Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“Excellent. Keep doing that at that rate. Back remaining flat, arms up in the air parallel to the legs. Now close fists. Bring the arms down bending at the elbows until the elbows touch the bed. Good. Now raise the arms up and at the same time open your hands completely and rapidly wiggle all your fingers. Good. Now repeat that action until I tell you to stop.”

It was effortless exercise, but also frightening. Whatever this man told them to do, they had to do! How elaborate it was she couldn’t imagine, but it was a kind of torture she might have imagined a demon to wield. But, of course, demons misused technology better than anyone, didn’t they?

While there was still the overriding numbness, there were twinges here and there in both the arms and the legs, which told her that the pain that created them must really be horrible.

The medic nodded. “You may stop now. Arms down at your sides, hands flat against your sides, legs down in rest.” He did a physical check of both of them again, and seemed satisfied.

In fact, the medic was surprised. They were in far better shape than he’d expected, or than he or most others here would be after this long in those restraints. The Captain might well be able to use them in fairly short order.

What a pity it would be to hand the controller over, though. This kind of thing might be worrisome but it gave such a rush! Power always beat every drug he’d tried.

“Well,” he sighed, “since you’re in such good shape, let’s see how good.” He brought the small tube near his mouth and she could see that he was actually holding down the buttons. Apparently one was her, one was him, and both buttons in operated both of them at once. “Arms vertical, hands forward, fingers closed,” he instructed. “Now, sit up and try and touch your toes.”

The first couple of tries she couldn’t do it; then, with an effort she could feel, she rose up and, with several rocking motions, managed to touch her toes. Since she had nothing to do with the operation, she tried to see if the man was doing it, too. If so, he wasn’t to her stage yet.

She could hear him breathing heavily, and then there was a mighty heave and he managed it, more or less, although he couldn’t keep his fingers on the toes. It was very possible, though, that he couldn’t before they’d done this to him. Different people were assembled in different ways.

“Very well, now arms at rest, pivot to your right on your ass and sit with your legs dangling over the side of the bed.”

She found herself doing it, although it required a little bit of adjustment. She was now facing the young man, who was in fact quite handsomely put together but still sitting with his arms reaching to his toes. He looked familiar, but not anybody of her age or classes and not anyone she’d worked with before.

The medic repeated the instructions but with a turn to the left rather than the right, but she found that they had no effect on her, only on him, as he pivoted and then sat facing her. There was some life, and recognition, in the eyes, but little else. Eye movement was automatic as needed, just like the use of the arms and hands for balance, but it was nothing either could control.

Walking proved more difficult, and the first time she’d been told to try it she’d had to reach out and grab the bed to keep from falling. Still, the medic kept at it, very professionally, until she managed to walk across the room to the wall, turn, and walk back to the bed. Her companion had even more trouble, but managed eventually to get it, too.

She wasn’t a really large woman, and both of these men were unusually tall; her companion in misery must have had twenty centimeters on her, and probably thirty kilos as well. The medic was even slightly taller than the Arm man, but thinner. Still, her level of total helplessness was compounded by standing there feeling dwarfed by the company. She had never felt so totally helpless in her life.

Well, Lord, if you are testing me, help me to pass my test , she prayed to the only one who could help her at that moment.

He had them do knee-bends and push-ups and several other exercises to check them out, but when it became easy and virtually effortless to do what he instructed, he tired of the game. It was clear that they were in remarkably good shape, even if visibly bruised where the chains and restraints had held them.

It was also becoming clear that whatever had been used to turn them into nothing more than automatons had serious limits in the number and complexity of instructions that would work with them. Simple things, from “Walk forward” and “Stop” to the slightly more complex “Follow me” worked fine, but any complex series of actions had to be told one instruction at a time and then combined into a sequence that would then be repeated ad nauseam. Even “Mop the floor” was tricky, since without any judgment they would just keep mopping the floor interminably until told to stop. If you couldn’t simply define when and where to stop, it didn’t work out. Still, she had to wonder if some of the limits weren’t more than enough.

What would happen if they were told to take these guns and go back to the ship and then shoot anybody they saw who was with the Doctor? She wasn’t sure there wasn’t a stepped sequence of orders that would allow that to be done.

She also had to wonder how long it might be before she was sexually violated. It seemed to her that these kind of people would be unable to not do that, sooner or later, when they had somebody like her who couldn’t resist. Particularly because the medic would have discovered right off in his probe that although the subject was well into her twenties she was still a virgin.

The same sort of thoughts had kept going through the medic’s own mind as he got them into condition to do whatever the Captain had in mind, but, damn it, he couldn’t and hope to still wake up the next day. Not now, not yet, and certainly not without the Captain and Committee’s permission.

It was time to hand these two over and at least get a pat on the head for being competent.

And the Captain was pleased. Very much so. He sensed the medic’s reluctance to give up the control stick, which was simply one of the leech containers set up to control up to four units from one panel, but he also understood it and grinned. “Maybe later. We have a lot of girls we can have fun with.”

“Not like that one,” the medic replied. “At least, not with more than four more without doing extractions and reprogramming. Oh—and I brought their robes. Didn’t bother to put ’em on yet, though.”

“Save it. I had been thinking along one set of lines, but now that I see these two I think perhaps I’ll go a different direction. What could be more intimidating and frightening to Woodward’s bunch than to see two of their own naked and totally obedient to the bad guys? They might even think that the rest of them were that way, too, and since they probably wouldn’t know the method they have no way of knowing if we can’t do it to everybody. A little misdirection and your mark’s ignorance of your own capabilities can do wonders.”

“I dunno,” the medic sighed.

“Eh? What?”

“They sure as hell know we can’t get off this rock without ’em.”

The Captain looked like he was going to have one of his infamous and dangerous flashes of serious temper, but he caught himself right off. “That’s okay, Doc. Trust me on this one. Go now. I’ll take it from here. But, if you like her looks, hell, if it don’t go well you can have your fun.”

The medic gave a slight shrug and left.

The Captain came up to them and walked around them, examining them from head to toe as if they were some kind of strange animals or specimens. He’d used leeches before, but rarely in recent years. Too much chance of them getting broken. He’d paid dear for these decades ago on the black market in Ceberan and he never felt he’d been cheated.