knowing what had happened outside in the dark. She was sure of only
one thing. She couldn't stay inside the house with her husband moving
about a few feet from fuel cylinders that might blow up at any moment,
for there was at least a fifty percent likelihood that the intruder had
accomplished what he'd come to do, before Thomas had seen the light
bobbing about in the yard.
She had straightened and was hugging her son to her, just starting to
turn, when John Lynton's voice rang out sharply from the doorway.
"Grace! I blasted at him but he got away! Listen carefully. I've only a
moment to talk."
He was standing in the doorway with the hand-gun reholstered at his
waist, its handle gleaming dully. His pallor was startling, for it went
far beyond mere paleness, as if all the blood had been drawn from his
face artificially, leaving the skin gray and shrunken.
"I can't be sure, but I think ... one of the cylinders has been
triggered to blow up," he went on quickly. "It isn't heating up.
There'd be no heat--just a faint vibration. When I put my hand on the
metal I was almost sure I could feel a vibration. We've got just one
chance of staying alive--and I'll have to move fast. I'm going to take
it to the Spaceport--I can get there in the conveyor truck in ten
minutes--and have them dismantle it. They'll know how. I don't. I'll
take all six of the cylinders, to make sure."
"John, no! It will blow up in the truck. I'm sure of it. We'd better
all get out in the desert, as far away from it as we can. If we start
right now and run--"
"We could go in the truck, Dad!" Thomas cried.
Lynton shook his head. "If just one cylinder blows up--it will take
three miles of desert with it. If all six go ... twenty miles of
desert. There are at least six thousand Colonists within three or four
miles of us. There are less than a thousand people at the Spaceport.
Only one big sky ship is still unloading. Better a thousand deaths than
six or seven thousand ... if it blows up before they can dismantle it."
"But John--Oh, God, I don't know."
"It's the best way, the surest way. We can't think only of ourselves.
If I drove straight out into the desert with it and it blows up within
twenty minutes the fallout would still kill several thousand Colonists.
The Spaceport's in the other direction, completely isolated. And I
can get there in fifteen minutes ... even if I'm stopped by the Wendel
police and have to blast my way to it."
"Why should they try to stop you? They'd die themselves--"
"Why did they send someone to trigger that bomb? They'll take any risk
now, because they know that Endicott's new bluff could smash them. That
cylinder is smaller than the first atomic bomb ever built--much smaller
than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima--and if they have to explode
a half-dozen of them in different parts of the Colony to demoralize the
Colonists and discredit Endicott they're prepared to do it, apparently.
Even if it kills thirty thousand people. Or maybe they figured the one
I'm taking to the Spaceport--and I _am_ taking it there, Grace--would
make the Colonists think twice about taking any more Endicott fuel
cylinders home with them."
"You're right, John," Grace Lynton said, with a firmness in her voice
which surprised her. "We can't think only of ourselves. Until you come
back--every moment will be a living death. But--you must do it. There's
no other way."
"I'll be back," Lynton said. "I--I love you, Grace."
"And I love you, John--even though I've said cruel, cutting things at
times. I love you very much."
"Take care of yourself, Dad," Thomas said.
"I will, son. Don't worry. Just be the man of the family and keep the
kids in line until I get back."
13
I had no way of knowing how long I remained on the outer fringes of
what was probably just a weakness-produced blackout before the outlines
of the hospital room wavered back, becoming so clear again that I could
see the foot of the bed, and a glass-topped table covered with small
bottles and a roll of gauze bandage that looked about as big as a
liquid fuel cylinder.
Someone who couldn't have been the doctor was sitting in a chair by
the bed, leaning a little forward, his eyes level with mine. I was
more than startled. An ice-cold measuring worm came out at the base of
my spine and started inching its way upward, bunching itself up and
lengthening out again, the way measuring worms do when they're trying
to decide if you're just the right fit for a human-style coffin.
I had a visitor whose face would have chilled a perfectly well man
prepared to defend himself against violence at the drop of a hat. He
was looking at me with a glacial animosity in his stare, as if he
resented the fact that I was still alive and would do something about
it if I gave him the slightest encouragement.
Even without encouragement I had the feeling that my life hung by a
thread which could snap at any moment, so long as he remained that
close to me with no one standing by to interfere if he lost control of
himself.
