The Altar at Asconel by John Brunner

whispering all the time.”
    “It’s a good idea to lock her in,” Spartak confirmed. “I wish there was some way we could lock all of us in—is there?”
    “Not that I know of,” Vix grunted. “Sooner or later, even if we closed everything fast, we’d be driven to operating the emergency escape hatches, which can’t possibly be locked.”
    He did as Vineta had asked, and on his return put a question to Spartak. “Little voices inside the head—is that how it feels to you?”
    Spartak shook his head. He answered loudly, as another command came over the communicator, trying to drown out the words with his own. “It affects different people different ways, I’m told. It gives me a helpless tightness in the guts, makes my mouth dry and I think eventually it will blur my vision.”
    “How long before it gets unbearable?”
    “I don’t know. How strong are we?”
    But the authorities’ patience was shorter than their endurance. With ten minutes still to go before the promised time of Tiorin’s arrival, there came a thunderous banging on the lock door, entirely different from Rochard’s timid knock.
    “Tiorin?” whispered Vix, whose neck was now corded with tension as he struggled against the invisible compulsion to leave the ship and fetch their unwanted passenger.
    “I guess it could be,” Spartak replied with difficulty. “I’d better go see. I think I know more about what’s been done to us than you do—I stand a marginally better chance of arguing for a while longer if it’s not Tiorin down there.”
    “Go ahead,” Vix consented, and his face twisted with self-contempt at his own frailty.
    It was not Tiorin. It was the pudgy woman with gray hair, accompanied by a squad of uniformed guards and the mutant girl—presumably—laid out on a stretcher on the back of the ground car in which they had all ridden over to the ship.
    “You there!” she roared at Spartak’s appearance. “If you fight our conditioning much longer, you won’t be in a state to fly space! If that’s how you think you’re going to evade my orders, I tell you straight you won’t get away with it! I’ll condition one of my own pilots and drag you out to jail, and Delcadoré will be the only planet you see for the rest of your lives!”
    A cloud of formless terror due to the conditioning enveloped Spartak’s brain. He was unable to speak, Ignoring him, the woman turned to the guards with her.
    “Get that girl off the car and put her aboard!”
    Slowly, the terror retreated as Spartak called on every trick of self-discipline taught him on Annanworld. He found his voice again, could see clearly as the guards awkwardly sought to get the girl-laden stretcher up the ladder to the lock at which he stood.
    A shocking possibility crossed his mind, and everything else, conditioning included, fled from his awareness. He leaned forward on the rail, peering down at the girl. From her face, and the slightness of the body under the blanket in which she was wrapped, he deduced that she was scarcely more than a child—fifteen or sixteen, perhaps.
    But that wasn’t what transfixed him. He had assumed her to be unconscious, perhaps injured by the peasants or whoever had tried to stone her to death—the gray-haired woman had mentioned something about that. However, he had seen without a shadow of doubt that her eyes were open.
    “What’s wrong with that girl?” he called.
    The guards, busy trying to get her up the ladder, didn’t answer. The woman on the car merely scowled.
    Behind him in the lock, Vix appeared, clutching his gun but somehow unable to find the trigger, so that his hands wandered absurdly over the stock and barrel, like jointed insects with minds of their own.
    “Is she sick, or hurt?” he inquired feverishly.
    “I don’t think so,” Spartak rapped.
    “Get back!”—from one of the guards manhandling the stretcher up to them. Despite himself, Vix obeyed instantly. Spartak heard him cursing under his breath.
    The