* * * * *
Menesee felt excitement surge like a living tide about him as he came
with the other directors into the vast Tribunal Hall. Sixty years ago,
inexcusable carelessness had deprived Earth of its first chance to
obtain a true interstellar drive. Now, within a few hours, Earth, or
more specifically, the upper echelons of that great political
organization called the Machine which had controlled the affairs of
Earth for the past century and a half, should learn enough of the
secrets of the drive to insure that it would soon be in their
possession.
Menesee entered his box between those of Directors Cornelius and
Ojeda, immediately to the right of the Spokesman's Platform and with
an excellent view of the prisoner. When Administrator Bradshaw and
Spokesman Dorn had taken their places on the platform, Menesee seated
himself, drawing the transcript of the day's proceedings towards him.
However, instead of glancing over it at once, he spent some seconds in
a study of the prisoner.
The fellow appeared to be still young. He was a magnificent physical
specimen, tall and strongly muscled, easily surpassing in this respect
any of the hard-trained directors present. His face showed alert
intelligence, giving no indication of the fact that for two of the
three days since his capture he had been drugged and subject to
constant hypnotic suggestion. He had given his name as Rainbolt,
acknowledged freely that he was a member of the group of malcontent
deserters known in the records of the Machine as the Mars Convicts,
but described himself as being a "missionary of Oneness" whose purpose
was to bring the benefits of some of the principles of "Oneness" to
Earth. He had refused to state whether he had any understanding of the
stardrive by the use of which the Mars Convicts had made their mass
escape from the penal settlements of the Fourth Planet sixty years
before, though the drive obviously had been employed in bringing him
out of the depths of interstellar space to the Solar System and Earth.
At the moment, while the significance of the bank of torture
instruments on his right could hardly have escaped him, his expression
was serious but not detectably concerned.
"Here is an interesting point!" Director Ojeda's voice said on
Menesee's right.
Menesee glanced over at him. Ojeda was tapping the transcript with a
finger.
"This Rainbolt," he said, "hasn't slept since he was captured! He
states, furthermore, that he has never slept since he became an
adult--"
Menesee frowned slightly, failing to see any great significance in the
fact. That the fellow belonged to some curious cult which had
developed among the Mars Convicts following their flight from the
Solar System was already known. Earth's science had methods of
inducing permanent sleeplessness but knew, too, that in most instances
the condition eventually gave rise to very serious side effects which
more than offset any advantages to be gained from it.
He picked up his transcript, indicating that he did not wish to be
drawn into conversation. His eyes scanned quickly over the pages. Most
of it was information he already had. Rainbolt's ship had been
detected four days earlier, probing the outermost of the multiple
globes of force screens which had enclosed Earth for fifty years as a
defense both against faster-than-light missiles and Mars Convict
spies. The ship was alone. A procedure had been planned for such an
event, and it was now followed. The ship was permitted to penetrate
the first two screens which were closed again behind it.
Rainbolt's ship, for all its incredible speed, was then a prisoner.
Unhurriedly, it was worked closer to Earth until it came within range
of giant scanners. For an instant, a large section of its interior was
visible to the instruments of the watchers on Earth; then the picture
blurred and vanished again. Presumably automatic anti-scanning devices
had gone into action.
The photographed view was disappointing in that it revealed no details
of the engines or their instruments. It did show, however, that the
ship had been designed for the use of one man, and that it was neither
armored or armed. Its hull was therefore bathed with paralytics, which
in theory should have left the pilot helpless, and ships of the
Machine were then sent up to tow the interstellar captive down to
Earth.
At that point, the procedure collapsed. The ship was in atmosphere
when an escape capsule was suddenly ejected from it, which later was
found to contain Rainbolt, alert and obviously not affected by the
paralysis beams. A moment later, the ship itself became a cloud of
swiftly dissipating hot gas.
The partial failure of the capture might have been unavoidable in any
case. But the manner in which it occurred still reflected very poorly,
Menesee thought, on the thoroughness with which the plans had been
prepared. The directors who had been in charge of the operation would
not be dealt with lightly--
He became aware suddenly that the proceedings of the day had begun and
hastily put down the transcript.
* * * * *
Spokesman Dorn, the Machine's executive officer, sitting beside
Administrator Bradshaw at a transparent desk on the raised platform to
Menesee's left, had enclosed the area about the prisoner with a sound
block and was giving a brief verbal resume of the background of the
situation. Few of the directors in the Tribunal Hall would have needed
such information; but the matter was being carried on the Grand
Assembly Circuit, and in hundreds of auditoriums on Earth the first
and second echelons of the officials of the Machine had gathered to
witness the interrogation of the Mars Convict spy.
The penal settlements on Mars had been established almost a century
earlier, for the dual purpose of mining the mineral riches of the
Fourth Planet and of utilizing the talents of political dissidents
with a scientific background too valuable to be wasted in research and
experimental work considered either too dangerous to be conducted on
Earth or requiring more space than could easily be made available
there. One of these projects had been precisely the development of
more efficient spacedrives to do away with the costly and tedious
manoeuverings required for travel even among the inner planets.
Work of such importance, of course, was supposed to be carried out
only under close guard and under the direct supervision of reliable
upper-echelon scientists of the Machine. Even allowing for criminal
negligence, the fact that the Mars Convicts were able to develop and
test their stardrive under such circumstances without being detected
suggested that it could not be a complicated device. They did, at any
rate, develop it, armed themselves and the miners of the other penal
settlements and overwhelmed their guards in surprise attack. When the
next ship arrived from Earth, two giant ore carriers and a number of
smaller guard ships had been outfitted with the drive, and the Mars
Convicts had disappeared in them. Their speed was such that only the
faintest and briefest of disturbances had been registered on the
tracking screens of space stations near Mars, the cause of which
remained unsuspected until the news came out.
