Nick Carter - Operation Moon Rocket

He opened his eyes. A shower of red pain burst through his skull. He moved his arm. The pain worsened. So he lay still, watching the sharp, reddish fragments race across his vision. He took stock. He could feel his feet and his hands. He could move his head from side to side. He could see the metallic coffin in which he lay. He could hear the steady roar of an engine.

He was in a moving object of some kind. A car trunk? No, too big, too smooth. A plane. That was it. He could feel the faint rise and fall, that sense of weightlessness that went with flight.

"Teddy, take care of our friend," said a voice somewhere off to his right. "He's comin' around."

Teddy. Max. Johnny Hung Fat. It came rushing back to him now. The Brooklyn-style stomping. An eighty percenter — the most savage kicking a man could absorb short of having his bones crushed. Rage gave him strength. He started to climb to his feet…

A sharp pain exploded in the back of his head and he pitched forward into the darkness coming up at him from the floor.

It seemed only an instant that he was out, but it had to be longer. For as consciousness came seeping slowly back, an image at a time, he found that he was out of the metallic coffin and sitting strapped in a chair of some kind inside a large sphere of glass webbed by steel piping.

The sphere hung at least fifty feet above the ground in a huge, cavernous room. Banks of computers stood along the far wall, making soft musical noises like children's roller toys. Men in white smocks resembling surgeons were working over them, pushing switches, loading reels of tape. Other men, wearing earphones with dangling plugs, stood looking up at Nick. The edges of the room were lined with a collection of weird-looking devices — rotating chairs reminiscent of giant kitchen blenders, tilt tables, egg-like disorientation drums revolving on multiple axes at fantastic speeds, heat chambers that looked like steel sauna baths, exercise unicycles, Aqua-EVA simulation pools constructed of canvas and wire.

One of the white-coated figures plugged a hand-mike into the console in front of him and spoke. Nick heard his voice, tiny and remote, trickling into his ear."…thank you for volunteering. The idea is to test how much vibration the human body can tolerate. High-speed whirling and tumbling on re-entry can shift the position of a man's liver a full six inches…"

If Nick could hear the man, then maybe… "Get me out of here!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs.

"…at zero-G, certain changes begin to take place," the voice continued without pause. "Blood pools, vein walls soften. Bones release calcium to the blood. There are serious shifts in body fluid level, muscular weakening. It's unlikely, however, that you will reach that point"

The chair had started to slowly turn. Now it began to pick up speed. At the same time it began shaking up and down with increasing violence. "Remember that you yourself control the mechanism," the voice in his ear said. "It's the button under your left index finger. When you feel that you have reached the limit of your endurance, press it The motion will cease. Thank you again for volunteering. Over and out"

Nick pressed the button. Nothing happened. The chair whirled faster and faster. The vibrations grew more intense. The universe splintered into a chaos of unbearable motion. His brain crumbled under the terrible onslaught A roaring started in his ears and over it he heard another sound. His own voice, shouting in agony against the mind-destroying shaking. His finger stabbed the button again and again but there was no reaction, nothing but the roaring in his ears and the bite of the straps that were tearing his body to pieces.

His shouts turned to screams as the assault on his senses continued. He closed his eyes in torment, but it did no good. The very cells of his brain, the corpuscles of his blood, appeared to throb, to burst in a mounting crescendo of pain.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the onslaught stopped. He opened his eyes but saw no change in the red-splashed darkness. His brain pounded inside his skull, the muscles of his face and body quivered uncontrollably. Gradually, bit by bit, his senses began to recover. The scarlet flashes became crimson, then green, then vanished. The background blended with them in a growing lightness, and through the haze of his damaged sight something gleamed, pale and motionless.

It was a face.

A thin, dead face with dead gray eyes and a savage scar around its throat The mouth moved. It said: "Is is there anythin' else you want to tell us? Anythin' you've forgotten?"

Nick shook his head and there was nothing after that but the long, deep dive into blackness. He surfaced once, briefly, to feel the faint rise and fall of a cool metal floor under him and to know that he was airborne once again; then the blackness spread across his vision like the wings of a great bird and he felt a cold, clammy rush of air against his face and knew it for what it was — death.

He awoke to a scream — a terrible, inhuman scream out of hell.

His reaction was automatic, an animal response to danger. He kicked out with his arms and legs, rolled to the left, landing on his feet in a half crouch, the ringers of his right hand closing around the gun that wasn't there.

He was naked. And alone. In a bedroom with thick white carpeting and Kelly green satin furnishings. He was facing in the direction from which the noise had come. But there was nothing there. Nothing that moved, inside or out.

Late morning sun streamed through the arched windows at the far end of the room. Outside, palmetto-fronds hung limp in the heat. Beyond them the sky was a pale, washed-out blue, and the light glinted off the sea with blinding flashes as if mirrors were being played across its surface. Cautiously, Nick inspected the bathroom and dressing room. Having made sure no danger lurked behind him, he returned to the bedroom and stood there, frowning. Everything was very quiet; then all at once the sharp, hysterical cry that had awakened him came again.

He strode across the room and looked out the window. The cage stood on the terrace below. Nick chuckled grimly. A myna bird! He watched it hop back and forth, its oily black plumage ruffling. The sight of it brought the other bird back to him. With it came the smell of death, the pain and — in a series of brilliant, razor-sharp images — everything that had happened to him. He glanced down at his body. Not a mark on it And the pain — vanished. But he automatically cringed at the thought of further punishment.

The new look in torture, he thought grimly. Twice as effective as the old because you recovered so quickly. No aftereffect except dehydration. He unstuck his tongue from the floor of his mouth and at once the acrid taste of chloral hydrate burst through. That made him wonder how long he'd been here, and where "here" was. He sensed movement behind him and swung around, body tensed, ready to defend himself.

"Good morning, sir. Feeling better, I hope."

The butler came ploughing through the heavy white carpeting, a tray in his hand. He was young and husky, with eyes like gray pebbles, and Nick noticed the telltale bulge under his jacket. He was wearing a shoulder rig. The tray held a glass of orange juice and "Mickey Elgar's" wallet. "You dropped this last night, sir," the butler said smoothly. "I think you'll find that everything's there."

Nick drank the juice down greedily. "Where am I?" he demanded.

The butler didn't bat an eye. "Cathay, sir. The Palm Beach estate of Alexander Simian. You were washed ashore last night."

"Washed ashore!"

"Yes, sir. Your launch is a total wreck, I'm afraid. It ran aground on the reef." He turned to go. "I'll tell Mr. Simian that you're up. Your clothes are in the closet, sir. We've pressed them, though I'm afraid the salt water hasn't done them any good." The door closed silently behind him.