Stewards of the Flame Read Online Free PDF

and his breathing wasn’t seriously impaired. All the same, it was worse than Jesse had expected. He had somehow thought that youthful experience with spacesickness would make induced nausea easier to bear. He remained in anguish for a long time afterward, and eventually he perceived that this had something to do with his general situation. He was unable to muster much optimism.
    The memory of Carla tore him in two. It was a light in the darkness; he closed his eyes and recalled her scent, her touch, and it seemed that no world she lived in could be all bad. Yet at the same time, he worried.
    How would they punish her? She’d violated rules, not law—surely no more than her job had been at stake. She’d be better off without it unless jobs were hard to come by in the colony. He didn’t know, and in his blacker moments imagined her destitute, forced to seek welfare because she had risked herself for him. The local authorities weren’t the sort she’d want to appeal to. Nor, perhaps, were her friends, if Anne was a sample! If only he were free. . . .
    To his impatience for release was now added a burning wish to see Carla again. He knew this was more than desire to repay her kindness.
    They moved him to another floor. He was given pajamas, but no robe; the rooms and corridors were kept at an even temperature. Nobody displayed any antagonism toward him, and he was forced to concede that they meant no cruelty. They really believed themselves to be helping a sick man. They behaved with uniform cheerfulness, even as they administered injections that—combined with the drinks they forced on him—would send him into agonizing, uncontrollable spasms of retching, followed by hours of lingering nausea combined with ever-more severe headache, palpitations, and labored breathing.
    After several sessions of this, during one of his brief periods of relative calm, new orderlies appeared with a gurney. “You’re going back to Psych for a while,” they announced. He was not given the option of walking there under his own power.
    Jesse’s spirits rose momentarily; Psych was where Carla worked—or had worked. But he was not taken to the same area as before. After an endless trip through the grid of corridors they wheeled him into a small room filled with ominous electrical equipment and proceeded to strap him into a reclining chair, over which hovered an elaborate metal headpiece bristling with wires.
    Electroshock? Undoubtedly, Jesse thought, striving to conceal his terror as they lowered the headpiece, encasing his scalp, and attached electrodes to his temples. Or something else that would even more disastrously alter his brain. . . . Carla had admitted that such things went on here. He was not sure what he had done to provoke it; perhaps it was merely that the initial psych testing had revealed too much of his personality for him to be judged on the basis of behavior alone. Dr. Kelstrom, or whoever else had looked at the records, must have realized that it would take more than “friendly health advice” to subdue his inner rebellion.
    The room dimmed and various lights on the instrument board beside him began to glow, accompanied by a nerve-jarring electronic hum. The technicians had disappeared; whatever was going to happen to him was evidently remotely controlled. He waited . . . and waited. Nothing seemed to have happened yet; he could still think clearly—but perhaps the shock was yet to come. There was no way to judge time; it seemed as if hours had passed. At length he heard the door open and someone outside saying, “All right, now inject him. Kelstrom said to use truth serum.”
    Jesse was past the capacity for protest. He lay mute while the technician inserted an IV into his arm. After that things got hazy.
    He knew, later, that he had been extensively and repeatedly interrogated, probably for psychiatric reasons rather than as any sort of conspiracy suspect—although the latter, he felt, would have been