THE WAY OUT

By RICHARD R. SMITH

Illustrated by RICHARD KLUGA

How do you kill a man without killing him? Unless that question could be answered, Earth would lose the war, and every Earthman would die!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity June 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The room was a maze of mirrors that reflected his nightmare image. At first he had tried to close his eyes but found that they had done something to them. He could not close them and was forced to look at the thing in the hundreds of mirrors, seeing it from all angles.

He had tried to sleep—thinking that, if asleep, he would not see the mirrors and himself. But they had injected drugs into his body—drugs that made sleep impossible except when they wanted him to sleep. A human body had to have a minimum of sleep; they knew what that minimum was and gave it to him when they wanted him to have it.

But even sleep was no release. During those first days, he discovered that a man unable to close his eyes will see while he sleeps. And in every dream the mirrors and the nightmare were there, superimposed upon the dream as two negatives placed one upon another. If he dreamed that he was a child again, playing in the fields and chasing rabbits, the nightmare image was there, superimposed upon the dream. If he dreamed that he was a teen-ager, walking Betty home from the movies and holding her soft hand in his, it was there—hovering in the air around them. No matter what he dreamed, it was there.

He found that there was one relief from the nightmare and only one. They had left his right arm intact. In the event, he thought, that I give in, I will be able to write the answers they want to know. But that was not a complete relief. To stare at the smoothness and perfection of flesh on his right arm for long periods was to admit that the rest of his body was....

They were clever with pain, he thought. Pain, he had realized during those first days, was a monumental thing to a man. Pain was the first sensation experienced by a man: the slap of the doctor's hand and the first breath of air in lungs unaccustomed to breathing. And pain was the very last sensation that a man experienced: 

  P 1/15 next