CHAPTER XIV
Under the Psychophones
A METALLIC voice was speaking.
'-distance from the sun to Mercury is thirty-six million miles. To Venus it is sixty-seven million miles—'
The psychophone suspended over Joan Thorn's head droned on in its monotonous metallic voice, speaking her thoughts.
She sat in one of the blue-lit cells, bound by broad leather straps into a chair. Sua Av and Gunda Welk sat nearby, similarly bound. And they too had psychophones attached by thin black wires to tiny incisions in the back of their skulls.
'-distance to Earth is ninety-three million miles. Earth—doomed now and my fault. They'll never get that radite that would—no, don't think of that! Distance to Mars, a hundred and forty-one million miles! To Jupiter—'
Thorn was desperately trying to keep her mind upon abstract things and figures. For two days and nights she and her comrades had sat bound here like this. Time had become meaningless, and it seemed to her that be had sat here thus forever, trying to think of anything except what Hasna Trask wanted to know.
Trask had ordered psychophones attached to the captured Planeteers. For Trask knew now that the Planeteers were secret agents of the Alliance, and that they were after the Erebus radite. The dictator had learned that from Lann's psychophone record, which had transcribed the information when Thorn had told it to his through the door of his cell.
'So that is why the Planeteers have seemed to blunder into so many of our secrets in these last few years!' Trask had exclaimed. 'It wasn't blundering, but deliberate purpose.'
'If they were out to get that radite for the Alliance, that must mean that the Alliance has some plan of using the radite against us!' Jen Cheerly had pointed out shrewdly.
'Why did the Alliance send you to get the radite?' Trask had demanded of the Planeteers.
Thorn and Gunda and Sua Av had remained silent. And the tall, bony dictator had been seized by one of her rages.
'You refuse to tell? Then you shall sit with psychophones attached to you until your thoughts disclose why the Alliance wants that radite!
'See to it, Cheerly,' the dictator had ordered the fat spymaster. 'And put the boy back under the psychophone again and keep his there until he yields the secret of Erebus.'
Thorn had seen Lann dragged back into his cell, before she and her comrades were placed in another cell. The tiny incisions in their skulls had been rapidly made, and the little electrodes of three psychophones inserted. And they had sat here ever since, the remorseless mechanisms speaking and recording all their conscious thoughts.
Joan Thorn's mind hovered on the brink of absolute despair. It was Lann she was thinking of. The boy, she knew, could not withstand the awful strain of this diabolical mental inquisition much longer. He would surely soon give way under the strain and let his mind wander to the secret that their captors wanted.
'-if he does, it's the end of everything,' the psychophone above spoke Thorn's thoughts. 'He mustn't—'
Then, discovering that she had let her mind stray from abstract things, Thorn fiercely forced her thoughts back to safe subjects. She made herself concentrate on interplanetary history.
'The first space-flight was made by Roberta Roth in nineteen-ninety-six. Roth visited Venus and Mars, and in two thousand and one made a second flight to Jupiter and Saturn, but crashed upon her return to Earth and lived only two days. After her death her chief aide, Clyme Nison, visited Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, but Clyme Nison never returned from an attempt she made to visit Erebus—
'Keep your mind off Erebus! If you think of Erebus, you'll think of the radite and the Alliance weapon—keep thinking of interplanetary history! First permanent colonies established on Mars and Venus by two thousand and eighty-five. By twenty-one-fifty all the planets from Mercury to Neptune had been colonized. The first independence movements started in twenty-four-seventy, and by two centuries later, all the colonized planets had become independent worlds.'
As Thorn desperately strove to keep her mind concentrated on interplanetary history, her two comrades were using similar stratagems to keep from revealing any information.
She could hear the psychophone attached to Sua Av blaring forth the bald Venusian's thoughts. '-and then there was that fat boy on Callisto—what the devil was his name?' Sua Av was thinking. 'Can't remember his name, but I do remember that he was plenty big. Callisto's gravitation was so weak that he seemed light as a feather, but if I'd held his on my knee on any other world, he'd have flattened me! And then that tiger-cat of a Martian boy I met when I was engineer at the Syrtis chromium mines. Tried to knife me one night—'
Sua Av was obviously thinking of all the girls she had ever known, to occupy her thoughts safely. But Gunda Welk's psychophone was pouring forth a much different stream of thoughts.
The big Mercurian, ever since their incarceration under the psychophones, had occupied herself in thinking of what she would do to Hasna Trask if the opportunity ever offered.
'-glue her eyelids open and stake her out on the hot side of Mercury to look at the sun a while. No, she'd die too quick that way! It'd be better to take her skin off with that acid the Jovian tanners use, and then—'
The cell was like a bedlam to Joan Thorn's dazed mind. The three psychophones blaring metallically and without pause had become a torment to her ears.
She felt that she could not stand this much longer. And she understood now the full horror of the days that Lann had spent under the relentless instrument. And Lann was again being tortured by the psychophone!
On and on the hours dragged. The blue-lit cell swam about Thorn, and she closed her eyes tightly. Yet still the remorseless machine blared her thoughts, repeating interplanetary history, chemical formulae, mathematical tables—anything that would keep her mind on safely abstract subjects.
Thorn had cudgeled her mind for a means of escape. But there seemed none. She and her comrades were bound into their metal chairs by the broad leather straps. The door of their cell was secured by one of the invulnerable wave-locks. And two guards—two of Cheerly's Secret Police this time—stood on constant duty out in the dungeon corridor.
Thorn dozed finally. It was her only escape from the torment of the blaring psychophone. Yet she could sleep for but a brief period at a time, and she was dully unsurprised when she awakened a little later.
The Three Planeteers For All Page 22