But he had no illusions. He could not maintain his imposture beneath the merciless beam of the Probe. Before the mental wizardry of the adepts of Nex, his grim determination to stay silent would not long shield him.
Without speaking, he permitted the robot warriors to lead him out of the chamber of the Space Mirror and down a long corridor of glimmering lights.
Pangoy and the Witch Queen looked down at the nude figure strapped to the operating table in Pangoy’s secret chambers. The Earthling lived, but his respiration was shallow. Sweat glistened on his dark skin and stood in cold globules in the lines of his tortured face. His features were distorted, twisted into a mask of silent agony.
Pangoy felt a certain cold pleasure in stripping the mind of the bold young thief who had thought to steal his own place beside Azeera. A curious helmet now surmounted the brows of the Mind Wizard. It was a domed and glittering thing of metal and crystal. Small odd lights flickered and wove amidst the miniscule mechanisms of the helm. This cunning device acted as an amplifier, to augment and direct the force of Pangoy’s own trained mind. To focus his mental probe into a narrow needle-beam with which he searched the shadowy terrain of Kirin’s helpless brain like a cartographer reading a map.
Pangoy had not expected a slightest degree of difficulty in laying Kirin’s inmost thoughts bare. Only a trained telepath of enormous skill and a vast reservoir of inner power could have hoped to avoid the tremendously magnified strength of Pangoy’s brilliant intellect. And, in point of fact, it had been child’s play to insinuate a mental tendril through a small crack in the Earthling’s mental defenses. The next step had been to intensify pressure against this small flaw until the outer walls of Kirin’s mental defenses broke and were crushed. The amplified intelligence of Pangoy could then at his leisure pick through the ruins and expose hidden things to the light of his probing sensors.
But his plans had gone awry.
Just as the mental walls were crumbling and Kirin howled, writhing in the agony of defilement and mental violation, his struggling, tenacious, battling mind somehow tapped a hidden source of mind power. Pangoy knew that the resources of a mind at bay were sometimes extraordinary. But those which Kirin’s mind displayed were something beyond the limits of even the Mind Wizard’s experience.
What had happened was swift and inexplicable. One moment the naked Earthling panted and fought against the Probe, the next instant he was plunged into a death-like sleep. In this trance-like state his mind was dead, lax, unreadable. All energy seemed to drain instantly from the memory-sequences. To the telepathic vision of Pangoy, these mental chains were like glowing paths that coiled and twisted between and around the dim glowing nuclei of the instinctive mind-centers. The blazing memory-sequences could be read like so many illuminated signs. But suddenly the energy source was annulled. The glowing sequences died into somnolent darkness. In the death-like darkness of Kirin’s mind, Pangoy’s attempts to probe his thoughts were useless.
Feeling an unaccustomed sense of frustration, Pangoy one by one withdrew his mind tendrils from the dead citadel. The lights in the steel and crystal helm dimmed, went out. Wearily he removed the curious headpiece and set it in its place atop a low pedestal.
This unusual mental defense-mechanism was something completely beyond Pangoy’s experience. He could do nothing further until such time as the Earthling awakened from his unnatural and death-like trance. He sought to explain this to the Witch Queen.
“I had hoped to strip his mental defenses to such a stage that you could question him yourself, my lady. In such a condition his conscious mind would be helpless and the answers to your queries would spring automatically from his memory-circuits. It is impossible for a man to lie under the Probe; hence you would learn the truth of his accusations and the falsehood of his counter-claims…”
She raised a hand for silence.
“Enough, Pangoy! I am not fully satisfied in the truth of your statements. Let me warn you that if you have slain the Earthling under guise of preparing him for my questioning, if you have destroyed his mind to protect your own position, my vengeance shall be sudden and terrible.”
He bowed humbly before the icy scorn in her voice.
“I swear to you that he lives and is sane! This trance condition is beyond my knowledge, but he will recover normal consciousness with time. Then we shall continue the Probe and you can discover for yourself whether I speak the truth or whether I lie…”
“Very well, Pangoy. We shall continue this at a later time,” she said, and together they left the laboratory.
Kirin was fully conscious of everything about him as Pangoy and Azeera discussed his condition. Although he could hear perfectly his eyes were closed and he had no knowledge of where he was. And he was unable to lift his eyelids and look. It was as if an unbreakable paralysis seized control of all his faculties. Although he strove desperately to break the spell that bound him as if with invisible chains, he could not so much as move a muscle.
His lungs expanded. His chest rose and fell. His heart pumped red blood through his body. All automatic life systems continued operation. But every conscious ability was numbed and rendered helpless. It was an eerie and terrifying state; it was as if his mind was a prisoner, locked and helpless within his own skull.
Within his mind strange forces were at work. He was conscious of them but in a vague, dim way. It was as if doors long sealed were opening one by one. Strange hulking shapes arose from the dark sediment of his bottomless unconscious. Whole unknown segments of memory rose slowly from the black well of the lower mind, that enormous reservoir of racial memory where the conscious mind can never trespass.
The sensation was uncanny. As if colossal submerged icebergs were lifting their titanic bulk out of an unknown and shadowy sea. Enormous sequences of memory rose slowly into the light of his upper mind and connected to his memory circuits. He caught glimpses of unknown lands, strange faces, curious symbols. Colors unknown to mortal man flashed before the inward eye of his mind. Tumbling panoramas of fantastic beauty, strangeness and terror rose into view.
There were colossal mountains of blazing crystal that covered the surface of an unknown planet. Titanic storms of flying fire clove and shattered the crystal ranges and brought their glittering escarpments down in a rain of ringing shards.
Other sectors of previously-submerged memory rose into place, linking with yet more, forming a colossal pattern. It was like the pieces of a mental jigsaw puzzle coming together into a whole.
There were vast and unfamiliar winged shapes of fierce light hurtling through regions of golden coiling mist towards an unknown goal. Then surging mists drove these things from view and when they parted he stared down on the strange purple waters of a nameless sea. Here a scaled and finny folk dwelt in coral cities adorned with giant pearls. He saw their glittering silvery bodies as they clove the winy foam. He watched as they tamed gigantic monsters of the depths to serve as their steeds and as animate weapons of war in a colossal conflict with feathery avians who dwelt in cloud realms above the surface. The wars of the sea and air seemed to occupy endless centuries of slow time. At length the mists drove all from view again.
He was conscious of remembering the sensation of rapid flight through regions of utter darkness and terrible cold. Then the darkness fell away and he strode through halls of golden splendor, where tall faceless beings were throned amidst thunderous light. He stood before them. Streams of unintelligible converse flowed about him; vaguely he understood that a mighty task had been set upon him, a quest of some nature beyond his powers of comprehension.