"I said get out!" Ostby's voice did not rise, but there was no mistaking the threat behind it.
Boorrls broke easily. He was a bully. "C'mon, Jorg," he mumbled and the two men left the room.
The figure suspended on the hooks could not see Ostby. Where his eyes had been were now only bloody orifices. His stomach was cut to ribbons and the inside organs showed through. He was beyond the help of any doctor.
He seemed to have recognized Ostby's voice. His lips and tongue moved agonizingly as he strove to speak. When he finally succeeded his voice came from far back in his throat—hardly more than a whisper. "For God's sake," the voice croaked, "kill me! Please!"
Ostby repressed a shudder as he gently touched the tortured man's leg.
They had picked him, back on Earth, for this job because his was a sensitive organism, keyed with "high survival characteristics."
His nervous system was geared exceptionally high, and its acute reflexes with their delicate balance of intricate excitations made his response to stimuli proportionately more rapid than that of other men.
Yet this very sensitiveness of brain and nerve fiber made the brutal circumstances with which he was forced to cope all the more difficult to endure. It was ironical that the very qualities that made him the most fit for this dangerous kind of work, made him suffer the greatest under its harshness.
Ostby could remember how, even as a child, he had suffered through this keenness of emotional reaction. His empathy with any person or animal in distress always caused him pain nearly as great as that of the sufferer.