Anatoly Dnieprov - The Maxwell Equations

"So will you," I said.

"That's as may be, but with you it's definite."

I shrugged.

"Will you go through it voluntarily or do you want us to force you?" he then asked, looking me over insolently.

"Voluntarily. As a physicist I'm even interested."

"Splendid. In that case remove your shoes and strip to the waist. I must examine you first and take your blood pressure."

I did as I was told. The first part of "registering the spectre" looked like an ordinary medical check-up-breathe, stop breathing and the rest of it.

When the examination was over the doctor said:

"Now step into the booth. You've got a mike there. Answer all my questions. I must warn you that one of the frequencies will make you feel an intense pain. But it will go as soon as you yell out."

In my bare feet I stepped on to the porcelain floor. An electric bulb flashed on overhead. The generator droned. It was operating in the low-frequency band. The tension of the field was obviously very high. I felt this by the way waves of warmth swelled and ebbed slowly through my body. Each electromagnetic pulse brought with it a strange tickling in the joints. Then my muscles began contracting and relaxing in time to the pulses.

Presently the frequency of the warmth waves was increased.

Here it goes, I thought. If only I can bear it. When the frequency reached eight cycles per second I would want to sleep. If only I could fight it. If only I could fool the blackguards. The frequency was slowly increasing. In my mind I counted the number of warm tides per second. One, two, three, four, more, still more… Then sleepiness was on me with overwhelming sudden-ness. I clamped my teeth together, willing myself into wakefulness. Sleep was pushing me under like an enormous clammy weight, bearing me down, loading my eyelids. It was a miracle I was still on my feet. I bit my tongue, hoping pain would help me throw off the nightmarish burden of sleep. At that moment, as if from afar, a voice came to me:

"Rauch, how do you feel?"

"Not bad, thank you. A bit cold," I lied. I didn't recognise my own voice and bit my lips and tongue as hard as I could.

"Don't you feel sleepy?"

"No," I said, though I thought I would drop into sleep the next moment. And then, abruptly, all sleepiness was gone. The frequency must have been increased beyond the first terminal threshold. I felt fresh and cheerful as after a good snooze. Now I must fall asleep, I thought, and, shutting my eyes, snored away. I heard the doctor say to his assistant:

"Odd. Sleep at ten cycles instead of eight and a half. Write it down, Pfaff," he told the old man. "Rauch, your sensations?"

I didn't reply, still snoring loudly, my muscles relaxed, knees stuck against the side of the booth.

"Let's go on with it," said the doctor. "Increase the frequency, Pfaff, will you."

In a second I "woke up". The frequency band through which I was now passing made me experience a whole gamut of emotions and changes of mood. I was sad, then gay, then happy, then utterly miserable.

"Time I yelled out," I suddenly decided.

At the moment the generator's roar increased I yelled all I could, whereupon the doctor immediately ordered:

"Cut the tension! It's the first time I've met such a crazy type. Write down: pain at seventy-five cycles per second when normal people experience it at one hundred and thirty. Go on."

That frequency is still in store for me, I thought in dread. Will I be able to cope with it?

"Now, Pfaff, try the ninety-three on him."

When the frequency stabilised something entirely unexpected happened to me. I suddenly remembered the equations which had brought me to Kraftstudt and with perfect clarity visualised every stage of their solution. This is the frequency which stimulates mathematical thinking, I thought fleetingly.

"Rauch, name the first five members of the Bessel function of the second order," the doctor demanded.

I rattled off the answer. My head was crystal clear and my whole being was permeated with a wonderful feeling of knowing all and having it on my tongue's tip.

"Name the first ten places of it."

I named them.

"Solve a cubic equation."

The doctor dictated one with unwieldy fractional coefficients.

In two or three seconds I had the solution ready, naming all the three roots.

"Let's go on. He's quite normal in this department."

Slowly the frequency increased and I felt maudlin. There was a lump in my throat and tears welled in my eyes. But I laughed. I roared with convulsive laughter as if being vigorously tickled. I laughed, while the tears rolled down my cheeks.

"Some idiotic idiosyncrasy again. In a class of his own, you might say. I at once knew him for a strong nervous type subject to neuroses. When will he winge, I wonder?"

I "winged" when weeping was farthest from my mood, when all of a sudden my heart was overflowing with buoyant happiness as a nuptial cup with good vine. I wanted to troll and laugh and dance for joy. All of them-Kraftstudt and Boltz and Deinis and the doctor-seemed to me capital fellows, the jolliest chaps I had ever met. It was then that, with great effort, I started to whimper and blow my nose loudly. Though ghastly inadequate, my weeping soon elicited the now familiar comments of the expert:

"Oh, what a type. All upside down. Nothing even remotely resembling the normal spectre. This fellow will give us a lot of trouble."

How far is the one hundred and thirty? I thought, in abject terror, when the happy and carefree sensation had given way to a feeling of worry, ungrounded anxiety, the presage of impending doom… I started humming a tune. I was doing it mechanically, with a great effort, while my heart pounded away in premonition of something terrible, something fatal and inevitable.

I at once knew when the frequency approached the one stimulating the sensation of pain. At first there was just a dull ache in the joints of the thumb on my right hand, then a sharp pain seared through an old war-time wound. This was followed by a terrible toothache spreading at once to all the teeth. Then a splitting headache added.

Blood pulsed painfully in my ears. Shall I be able to stand it? Shall I have enough will-power to overcome the nightmarish pain and not show it? People have been known after all to be done to death in torture chambers without groaning once. History has recorded cases of people dying on the faggots mute…

The pain went on increasing. Finally it reached its peak and my whole body became one knot of gnawing, stinging, racking, throbbing, excruciating pain. I was all but unconscious and saw purple specks revolving before my eyes, but I remained silent.

"Your sensations, Rauch," the doctor's voice penetrated to me.

"A sensation of murderous rage," I muttered through clenched teeth. "If I only could lay my hands on you…"

"Let's go on. He's completely abnormal. Everything's the other way round with him."

And when I was on the verge of passing out, ready to scream or groan, all pain was suddenly gone. There was sweat, clammy and cold, all over my body. My every muscle trembled.

Later some frequency made me see a blinding light which was there even when I shut my eyes, then I experienced wolfish hunger, heard a scale of deafening noises, felt cold as if taken out into the frost without a stitch on. But I persisted in giving the doctor wrong answers until he fumed with rage. I knew I still had one of the most terrible tests mentioned in the ward the day before coming to me: loss of will-power. It was will that had seen me through so far. It was this invisible inner force that had helped me fight the sensations created artificially by my tormentors. But they would get at it eventually with their hellish pulse generator. Now, would they be able to find I had lost it? I waited for that frequency in dread. And it came.