Clive Bedford - Mistress of torment

But such punishments were mild and of short duration. During the past hundred solar years or so, there had been only two executions, both for hot-blooded murder. And there had been five or six cases of torture! Gulda had been present at one of these, as a guard, only a few years ago. Under the influence of a real or imagined grievance, one of the crew had removed a vital piece of equipment and hidden it. For three hours, while the Lady had reasoned with the defaulter, the craft had lain in full view in the middle of an arable field in Eire, not twenty miles from the center of Dublin. The craft could not be made to dematerialize. Realizing that reason was getting her nowhere, and desperately worried about the safety of the craft and her crew, the Lady had at last, reluctantly resorted to torture and, inside five minutes the defaulter had been only too glad to say where the missing item had been hidden. But the confession was too late for the victim. The only possible end for her had been a quick and merciful strangulation.

Gulda had been one of the guards that time, and as she stood, strained in every joint and muscle, she sweated as she recalled the sound of the screams of agony she had heard. When the torture and execution was over, Gulda and her co-guard had been immediately relieved from guard duty for a period of twenty-five years. She had not expected to find herself in this dreadful place again, so soon!

They had backed Gulda to the wall and had clamped her wrists high over her head, jacking the clamps up so that she was forced to stand on the tips of her toes. Then they had clamped her ankles in the same way. Sunk into the wall were metal pistons, in cylinders filled with hydraulic fluid. At the end of each piston was a short cross-bar. When Gulda was in position, one of the guards stood as observer while the other one, working at a console, had moved the pistons outward so that the cross-bars pressed against Gulda's joints. At her knees instead of a bar there was a clamp around her leg. Each bar was moved out to make contact with Gulda's shrinking flesh and then, very slowly and carefully they were moved out under pressure further and further, forcing the joints of her ankles, hips, vertebrae, neck and elbows outward. Her head was restrained by a clamp, and the clamps around her knees were drawn inward.

The tension was increased far past the threshold of acute pain, almost but not quite, to breaking-point. Every little joint of her body became a screaming agony, but Gulda knew this was merely the preparation for the real pain. Even though she feared the arrival of the Lady, Gulda felt almost relieved when at last the door opened and she entered. Gulda did not wait to be spoken to.

"Lady," she cried, "there's no need to torture me, really there isn't. I'll tell you everything that happened, everything! It was nothing that mattered anyway. I didn't mean to do any harm… Maybe I was foolish, but I wasn't wicked. I'll tell… I'll tell…"

The Lady looked at her with a face that was filled with a kind of understanding; not compassion, not pity; but understanding of the fact that Gulda was subject to the temptations and follies of all living creatures. Indeed, the Lady liked Gulda; she had thought so highly of her that she had personally selected her to go out into the Earth as her special emissary.

But Gulda had been a tool that had turned in the Lady's hand. She had become enmeshed in the dangerous passions of the Earth people. She was spoiled now. There was no place for her in the plans of the Andromedans. The final service she could give would be to reveal every detail of what she had done, down to the last word and action. After that…! The Lady shrugged her shoulders in a scarcely perceptible movement. There was no shortage of Andromedans, all with nowhere to rest. One would not be missed.

The Lady nodded to one of the guards. "Twenty seconds," she said, "full strength."

Gulda began to scream even before the guard's hand had reached the switches, but it was only a tentative, half-hearted scream. Two seconds later her screams were full-bodied, well grown, strong, hearty, and genuine!

With every bone-joint in her body under the extreme limit of compression, the pistons attached to the cross-bars began to vibrate, not slowly, nor even quickly, but at such high speed that in a fraction of a second the sound rose out of the audible scale and became merely an ache in the ear. Not that Gulda noticed that minor discomfort. The ultrasonic vibrations of bone against bone had an amplitude of about a quarter of an inch. At such high speed, the effect on the nerves that passed close to the joints was incredible. It was comparable to having a hundred teeth drilled at once, without anesthetic. But far worse was the fact that within two minutes at the outside the bone-joints would begin to soften and wear away. As they collapsed, so the pistons would move outward to maintain the compression; and still the fantastic vibration continued.

After a twenty-second treatment, Gulda would be unable to walk for two weeks. Alter two minutes all her joints would be useless forever. She would flop limp like a jelly fish out of water. Nothing would save her life, and unless she were put out of her misery, she would die in agony in a few hours!

The twenty seconds seemed so long to Gulda that she was surprised when the vibration stopped. The note of her screams diminished in scale, but she did not stop. The pain was perhaps less than before, but such things are only relative. How can one relate pain to pain, compare one with the other? Over all was Gulda's fear of her lovely, strong body which she knew must be ruined, smashed in a few moments, saving a miracle to prevent it. And Gulda was not a believer in miracles. Into her mind came a vague memory of something she had heard of, or maybe witnessed. The Andromedans had been around the Earth for a very long time now… broken on the wheel! That was it. Way back – about two centuries, no more, in France, they used to lash a criminal to a crude wheel, revolving in a horizontal plane. The wheel was turned by a couple of assistants at capstan underneath. The executioner stood by, armed with a heavy iron crow-bar. Every time the criminal came past him, the iron bar would fall to smash a bone, until at last the poor wretch was a shuddering, screaming mass of bloody, palpitating flesh. More often than not, when they untied him from the wheel, he would be still alive, still conscious, and he would fall to the stone floor and lie there, a mere lump of meat!

And that was how she, Gulda, of the narrow waist and the full breasts, the long limbs and the beautiful face would be – in just over a minute! In the meantime, the pain was almost unbearable – almost, but not quite. She became aware that the Lady was talking to her.

"Tell me about it, Gulda," she said, and it seemed almost as though there was a note of pleading in her voice. The Lady was not cruel; she took no pleasure in what had to be done. But she was the leader of a great and numerous people. Like Moses of old, she had not brought them across the wilderness of empty space to go wool-gathering!

Gulda told her, in every little detail. She was anxious to omit nothing, until at last even the Lady had ask her not to be quite so meticulous with times and dates and names. Gulda babbled on and on, every word recorded for future study. And as her words poured out of her, the Lady became enmeshed to some extent in the passions that had torn her emissary. Dimly she understood that there was still a mystery about the Earth people which avoided her keen intellect. The history of the relationships between the Earth people and Andromedans went back thousands of solar years.

The danger to their planet had begun to show itself some four thousand solar years ago. It had taken a thousand of those years to develop the technology permitting the faint possibility of invading another planet. And after that, for some two and a half thousand solar years there had been hundreds of patient, scholarly and terribly dangerous expeditions, most of them to Earth, and exclusively so for the past five-hundred years. And now, this was the final exploration prior to the full-scale invasion which was imminent. Half a million picked immigrants in some five-hundred passenger-carrying craft, backed up by about a thousand carrying cargo were almost ready to land – and the Lady still had to admit there was much neither she nor any other Andromedan knew about these primitive creatures; these bloody-minded, self-destructive animals.