He didn't answer, preoccupied with the weird sensation inside his body: the diaphragm's birdwing flutterings, the ghostly fingers playing a pizzicato on his arteries' strings closer and closer to the heart. "Why answer?" he thought. "Why say anything? Whatever they said was part of the trap they were building and whatever he said they would make a part of that trap. Why did they have to go through all of this professional subtlety?"
The voices sounded lower now and farther away: "Go easy on the rheostats, Mellish. I think trance has already set in."
"Yes; I remember his chart, he rates a high sensitivity, the rays work fast on types like that."
At the footend the screen was gradually lighting up. Like an aurora borealis the pale lights shot up in flashes, in quivering arcs, in undulating waves. Their dance kept step with the vibrations which surged up from Lee's chest into his brain and started racing through his consciousness around and around, forming a vortex which swept up his thoughts like wilted leaves. Fear froze his blood; the deadly fear of inquisition victims in old and modern times who know that neither lie nor truth can save them from a fate already sealed.
Images started forming out of the luminous clouds upon the screen.
There was some giant octopus, nebulous and terrifying as a diver might see creeping out of the belly of a sunken ship. From the other side of the screen a huge round, tentacled being crawled, radiant and somewhat like the sun symbols of great antiquity. The two closed in and as they did the octopus flung its arms around the shining disk obscuring it as a dark cloud the sun. It seemed to suck the light out of the disk; paler and paler it became and bigger and bigger swelled the body of the octopus until it had swallowed the sun.
Now snakes came creeping from all sides up to the swollen octopus. All of a sudden the primeval struggle turned into the classic image of the Laokoon group: a giant central figure of a man wrestling with pythons which crushed him in their coils. Then there was only the head of the giant, majestic like the Moses hewn by Leonardo's hands but torn in pain with the noose of a python's muscle around his neck. Gasping, the giant opened his mouth and long tongues of flames shot out of it....
Behind his ears he heard the voices whisper:
"By God, Scriven was right."