Oreo made him open the back door, and they dragged me into the building.
“They took me down into a little basement room, where they wouldn’t be interrupted—for I had made friends of my own, in spite of Oreo.
They did various things to me, but I didn’t speak.
Stephen Oreo’s terrible pride was burning cold in his eyes.
I think my stubbornness made him angry—if you can imagine that.
“He exhausted the customary penalties, and thought of new ones.
He was clever, and he had a taste for such work.
Even after his three companions got frightened, he wouldn’t agree to let me go.
“Finally, he sent one of the others up to break open a display case and bring him down a rusty torture implement that dated from the last corrupt reigns of the Empire, when the democratic Greens were about to overthrow the power-rotted Purples.
A device invented to break political prisoners.
It was called the Iron Confessor.”
“Huh?”
The commander peered suddenly at that pale scar, with dark, startled eyes.
“I think I remember seeing that display.
Isn’t the thing a sort of helmet?”
“There’s a wide iron ring that goes around the head,” Bob Star said huskily.
“And a sort of three-edged blade that can be forced through a hole in it, as the screws are tightened, into the scalp and the skull of the victim.
“I think Stephen Oreo was showing his jealousy, then.
He couldn’t forget that I came from the old imperial family.
If he had been John Star’s son—or the Pretender’s either—I think he would have been plotting to restore the Empire.
Anyhow, he called that torture device the Purple crown, and I could see the savage envy in the way he made me wear it.”
Jay Kalam stood staring at the scar.
“He didn’t do—that!”
“He made his men hold me,” Bob Star said.
“He put that ring on my head, and tightened the screws until I felt the blood running down my face.
He kept commanding me to repeat the wicked lie.
Still I wouldn’t do it, and my silence seemed to goad him.
“The Iron Confessor was more than the ring and the blade.
There was another part, that had been smashed before it was put in the museum.
Oreo repaired that, while his men held me there with that blade in my skull.
I don’t know exactly what it was, or how it worked—I didn’t have much attention left, just then, for mechanical details.
But Oreo said it used supersonic vibration, tuned to stimulate the pain centers of the brain.
It looked like a radio amplifier.
A cable ran from it to that three-edged blade.
What it did was to transform a voice into sensations of intolerable pain.
“Stephen Oreo stood hi front of me, when he got it hooked up.
The room was dark, but I could see his face in the glow from the tubes of that device.
The hair red like flame. The blue eyes triumphant and mocking and terrible.
He began talking into a little microphone, and that thing turned his voice into great waves of red agony beating at my mind.
“It felt unendurable.
But I was already exhausted from trying to get away.
The others were all grown men, and trained athletes.
I was twelve years old, growing weak from loss of blood, and already half-unconscious with pain.
There was nothing I could do.
“Oreo kept on talking, gradually twisting the dials of that fiendish device to step up the intensity of agony.
The Iron Confessor had been invented by my own family, he said, to extract confessions from enemies.
It was guaranteed, he said, to make anybody confess any-thing.
“He said it was based on the secret principles of political conversion first discovered by a party called the Reds, a thousand years ago.
The tuned ultrasonic vibrations from that blade could destroy the synaptic patterns of my brain, he said—to break my will and make the truth of everything he told me.
“And I was terribly afraid for a while—afraid of yielding to him.