at?

"If our positions were reversed, Mr. Cornell, I'm sure that you'd seek
some additional binding force against me. I shall continue to seek some
such lever against you for the same reason. In the meantime, Mr.
Cornell, we shall make a test to see whether we have any real basis for
any agreement at all. You may have ceased to be a carrier, you know."

"Yeah," I admitted darkly.

"In the meantime," he said cheerfully, "the least we can do is to treat
your finger. I'd hate to have you hedge a deal because we did not
deliver your cured body in the whole."

He put his head out of the door and summoned a nurse who came with a
black bag. From the bag, Scholar Phelps took a skin-blast hypo and a
small metal box, the top of which held a small slender, jointed platform
and some tiny straps. He strapped my finger to this platform and then
plugged in a length of line cord to the nearest wall socket. The little
platforms moved; the one nearest my wrist vibrated rapidly across a very
small excursion that tickled like the devil. The end platform moved in
an arc, flexing the finger tip from straight to about seventy degrees.
This moved fairly slow but regularly up and down.

"I'll not fool you," he said drily. "This is going to hurt."

He set the skin-blast hypo on top of the joint and let it go. For a
moment the finger felt cold, numb, pleasant. Then the shock wore away
and the tip of my finger, my whole finger and part of my hand shocked me
with the most excruciating agony that the hide of man ever felt. Flashes
and waves of pain darted up my arm to the elbow and the muscles in my
forearm jumped. The sensitive nerve in my elbow sang and sent darting
waves of zigzag needles up to my shoulder. My hand was a source of
searing heat and freezing cold and the pain of being crushed and twisted
and wrenched out of joint all at the same time.

Phelps wiped my wet face with a towel, loaded another hypo and let me
have it in the shoulder. Gradually the stuff took hold and the awful
pain began to subside. Not all the way, it just diminished from
absolutely unbearable to merely terrible.

I knew at that moment why a trapped animal will bite off its own foreleg
to get free of the trap.

From the depths of his bag he found a bottle and poured a half-tumbler
for me; it went down like a whiskey-flavored soft drink. It had about as
much kick as when you pour a drink of water into a highball glass that
still holds a dreg of melted ice and