For him the trip to Arisia was neither long nor tedious. The little racer was fully automatic, and as it tore through space he worked as coolly and efficiently as he was wont to do at his desk. Indeed, more so, for here he could concentrate without interruption. Many were the matters he planned and the decisions he made, the while his portfolio of notes grew thicker and thicker.
As he neared his destination he put away his work, actuated his special mechanisms, and waited. When the speedster struck the barrier and stopped, Helmuth wore a faint, hard smile; but that smile disappeared with a snap as a thought crashed into his supposedly shielded brain.
"You are surprised that your thought-screens are not effective?" The thought was coldly contemptuous. "Wherever, think you, originated those screens? We did not foresee your theft of them from Velantia, but think you that we would allow to remain at large a thing which we could not neutralize?
"Know, fool, once and for all, that Arisia does not want and will not tolerate uninvited visitors. Your presence is particularly distasteful, representing as you do a despotic, degrading, and antisocial culture. Evil and good are, of course, purely relative, so it cannot be said in absolute terms that your culture is evil. It is, however, based upon greed, hatred, corruption, violence, and fear. Justice it does not recognize, nor mercy, nor truth except as a scientific utility. It is basically opposed to liberty. Now liberty—of person, of thought, of action—is the basis and the goal of civilization to which you are opposed, and with which any really philosophical mind must find itself in accord.
"Inflated overweeningly by your warped and perverted ideas, by your momentary success in dominating your handful of minions, tied to you by bonds of greed, of passion, and of crime, you come here to wrest from us the secret of the Lens—from us, who were already an ancient race when the remotest ancestors of your own were still wriggling in their planet's primordial slime.
"You consider yourself cold, hard, ruthless. Comparatively you are weak, soft, tender as a child unborn. That you may learn and appreciate that fact is one reason why you are living at this present moment. Your lesson will now begin."
Then Helmuth, starkly rigid, unable to move a muscle, felt delicate probes enter his brain. One at a time they pierced his innermost being, each to a definitely selected center. It seemed that each thrust carried with it the ultimate measure of exquisitely poignant anguish possible of endurance, but each successive needle carried with it an even more keenly unbearable thrill of agony.
Helmuth was not calm and cold now. He would have screamed in wild abandon; but even that relief was denied him. He could not even scream; all he could do was sit there and suffer.
Then he began to see things. There, actually materializing in the empty air of the speedster, he saw, in endless procession, things he had done, either in person or by proxy, both during his ascent in his present high place in the pirates' organization and since the attainment of that place. Long was the list, and black. As it unfolded his torment grew more and ever more intense; until finally, after an interval that might have been a fraction of a second or might have been untold hours, he could stand no more. He fainted, sinking beyond the reach of pain into a sea of black consciousness.