Jack Odin groaned in pain and awoke. The pain hit him again and he thrust out with his arms. But strong hands were holding him down.
He became conscious of a buzzing, murmuring sound. It was neither sad nor glad. Something like the sound that the last bee of autumn makes as it hovers above the last ball of clover.
Something was falling across the back of his neck and spreading out across his shoulders. Like a woman’s hair, he thought. Perhaps it was a bit coarser. But not much. But then, just as the strange soothing feeling was putting him back to sleep, the hairs changed their soft caress and a dozen of them plunged into his spinal cord and upward into that small old-brain where all the bogies of the stone age still cowered.
Odin yelled in pain and fought. But the hands held him tight. In his ears he could hear someone else screaming and cursing—threatening all sorts of vengeance. The voice was Gunnar’s.
Three times more the soft mane of hair caressed him and three times more just as he was getting ready to go back to sleep the torture began. And all the while he was lying upon his belly, his face thrust into a pillow. He could see little as he writhed from one side to the other. The hands held him securely. And once when he almost struggled clear, a strong knee was thrust into his back and forced him down.
At intervals, he could hear Gunnar’s voice—and his own—crying, pleading, threatening.
Then at last it was over. The hands turned Odin upon his back and he lay there, gasping and hurting, like one who has just come up from deep water.
The lights were so bright that at first he could see nothing. Then his vision cleared and he knew where he was—in the surgery room of the Nebula.
Ato was standing nearby, trying to reassure him. Beside Odin on another bed was Gunnar, lying flat on his back and stripped to the waist. Gunnar was howling curses and kicking like a frog.
A doctor and a nurse were there. And completing the group was Nea holding a round object in each hand—round things with unkempt, trailing hair. He was not completely conscious—and for a second she looked like a high priestess of the Amazon, holding two mummified heads before her—