between Ward and the cage. “It is too late,” it said. “We shall take care of the cage for you. We shall release it in space.” He reached for Ward.

He would have fought, but he knew there were others waiting outside. Red had said so, and he believed Red. The important thing was to clear this room long enough for Red to take the cage out and conceal it somewhere on the great liner.

“I’ll come,” he said. It eased his badly depressed ego to admit the obvious.

Blackness and indescribable pain indefinitely prolonged, intermingled with a kind of eternity in the stygian night of the psychocell. There was no time in the blackness, so that forever and now, all concepts of time, merged into only pain. The Mo-Sanshon were killing him with sound.

There would be no evidence. The pain impinged with hideous slowness, played over his nerves like liquid flame. It coursed through his veins, his spine, until he shook and twitched with agony for which there is no speech interpretation. It exploded again and again in his mind, and grew steadily into a monstrous continuous hell.

He was aware of periods of screaming and slobbering. He remembered indefinite episodes in which he was on his feet, hopping and jerking catatonically like a mad electric marionette. Every nerve cell jiggled; each separate nerve was erratic anguish.

Sometime later, still in the timeless blackness, he was stiffly outstretched on his face, his lips murmuring in a salty-tasting pool, either blood, sweat, or both, making hoarse, rattling animal noises.

What a way to die! How many others would die this way, or in even more ingeniously inhuman ways, beneath the emotionless alien dictates of the Mo-Sanshon!

And, sometime after that, he discovered that the ghastly torture had stopped. His body reacted like rubber stretched to maximum, then abruptly released. He was rolling, sobbing in an ecstasy of freedom.

He heard the sliding of a grate, and saw a narrow slit of pale light. He couldn’t move toward the sound, and even the harsh whisper had little reality for Ward.

“Doc. Doc. It’s me, Red. You still kicking?”

Ward listened for a long time before he finally heard a voice resembling his. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“I finally found the 

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