Hypnotic Torture
:
The Airlords Of Han
Some twenty minutes later the ship arrived. It settled down slowly into
the ravine on its repeller rays until it was but a few feet above the
tree tops. There it was stopped, and floated steadily, while a little
cage was let down on a wire. Into this I was hustled and locked,
whereupon the cage rose swiftly again to a hole in the bottom of the
hull, into which it fitted snugly, and I stepped into the interior of a
craf
not unlike the one with which I had had my fateful encounter, the
cage being unlocked.
The cabin in which I was confined was not an outside compartment, but
was equipped with a number of viewplates.
The ship rose to a great height, and headed westward at such speed that
the hum of the air past its smooth plates rose to a shrill, almost
inaudible moan. After a lapse of some hours we came in sight of an
impressive mountain range, which I correctly guessed to be the Rockies.
Swerving slightly, we headed down toward one of the topmost pinnacles of
the range, and there unfolded in one of the viewplates in my cabin a
glorious view of Lo-Tan, the Magnificent, a fairy city of glistening
glass spires and iridescent colors, piled up on sheer walls of brilliant
blue, on the very tip of this peak.
Nor was there any sheen of shimmering disintegrator rays surrounding it,
to interfere with the sparkling sight. So far-flung were the defenses of
Lo-Tan, I found, that it was considered impossible for an American
rocket gunner to get within effective range, and so numerous were the
dis ray batteries on the mountain peaks and in the ravines, in this
encircling line of defenses, drawn on a radius of no less than 100
miles, that even the largest craft, in the opinion of the Hans, could
easily be brought to earth through air-pocketing tactics. And this, I
was the more ready to believe after my own recent experience.
* * * * *
I spent two months as a prisoner in Lo-Tan. I can honestly say that
during that entire time every attention was paid to my physical comfort.
Luxuries were showered upon me. But I was almost continuously subjected
to some form of mental torture or moral assault. Most elaborately staged
attempts at seduction were made upon me with drugs, with women.
Hypnotism was resorted to. Viewplates were faked to picture to me the
complete rout of American forces all over the continent. With incredible
patience, and laboring under great handicaps, in view of the vigor of
the American offensive, the Han intelligence department dug up the fact
that somewhere in the forces surrounding Nu-Yok, I had left behind me
Wilma, my bride of less than a year. In some manner, I will never tell
how, they discovered some likeness of her, and faked an electronoscopic
picture of her in the hands of torturers in Nu-Yok, in which she was
shown holding out her arms piteously toward me, as though begging me to
save her by surrender.
Surrender of what? Strangely enough, they never indicated that to me
directly, and to this day I do not know precisely what they expected or
hoped to get out of me. I surmise that it was information regarding the
American sciences.
There was, however, something about the picture of Wilma in the hands of
the torturers that did not seem real to me, and my mind still resisted.
I remember gazing with staring eyes at that picture, the sweat pouring
down my face, searching eagerly for some visible evidence of fraud and
being unable to find it. It was the identical likeness of Wilma. Perhaps
had my love for her been less great, I would have succumbed. But all the
while I knew subconsciously that this was not Wilma. Product of the
utmost of nobility in this modern virile, rugged American race, she
would have died under even worse torture than these vicious Han
scientists knew how to inflict, before she would have pleaded with me
this way to betray my race and her honor.
But these were things that not even the most skilled of the Han
hypnotists and psychoanalysts could drag from me. Their intelligence
division also failed to pick up the fact that I was myself the product
of the Twentieth Century and not the Twenty-fifth. Had they done so, it
might have made a difference. I have no doubt that some of their most
subtle mental assaults missed fire because of my own Twentieth Century
"denseness." Their hypnotists inflicted many horrifying nightmares on
me, and made me do and say many things that I would not have done in my
right senses. But even in the Twentieth Century we had learned that
hypnotism cannot make a person violate his fundamental concepts of
morality against his will, and steadfastly I steeled my will against
them.
* * * * *
I have since thought that I was greatly aided by my newness to this age.
I have never, as a matter of fact, become entirely attuned to it. And
even today I confess to a longing wish that man might travel backward as
well as forward in time. Now that my Wilma has been at rest these many
years, I wish that I might go back to the year 1927, and take up my old
life where I left it off, in the abandoned mine near Scranton.
And at the period of which I speak, I was less attuned than now to the
modern world. Real as my life was, and my love for my wife, there was
much about it all that was like a dream, and in the midst of my tortures
by the Hans, this complex--this habit of many months--helped me to tell
myself that this, too, was all a dream, that I must not succumb, for I
would wake up in a moment.
And so they failed.
More than that, I think I won something nearer to genuine respect from
those around me than any other Hans of that generation accorded to
anybody.
