fightin' for his
life in there--_with one good arm_?"

"Why--" cried Jeckol, in sudden appalled perception. "He couldn't even
eat. He's starving inside that suit!"

"Starving?" echoed Bartlet, from colorless lips. "God--if that was all!
He's dying of thirst by inches!"...

I do not know how it struck Jeckol, but it seemed to me as if a
blackness came in upon the sun.

"Go on," urged Bartlet. "Go on!"

But it was not so easy to go on. Peters found whole pages of the Book
impossible to decipher. At places it lapsed to a mere jumble of
sprawling characters. Again the soft lead was hopelessly blurred over,
where the pages had been often thumbed, or perhaps crumbled and thrown
aside. He shuffled them hastily and we hung upon his search.

_... uneasy god. They got me tied up now to keep me safe [words
missing] joke, to pass out here like a rat under a bell jar. Not
me. I don't mean to...._

Curious. When Peters resumed the thread, when he read that eloquent
line, those of u