He pressed a button, and a nerve-shattering wave of pain swept over the Earthman. When it finally faded, Magruder found his belly muscles tied in knots, his fists and teeth clenched, and tears running down his cheeks. Then nausea overtook him, and he lost the contents of his stomach.
Thagobar Verf turned distastefully away. “Put him back in his cell and clean up the interrogation chamber. Is he badly hurt?”
Zandoplith had already checked his instruments. “I think not, Your Splendor; it is probably only slight shock and nothing more. However, we will have to retest him in the next session anyhow. We’ll know then.”
Magruder sat on the edge of a shelflike thing that doubled as a low table and a high bed. It wasn’t the most comfortable seat in the world, but it was all he had in the room; the floor was even harder.
It had been several hours since he had been brought here, and he still didn’t feel good. That stinking machine had hurt! He clenched his fists; he could still feel the knot in his stomach and—
And then he realized that the knot in his stomach hadn’t been caused by the machine; he had thrown that off a long time back.
The knot was caused by a towering, thundering-great, ice-cold rage.
He thought about it for a minute and then broke out laughing. Here he was, like a stupid fool, so angry that he was making himself sick! And that wasn’t going to do him or the colony any good.
It was obvious that the aliens were up to no good, to say the least. The colony at New Hilo numbered six thousand souls—the only humans on New Hawaii, except for a couple of bush expeditions. If this ship tried to take over the planet, there wouldn’t be a devil of a lot the colonists could do about it. And what if the aliens found Earth itself? He had no idea what kind of armament this spaceship carried nor how big it was—but it seemed to have plenty of room inside it.
He knew it was up to him. He was going to have to do something, somehow. What? Could he get out of his cell and try to smash the ship?
Nope. A naked man inside a bare cell was about as helpless as a human being can get. What, then?
Magruder lay on his back and thought about it for a long time.
Presently, a panel opened in the door and a red-violet face appeared on the other side of a transparent square in the door.
“You are doubtless hungry,” it said solemnly. “An analysis of your bodily processes has indicated what you need in the way of sustenance. Here.”
The quart-size mug that slid out of a niche in the wall had an odd aroma drifting up from it. Magruder picked it up and looked inside. It was a grayish-tan, semitranslucent liquid about the consistency of thin gravy. He touched the surface with his finger and then touched the finger with his tongue. Its palate appeal was definitely on the negative side of zero.
He could guess what it contained: a score, more or less, of various amino acids, a dozen vitamins, a handful of carbohydrates, and a few percent of other necessities. A sort of pseudo-protoplasmic soup; an overbalanced meal.
He wondered whether it contained anything that would do him harm, decided it probably didn’t. If the aliens wanted to dope him, they didn’t need to resort to subterfuge, and besides, this was probably the gunk they had fed him while he was learning the language.
Pretending to himself that it was beef stew, he drank it down. Maybe he could think better on a full stomach. And, as it turned out, he was right.
Less than an hour later, he was back in the interrogation chamber. This tune, he was resolved to keep Thagobar’s finger off that little button.
After all, he reasoned to himself, I might want to lie to someone, when and if I get out of this. There’s no point in getting a conditioned reflex against it.
And the way the machine had hurt him, there was a strong possibility that he just might get conditioned if he took very many jolts like that.
He had a plan. It was highly nebulous—little more than a principle, really, and it was highly flexible. He would simply have to take what came, depend on luck, and hope for the best.
He sat down in the chair and waited for the wall to become transparent again. He had thought there might be a way to get out as he was led from his cell to the interrogation chamber, but he didn’t feel like tackling six heavily armored aliens all at once. He wasn’t even sure he could do much with just one of them. Where do you slug a guy whose nervous system you know nothing about, and whose body is plated like a boiler?
The wall became transparent, and the alien was standing on the other side of it. Magruder wondered whether it was the same being who had questioned him before, and after looking at the design on the plastron, decided that it was.
He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and waited for the first question.
Thagobar Verf was a very troubled Dal. He had very carefully checked the psychological data with General Orders after the psychologists had correlated it according to the Handbook. He definitely did not like the looks of his results.
General Orders merely said: “No race of this type has ever been found in the galaxy before. In this case, the commander will act according to GO 234,511,006-R-g, Ch. MMCDX, Par. 666.”
After looking up the reference, he had consulted with Zandoplith. “What do you think of it?” he asked. “And why doesn’t your science have any answers?”
“Science, Your Splendor,” said Zandoplith, “is a process of obtaining and correlating data. We haven’t enough data yet, true, but we’ll get it. We absolutely must not panic at this point; we must be objective, purely objective.” He handed Thagobar another printed sheet. “These are the next questions to be asked, according to the Handbook of Psychology.”
Thagobar felt a sense of relief. General Orders had said that in a case like this, the authority of action was all dependent on his own decision; it was nice to know that the scientist knew what he was doing, and had authority to back it.