The two floors were occupied by laboratories that contained a great many cages with guinea pigs, dogs and rats. But the heart and meaning of the structure was a room in its cellar, deep under the ground; the room had been incompetently lined with the porous sheets of soundproofing material; the sheets had begun to crack and the naked rock of a cave showed through.
The unit was always protected by a squad of four special guards. Tonight, the squad had been augmented to sixteen, summoned for emergency duty by a long-distance telephone call from New York. The guards, as well as all other employees of “Project F,” had been carefully chosen on the basis of a single qualification: an unlimited capacity for obedience.
The sixteen were stationed for the night outside the structure and in the deserted laboratories above the ground, where they remained uncritically on duty, with no curiosity about anything that might be taking place below.
In the cellar room, under the ground, Dr. Ferris, Wesley Mouch and James Taggart sat in armchairs lined up against one wall. A machine that looked like a small cabinet of irregular shape stood in a corner across from them. Its face bore rows of glass dials, each dial marked by a segment of red, a square screen that looked like an amplifier, rows of numbers, rows of wooden knobs and plastic buttons, a single lever controlling a switch at one side and a single red glass button at the other. The face of the machine seemed to have more expression than the face of the mechanic in charge of it; he was a husky young man in a sweat-stained shirt with sleeves rolled above the elbows; his pale blue eyes were glazed by an enormously conscientious concentration on his task; he moved his lips once in a while, as if reciting a memorized lesson.
A short wire led from the machine to an electric storage battery behind it. Long coils of wire, like the twisted arms of an octopus, stretched forward across the stone floor, from the machine to a leather mattress spread under a cone of violent light. John Gait lay strapped to the mattress. He was naked; the small metal disks of electrodes at the ends of the wires were attached to his wrists, his shoulders, his hips and his ankles; a device resembling a stethoscope was attached to his chest and connected to the amplifier.
“Get this straight,” said Dr. Ferris, addressing him for the first time. “We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand? We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give. What we want, we mean to get. Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won’t save you now. We want ideas—or else. We won’t let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you’ll take to save our system. Then we’ll have you tell it to the country over the radio.” He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then
we’ll
start. Do you understand?”
Galt was looking straight at them, his face expressionless, as if he understood too much. He did not answer.
They heard the sound of the stop-watch in the silence, counting off the seconds, and the sound of Mouch’s choked, irregular breathing as he gripped the arms of his chair.
Ferris waved a signal to the mechanic at the machine. The mechanic threw the switch; it lighted the red glass button and set off two sounds: one was the low, humming drone of an electric generator, the other was a peculiar beat, as regular as the ticking of a clock, but with an oddly muffled resonance. It took them a moment to realize that it came from the amplifier and that they were hearing the beat of Galt’s heart.
“Number three,” said Ferris, raising a finger in signal.
The mechanic pressed a button under one of the dials. A long shudder ran through Galt’s body; his left arm shook in jerking spasms, convulsed by the electric current that circled between his wrist and shoulder. His head fell back, his eyes closed, his lips drawn tight. He made .no sound.
When the mechanic lifted his finger off the button, Galt’s arm stopped shaking. He did not move.
The three men glanced about them with an instant’s look of groping. Ferris’ eyes were blank, Mouch’s terrified, Taggart’s disappointed. The sound of the thumping beat went on through the silence.
“Number two,” said Ferris.
It was Galt’s right leg that twisted in convulsions, with the current now circling between his hip and ankle. His hands gripped the edges of the mattress. His head jerked once, from side to side, then lay still. The beating of the heart grew faintly faster.
Mouch was drawing away, pressing against the back of his armchair. Taggart was sitting on the edge of his, leaning forward.
“Number one, gradual,” said Ferris.
Galt’s torso jerked upward and fell back and twisted in long shudders, straining against his strapped wrists—as the current was now running from his one wrist to the other, across his lungs. The mechanic was slowly turning a knob, increasing the voltage of the current; the needle on the dial was moving toward the red segment that marked danger. Galt’s breath was coming in broken, panting sounds out of convulsed lungs.
“Had enough?” snarled Ferris, when the current went off.
Galt did not answer. His lips moved faintly, opening for air. The beat from the stethoscope was racing. But his breath was falling to an even rhythm, by a controlled effort at relaxation.
“You’re too easy on him!” yelled Taggart, staring at the naked body on the mattress.
Galt opened his eyes and glanced at them for a moment. They could tell nothing, except that his glance was steady and fully conscious. Then he dropped his head again and lay still, as if he had forgotten them.
His naked body looked strangely out of place in this cellar. They knew it, though none of them would identify that knowledge. The long lines of his body, running from his ankles to the flat hips, to the angle of the waist, to the straight shoulders, looked like a statue of ancient Greece, sharing that statue’s meaning, but stylized to a longer, lighter, more active form and a gaunter strength, suggesting more restless an energy—the body, not of a chariot driver, but of a builder of airplanes. And as the meaning of a statue of ancient Greece—the statue of man as a god—clashed with the spirit of this century’s halls, so his body clashed with a cellar devoted to prehistorical activities. The clash was the greater, because he seemed to belong with electric wires, with stainless steel, with precision instruments, with the levers of a control board. Perhaps—this was the thought most fiercely resisted and most deeply buried at the bottom of his watchers’ sensations, the thought they knew only as a diffused hatred and an unfocused terror—perhaps it was the absence of such statues from the modern world that had transformed a generator into an octopus and brought a body such as his into its tentacles.
“I understand you’re some sort of electrical expert,” said Ferris, and chuckled. “So are we—don’t you think so?”
Two sounds answered him in the silence: the drone of the generator and the beating of Galt’s heart.
