"A sensation of murderous rage," I muttered through clenched teeth. "If I only could lay my hands on you…"

"Let's go on. He's completely abnormal. Everything's the other way round with him."

And when I was on the verge of passing out, ready to scream or groan, all pain was suddenly gone. There was sweat, clammy and cold, all over my body. My every muscle trembled.

Later some frequency made me see a blinding light which was there even when I shut my eyes, then I experienced wolfish hunger, heard a scale of deafening noises, felt cold as if taken out into the frost without a stitch on. But I persisted in giving the doctor wrong answers until he fumed with rage. I knew I still had one of the most terrible tests mentioned in the ward the day before coming to me: loss of will-power. It was will that had seen me through so far. It was this invisible inner force that had helped me fight the sensations created artificially by my tormentors. But they would get at it eventually with their hellish pulse generator. Now, would they be able to find I had lost it? I waited for that frequency in dread. And it came.

Suddenly I felt indifference. Indifference to being in the hands of the Kraftstudt gang, indifference to him and his associates, indifference to myself. My mind was a complete blank. The muscles felt flabby. All sensations were gone. It was a state of total physical and moral spineless-ness. I couldn't force myself to think or make the slightest movement. I had no will of my own.

And yet, surviving in some remote corner of my consciousness, a tiny thought insisted: You must… you must… you must.

You must what? Why? Whatever for? "You must… you must… you must," kept on insisting what seemed to me a single nerve cell by some kind of miracle impervious to the all-powerful electromagnetic pulses that held sway over my nerves, bidding them to feel whatever those hangmen wanted.

Later, when I learned about the theory of the central encephalic system of brain activity, according to which all the nerve cells in the cortex are governed by a single, master group of nerve cells, I realised that this supreme psychic authority was impervious even to the strongest outside physical and chemical influences. That must be what saved me then.

Suddenly the doctor ordered:

"You will collaborate with Kraftstudt."

I said:

"No."

"You will do all that you are told to do."

"No."

"Run your head against the wall."

"No."

"Let's go on. He's abnormal, Pfaff, but mind you we'll get at him yet."

I shammed loss of will-power just when a sensation of the strongest will flooded my whole being and I felt I could make myself do the impossible.

Checking on my "abnormalities" the doctor put me a few more questions.

"If the happiness of mankind depended on your life, would you give it?"

"Why should I?" I asked dully.

"Can you commit suicide?"

"Yes."

"Do you want to kill the war criminal, Obersturmfuhrer Kraftstudt?"

"What for?"

'Will you collaborate with us?"

"Yes."

"Damned if I can make anything out of him! I hope it's the first and the last time I have such a case to deal with. Loss of will-power at 175. Write that down. Let's go on with it."

And they went on for another half-hour. Finally the frequency chart of my nervous system was complete. The doctor now knew all the frequencies by means of which I could be made to experience any sensation or mood. At least he thought he did. Actually the only genuine frequency was the one which stimulated my mathematical abilities. And that was just what I needed most. The point was that I had evolved a plan of blowing the criminal firm sky-high. And mathematics was to be my dynamite.

It is an established fact that hypnosis and suggestion work best on weak-willed individuals. That was how the Kraftstudt personnel instilled in the calculators-their wills generator-treated- awed obedience and reverence towards their "teacher".

I, too, was to pass through an obedience course, but because of my "abnormal" spectre this;was postponed for a time. I required an individual approach.

While a working place was being specially set up for me I had comparative freedom to move about. I was allowed to go out of the ward into the corridor and glance into the class-rooms where my colleagues studied or worked.

I was not allowed to join in the common prayers held between the walls of a huge aluminium condenser for half an hour every morning, during which Kraftstudt's victims paid homage to the firm's head. Devoid of will and thought, they dully repeated words read to them over a closed-circuit broadcast system.

"Joy and happiness lie in self-knowledge," announced the relayed voice.

"Joy and happiness lie in self-knowledge," the twelve men on bended knees repeated in chorus, their will-power destroyed by the alternating current field "between the walls".

"By understanding the mysteries of the circulation of impulses across neurone synapses we achieve joy and happiness."

"… joy and happiness," repeated the chorus.

"How wonderful that everything is so simple!

What a delight it is to know that love, fear, pain, hatred, hunger, sorrow, joy are all nothing but movement of electrochemical impulses in our bodies!"

"… in our bodies."

"How miserable he who does not know this great truth!"

"… this great truth," repeated the slaves dully.

"Herr Kraftstudt, our teacher and saviour, gave us this happiness!"

"… happiness."

"He gave us life."

"He gave us life."

I listened to this monstrous prayer, peeping through the glass-panel door of a class-room.

Inert and flabby, with eyes half-closed, the men repeated the nightmarish maxims in expressionless voices. The electric generator hardly ten paces away pumped submission into their minds robbed of resistance. Something inhuman, vile to the extreme, bestial and at the same time exquisitely cruel was being done to them. Boggled for comparison at the sight of that herd of miserable creatures with no will of their own, my mind could only suggest dipsomania or drug-addiction at their worst.

The thanksgiving over, the twelve passed into a spacious hall with rows of desks. Suspended over each desk was a round plate of aluminium forming part of a mammoth condenser. A second plate was apparently sunk in the floor.

This hall reminded me somehow of an open-air cafe with shaded tables. But the idyllic impression was swept away as soon as I looked at the men under the plates.

A sheet of paper setting out the problem awaited each one of them. At first the calculators looked at these in dumb incomprehension, still under the influence of the will-destroying frequency. Presently the frequency of ninety-three cycles was switched on and a crisp order to begin work relayed.

And all the twelve, snapping up pad and pencil, pitched into feverish scribbling. This could not be called work. It was frenzy, a kind of mathematical epilepsy. The men writhed and squirmed over their pads, their hands shuttled to and fro till they blurred; their faces turned deep purple with the strain; their eyes started out of their sockets.

This lasted for the best part of an hour. Then, when their hands started moving jerkily, heads lowered almost to the table-tops and livid veins swelled rope-like in their extended necks, the generator was switched to eight cycles. All the twelve at once dropped asleep.

Kraftstudt saw to it that his slaves got some rest!

Then it all began afresh.

One day, while watching this horrible scene of mass mathematical frenzy I saw one of the calculators break down. Suddenly he stopped writing, crazily turned to one of his furiously writing neighbours and stared at him blankly for a while as if at great pains to remember something.

Then he gave a terrible guttural cry and began tearing his clothes. He bit himself, gnawed at his fingers, tore skin off his chest, battered his head on the table. Finally he passed out and slumped down on the floor.