Part 2

"Do you talk now?" the speaker on the ceiling asked.

"I--" In this moment of terrible threat, he knew he would talk, not to save his life, but because he could not help himself, because he could not keep from talking. He knew, also, that there was nothing he could put into words which would reveal what he knew to be true. "I--I can't."

* * * * *

Again the valve was opened, again the water came into the narrow cell. It reached Holder's chin. He knew now that they fully intended to drown him if he didn't reveal what he knew. From the viewpoint of the watchers, it was better that he should die than that they should take a chance on letting him escape to tell what he knew to someone else!

"I can't tell you," he screamed. "It won't go into words. It's something I do inside my mind."

"Talk!" the loudspeaker answered.

"But I'm telling you that I can't--" His voice took on the sound of a gargle as water poured into his mouth. He spat it out and tried to scream. The water, rising higher, poured into his mouth. He twisted his head upward, shoving against the chains that held him to the wall. The water reached his nose and flowed downward into his lungs.

Within a minute, at most, the level of the water would be hastily lowered. After he was revived he would be given a chance to tell what he knew. If he still proved obstinate, the process would be repeated. But Holder did not know this.

Some prisoners had withstood repeated duckings only to be drowned in the end. Most told everything they knew after the first treatment.

Inside him, John Holder knew that the human body was only a mental construction. Only the strength of an idea held flesh and bones and blood together. He also knew there was no way on earth for him to reveal this secret to another person, in words. Perhaps long and careful study of the nature and the kinds of energies involved would enable him to give a mathematical description of what he knew he could do inside of him. The Reds would never wait for such a study to be made. They were looking for something as simple and as dramatic as _E is equal to MC squared_, the basic equation that had served for the mathematical springboard for the atom bomb.

As the water poured into his nose and down into his lungs, he made one last furious effort. The process had worked on other people. How could he make it work on him? An answer popped into his mind. All he had to do was to think of himself as another person.

He did this. Light exploded through his brain and flooded through his whole body.

When the water level was lowered, the bewildered Reds found empty chains dangling from the walls of the cell. The body they had placed in the chains was no longer there.

Three days later, the driver of an American jeep, on border patrol at night with a squad of men, was astonished to find four bodies suddenly appear within his headlights. To him, they seemed to come out of nowhere. Brakes screaming, the driver jerked the jeep to a halt. The sergeant in charge of the squad hastily dismounted.

"I am John Holder and this is my wife and our two children," the man in the glare of the headlights said.

"Holder?" the sergeant said. "Say, we've got a search order out for you. You vanished behind the iron curtain."

"We have come back through it," Holder answered. "Take us to your commanding officer, at once."

They were put into the jeep. "Johnny, go hide again," the smallest child kept saying. "So we can find him in that place where the light is. Johnny go hide--"

"Shhh, Teresa," her father answered, indulgently. "No more game until we get back to America." He thought longingly of that land across the sea that to them was home. "Besides it is too hard to find you on the other side, and re-integrate a body for you--"

"John," the woman spoke reprovingly. "Why explain it to them? You know they can't understand what you're talking about."

Holder grinned and was silent. Sometimes he wondered if he understood it all himself. All he knew was that a body could be disintegrated, by pure mental force.

The jeep shifted into high gear. At the end of this journey, a plane would be waiting. This would take them to America.... Home.... There a whole new world of exploration waited for him. The very best research teams the country possessed would be at his disposal, the keenest brains, the sharpest minds. Hugging the kids to him, he smiled quietly to himself.