Free He Wanted the Moon by Mimi Baird, Eve Claxton Page A

region had in some way become detached from the Earth and was catapulting through space like a rocket ship. Either a movie camera left running had produced the ghostly figures on the porch, or else these poor patients were trapped with me. The silence continued.
    I lost all sense of time. I knew that Earth was hundreds or millions of miles away. I felt sure that several hundred years had passed and that if I ever got back to Earth all the people I had known would be dead and gone. I whistled “Intermezzo” and talked aloud to myself. The chart of my travels through space seemed to be toward Mars and I feared I might get stranded there. It occurred to me that other planets might be pleasant places to live, but I wanted to get back to Earth, even if all the people I knew were dead. Itoccurred to me that thought-waves were the only influence that I could exert to get the ship back to Earth. I sang and whistled and talked, trying to find the combination. Days, weeks and years rolled on by. No one came in my room. No one brought me food. To test reality, I made my bed jump up and down, and I made it move around and around the room.
    Once, as I was making my bed jump up and down, I heard a crashing of boards and the bed seemed suddenly to get jammed in the floor and I couldn’t move it. This made me imagine that the hospital building had been placed on wooden boards on a lake and that I had created a vibration with my bed that had crushed the boards and let the building sink to the bottom of the lake. For a while I thought we were at the bottom of the ocean between Greenland and the British Isles.
    After what seemed an eternity I heard voices in the hall and some attendants came in and gave me food. And then I was left again to silence, loneliness, to roam lost in the universe. Night came and lasted a hundred years. In the morning the attendants came and took me to the bathroom. I sat on the toilet quickly, then climbed over the partition into the toilet next to the window. I seemed unable to speak. I clutched the window tightly, looking at the glorious morning sun. The attendants had to drag me out by force.
    Another morning came. I detected an odor of exhaust gas coming through the window as I lay there in my straightjacket. I surmised that everyone in New England except us had been killed by gas released by the Japs. I dreamed of thousands of Japs disguised as American citizens invadingthe Boston area, and I dreamed of an earthquake that made the Ritz Hotel topple over. My heart and soul were rent in agony.
    While I was trapped in this delirium, my wife and secretary came in with the sheriff to serve the divorce papers on me. My secretary was to serve as witness. I remember nothing of the episode, but my secretary related the facts about as follows:
    She and Gretta entered the room first. I was lying on the bed. The attendant came in and said I had visitors. I rose and sat up in bed. Eleanor, my secretary, put out her hand. I did not seem to see her hand or her. I did not shake hands. I rolled over toward the east window with my back to my visitors.
    “Dear, if you don’t feel well we’ll come again some other day,” Gretta said.
    Eleanor identified me as Perry Baird. The sheriff served his papers.
    Gretta wept all the way home.
    ONE day Mr. Burns came in with several attendants. I was loosened from my moorings to the bed and allowed to get up. Wandering around my room, perhaps a little confused, I recalled the night when I was tapping on the windowpanes and two of them became shattered into small pieces as if broken by sound vibrations. I stepped up to the north window and brought my right fist down against one of the small panes of glass. The blow was much too strong and the glass broke with large sharp fragments with dagger-likeedges. The top of my right hand near the inside of the wrist was deeply cut. It bled profusely through an opening a little less than an inch long and evidently extending through the full