Ill
The Farthest Dream
It was ironic, thought Odal, that they were using the dueling machine to torture him. For it was torture, no matter what they called it or how they smiled when they were doing it.
He sat there in the cramped cubicle, staring at its featureless walls, the blank viewscreen, waiting for them to begin.
The price of failure was heavy, too heavy. Kanus had made Odal the glory of Kerak while he was a success, while he was Idltmg the enemies of Kerak.
Now they were Jailing him.
Not that they caused him any physical harm. He was not even under arrest, technically. Merely assigned to experimentation at Kor’s headquarters, the Ministry of Intelligence: a huge, stone, hifltop castle, ancient and brooding from the outside; inside, a maze of pain and terror and Kor’s swelling lust for victims.
In the dueling machine, the illusion of pain was noss agonizing than the real thing. Odal smiled sardonically. The men he had tailed died first in their imaginations. But soon enough their hearts stopped beating.
Now then, are you ready? It was a voice in his mind, put there by the machine’s circuitry through the neurocontacts circling his head.
We are going to probe a bit deeper today, in an effort to find the source of your extrasensory talents. I advise you to relax and cooperate.
There had been three of them working on him yesterday, from the other side of the machine. Today, Odal could tell, there were more. Six? Eight? A dozen, possibly.
He felt them: foreign thoughts, alien personalities, in his own mind. His hands twitched uncontrollably and his body began to ache and heave.