"That's not true!" Bikini cried. "Nobody ever—"
"What does she know of the way I lived, dreading the way people cringed at the sight of my face? They wouldn't even let me work in peace until I came here.
"My plants don't cringe from me. My mindless slaves neither see nor react to my face. I don't have to watch people turn away."
"You're buried here," Solo said. "Worse than buried."
"That's where you're so wrong. Solo. Perhaps I shall yet control the world." Nesbitt looked around him now as though he wished to talk more fully about himself and his work.
"I shall set the world free by the use of light, Mr. Solo. I'm sure you've heard the theory that all light rays enter the eyes of animals and people, directly influencing the pituitary gland.
"In the same general way light radically affects the growth of plants. Scientists have exposed young rats to the rays of television rays and they die of severe brain damage within twelve days. By my own application of this theory I have made my slaves mindless.
"And I use the same X-ray light that comes from TV tubes, many times intensified. My jungle plants exposed to this X-ray light grow at phenomenal speed and to unheard of sizes.
"Light, Mr. Solo. Light to control. Light to kill. Light to grow. Everything subject to the intensity of my X-ray light. From a glow soft enough to be harmless to strength to register wildly on a Geiger counter. With light I shall control the world."
"Sure. And THRUSH lets you believe that you will. In exchange for what? For those plants which will grow and multiply and kill?"
Nesbitt smiled. "That is part of my experiment."
He shook his head and lowered his voice to that reasonable tone so characteristic of the deranged, "So you can see why I cannot permit you people to leave here—to spread the word of my work?"
THREE
ILLYA FELT himself being lifted up from the corridor floor where he'd crumpled like a bug when stunned by the light beam.
The men lifting him carried him loosely between them. They did not speak to each other, moving like robots.
Double doors swung open in the corridor walls ahead of them and Illya saw he was being carried into a room of dark chocolate walls with hundreds of small lights set under the ceiling, across it, and along the sills.
The guards placed him in an ordinary appearing chair which lighted up under his weight.
When he attempted to stand, Illya found he was helpless to move. The action of the light was like a terrible magnet holding him pinned to the chair.
There was no pain of any kind. It was simply impossible to break the pull of the light-magnets which secured him in the strange chair.
After a moment Kuryakin stopped fighting. He felt the strength return to his arms and legs. He still had a sense of being dizzy, but even this lessened after a few moments. He examined the chair as the guards backed out of the room.
The doors closed and locked, Illya supposed. He looked around, finding the room extremely dark and himself seated in the lighted chair like an illumined island.
He shifted his weight, attempted to raise his arms from the chair.
He could not move. The darkness seemed to press in upon him, and he had the eerie sense that unseen eyes probed at him from the walls.
Illya felt a desperate urge to cry out, but he did not. He wouldn't give hidden onlookers the satisfaction.
Suddenly he heard the crackling noise such as a TV tube made warming up, and a forty inch screen suddenly lightened the dark wall directly before him.
Dr. Nesbitt's scarred face appeared upon the screen. His mouth pulled into a mocking smile. He said, "Are you comfortable, Mr. Kuryakin?"
Illya did not answer.
"Quite secure, Mr. Kuryakin? By now, I'm sure you're convinced you cannot get out of that chair until I want you out of it. Eh?"
Illya waited. He hated this weird darkness. The television screen flickered, the gray shadows leaping across him, Dr. Nesbitt's strange eyes fixed upon him.
"The tests I'm about to subject you to, Mr. Kuryakin," Dr. Nesbitt said from the screen in his best lecture tone, "will be most fascinating to you, I'm sure, as long as you retain your senses."
The screen remained lighted, but Dr. Ivey Nesbitt's broken face disappeared.
"You look better like that," Illya said to the blank screen.
Illya heard the dim hum as some small motor was activated. The strip of flooring upon which his lighted chair was secured moved suddenly, sliding backward about ten feet.
The screen gradually darkened and the multicolored lights flashed on, along the ceiling and the floor. Somehow the room remained dark despite the many lights, and then Illya supposed this was caused by the action of one set of colored lights upon another.
His eyes burned slightly so that he wanted to rub them, but he could not lift his hand to his face.
The small motor hummed again and the strips before and behind the chair slowly folded over him and locked, making a wide circle.
After a moment the motor engaged again and two sections of the flooring on each side of him locked into place, securing him and the lighted chair inside a dark drum.
The lights on the chair flared and died, leaving him in darkness. The magnetic power was cut off, but now there was nowhere to go. There was not even room enough to stand up inside the drum.
Nesbitt's voice pursued him, even here. "Pain from light, Mr. Kuryakin. Are you acquainted with the phenomenon? I assure you, you will be well versed in the subject soon. The simplest application I can give to prepare you for what's going to happen to you is that of the young children, sitting for hours two to three feet from a television set. They suffer all manner of illnesses, including emotional disturbances, all induced by the X-ray light from that tube. The larger the picture tube, the greater the voltage.
"In other words, the greater intensification of that X-ray light, the more pain induced. We use this principle, Mr. Kuryakin, but of course, for our purposes, we have greatly refined it, and find that colored lights offer a great deal more intensity, just as does a colored tv picture tube."
The voice snapped off and for a moment the silence and darkness persisted until Illya thought Nesbitt had gone away and forgotten him.
Somewhere a switch clicked, small motors hummed, and the first banks of lights flooded the drum. For a long time they remained constant, and then they alternated, colors flashing around and around the drum, faster and faster.
Illya Kuryakin sweated. For a long time he was conscious of no other reaction to the lights.
They grew brighter, the colors alternating in some crazy scheme. The effect was of a clockwise flashing of lights, until suddenly Illya felt himself and the chair following, the drum turning with the lights, but at first slowly. Illya felt slightly nauseated.
He closed his eyes tightly. He could still see the lights, still felt the drum spinning him over backwards. He pressed his hands over his eyes, and realized the chair was stationary, the drum was not moving, only the whirling lights caused the sickening sensation of spinning.
He pressed his arm over his eyes. Sweat burned into them. He cried out involuntarily.
Although he pressed his arm tightly across his eyes, he suddenly could see the flashing lights through them!