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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.

There were better planets in the galaxy, he decided two hours later. Thousands of them.

For one thing, it was a small, but dense world, with a surface gravity of one point two standard gees–not enough to be disabling, but enough to make a man feel sluggish. For another, its main export was farm products: there were very few large towns on Viornis, and no center of population that could really be called a city. Even here, at the spaceport, the busiest and largest town on the planet, the population was less than a million. It was a “new” world, with a history that didn’t stretch back more than two centuries. With the careful population control exercised by the ruling Execs, it would probably remain small and provincial for another half millennium.

The Guesser moseyed down one of the streets of Bellinberg probably named after the first Prime Executive of the planet–looking for a decent place for a spaceman to have a drink. It was evening, and the sinking of the yellow primary below the western horizon had left behind it a clear, star-filled sky that filled the air with a soft, white radiance. The streets of the town itself were well-lit by bright glow-plates imbedded in the walls of the buildings, but above the street level, the buildings themselves loomed darkly. Occasionally, an Exec’s aircar would drift rapidly overhead with a soft rush of air, and, in the distance, he could see the shimmering towers of the Executive section rising high above the eight- or ten-storyed buildings that made up the majority of Bellinberg.

The streets were fairly crowded with strollers–most of them Class Four or Five citizens who stepped deferentially aside as soon as they saw his uniform, and kept their eyes averted from him. Now and then, the power car of a Class Three rolled swiftly by, and The Guesser felt a slight twinge of envy. Technically, his own rank was the equivalent of Class Three, but he had never owned a groundcar. What need had a spaceman of a groundcar? Still, it would be nice to drive one just once, he thought; it would be a new experience, certainly.