He didn't have a moronic or particularly brutal looking face.
Intelligence of a high order had given his features a cast you
couldn't mistake. It was the kind of look that went with disciplined
thinking--long years of it--and behavior that was based on intellectual
discernment, however much that discernment had been abused during
moments of uncontrollable rage. Uncontrollable rage, as every
psychologist knows, can tie the reasoning part of any man's mind into
knots. Everything that was primitive in him seemed to be at the helm
now, as if he bore me so much ill-will that he might be capable of
trying to take my life with just his bare hands, if he happened to be
unarmed. And I was far from sure of that.
His glacial gray eyes seemed to say: "I've got you exactly where I
want you, chum. It won't do you any good to shout for help. It stands
to reason that if I could get in here to talk to you at a time like
this, throwing my weight around a little further would be no problem
at all. Five minutes of privacy will suit me fine. After all, how long
will killing you take?"
He was a fairly big man, compactly built, with hands that looked strong
enough to bend a steel bar, if he didn't mind chancing a rush of blood
to the head that might have been a little risky in a man his age.
I had no idea why he was sitting there, only that the alarm bells were
ringing again. Only this time it wasn't taking place in a crowded
subway train in total darkness, or up near the top of a swaying spiral
where an assassin's aim could be a little less than sure. It was man to
man, tete-a-tete, in a well-lighted hospital room.
I was flat on my back and weak as hell and Death was looking straight
at me out of ice-blue eyes. I had only one straw to clutch at. The
hospital room might just possibly be under surveillance and an act of
violence that's likely to boomerang can give an assassin pause.
His first words ripped that straw from me and crumpled it up, with such
vigor I was sure I could hear a crunching sound.
"I've just a few questions to ask you," he said, in a surprisingly mild
tone. "We've made sure that there are no recording devices in this
room. We always make a careful check as a matter of routine, when we're
forced to demand complete privacy during an interrogation of this sort.
It's something we'd prefer not to do, but there are times--"
He shrugged, as if he'd made the point clear enough and resented the
necessity of making it any plainer.
"When the internal security of the Colony is endangered," he went on
impatiently, "we do not hesitate to invoke all of our authority. We
have no choice. Too many people take it for granted that a privately
owned combine is exceeding its authority when it undertakes police
investigations not specifically authorized by its charter. They
forget that such police powers are implicit in every charter which
provides for the exercise of reasonable vigilance in the public domain.
Safe-guarding the public, which Wendel Atomics serves, would not be
possible if we did not exercise such authority."
How true that was I didn't have enough legal knowledge at my
finger-tips to decide. But I was pretty sure it was a bald-faced lie.
But just his use of the word "power" explained how he'd managed to get
as close to me as he'd done, with no one within earshot to hear me if I
burst my lungs shouting.
The kind of power the Board had given me the right to exercise
superceded whatever display of authority Wendel Atomics had used to
turn the hospital room into a prison cell. But who would know or make
a move to save me--if the silver bird didn't get a chance to flap its
wings on my uniform until they were pumping embalming fluid into my
veins and making plans to lower me, with a ceremonial flourish, into a
desert grave?
"There are a few things Wendel Atomics has a right to know," Glacial
Stare was saying. "A legal right--make no mistake about that. I'd
advise you not to lie to me. If you do--"
He shrugged again.
I said something then that surprised me, because I didn't think right
at the moment I had that much defiance on tap.
"Shove it!" I said.
He couldn't have heard me, because he went on with no change of
expression. "Commander Littlefield is within his rights in refusing
to permit us to question him as to what took place on board the Mars'
rocket. We have no jurisdiction over such ... irregularities in space.
If we questioned just one of his officers, the Board would have every
right to revoke our charter. But two of the officers have come to
us and voluntarily submitted information which we cannot ignore. We
believe that the internal security of the Colony is in danger and we
intend to take steps to make sure that none of the questions we have a
right to ask will remain unanswered."
He was laying it on the line, all right, speaking with an almost
surgical kind of precision, so that I couldn't claim later--if I turned
stubborn--that I'd failed to understand him. It's funny how a man who's
holding all the cards will sometimes do that, just on the off-chance
that you may have an ace up your sleeve and may use it to make trouble
for him later on.
