I "winged" when weeping was farthest from my mood, when all of a sudden my heart was overflowing with buoyant happiness as a nuptial cup with good vine. I wanted to troll and laugh and dance for joy. All of them-Kraftstudt and Boltz and Deinis and the doctor-seemed to me capital fellows, the jolliest chaps I had ever met. It was then that, with great effort, I started to whimper and blow my nose loudly. Though ghastly inadequate, my weeping soon elicited the now familiar comments of the expert:
"Oh, what a type. All upside down. Nothing even remotely resembling the normal spectre. This fellow will give us a lot of trouble."
How far is the one hundred and thirty? I thought, in abject terror, when the happy and carefree sensation had given way to a feeling of worry, ungrounded anxiety, the presage of impending doom… I started humming a tune. I was doing it mechanically, with a great effort, while my heart pounded away in premonition of something terrible, something fatal and inevitable.
I at once knew when the frequency approached the one stimulating the sensation of pain. At first there was just a dull ache in the joints of the thumb on my right hand, then a sharp pain seared through an old war-time wound. This was followed by a terrible toothache spreading at once to all the teeth. Then a splitting headache added.
Blood pulsed painfully in my ears. Shall I be able to stand it? Shall I have enough will-power to overcome the nightmarish pain and not show it? People have been known after all to be done to death in torture chambers without groaning once. History has recorded cases of people dying on the faggots mute…
The pain went on increasing. Finally it reached its peak and my whole body became one knot of gnawing, stinging, racking, throbbing, excruciating pain. I was all but unconscious and saw purple specks revolving before my eyes, but I remained silent.
"Your sensations, Rauch," the doctor's voice penetrated to me.
"A sensation of murderous rage," I muttered through clenched teeth. "If I only could lay my hands on you…"
"Let's go on. He's completely abnormal. Everything's the other way round with him."
And when I was on the verge of passing out, ready to scream or groan, all pain was suddenly gone. There was sweat, clammy and cold, all over my body. My every muscle trembled.
Later some frequency made me see a blinding light which was there even when I shut my eyes, then I experienced wolfish hunger, heard a scale of deafening noises, felt cold as if taken out into the frost without a stitch on. But I persisted in giving the doctor wrong answers until he fumed with rage. I knew I still had one of the most terrible tests mentioned in the ward the day before coming to me: loss of will-power. It was will that had seen me through so far. It was this invisible inner force that had helped me fight the sensations created artificially by my tormentors. But they would get at it eventually with their hellish pulse generator. Now, would they be able to find I had lost it? I waited for that frequency in dread. And it came.
Suddenly I felt indifference. Indifference to being in the hands of the Kraftstudt gang, indifference to him and his associates, indifference to myself. My mind was a complete blank. The muscles felt flabby. All sensations were gone. It was a state of total physical and moral spineless-ness. I couldn't force myself to think or make the slightest movement. I had no will of my own.
And yet, surviving in some remote corner of my consciousness, a tiny thought insisted: You must… you must… you must.
You must what? Why? Whatever for? "You must… you must… you must," kept on insisting what seemed to me a single nerve cell by some kind of miracle impervious to the all-powerful electromagnetic pulses that held sway over my nerves, bidding them to feel whatever those hangmen wanted.
Later, when I learned about the theory of the central encephalic system of brain activity, according to which all the nerve cells in the cortex are governed by a single, master group of nerve cells, I realised that this supreme psychic authority was impervious even to the strongest outside physical and chemical influences. That must be what saved me then.
Suddenly the doctor ordered:
"You will collaborate with Kraftstudt."
I said:
"No."
"You will do all that you are told to do."
"No."
"Run your head against the wall."
"No."
"Let's go on. He's abnormal, Pfaff, but mind you we'll get at him yet."
I shammed loss of will-power just when a sensation of the strongest will flooded my whole being and I felt I could make myself do the impossible.
Checking on my "abnormalities" the doctor put me a few more questions.
"If the happiness of mankind depended on your life, would you give it?"
"Why should I?" I asked dully.
"Can you commit suicide?"
"Yes."
"Do you want to kill the war criminal, Obersturmfuhrer Kraftstudt?"
"What for?"
'Will you collaborate with us?"
"Yes."
"Damned if I can make anything out of him! I hope it's the first and the last time I have such a case to deal with. Loss of will-power at 175. Write that down. Let's go on with it."
And they went on for another half-hour. Finally the frequency chart of my nervous system was complete. The doctor now knew all the frequencies by means of which I could be made to experience any sensation or mood. At least he thought he did. Actually the only genuine frequency was the one which stimulated my mathematical abilities. And that was just what I needed most. The point was that I had evolved a plan of blowing the criminal firm sky-high. And mathematics was to be my dynamite.
It is an established fact that hypnosis and suggestion work best on weak-willed individuals. That was how the Kraftstudt personnel instilled in the calculators-their wills generator-treated- awed obedience and reverence towards their "teacher".
I, too, was to pass through an obedience course, but because of my "abnormal" spectre this;was postponed for a time. I required an individual approach.
While a working place was being specially set up for me I had comparative freedom to move about. I was allowed to go out of the ward into the corridor and glance into the class-rooms where my colleagues studied or worked.
I was not allowed to join in the common prayers held between the walls of a huge aluminium condenser for half an hour every morning, during which Kraftstudt's victims paid homage to the firm's head. Devoid of will and thought, they dully repeated words read to them over a closed-circuit broadcast system.
"Joy and happiness lie in self-knowledge," announced the relayed voice.
"Joy and happiness lie in self-knowledge," the twelve men on bended knees repeated in chorus, their will-power destroyed by the alternating current field "between the walls".
"By understanding the mysteries of the circulation of impulses across neurone synapses we achieve joy and happiness."
"… joy and happiness," repeated the chorus.
"How wonderful that everything is so simple!
What a delight it is to know that love, fear, pain, hatred, hunger, sorrow, joy are all nothing but movement of electrochemical impulses in our bodies!"
"… in our bodies."
"How miserable he who does not know this great truth!"
"… this great truth," repeated the slaves dully.
"Herr Kraftstudt, our teacher and saviour, gave us this happiness!"
"… happiness."