“The mixed series!” ordered Ferris, waving one finger at the mechanic.
The shocks now came at irregular, unpredictable intervals, one after another or minutes apart. Only the shuddering convulsions of Galt’s legs, arms, torso or entire body showed whether the current was racing between two particular electrodes or through all of them at once. The needles on the dials kept coming close to the red marks, then receding: the machine was calculated to inflict the maximum intensity of pain without damaging the body of the victim.
It was the watchers who found it unbearable to wait through the minutes of the pauses filled with the sound of the heartbeat: the heart was now racing in an irregular rhythm. The pauses were calculated to let that beat slow down, but allow no relief to the victim, who had to wait for a shock at any moment.
Gait lay relaxed, as if not attempting to fight the pain, but surrendering to it, not attempting to negate it, but to bear it. When his lips parted for breath and a sudden jolt slammed them tight again, he did not resist the shaking rigidity of his body, but he let it vanish the instant the current left him. Only the skin of his face was pulled tight, and the sealed line of his lips twisted sidewise once in a while. When a shock raced through his chest, the gold-copper strands of his hair flew with the jerking of his head, as if waving in a gust of wind, beating against his face, across his eyes. The watchers wondered why his hair seemed to be growing darker, until they realized that it was drenched in sweat.
The terror of hearing one’s own heart struggling as if about to burst at any moment, had been intended to be felt by the victim. It was the torturers who were trembling with terror, as they listened to the jagged, broken rhythm and missed a breath with every missing beat. It sounded now as if the heart were leaping, beating frantically against its cage of ribs, in agony and in a desperate anger. The heart was protesting; the man would not. He lay still, his eyes closed, his hands relaxed, hearing his heart as it fought for his life.
Wesley Mouch was first to break. “Oh God, Floyd!” he screamed. “Don’t kill him! Don’t dare kill him! If he dies, we die!”
“He won‘t,” snarled Ferris. “He’ll wish he did, but he won’.t! The machine won’t let him! It’s mathematically computed! It’s safe!”
“Oh, isn’t it enough? He’ll obey us now! I’m sure he’ll obey!”
“No! It’s not enough! I don’t want him to obey! I want him to
believe!
To accept! To
want
to accept! We’ve got to have him work for us
voluntarily!”
“Go ahead!” cried Taggart. “What are you waiting for? Can’t you make the current stronger? He hasn’t even screamed yet!”
“What’s the matter with you?” gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of Taggart’s face while a current was twisting Galt’s body: Taggart was staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into an obscene caricature of enjoyment.
“Had enough?” Ferris kept yelling to Galt. “Are you ready to want what we want?”
They heard no answer. Galt raised his head once in a while and looked at them. There were dark rings under his eyes, but the eyes were clear and conscious.
In mounting panic, the watchers lost their sense of context and language—and their three voices blended into a progression of indiscriminate shrieks: “We want you to take over! ... We want you to rule! ... We order you to give orders! ... We demand that you dictate! ... We order you to save us! ... We order you to think! ...”
They heard no answer but the beating of the heart on which their own lives depended.
The current was shooting through Galt’s chest and the beating was coming in irregular spurts, as if it were racing and stumbling—when suddenly his body fell still, relaxing: the beating had stopped.
The silence was like a stunning blow, and before they had time to scream, their horror was topped by another: by the fact that Galt opened his eyes and raised his head.
Then they realized that the drone of the motor had ceased, too, and that the red light had gone out on the control panel: the current had stopped; the generator was dead.
The mechanic was jabbing his finger at the button, to no avail. He yanked the lever of the switch again and again. He kicked the side of the machine. The red light would not go on; the sound did not return. .
“Well?” snapped Ferris. “Well? What’s the matter?”
“The generator’s on the blink,” said the mechanic helplessly.
“What’s the matter with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, find out and fix it!”
The man was not a trained electrician; he had been chosen, not for his knowledge, but for his uncritical capacity for pushing anv buttons; the effort he needed to learn his task was such that his consciousness could be relied upon to have no room for anything else. He opened the rear panel of the machine and stared in bewilderment at the intricate coils: he could find nothing visibly out of order. He put on his rubber gloves, picked up a pair of pliers, tightened a few bolts at random, and scratched his head.
“I don’t know,” he said; his voice had a sound of helpless docility. “Who am I to know?”
The three men were on their feet, crowding behind the machine to stare at its recalcitrant organs. They were acting merely by reflex: they knew that they did not know.
“But you’ve
got
to fix it!” yelled Ferris. “It’s
got
to work! We’ve
got
to have electricity!”
“We must continue!” cried Taggart; he was shaking. “It’s ridiculous! I won’t have it! I won’t be interrupted! I won’t let
him
off!” He pointed in the direction of the mattress.
“Do something!” Ferris was crying to the mechanic. “Don’t just stand there! Do something! Fix it! I order you to fix it!”
“But I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” said the man, blinking.
“Then find out!”
“How am I to find out?”
“I order you to fix it! Do you hear me? Make it work—or I’ll fire you and throw you in jail!”
“But I don’t know what’s wrong with it.” The man sighed, bewildered. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s the vibrator that’s out of order,” said a voice behind them; they whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. “Take it out and pry off the aluminum cover. You’ll find a pair of contacts fused together. Force them apart, take a small file and clean up the pitted surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine—and your generator will work.”
There was a long moment of total silence.
The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt’s glance—and even he was able to recognize the nature of the sparkle in the dark green eyes: it was a sparkle of contemptuous mockery.
He made a step back. In the incoherent dimness of his consciousness, in some wordless, shapeless, unintelligible manner, even he suddenly grasped the meaning of what was occurring in that cellar.