'No thank you.'
'Are you sure? It'll be your last smoke.'
'I said no thank you.' Bond had almost forgotten his nicotine-hunger. And the thought of those yellow fingers putting the cigarette in his mouth, helpfully removing it to shake off the ash, as he could so clearly imagine them doing, was not to be borne.
'As you wish.' Sun operated a leather-bound Ronson and puffed out smoke. 'So, then. Where? Where does a man live? Where's the inmost part of a man, his soul, his being, his identity?
'One can do very unpleasant things to a man's fingernails, for example. Or to his genitals, as we were saying. The knee-joint is a neural focus and the most surprising results can be obtained by interference with it. But all this happens, so to speak, somewhere else. A man can watch himself being disembowelled and derive great horror, as well as pain, from the experience. But it's going on at a distance. It isn't taking place... where he is.'
Sun came over and knelt beside Bond's chair. He spoke in a half-whisper. His throat was trembling. 'A man lives inside his head. That's where the seat of his soul is. And this is true objectively as well as subjectively. I was present once - I wasn't directly concerned - when an American prisoner in Korea was deprived of his eyes. And the most astonishing thing happened. He wasn't there any more. He'd gone, though he was still alive. There was nobody inside his skull. Most odd, I promise you.
'So, James, I am going to penetrate to where you are, to the inside of your head. We'll make our first approach via the ear.' Sun got up and went over to the table. 'I take this skewer and I insert it into your skull.' The thin length of metal gleamed in the muddy light. 'You won't feel anything at first. In fact, in the true sense you won't _feel__ anything at all. The tympanic membrane, which I'm about to stimulate, has no touch receptors, only pain ones. So the first you'll know will be when... well, I leave it to you to put a name to your experience. If you can.'
Crushing out his cigarette beneath his heel, Sun gazed over at Bond with a sort of compassion. 'Just one more thing, James. This cellar is well on the way to being sound-proof, down here in the rock. And blankets and rugs have been laid on the floor overhead to seal it even further. Our tests showed that virtually nothing can be heard at a hundred yards. So you may scream all you wish.'
'God damn you to hell.'
'He can't do that, James. He can't reach me. It's I who am damning you to hell.'
Then, with the brisk stride of a man anxious not to be late for an important engagement, Colonel Sun came over to the chair. With ferocious efficiency he seized Bond's head in a clamp formed by his powerful left arm and his chest. Bond strained away with all his strength, but to no purpose. In a couple of seconds he felt the tip of the skewer probing delicately at the orifice of his left ear. Teeth clenched, he waited.
It came without warning, the first dazzling concussion of agony, as instantaneously violent as the discharge of a gun. He heard himself whimper faintly. There was an interval just long enough for the thought that the cessation of pain was an infinitely more exquisite sensual thrill than the wildest spasms of love. After that, pain in bursts and thrusts and sheets and floods, drenching and blazing pain, pain as inexhaustible as the sea or the sands of the desert. Another interval, another thought: this is as bad as it can get. Immediately, worse and worse pain. Breathe in; whimper. Breathe in; whimper. Breathe in...
The scream ceased. Sun felt Bond go limp and released him. The head, running with sweat at every pore, fell forward on to the labouring chest. With a gesture like that of an adult to an engaging child, Sun ruffled the saturated hair. He turned away abruptly, climbed the ladder and pushed hard at the trap-door. It rose a few inches.
At once a muffled voice spoke. 'Yes, sir?'
'You may come down now, Lohmann.'
'Right away, sir.'
The doctor, carrying his black leather case, appeared and descended. He was followed by von Richter and Willi.
'I hope you don't mind our joining you, Colonel.'
'Of course not, my dear Ludwig, I appreciate your interest. As you see, provision has been made for spectators. Do please sit down.'
'This...' The doctor cleared his throat and started again. 'This man is unconscious, sir.'
'I'm glad you agree with me. Now sit down and prepare to observe closely. This is good training for you. If you want to be of further service to our movement you must allow your inhibitions to be broken down. You appreciate that?'
Dr Lohmann hesitated, nodded, and took his seat on the bench next to Willi.
'Well, what have you in store for us, Sun?' Von Richter drawled the question. 'We expect great things of you, you know. Everybody tells me that Peking leads the world in this field.'
Sun tilted his head, pleased at the compliment, but anxious to be strictly fair. 'Good work is also being done in Vietnam. Some of Ho Chi-minh's men have learnt their job with remarkable speed, considering the comparative backwardness of that part of the world. Very promising. Ah...'
He stepped over and lifted Bond's chin. The blue-grey eyes fluttered open, cleared, and steadied. 'Damn you, Sun,' said a thin voice.
'Excellent. We can proceed. I'm working on his head, Ludwig, as I described earlier. He's taken it well so far, but this is only the beginning. Eventually he'll scream when he merely sees me advancing on him to continue the treatment.
'I now propose to stimulate the septum, the strip of bone and cartilage that divides the nasal cavity. Can you see, all of you? Good.'
More pain, different at first from the other, then indistinguishable. Bond tried to build a place in his mind where the pain was not all that there was, where there were thoughts, as he had been able to do under the hands of other torturers and so to some degree hold out against them. But the pain was fast becoming all that there was. The only thought that he could find and keep in place was that he would not scream yet, not this time. Or this time. Or this time...
It was later and the pain had receded for the moment. He was somewhere. That was all he knew. But there must be other things. Screaming. Had he screamed? Forgotten. But still try not to.
People were talking. He recognized some of the words through a sound like a fast-running river. Danger. Shock. Injection. A tiny pricking in his arm, ridiculously tiny.
More pain. It was all that there was. There were no thoughts anywhere in the world.
It was much later and he was back. There were thoughts again. Or rather one big thought that filled everything and was everything. It weighed down on him like an impossibly thick blanket, it came oozing up round him like the cold slime of the sea-bed. Bond had never experienced it before, but he knew quite soon what it was. It was despair, the terminal state of life, the foretaste of death. In comparison, the blood in his nose and mouth, the ferociously throbbing ache within his head - all this was nothing.
Bond opened his eyes. He found he could see reasonably well. Sun's face was a foot away. But something had happened to it since he last saw it. Something had dried it so that the skin looked like paper out of an old book, the eyes were red and dull, the open lips had shrivelled. The man's breathing was shallow and noisy, and he swallowed constantly. He seemed in the grip of an exhaustion as profound as Bond's. This was puzzling, but it did not matter. Nothing mattered now.
Somebody was coming down the ladder. Bond looked up automatically without interest. It was one of the girls in the team, the dark one. She glanced at Bond, then quickly away again. Her small features expressed faint repulsion and great fear. Sun straightened up slowly and turned to her.