"As you wish," he said with a sigh. "I'm very sorry, though."
After a minute's silence he stood up briskly, went over to the door and, opening it, called out:
"Eider, Schrank, come in here!"
"What are you going to do to me?" I asked, also getting up.
"To begin with we'll record the pulse-code spectre of your nervous system."
"Which means?"
"Which means we'll record the form, intensity and frequency of the pulses responsible for your every emotional and intellectual state and make them into a chart."
"But I won't let you. I will protest. I-"
"Show the Professor the way to the test laboratory," Boltz cut in indifferently and turned his back on me to look out of the window.
As I entered the test laboratory I had already formed the decision which was to play a crucial role in the events that followed. My line of reasoning was this. They are going to subject me to a test that will give Kraftstudt and his gang complete information on my inner self. They need this to know what electromagnetic influence to bring to bear on my nervous system to produce any emotion or sensation they want. If they are fully successful I'll be in their power beyond hope of escape. If they are not I'll retain a certain amount of free play. Which I might soon badly need. So the only hope for me is to try to fool those gangsters as much as possible. That I can' do so to a degree I deduced from what a slave of Kraftstudt's said yesterday about pulse-code characteristics being individual, except where mathematical thought is concerned.
I was led into a large room cluttered up with bulky instrumentation, the whole looking like the control room of a power station. The middle of the laboratory was taken up by a control console with instrument panels and dials. To its left, behind a screen of wire mesh, towered a transformer, several generator lamps glowing red in white porcelain panels. Fixed to the wire mesh which served as a screen-grid for the generator were a voltmeter and an ammeter. Their readings were used, apparently, to measure the generator's output. Close by the control console stood a cylindrical booth made up of two metallic parts, top and bottom.
As I was led up to the booth two men rose from behind the console. One of them was the same doctor who had taken me to Kraftstudt the day before, the other-a wizened old man whom I didn't know, with sparse hair disciplined into perfect smoothness on a yellow crane.
"Failed to persuade him," the doctor said. "I knew as much. I could see at once that Rauch belonged to the strong type. You will come to a bad end, Rauch," he said to me.
"So will you," I said.
"That's as may be, but with you it's definite."
I shrugged.
"Will you go through it voluntarily or do you want us to force you?" he then asked, looking me over insolently.
"Voluntarily. As a physicist I'm even interested."
"Splendid. In that case remove your shoes and strip to the waist. I must examine you first and take your blood pressure."
I did as I was told. The first part of "registering the spectre" looked like an ordinary medical check-up-breathe, stop breathing and the rest of it.
When the examination was over the doctor said:
"Now step into the booth. You've got a mike there. Answer all my questions. I must warn you that one of the frequencies will make you feel an intense pain. But it will go as soon as you yell out."
In my bare feet I stepped on to the porcelain floor. An electric bulb flashed on overhead. The generator droned. It was operating in the low-frequency band. The tension of the field was obviously very high. I felt this by the way waves of warmth swelled and ebbed slowly through my body. Each electromagnetic pulse brought with it a strange tickling in the joints. Then my muscles began contracting and relaxing in time to the pulses.
Presently the frequency of the warmth waves was increased.
Here it goes, I thought. If only I can bear it. When the frequency reached eight cycles per second I would want to sleep. If only I could fight it. If only I could fool the blackguards. The frequency was slowly increasing. In my mind I counted the number of warm tides per second. One, two, three, four, more, still more… Then sleepiness was on me with overwhelming sudden-ness. I clamped my teeth together, willing myself into wakefulness. Sleep was pushing me under like an enormous clammy weight, bearing me down, loading my eyelids. It was a miracle I was still on my feet. I bit my tongue, hoping pain would help me throw off the nightmarish burden of sleep. At that moment, as if from afar, a voice came to me:
"Rauch, how do you feel?"
"Not bad, thank you. A bit cold," I lied. I didn't recognise my own voice and bit my lips and tongue as hard as I could.
"Don't you feel sleepy?"
"No," I said, though I thought I would drop into sleep the next moment. And then, abruptly, all sleepiness was gone. The frequency must have been increased beyond the first terminal threshold. I felt fresh and cheerful as after a good snooze. Now I must fall asleep, I thought, and, shutting my eyes, snored away. I heard the doctor say to his assistant:
"Odd. Sleep at ten cycles instead of eight and a half. Write it down, Pfaff," he told the old man. "Rauch, your sensations?"
I didn't reply, still snoring loudly, my muscles relaxed, knees stuck against the side of the booth.
"Let's go on with it," said the doctor. "Increase the frequency, Pfaff, will you."
In a second I "woke up". The frequency band through which I was now passing made me experience a whole gamut of emotions and changes of mood. I was sad, then gay, then happy, then utterly miserable.
"Time I yelled out," I suddenly decided.
At the moment the generator's roar increased I yelled all I could, whereupon the doctor immediately ordered:
"Cut the tension! It's the first time I've met such a crazy type. Write down: pain at seventy-five cycles per second when normal people experience it at one hundred and thirty. Go on."
That frequency is still in store for me, I thought in dread. Will I be able to cope with it?
"Now, Pfaff, try the ninety-three on him."
When the frequency stabilised something entirely unexpected happened to me. I suddenly remembered the equations which had brought me to Kraftstudt and with perfect clarity visualised every stage of their solution. This is the frequency which stimulates mathematical thinking, I thought fleetingly.
"Rauch, name the first five members of the Bessel function of the second order," the doctor demanded.
I rattled off the answer. My head was crystal clear and my whole being was permeated with a wonderful feeling of knowing all and having it on my tongue's tip.
"Name the first ten places of it."
I named them.
"Solve a cubic equation."
The doctor dictated one with unwieldy fractional coefficients.
In two or three seconds I had the solution ready, naming all the three roots.
"Let's go on. He's quite normal in this department."
Slowly the frequency increased and I felt maudlin. There was a lump in my throat and tears welled in my eyes. But I laughed. I roared with convulsive laughter as if being vigorously tickled. I laughed, while the tears rolled down my cheeks.
"Some idiotic idiosyncrasy again. In a class of his own, you might say. I at once knew him for a strong nervous type subject to neuroses. When will he winge, I wonder?"