When he came to, he was in an ordinary hospital room, but he did not notice it. He seemed bedded in fire. He lifted his hand to see if there were flames on it. It looked the way it always had, except that it was a little red and a little swollen. He tried to turn in the bed. The fire became a scorching blast which stopped him in mid-turn. Uncontrollably, he moaned.
A voice spoke, “You are ready for some pain-killer.”
It was a girl nurse. “Hold your head still,” she said, “and I will give you half an amp of pleasure. Your skin won’t bother you then.”
She slipped a soft cap on his head. It looked like metal but it felt like silk.
He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from threshing about on the bed.
“Scream if you want to,” she said. “A lot of them do. It will just be a minute or two before the cap finds the right lobe in your brain.”
She stepped to the corner and did something which he could not see.
There was the flick of a switch.
The fire did not vanish from his skin. He still felt it; but suddenly it did not matter. His mind was full of delicious pleasure which throbbed outward from his head and seemed to pulse down through his nerves.
He had visited the pleasure palaces, but he had never felt anything like this before.
He wanted to thank the girl, and he twisted around in the bed to see her. He could feel his whole body flash with pain as he did so, but the pain was far away. And the pulsating pleasure which coursed out of his head, down his spinal cord and into his nerves was so intense that the pain got through only as a remote, unimportant signal.
She was standing very still in the corner.
“Thank you, nurse,” said he.
She said nothing.
He looked more closely, though it was hard to look while enormous pleasure pulsed through his body like a symphony written in nerve-messages. He focused his eyes on her and saw that she too wore a soft metallic cap.
He pointed at it.
She blushed all the way down to her throat.
She spoke dreamily, “You looked like a nice man to me. I didn’t think you’d tell on me… “
He gave her what he thought was a friendly smile, but with the pain in his skin and the pleasure bursting out of his head, he really had no idea of what his actual expression might be. “It’s against the law,” he said. “It’s terribly against the law. But it is nice.”
“How do you think we stand it here?” said the nurse. “You specimens come in here talking like ordinary people and then you go down to Shayol. Terrible things happen to you on Shayol. Then the surface station sends up parts of you, over and over again. I may see your head ten times, quick-frozen and ready for cutting up, before my two years are up. You prisoners ought to know how we suffer,” she crooned, the pleasure-charge still keeping her relaxed and happy, “you ought to die as soon as you get down there and not pester us with your torments. We can hear you screaming, you know. You keep on sounding like people even after Shayol begins to work on you. Why do you do it, Mr. Specimen?” She giggled sillily. “You hurt our feelings so. No wonder a girl like me has to have a little jolt now and then. It’s real, real dreamy and I don’t mind getting you ready to go down on Shayol.” She staggered over to his bed. “Pull this cap off me, will you? I haven’t got enough will power left to raise my hands.”
Mercer saw his hand tremble as he reached for the cap.
His fingers touched the girl’s soft hair through the cap. As he tried to get his thumb under the edge of the cap, in order to pull it off, he realized that this was the loveliest girl he had ever touched. He felt that he had always loved her, that he always would. Her cap came off. She stood erect, staggering a little before she found a chair to hold to. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
“Just a minute,” she said in her normal voice. “I’ll be with you in just a minute. The only time I can get a jolt of this is when one of you visitors gets a dose to get over the skin trouble.”
She turned to the room mirror to adjust her hair. Speaking with her back to him, she said, “I hope I didn’t say anything about downstairs.”
Mercer still had the cap on. He loved this beautiful girl who had put it on him. He was ready to weep at the thought that she had had the same kind of pleasure which he still enjoyed. Not for the world would he say anything which could hurt her feelings. He was sure she wanted to be told that she had not said anything about “downstairs”—probably shop talk for the surface of Shayol — so he assured her warmly, “You said nothing. Nothing at all.”.
She came over to the bed, leaned, kissed him on the lips. The kiss was as far away as the pain; he felt nothing; the Niagara of throbbing pleasure which poured through his head left no room for more sensation. But he liked the friendliness of it. A grim, sane corner of his mind whispered to him that this was probably the last time he would ever kiss a woman, but it did not seem to matter.
With skilled fingers she adjusted the cap on his head. “There, now. You’re a sweet guy. I’m going to pretend-forget and leave the cap on you till the doctor comes.”
With a bright smile she squeezed his shoulder.
She hastened out of the room.
The white of her skirt flashed prettily as she went out the door. He saw that she had very shapely legs indeed.
She was nice, but the cap… ah, it was the cap that mattered! He closed his eyes and let the cap go on stimulating the pleasure centers of his brain. The pain in his skin was still there, but it did not matter any more than did the chair standing in the corner. The pain was just something that happened to be in the room.
A firm touch on his arm made him open his eyes.
The older, authoritative-looking man was standing beside the bed, looking down at him with a quizzical smile.
“She did it again,” said the old man.
Mercer shook his head, trying to indicate that the young nurse had done nothing wrong.
“I’m Doctor Vomact,” said the older man, “and I am going to take this cap off you. You will then experience the pain again, but I think it will not be so bad. You can have the cap several more times before you leave here.”
With a swift, firm gesture he snatched the cap off Mercer’s head.
Mercer promptly doubled up with the inrush of fire from his skin. He started to scream and then saw that Doctor Vomact was watching him calmly.
Mercer gasped, “It is — easier now.”
“I knew it would be,” said the doctor. “I had to take the cap off to talk to you. You have a few choices to make.”
“Yes, Doctor,” gasped Mercer.
“You have committed a serious crime and you are going down to the surface of Shayol.”
“Yes,” said Mercer.
“Do you want to tell me your crime?”
Mercer thought of the white palace walls in perpetual sunlight, and the soft mewing of the little things when he reached them. He tightened his arms, legs, back and jaw. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s the crime without a name. Against the Imperial family… “
“Fine,” said the doctor, “that’s a healthy attitude. The crime is past. Your future is ahead. Now, I can destroy your mind before you go down — if you want me to.”
“That’s against the law,” said Mercer.
Doctor Vomact smiled warmly and confidently. “Of course it is. A lot of things are against human law. But there are laws of science, too. Your body, down on Shayol, is going to serve science. It doesn’t matter to me whether that body has Mercer’s mind or the mind of a low-grade shellfish. I have to leave enough mind in you to keep the body going, but I can wipe out the historic you and give your body a better chance of being happy. It’s your choice, Mercer. Do you want to be you or not?”
Mercer shook his head back and forth, “I don’t know.”