The one-sided fight ended. Thorn was jerked to his feet by four Saturnians who gripped him. Sual Av and Lana were similarly held. Gunner Welk lay unconscious on the floor.
"We shall now find out why these Planeteers came here and who they are working for!” Haskell Trask declared.
"But they dared threaten you, sir!” protested the tall captain. “They deserve instant execution for that crime."
"The indignity to me is nothing, declared the dictator fanatically. “I am thinking only of the great cause we all serve.
"You Planeteers are not as cunning as I thought,” Jenk Cheerly told Thorn tauntingly, “or you'd have guessed that there would be a spyplate outside the entrance to the dungeon."
Thorn's heart sank. So that was how they had been detected — by a hidden spy-plate outside the dungeon entrance, by which a distant officer could keep watch over all who entered or left the prison. The spy-plate watcher had seen them forcing the dictator and the other two ahead of them, and had summoned guards with a damper to nullify the Planeteers’ weapons and make sure they had no chance to harm the Leader when they were captured.
Thorn's wild hopes had crashed in utter ruin. He could not face Lana. He felt with bitter self-reproach that he had failed her, and that he had failed the Alliance.
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 John Thorn's head droned on in its monotonous metallic voice, speaking his thoughts.
He sat in one of the blue-lit cells, bound by broad leather straps into a chair. Sual Av and Gunner 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 his mind upon abstract things and figures. For two days and nights he and his comrades had sat bound here like this. Time had become meaningless, and it seemed to him that be had sat here thus forever, trying to think of anything except what Haskell 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 Lana's psychophone record, which had transcribed the information when Thorn had told it to her through the door of her 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!” Jenk Cheerly had pointed out shrewdly.
"Why did the Alliance send you to get the radite?” Trask had demanded of the Planeteers.
Thorn and Gunner and Sual Av had remained silent. And the tall, bony dictator had been seized by one of his 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 girl back under the psychophone again and keep her there until she yields the secret of Erebus."
Thorn had seen Lana dragged back into her cell, before he and his 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.
John Thorn's mind hovered on the brink of absolute despair. It was Lana he was thinking of. The girl, he knew, could not withstand the awful strain of this diabolical mental inquisition much longer. She would surely soon give way under the strain and let her mind wander to the secret that their captors wanted.
"— if she does, it's the end of everything,” the psychophone above spoke Thorn's thoughts. “She mustn't—"
Then, discovering that he had let his mind stray from abstract things, Thorn fiercely forced his thoughts back to safe subjects. He made himself concentrate on interplanetary history.
"The first space-flight was made by Robert 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 his return to Earth and lived only two days. After his death his chief aide, Clymer Nison, visited Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, but Clymer Nison never returned from an attempt he 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 his mind concentrated on interplanetary history, his two comrades were using similar stratagems to keep from revealing any information.
He could hear the psychophone attached to Sual Av blaring forth the bald Venusian's thoughts. “-and then there was that fat girl on Callisto — what the devil was her name?” Sual Av was thinking. “Can't remember her name, but I do remember that she was plenty big. Callisto's gravitation was so weak that she seemed light as a feather, but if I'd held her on my knee on any other world, she'd have flattened me! And then that tiger-cat of a Martian wench I met when I was engineer at the Syrtis chromium mines. Tried to knife me one night—"
Sual Av was obviously thinking of all the girls he had ever known, to occupy his thoughts safely. But Gunner Welk's psychophone was pouring forth a much different stream of thoughts.
The big Mercurian, ever since their incarceration under the psychophones, had occupied himself in thinking of what he would do to Haskell Trask if the opportunity ever offered.
"— glue his eyelids open and stake him out on the hot side of Mercury to look at the sun a while. No, he'd die too quick that way! It'd be better to take his skin off with that acid the Jovian tanners use, and then—"
The cell was like a bedlam to John Thorn's dazed mind. The three psychophones blaring metallically and without pause had become a torment to his ears.
He felt that he could not stand this much longer. And he understood now the full horror of the days that Lana had spent under the relentless instrument. And Lana was again being tortured by the psychophone!
On and on the hours dragged. The blue-lit cell swam about Thorn, and he closed his eyes tightly. Yet still the remorseless machine blared his thoughts, repeating interplanetary history, chemical formulae, mathematical tables — anything that would keep his mind on safely abstract subjects.
Thorn had cudgeled his mind for a means of escape. But there seemed none. He and his 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 his only escape from the torment of the blaring psychophone. Yet he could sleep for but a brief period at a time, and he was dully unsurprised when he awakened a little later.