Once more he felt the pressure of that cold steel band around his head, and the cruel thrust of that three-edged blade, and the burning agony of that unendurable vibration.
He could see Stephen Oreo’s furious face against the darkness of that room, and hear his savage voice, amplified and changed to unbearable pain:
“So you don’t like it, pup?
Then you had better change your mind.
Because you’ll never be able to do anything about it.
I’m fixing you now so you can’t kill anybody.
This machine is stronger than anybody’s will.
When it gets through breaking you, you’ll stay broken.
Even if you weren’t a sniveling coward before, you’ll be one now.
“You can’t kill me.
You can’t kill—”
Those taunting words echoed again in his mind, with the imperative effect of a post-hypnotic suggestion.
He couldn’t kill—but he must!
The image of that frightened girl in the wall came back to spur him on, and he took another dragging step toward that push button.
But still he couldn’t kill—
Something was wrong with the lights in the room.
They were turning green.
Or was there a green light shining through the massive door behind him.
The crisis was here.
Now he had to act, and there were only two more steps—
A greenish mist had flooded the room, rising swiftly against the transparent barrier that separated him from Stephen Oreo—or was it only in his eyes?
The gray walls swam, until he thought they were going to dissolve into another inexplicable vista.
His skin began to prickle strangely.
Something numbed all his sensations.
Stiffness seized his limbs.
He thrust his arm out frantically toward that red push button—or tried to.
But he no longer had an arm.
Darkness annihilated everything.
He didn’t know when he hit the floor.
7 The Beast of the Mists
The muttered thunder of descending rockets awoke Bob Star.
Bitter cold had stiffened his cramped limbs, and his eyes opened upon oppressive green twilight.
He found himself sprawled upon frozen ground, still numb with that tingling paralysis which had robbed him of consciousness.
Groping desperately for recollection, he found a disturbing conviction that the gap in his consciousness had contained something un-thinkably hideous—something that his mind had sealed away, to preserve its sanity.
After a moment, however, the sickening fact of his own failure came back.
Despair swept away that other disquieting half-memory, and he sank back for a time in a crushed and hopeless apathy, until the increasing sound of the rockets became too loud to be ignored.
Gasping in a great breath of that icy air, he sat up stiffly.
He was bewildered to find himself at the very brink of an appal-ling chasm.
The flat and barren face of Neptune broke, not a dozen feet from where he had lain, into a dreadful pit of greenish darkness. He stood up to look into it, and found only misty emptiness.
It seemed to have no farther walls, nor floor.
He swayed back from it, giddily.
The scrape of a foot jarred his nerves.
He spun apprehensively, and then grinned with a shaken relief when he found his two bodyguards behind him, safely back from the rim of the inexplicable pit, staring up at a vague blue flickering in the cloudy dark above.
“Aye!” boomed Hal Samdu.
“It’s a ship.”
“And time we were rescued!” gasped Giles Habibula.
“Dear life knows we’ve been waiting long enough, dying in this wicked cold.”
“Giles!” Bob Star called anxiously.
“How did we get here?
And what’s this pit?”