"It might be ironical to let you warn that SP ship you keep thinking about. But we know your weapon now. Already our ship is equipped with a force field designed especially to deflect your atomic guns."
Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts quickly. They can delve deeper than the surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a leash on my thoughts?
The Steel-Blue chuckled. "You get—absent-minded, is it?—every once in a while."
Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared lugging great sheets of plastic and various other equipment.
They dumped their loads and began unbundling them.
Working swiftly, they built a plastic igloo, smaller than the living room in the larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments inside—one of them Jon Karyl recognized as an air pump from within the station—and they laid out a pallet.
When they were done Jon saw a miniature reproduction of the service station, lacking only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the other.
His Steel-Blue said: "We have reproduced the atmosphere of your station so that you be watched while you undergo the torture under the normal conditions of your life."
"What is this torture?" Jon Karyl asked.
The answer was almost caressing: "It is a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes joints to harden if even so much as a drop remains on it long. It eats away the metal, leaving a scaly residue which crumbles eventually into dust.