He must have been pretty sure I didn't have a concealed ace, however,
for he backed up what he was saying with the most dangerous kind of
threat. Dangerous to him ... if there _had_ been a hidden listening
device in the room and a tape with that threat on it had come to the
attention of the Board.
"I hope, for your sake," he said, "that you'll keep nothing back. It
is very unpleasant to sit in a Big-Image interrogation room and have
part of your mind destroyed. The part you value most, that makes you
what you are--destroyed, sliced away. Yes ... _sliced away_ is quite
accurate, even though no instrument would be needed and not a hand
would be laid on you. You can cut deep into the brain with vibrations
alone. But nothing ... _physical_ ever takes place in the Big-Image
interrogation room. No knife or vibrator, as you know. The destruction
is brought about in a quite different way. But it's just as drastic and
irreversible as a prefrontal lobotomy."
He stopped talking abruptly, looking past me at the opposite wall,
as if he could already see the shadow of a broken and tormented man
projected there. I could see it too, and I didn't like to think that I
was coming that close to sharing his thoughts. But it was useless to
pretend that the man who was casting that shadow might not turn out to
be me.
So they had them on Mars, too, with the Wendel police on hand to
make sure that the big screen with its multiple sound tracks and the
smoothly operating projector were kept carefully hidden from the law.
Big-Image interrogation rooms--a cruel vestige of the brain-washing
techniques that had so outraged world opinion in the middle decades of
the twentieth century that they had been castigated and outlawed by
the United Nations, the World Court and every responsible Governmental
agency on Earth.
But the criminal mind has very little respect for world opinion or
restrictions on brutal practices that are very difficult to enforce.
Big-Image interrogation had begun as a police investigation procedure,
which made it easy for the wrong kind of police force to resort to it
and claim historic precedent and moral justification as a cover-up if
their activities ever came to light.
I was sure that Glacial Stare had mentioned it solely to turn the screw
as far as it would go, hoping I'd turn pale and answer his questions
in a completely cooperative way. I was sure that if I did he'd stop
threatening me immediately, listen with attentive ear to what I had to
say and apologize for letting me think, even for a moment, that it was
just a part of my mind he'd been planning to destroy. Why should he
want to upset me that way, when the only thing he'd had in mind from
the start was to persuade me to talk and then relieve me of all anxiety
by killing me?
He wasn't giving me credit for having the kind of brain it would have
been worth taking the trouble to destroy, even in part, but there was
nothing to be gained by reminding him of that.
You don't have to be a professional historian or even a data-collecting
research specialist in the police procedure field to pinpoint the
origin of Big-Image interrogation in the middle years of the twentieth
century.
Three out of five well-informed people can tell you exactly how it
began, if you jog them into remembering by showing them a micro-film
recording of what took place during just one of those interrogations
sixty or seventy years ago.
My memory didn't need to be jogged. I'd examined too many micro-film
recordings made even earlier than that--so many years before I was born
that the grooves have to be altered if you want to run them off in the
projectors that were in common use at the turn of the century, because
they ante-date even those old-style machines.
As early as 1965 someone had discovered and pointed out that the cinema
was no longer just an entertainment medium. Everyone at the time, I
suppose, had made that discovery already, in a private sort of way,
but an entire society can have a blind spot and go right on clinging
to established patterns of thought, if only because people in general
are a little reluctant to discuss openly anything that threatens to
overturn the apple cart.
At any rate, about 1965 someone whose name has not come down to
us--quite possibly he was a drama critic, that most curious of
breeds--had pointed out that the cinema had become a potentially
mind-shattering instrument of torture, which could be used to
brain-wash a spectator until he became a hopeless psychotic, incapable
of distinguishing reality from illusion. Schizophrenic or manic
depressive, take your pick.
It was the bigger-than-life illusion that could do that--the strange,
often terrifying sense of being caught up in some super-reality that
had no real existence in time or space, in the ordinary way that
time-and-space manifests itself to us in everyday life.
The cinema became potentially that kind of torture medium the instant
the first of the twenty-million-dollar spectacles in full color
appeared on the screen.
We know what that kind of illusion can do today and when we watch a
screen spectacle that distorts reality for three or four hours by
making everything seem fifty or a hundred times as large as life ... we
make sure that we are entering a theater that is Government supervised
and not a Big-Image interrogation room presided over by a sadist in
police uniform.
