I took out a cigarette and lit it with trembling fingers, while he watched me. Blowing out a streamer of smoke and jabbing in his direction with my fingers, I said, "I'm learning a few things, Resnick. Already--I'm learning. I wonder how much it will take to break _you_ down." I pushed his head back and tried to put my thumb against his eyeball. He closed his eyes tightly and I forced his right eye open and pressed the ball of my thumb against the exposed eyeball. "Not too much or it will make your eye bloodshot," I said, in hardly more than a whisper. "Evidence, you know. Who's going to believe that the Captain did such a thing? Not even the crew! Sure, they'll agree with you to keep from being beat up. That is, if you have any stomach for that sort of thing when I get through with you. I'm just beginning, you know." I lifted my thumb from his eye and squeezed his nostrils together, watching the terror build up in him, watching his struggles, watching him grow weaker and weaker, and releasing him at the last moment before he lost consciousness, and watching his chest heave as he sucked in lungsful of air. "I just thought of something," I said to him. "You wouldn't _dare_ retaliate after I let you go. To strike me would be treason, punishable by life imprisonment, wouldn't it? And what would be your defense? That the Captain had tortured you? Who would believe that? Who are your witnesses? See how I have stolen your weapons?" I pried his left eye open and pressed against it with a thumbnail. "A half hour ought to do it," I taunted. "No marks. I have to be very careful so that an examination by the ship's doctor won't show a thing." In ten minutes--or was it ten eternities?--he became a quivering mass of flesh. I did things to him that left him too weak to move. At the end of half an hour I pulled the tape off his mouth and listened to him blubber. I took the tape off his ankles, and the belt off his wrists. I tortured him some more and he took it. "And when I call for you over the intercom," I said, "if you don't come at once I have you for gross insubordination to your Captain. And if you so much as touch one member of the crew again I'll call you, boy. I'll call you." Finally I let him go. * * * * * After he had gone I trembled like a leaf. Slowly a little bit of sanity returned to me, and with it a realization of what I had done. Nausea overcame me and I staggered into the washroom and got rid of my breakfast, then returned to my desk. For hours I sat there while my mind picked up the threads of life and began functioning again. There was still the feeling that Resnick was omniscient, that he would be able to topple me into disgrace. But with it, gradually, came the realization that he wouldn't, that he couldn't. I had used his own psychological weapons on him, building up in him a fear psychosis that he couldn't successfully fight. I had turned the tables.