The psychophone suspended over John Thorn's head droned on in its monotonous metallic voice, speaking his thoughts.
He sat in one of the blue-lit cells, bound by broad leather straps into a chair. Sual Av and Gunner Welk sat nearby, similarly bound. And they too had psychophones attached by thin black wires to tiny incisions in the back of their skulls.
"— distance to Earth is ninety-three million miles. Earth — doomed now and my fault. They'll never get that radite that would — no, don't think of that! Distance to Mars, a hundred and forty-one million miles! To Jupiter—"
Thorn was desperately trying to keep his mind upon abstract things and figures. For two days and nights he and his comrades had sat bound here like this. Time had become meaningless, and it seemed to him that be had sat here thus forever, trying to think of anything except what Haskell Trask wanted to know.
Trask had ordered psychophones attached to the captured Planeteers. For Trask knew now that the Planeteers were secret agents of the Alliance, and that they were after the Erebus radite. The dictator had learned that from Lana's psychophone record, which had transcribed the information when Thorn had told it to her through the door of her cell.
"So that is why the Planeteers have seemed to blunder into so many of our secrets in these last few years!” Trask had exclaimed. “It wasn't blundering, but deliberate purpose."
"If they were out to get that radite for the Alliance, that must mean that the Alliance has some plan of using the radite against us!” Jenk Cheerly had pointed out shrewdly.
"Why did the Alliance send you to get the radite?” Trask had demanded of the Planeteers.
Thorn and Gunner and Sual Av had remained silent. And the tall, bony dictator had been seized by one of his rages.
"You refuse to tell? Then you shall sit with psychophones attached to you until your thoughts disclose why the Alliance wants that radite!