"See to it, Cheerly,” the dictator had ordered the fat spymaster. “And put the girl back under the psychophone again and keep her there until she yields the secret of Erebus."
Thorn had seen Lana dragged back into her cell, before he and his comrades were placed in another cell. The tiny incisions in their skulls had been rapidly made, and the little electrodes of three psychophones inserted. And they had sat here ever since, the remorseless mechanisms speaking and recording all their conscious thoughts.
John Thorn's mind hovered on the brink of absolute despair. It was Lana he was thinking of. The girl, he knew, could not withstand the awful strain of this diabolical mental inquisition much longer. She would surely soon give way under the strain and let her mind wander to the secret that their captors wanted.
"— if she does, it's the end of everything,” the psychophone above spoke Thorn's thoughts. “She mustn't—"
Then, discovering that he had let his mind stray from abstract things, Thorn fiercely forced his thoughts back to safe subjects. He made himself concentrate on interplanetary history.
"The first space-flight was made by Robert Roth in nineteen-ninety-six. Roth visited Venus and Mars, and in two thousand and one made a second flight to Jupiter and Saturn, but crashed upon his return to Earth and lived only two days. After his death his chief aide, Clymer Nison, visited Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, but Clymer Nison never returned from an attempt he made to visit Erebus—
"Keep your mind off Erebus! If you think of Erebus, you'll think of the radite and the Alliance weapon — keep thinking of interplanetary history! First permanent colonies established on Mars and Venus by two thousand and eighty-five. By twenty-one-fifty all the planets from Mercury to Neptune had been colonized. The first independence movements started in twenty-four-seventy, and by two centuries later, all the colonized planets had become independent worlds."
As Thorn desperately strove to keep his mind concentrated on interplanetary history, his two comrades were using similar stratagems to keep from revealing any information.
He could hear the psychophone attached to Sual Av blaring forth the bald Venusian's thoughts. “-and then there was that fat girl on Callisto — what the devil was her name?” Sual Av was thinking. “Can't remember her name, but I do remember that she was plenty big. Callisto's gravitation was so weak that she seemed light as a feather, but if I'd held her on my knee on any other world, she'd have flattened me! And then that tiger-cat of a Martian wench I met when I was engineer at the Syrtis chromium mines. Tried to knife me one night—"
Sual Av was obviously thinking of all the girls he had ever known, to occupy his thoughts safely. But Gunner Welk's psychophone was pouring forth a much different stream of thoughts.