ns and asking for my
blood.

There was but one thing for it--to get to a train before this angry
horde could secure its tickets; so I made a wild dash for the
moving-staircase, shedding Bradburys _en route_ like a paper-chase.

As I rushed past the ticket-puncher she made a vicious lunge at my
out-stretched hand with an enormous pair of pincers, missing the ticket
and partially amputating my thumb.

As I have always expected to do, but have never yet done, I missed
my footing at the top of the escalator, and my desire to outstrip my
enemies was realised beyond my wildest hopes as I crashed, by a series
of petrifying somersaults, down the entire flight, to be belched forth
like a sausage from a machine at the bottom.

Tattered, torn and in unspeakable agony I picked myself up and found my
steering-gear so damaged that I could only move sideways, crab-fashion,
and in this manner I crawled on to the platform just as a train was
beginning its exit.

I make a leap for it. The gates crash to! Am I inside them or out?
Neither. I am pinned there with the first half of my body struggling
inside the car while the second half protrudes over the fast-receding
platform.

I remember how in my agony it flashed across my mind that I would never
again slay a wasp with my fork.

I must have been pulled into the car just in time to stop the tunnel
(which is a dreadfully close fit) from bisecting me, for the next thing
I remember was being dropped into a corner seat and severely admonished
by the guard for getting into the train whilst it was in motion.

I was now a quivering and shapeless mass; nobody pitied me, nobody
helped me, so loathsome a spectacle did I present.

Of course the train passed my station, and at the next I was thrown out
like a mail-bag, to be trodden on by massed formations of travellers
fighting to enter and leave the car by the same door at the same time.

When the multitudes had dispersed and I was alone, by superhuman efforts
I contrived to wriggle on my stomach to the foot of the ascending
stairway, but not having sufficient strength to wriggle off on arrival
at the top, my long-dreaded horror of being sucked under the barrier,
where moving stairways disappear, was realised.

By now immune to pain, I regarded the next process (akin to being passed
through a mangle) as child's play. To my amazement, after a few minutes
amongst giant cog-wheels, I again found the light on the down-going
staircase, whi