Among these was San-Lan himself, the ruler. In the end it was he who
ordered the cessation of these tortures, and quite frankly admitted to
me his conviction that they had been futile and that I was in many
senses a super-man. Instead of having me executed, he continued to
shower luxuries and attentions on me, and frequently commanded my
attendance upon him.
Another was his favorite concubine, Ngo-Lan, a creature of the most
alluring beauty; young, graceful and most delicately seductive, whose
skill in the arts and sciences put many of their doctors to shame. This
creature, his most prized possession, San-Lan with the utmost moral
callousness ordered to seduce me, urging her to apply without stint and
to its fullest extent, her knowledge of evil arts. Had I not seen the
naked horror of her soul, that she let creep into her eyes for just one
unguarded instant, and had it not been for my conviction of Wilma's
faith in me, I do not know what--but suffice it to say that I resisted
this assault also.
Had San-Lan only known it, he might have had a better chance of breaking
down my resistance through another bit of femininity in his household,
the little nine-year-old Princess Lu-Yan, his daughter.
* * * * *
I think San-Lan held something of real affection for this sprightly
little mite, who in spite of the sickening knowledge of rottenness she
had already acquired at this early age, was the nearest thing to
innocence I found in Lo-Tan. But he did not realize this, and could not;
for even the most natural and fundamental affection of the human race,
that of parents for their offspring, had been so degraded and suppressed
in this vicious Han civilization as to be unrecognizable. Naturally
San-Lan could not understand the nature of my pity for this poor child,
nor the fact that it might have proved a weak spot in my armor. But had
he done so, I truly believe he would have been ready to inflict
degradation, torture and even death upon her, to make me surrender the
information he wanted.
Yet this man, perverted product of a morally degraded race, had about
him something of true dignity; something of sincerity, in a warped,
twisted way. There were times when he seemed to sense vaguely,
gropingly, wonderingly, that he might have a soul.
The Han philosophy for centuries had not admitted the existence of
souls. Its conception embraced nothing but electrons, protons and
molecules, and still was struggling desperately for some shred of
evidence that thoughts, will power and consciousness of self were
nothing but chemical reactions. However, it had gotten no further than
the negative knowledge we had in the Twentieth Century, that a sick body
dulls consciousness of the material world, and that knowledge, which all
mankind has had from the beginning of time, that a dead body means a
departed consciousness. They had succeeded in producing, by synthesis,
what appeared to be living tissues, and even animals of moderately
complex structure and rudimentary brains, but they could not give these
creatures the full complement of life's characteristics, nor raise the
brains to more than mechanical control of muscular tissues.
It was my own opinion that they never could succeed in doing so. This
opinion impressed San-Lan greatly. I had expected him to snort his
disgust, as the extreme school of evolutionists would have done in the
Twentieth Century. But the idea was as new to him and the scientists of
his court as Darwinism was to the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth
Centuries. So it was received with much respect. Painfully and with
enforced mental readjustments, they began a philosophical search for
excuses and justifications for the idea.
* * * * *
All of this amused me greatly, for of course neither the newness nor the
orthodoxy of a hypothesis will make it true if it is not true, nor
untrue if it is true. Nor could the luck or will-power, with which I had
resisted their hypnotists and psychoanalysts, make what might or might
not be a universal fact one whit more or less of a fact than it really
was. But the prestige I had gained among them, and the novelty of my
expressed opinion carried much weight with them.
Yet, did not even brilliant scientists frequently exhibit the same lack
of logic back in the Twentieth Century? Did not the historians, the
philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome show themselves to be the same
shrewd observers as those of succeeding centuries, the same masters of
the logical and slaves of the illogical?
After all, I reflected, man makes little progress within himself.
Through succeeding generations he piles up those resources which he
possesses outside of himself, the tools of his hands, and the
warehouses of knowledge for his brain, whether they be parchment
manuscripts, printed book, or electronorecordographs. For the rest he is
born today, as in ancient Greece, with a blank brain, and struggles
through to his grave, with a more or less beclouded understanding, and
with distinct limitations to what we used to call his "think tank."
* * * * *
This particular reflection of mine proved unpopular with them, for it
stabbed their vanity, and neither my prestige nor the novelty of the
idea was sufficient salve. These Hans for centuries had believed and
taught their children that they were a super-race, a race of destiny.
Destined to Whom, for What, was not so clear to them; but nevertheless
destined to "elevate" humanity to some sort of super-plane. Yet through
these same centuries they had been busily engaged in the extermination
of "weaklings," whom, by their very persecutions, they had turned into
"super men," now rising in mighty wrath to destroy them; and in reducing
themselves to the depths of softening vice and flabby moral fiber. Is it
strange that they looked at me in amazed wonder when I laughed outright
in the midst of some of their most serious speculations?