he met a lesser crewman, ready to lower it if
he met an executive officer.

He could already feel the terrible pain of the nerve-burner coursing
through his body--a jolt every ten seconds for two minutes, like a whip
lashing all over his body at once. His only satisfaction was the
knowledge that he had sentenced Kraybo to ten minutes of the same thing.

* * * * *

The Guesser lay on his bed, face down, his grasping fingers clutching
spasmodically at the covering as his nerves twitched with remembered
pain. Thirteen jolts. Thirteen searing jolts of excruciating torture. It
was over now, but his synapses were still crackling with the memories of
those burning lashes of energy.

He was thirty-five. He had to keep that in mind. He was thirty-five now,
and his nerves should be under better control than they had been at
twenty. He wondered if there were tears streaming from his eyes, and
then decided it didn't matter. At least he wasn't crying aloud.

Of course, he had screamed in the nerve-burner; he had screamed thirteen
times. Any man who didn't scream when those blinding stabs of pain came
was either unconscious or dead--it was no disgrace to scream in the
burner. But he wasn't screaming now.

He lay there for ten minutes, his jaw clamped, while the twitching
subsided and his nervous system regained its usual co-ordination.

The burner did no actual physical damage; it wasn't good economics for
an Executive to allow his men to be hurt in any physical manner. It took
a very little actual amount of energy applied to the nerve endings to
make them undergo the complex electrochemical reaction that made them
send those screaming messages to the brain and spine. There was less
total damage done to the nerves than a good all-night binge would do to
a normal human being. But the effect on the mind was something else
again.

It was a very effective method of making a man learn almost any lesson
you wanted to teach him.

After a while, The Guesser shuddered once more, took a deep breath, held
it for fifteen seconds, and then released it. A little later, he lifted
himself up and swung his legs over the edge of his bed. He sat on the
edge of the bed for a few minutes, then got up and got dressed in his
best uniform.

After all, the captain hadn't said anything about restricting him to the
ship, and he had never been to Viornis before. Besides, a couple of
drinks might make him feel better.