e, and I was glad enough to do so.

I must have slept soundly for an hour or two, and then I remember dozing
and rolling lazily in my bed, as I usually did at home on Sunday
mornings. During my previous nap the bunk had seemed hard and cramped,
and I had privately grumbled at the doctor for overlooking personal
comforts; but now I felt that luxurious sensation of sleeping on soft
mattresses and yielding springs, though of course I had neither. I do
not know how soon I should have thoroughly awakened had I not lifted my
hand to rub my eye, and unwittingly dealt myself a stinging blow in the
face. This roused me.

But what was the matter with that arm? It was as it had once been in a
nightmare, when it felt detached from its place, and moved lightly and
without effort, like a bough in the wind. I pinched it with my other
hand, and it was quite sensible to the pain. In fact, the other arm was
now acting in the same queer way. I arose in bed quickly to see what was
the matter, and the upper part of my body bent violently over and struck
against my knees. Then my effort to take an upright position threw me on
my back again. Evidently my muscles were not working as they were when I
went to bed. They must be over-excited and over-active. I immediately
thought of my heart as the principal and controlling muscle, and in my
eagerness to feel its beating my hand dealt me a slap in the chest.
These blows, though rapid, did not seem to hurt as much as they ought,
after the first stinging sensation. I found my heart was beating
regularly enough.

"Doctor!" I cried out presently, more to test my voice than for
anything else. It sounded perfectly natural, and my vocal chords were
not over-stimulated or abnormal.

He came half way down from his compartment soon after hearing me, and
rested his elbow against one side of the aperture between the
compartments, leaning against the other side easily. He had a scale made
of heavy coiled spring in his hand.

"I wish to calculate our distance from the Earth," he said. "Do you mind
weighing yourself on these scales?" and he held the spiral down toward
me.

"You can't support my weight!" I exclaimed, and springing up from the
bed I bumped my head against the partition between the compartments,
eight feet above my floor. I grasped the lower ring of the scale he held
down and lifted up my feet. It seemed as if something were still
supporting me from below, for scarcely one-tenth my weight ha