a glimpse of the sprawling amusement park
spread out below them like a collection of gaudy toys on the floor of a
playroom; then the coaster was roaring and thundering down into the
hollow of the first big dip.

Everyone but the Negro boy and the tall man yelled. These two looked
detached--without emotion--as though they wouldn't have cared if the
train of cars went off the tracks.

The cars didn't go off the tracks. The people did.

The orange-blue rolling stock hit the bottom, slammed around a turn and
shot upward again, the wind of its passage whistling boisterously. But
by then there were none to hear the wind, to feel the gust of it in
watered eyes or open shouting mouths. The cars were empty.

* * * * *

"Is this what happens to _everybody_ who takes a ride on the coaster?"
asked a bewildered voice with a slight Mexican accent. "_Santos_," it
continued, "to think I have waited so many years for this!"

"What is it?" said a woman. "Was there an accident? Where are we?"

"I don't know, dear. Maybe we jumped the tracks. But it certainly
doesn't look like a hospital."

John Summersby opened his eyes. The last voice had told the truth: the
room didn't look like a hospital. It didn't look like anything that he
could think of offhand.

It was about living-room size, with flat yellow walls and a gray
ceiling. There was a quantity of musty-smelling straw on the floor. Four
tree trunks from which the branches had been lopped were planted solidly
in that floor, which felt hard and a little warm on Summersby's back.
Near the roof was a round silver rod, running from wall to wall; over in
a corner was a large shallow box filled with something, he saw as he
slowly stood up, that might have been sand. An old automobile tire lay
in the straw nearby, and a green bird-bath sort of thing held water that
splashed from a tiny fountain in its center. Five other people, four men
and a woman, were standing or sitting on the floor.

"If it was a hospital, we'd be hurt," said a thin yellow-haired man with
a briefcase under one arm. "I'm all right. Feel as good as I ever did."

Several men prodded themselves experimentally, and one began to take his
own pulse. Summersby stretched and blinked his eyes; they felt gummy, as
though he'd been asleep a long time, but his mouth wasn't cottony, so he
figured the blacked-out interval must have been fairly short.

"Where's the door?" asked the woman.

Eve