Bending down, Crofts picked up a small metal box, carefully avoiding the two handles. “And these were not designed and built on Earth. The entire Mercer Movement is null-T all the way, and that’s the fact we’ve got to contend with.”

Herrick said, “If Mercer is not a Terran, then he may have suffered and even died before, on other planets.”

“Oh, yes,” Crofts said. “Mercer—or whatever his or its real name is—may be highly experienced in this. But we still don’t know what we want to know.” And that of course was, What happens to those people holding onto the handles of their empathy boxes?

Crofts seated himself at his desk and scrutinized the box resting directly before him, with its two inviting handles. He had never touched them, and he never intended to. But—

“How soon will Mercer die?” Herrick asked.

“They’re expecting it some time late next week.”

“And Mr. Lee will have gotten something from the girl’s mind by then, you think? Some clue as to where Mercer really is?”

“I hope so,” Crofts said, still seated at the empathy box but still not touching it. It must be a strange experience, he thought, to place your hands on two ordinary-looking metal handles and find, all at once, that you’re no longer yourself; you’re another man entirely, in another place, laboring up a long, dreary inclined plain toward certain extinction. At least, so they say. But hearing about it… what does that actually convey? Suppose I tried it for myself.

The sense of absolute pain… that was what appalled him, held him back.

It was unbelievable that people could deliberately seek it out, rather than avoiding it. Gripping the handles of the empathy box was certainly not the act of a person seeking escape. It was not the avoidance of something but the seeking of something. And not the pain as such; Crofts knew better than to suppose that the Mercerites were simple masochists who desired discomfort. It was, he knew, the meaning of the pain which attracted Mercer’s followers.