Back down the corridor, the mocking stars still bright through the crystal underfoot. Back and down, till they came to the gray room, where the pulsing, whining generators spun their web of anti-gravitational power. "We don't have a brig," the mate apologized. "But I think this will hold you in." Eyes warily on Nolan, he circled him and opened a round metal door. It was an unused storeroom, bare except for rows of vacant metal shelves. "In you go," said the Venusian, and Nolan complied. The door slammed behind him and was bolted. There was a whine in the air, he noticed. The singing of the grav-generators. It was not unpleasant ... at least, not unbearable, he corrected himself. But how it persisted! It was constant as the keening of a jammed frequency-modulator, high as the wail of a banshee. He let his aching body slip to the floor, lay there without even trying to think. He raised his head for a searching second, but there was nothing to see. Bare walls, bare shelves. He was helpless. His chance might come when the second let him out. Till then, he would sleep. When had he slept last? Save for the few minutes of unconsciousness, it was easily thirty hours. He pillowed his head on his arm.... He moved his head uncomfortably, burrowed his ear deeper into his biceps. That damned keening! He shifted restlessly, stopped his exposed ear with his other hand. That movement racked the beaten ribs, but the shrilling, soft and remorseless, kept on. It was enough to drive a man mad! It was-- He sat bolt upright, eyes flaring angrily. That was what Woller had planned! It was torture--subtle, undramatic, simple. But pure, horrid torture. Nolan's face was gray with strain. It was incredible that a sound, a noise, could become a threat. He'd heard the same sound a million times before, though never at such close range, or from such titanic generators. But now-- He began trying to fill his mind with other things, but there was no room for thought in a brain that was brimming with naked sound. Snatches of school-days poetry, long columns of multiplication tables--They jumbled in his brain. The lines ran together and muddled, were drowned out by the wail of the generators. He gave up and sat there, forcing himself to be still, while the sound hovered in the atmosphere all around him, his jaw muscles taut enough to bite through steel, a great pulse pounding in his temples.... Flesh could stand only so much. After a while--he didn't know when--he was mercifully unconscious. * * * * * A volcano erupted under him and awoke. His whole body was a mass of flame now, head throbbing like the jets of a twenty-ton freight skid, chest and ribs as sore as though they were flayed. A sickening weight held him crushed against the metal floor.