When Guerlan finally awoke, he found himself in intense darkness. Only his labored breath disturbed the silence. Motionless, his body a living pain, he tried to adjust his thoughts and piece together the jig-saw puzzle of the last few hours. Groping into his tunic he brought out an atomo-torch. By its discreet illumination, he saw that the girl was quivering like a being in torture. Gently he massaged her temples and the base of her neck then her soft, white throat; with infinite care he opened her mouth and inserted a pellet of alphaline to stimulate her heart, then stroked the gleaming red-gold hair back from her forehead until the girl showed signs of coming to.
"Have you any stimulants aboard?" he asked her, when Perlac opened her eyes. "I feel drained, but that's nothing to what you must feel, Perlac!"
She gave him a pallid smile. "There," she pointed weakly, "to the left of the instrument panel."
Guerlan pressed the combination lock and found in the compartment a full kit of surgical instruments and bandages in a superb Jadite case. A priceless flask of Sapphirac filled with sterile water, and, to his intense surprise, a Platino-plastic bottle, encrusted with tourmalines more brilliant than emeralds and filled with the utterly proscribed Sulfalixir!
"That ... that's it," Perlac gasped and reached for the bottle in Guerlan's hand.
"But, it's deadly!" Guerlan was aghast. "How can you risk addiction to that dreadful drug?"
"You're a victim of conditioning." Even as weak as she felt, Perlac managed a low laugh, "Sulfalixir is a miracle drug—not what you've been taught to believe." She drank sparingly and offered him the bottle, but Guerlan drew back in categorical refusal. "As you wish. Now we must leave the plane."
"But where in ten thousand Hellacoriums are we?" Guerlan's voice was mutinous. "I've been a pawn in a game ever since I went to the sphere and blasphemed, since you burst the acid vat and exploded Organic 66! By Neptune's Moon I'll be dissolved if I stir another step without knowing what this is all about!" His green eyes were wide and gleaming, his handsome face set in rigid lines.
"All right, atavism! You're on Level Five, and you're going to a meeting. I want you to appraise what the Amnesiac treatment does to human beings, and how the condemned live on this level. The third level is sheer luxury compared to this. You Scientists of the First Level have no conception of what happens on the third, fourth and fifth levels, where life ceases to be even existence and becomes...." But words failed her, and she fell back against her mullioned seat breathing heavily. After a pause she asked: "Will you come now?"
"No," Guerlan grinned. "I'll lead the way. It was an experience seeing you in a fury; blessed if I thought anything could disturb you!" He stood up and pressed the plane's dome release and the stale, fetid air of the nether regions of the city swept in. Only the conditioners broke the silence with their constantly iterated and reiterated subconscious homily of simple, child-like thought-patterns for the amnesiacs. It was an eternal reiteration of the "Conditioning Controls" which no amnesiac could ever escape, except at intervals when the amnesiac counter-reaction set in as their metabolism building up a resistance to the administered drug rendered them impervious and they regained a measure of their former memories as consciousness returned. That was the period of danger, when they were at the verge of any madness, in their utter hopelessness. Deliberately they invited death. But here in these vast catacombs, their end was but a detail, and the organic vats eventually received them.