Anything which could have thrown any light on the nature of the drive
naturally had been destroyed by the deserters before they left; and
the few Machine scientists who had survived the fighting were unable
to provide information though they were questioned intensively for
several years before being executed. What it added up to was that some
eighteen thousand sworn enemies of the Machine had disappeared into
space, equipped with an instrument of unknown type which plainly could
be turned into one of the deadliest of all known weapons.
The superb organization of the Machine swung into action instantly to
meet the threat, though the situation became complicated by the fact
that rumors of the manner in which the Mars Convicts had disappeared
filtered out to the politically dissatisfied on Earth and set off an
unprecedented series of local uprisings which took over a decade to
quell. In spite of such difficulties, the planet's economy was geared
over to the new task; and presently defenses were devised and being
constructed which would stop missiles arriving at speeds greater than
that of light. Simultaneously, the greatest research project in
history had begun to investigate the possibilities of either
duplicating the fantastic drive some scientific minds on Mars had come
upon--chiefly, it was concluded, by an improbable stroke of good
luck--or of matching its effects through a different approach. Since
it had been demonstrated that it could be done, there was no question
that in time the trained men of the Machine would achieve their goal.
Then the armed might of the Machine would move into space to take
control of any colony established by the Mars Convicts and their
descendants.
That was the basic plan. The task of developing a stardrive remained a
huge one because of the complete lack of information about the
direction organized research should take. That difficulty would be
overcome easily only by a second unpredictable twist of
fortune--unless one of the Mars Convicts' FTL ships ventured close
enough to Earth to be captured.
The last had now happened. The ship had been destroyed before it could
be investigated, so that advantage was again lost. The ship's pilot,
however, remained in their hands. The fact that he disclaimed having
information pertinent to the drive meant nothing. So far as he knew,
he might very well be speaking the truth. But he had piloted a ship
that employed the stardrive, was familiar with instruments which
controlled it, had been schooled in their use. A detailed
investigation of his memories could not fail to provide literally
hundreds of meaningful clues. And the Machine's scientists, in their
superficially still fruitless search for the nature of the drive, had,
in fact, covered basic possibilities with such comprehensive
thoroughness that a few indisputably valid clues would show them now
what it _must_ be.
* * * * *
The prisoner, still demonstrating an extraordinary degree of
obliviousness to what lay in store for him, appeared to welcome the
opportunity to be heard by the directors of the Machine. Menesee,
leaning back in his chair, studied the man thoughtfully, giving only
partial attention to what was said. This was the standard opening
stage of a Tribunal interrogation, an underplayed exchange of
questions and answers. Innocuous as it seemed, it was part of a
procedure which had become refined almost to an unvarying ritual--a
ritual of beautiful and terrible precision which never failed to
achieve its goals. Every man watching and listening in the Machine's
auditoriums across the world was familiar with the swift processes by
which a normal human being was transformed into a babbling puppet, his
every significant thought becoming available for the upper echelons to
regard and evaluate.
They would, of course, use torture. It was part of the interlocking
mechanisms of interrogation, no more to be omitted than the
preliminary conditioning by drug and hypnosis. Menesee was not unduly
squeamish, but he felt some relief that it would not be the crude
instruments ranked beside the prisoner which would be used. They were
reserved as a rule for offending members of the organization,
providing a salutary warning for any others who might be tempted to
act against the interests of the Machine or fail culpably in their
duties. This prisoner, as an individual, meant nothing to the Machine.
He was simply a source of valuable information. Therefore, only direct
nerve stimulation would be employed, in the manipulation of which
Spokesman Dorn was a master.
So far the Spokesman had restricted himself to asking the prisoner
questions, his voice and manner gravely courteous. To Menesee's
surprised interest, he had just inquired whether two men of the last
Earth ship to visit Mars, who had disappeared there, might not have
been captured by Mars Convicts operating secretly within the Solar
System.
"Yes, sir," Rainbolt replied readily, "they were. I'm happy to say
that they're still alive and well."
Menesee recalled the incident now. After the mass escape of the Mars
Convicts, the penal settlements had been closed down and the mining
operations abandoned. To guard the desert planet against FTL raiders
as Earth was guarded was technically infeasible. But twice each decade
a patrol ship went there to look for signs that the Mars Convicts had
returned. The last of these patrols had been conducted two years
before. The missing men were believed to have been inspecting a
deserted settlement in a ground vehicle when they vanished, but no
trace of them or the vehicle could be discovered.
Administrator Bradshaw, seated to the spokesman's left, leaned forward
as if to speak, but then sat back again. Menesee thought that
Rainbolt's blunt admission had angered him. Bradshaw, white-haired and
huge in build, had been for many years the nominal head of the
Machine; but in practice the powers of the administrator were less
than those of the spokesman, and it would have been a breach of
protocol for Bradshaw to intervene in the interrogation.
Dorn appeared to have noticed nothing. He went on. "What was the
reason for capturing these men?" "It was necessary," Rainbolt
explained, "to find out what the conditions on Earth were like at
present. At the time we didn't want to risk discovery by coming too
close to Earth itself. And your two men were able to tell us all we
needed to know."
"What was that?" the spokesman said.
Rainbolt was silent a moment, then said, "You see, sir, most of the
past sixty years have been spent in finding new worlds on which human
beings can live without encountering too many difficulties. But
then--"