She flushed slightly. 'I wondered if you were awake. I have our breakfast ready. It is not bad, the nutritional fluid. Though it's likely to become monotonous.'
'I doubt if we will be here long enough to grow tired of it,' Gordon said grimly.
She looked at him. 'You think that Shorr Kan will insist on your giving him the Disrupter secret today?'
'I'm afraid so,' he said. 'If that secret is all that is holding back his attack, he'll want it as soon as possible.'
Through the hours of the gloomy day, as the red sun swept with somber slowness across the shadowy sky, they expected Shorr Kan's summons.
But it was not until night had returned that Durk Undis and four armed soldiers entered the apartment.
The young fanatic Cloud-man again bowed stiffly. 'The commander will see you now, Prince Zarth. Alone,' he added quickly, as Lianna stepped forward with Gordon.
Lianna's eyes flashed. 'I go where Zarth goes!'
'I regret that I must carry out my orders,' said Durk Undis coldly. 'Will you come now, Prince Zarth?'
Lianna apparently realized the hopelessness of further resistance. She stood back.
Gordon hesitated, then let impulse sweep him and strode back to her. He took her face between his hands and kissed her.
'Don't worry, Lianna,' he said, and turned away.
His heart beat painfully as he followed Durk Undis through the corridors. He was certain that he had seen Lianna for the last time.
Maybe better this way! he thought. Maybe better to forget her in death than to go back to his own time and be forever haunted by memory of love irrevocably lost.
Gordon's desperate thoughts received a check when he followed his guards into a room. It was not the austere study of the previous day.
This was a laboratory. There was a table, above which hung a massive metal cone connected by cables to a complicated apparatus of banked, vacuum tubes and moving tapes. Here were two thin, nervous-looking Cloud- men-and Shorr Kan.
Shorr Kan dismissed Durk Undis and the guards, and quickly greeted Gordon.
'You've slept, rested? That's good. Now tell me what you've decided.'
Gordon shrugged. 'There was no decision to make. I can't give you the secret of the Disruptor.'
Shorr Kan's strong face changed slightly in expression, and he spoke after a pause.
'I see. I might have expected it. Old mental habits, old traditions-even intelligence can't conquer them, sometimes.'
His eyes narrowed slightly. 'Now listen, Zarth. I told you yesterday that there was an unpleasant alternative if you refused. I didn't go into details because I wanted to gain your willing cooperation.
'But now you force me to be explicit. So let me assure you first of one thing. I am going to have the Disruptor secret from you, whether you give it willingly or not.'
'Torture, then?' sneered Gordon. 'That is what I expected.'
Shorr Kan made a disgusted gesture. 'Faugh, I don't use torture. It's clumsy and undependable, and alienates even your own followers. No, I have quite another method in mind.'
He gestured to the older of the two nervous-looking men nearby. 'Land Allar, there, is one of our finest psycho-scientists. Some years ago he devised a certain apparatus which I've been forced to utilize several times.'
'It's a brain-scanner. It literally reads the brain, by scanning the neurons, plotting the synaptic connections, and translating that physical set-up into the knowledge, memories and information possessed by that particular brain. With it, before this night is over, I can have the Disruptor secret right out of your brain.'
'That,' said John Gordon steadily, 'is a rather unclever bluff,'
Shorr Kan shook his dark head 'I assure you it is not. I can prove it to you if you want me to Otherwise, you must take my word that the scanner
He went on, 'The trouble is that the impact of the scanning ray on the brain for hour after hour in time breaks down the synaptic connections it scans. The subject emerges from the process a mindless idiot. That is what will happen to you if we use it on you.'
The hair bristled on Gordon's neck. He had not a doubt now that Shorr Kan was speaking the truth. If nothing else, the pale, sick faces of the two scientists proved his assertion.
Weird, fantastic, nightmarishly horrible-yet wholly possible to this latter day science! An instrument that mechanically read the mind, and in reading wrecked it!
'I don't want to use it on you, I repeat,' Shorr Kan was saying earnestly. 'For as I told you, you'd be extremely valuable to me as a puppet emperor after the galaxy is conquered. But if you persist in refusing to tell that secret, I simply have no choice.'
John Gordon felt an insane desire to laugh. This was all too ironic.
'You've got everything so nicely calculated,' he told Shorr Kan. 'But again, you find yourself defeated by pure chance.'
'Just what do you mean?' asked the League ruler, with dangerous softness.
'I mean that I can't tell you the secret of the Disruptor because I don't know it!'
Shorr Kan looked impatient. 'That is a rather childish evasion. Everyone knows that as son of the emperor you would be told all about the Disruptor.'
Gordon nodded. 'Quite true. But I happen not to be the emperor's son. I'm a different man entirely.'
Shorr Kan shrugged. 'We are gaining nothing by all this. Go ahead.'
The last words were addressed to the two scientists. At that moment Gordon savagely leaped for Shorr Kan's throat!
He never reached it. One of the scientists had a glass paralyzer ready, and swiftly jabbed it at the back of his neck.
Gordon sank, shocked and stunned. Only dimly, he felt them lifting him onto the metal table. Through his dimming vision, Shorr Kan's hard face and cool black eyes looked down.
'Your last chance, Zarth! Make but a signal and you can still avoid this fate.'
Gordon felt the hopelessness of it all, even as his raging anger made him glare up at the League commander.
The paralyzer touched him again. This shock was like a physical blow. He just sensed the two scientists busy with the massive metal cone above his head, and then darkness claimed him.
14: Dark-World Menace
Gordon came slowly to awareness of a throbbing headache. All the devil's triphammers seemed to be pounding inside his skull, and he felt a sickening nausea.
A cool glass was held to his lips, and a voice spoke insistently in his ear.
'Drink this!'
Gordon managed to gulp down a pungent liquid. Presently his nausea lessened and his head began to ache less violently.
He lay for a little time before he finally ventured to open his eyes. He still lay on the table, but the mental cone and the complicated apparatus were not now in sight.
Over him was bending the anxious face of one of the two Cloud scientists. Then the strong features and brilliant black eyes of Shorr Kan came down in his field of vision.
'Can you sit up?' asked the scientist. 'It will help you recover faster.'
The man's arm around his shoulders enabled Gordon weakly to slide off the table and into a chair.
Shorr Kan came and stood in front of him, looking down at him with a queer wonder and interest in his expression.
He asked, 'How do you feel now, John Gordon?'
Gordon started. He stared back up at the League commander.