Everyone knows how it is today, and stays on guard, perpetually
alert. But back in the twentieth century the danger wasn't clearly
understood, and that lack of understanding was taken advantage of by
the brain-washers in uniform to exact confessions at a terrible price.
Everyone is familiar with the disorientation I'm talking about. Even
the old stage plays and the earlier black-and-white movies and not
a few books could bring it about to some extent, when you left the
theater or closed the book, and passed from a world of dramatically
heightened illusion into the drabness of everyday life.
But the big screen spectacles in full color, with electronic sound
effects, make the world of illusion and the world of sober reality seem
as far apart as two contradictory constructs in symbolic logic. When
you look at that kind of motion picture you get the illusion that all
of the events on the screen, even the intimate, two-person closeups,
are taking place on a gigantic scale.
The sharpness and brightness of everything, the brilliance of the
colorama, the dramatic selectivity which makes each scene burn its
way into your brain as a titan encounter in a world of giants is so
overwhelming that when you emerge from the theater after watching such
a film the world of reality seems small, stunted, anaemic by contrast.
You look at the men and women walking past you on the street and they
seem to have nothing in common with the men and women you've just
seen on the screen. That quiet little guy puffing on a cigarette and
returning your stunned stare with a perplexed frown may be the director
of a big power combine, with just as much lightning at his finger-tips.
But he seems like a pygmy. It would be impossible to visualize him as
a helmeted giant stripped to the waist, breasting wild seas at the
helm of a Viking ship or a spacesuited giant in a colorama with a
present-day background.
In the big screen spectacles all of the men seem gigantic, with
tremendous, muscular torsos. Even the little guys look like titan
figures, fifty or a hundred times as large as they seem outside the
theater. And the women--with the possible exception of the very
feminine ones with overwhelming sex appeal--look like Amazons.
You can't even equate the violence you encounter in everyday life with
the violence that takes place in a big screen spectacle. After you've
watched the spectacle kind of violence for three or four hours an
army equipped with the most formidable of modern weapons, closing in
on a half-bombed out city would look infinitely less formidable--toy
soldiers in a kindergarten world which the big-image, colorama giants
could topple and scatter just by inflating their cheeks and blowing on
them.
Even the Big Mushroom, which we've miraculously managed to keep from
blowing Earth apart for almost a century now, looks fifty times as
destructive when you see it on the screen, spiraling skyward as the
crowning spectacle of a sound-color, fifty-million-dollar Armageddon.
But remember this. It doesn't cost anything like that much to put
four or five giants from that kind of motion picture on a screen in a
Big-Image interrogation room. The cost, in fact, is negligible, because
just one scene can be repeated over and over. You're seated all alone
in the middle of what looks like a medieval torture chamber--if you
leave out the racks and thumbscrews and iron maidens and just think of
such a chamber as a blank-walled, cell-like horror--and on the screen,
fifty or a hundred times lifesize, are the lads who have been given the
task of cutting you down to size.
_You're_ still very much a part of the puny world outside the theater
you've lived in most of your life. You know it, you feel it ... you
can't escape from it. When a big screen production has been designed
solely to entertain you, you can identify yourself with the giants
to some extent. You become a part of the illusion. But how can you
identify with four or five brutish looking lads with no resemblance to
yourself, with a look on their faces which says they hate your guts and
are out for blood and won't be satisfied until they've brain-washed you.
Oh, it looks easy. Resistance, laughing in their faces, should be no
problem at all, because you know damn well it's nothing but an illusion.
But just how long do you think you can go on believing that those
Neanderthaler types with five-pronged metal whip-lashes dangling from
their wrists aren't flesh-and-blood tormentors?
All right, you still think it should be easy. All I can say is ... just
sit for five hours in a Big-Image interrogation room and try staying
sane. Go ahead, insist on being granted that privilege. It might be a
little difficult to come as close to it as I was right at that moment,
flat on my back in a hospital bed with Glacial Stare reminding me just
how terrible it could be. But you never know until you try. On Mars
bringing that about shouldn't be too difficult ... with Wendel Atomics
determined to build up a reputation for ruthlessness to protect its
interests in the war it was waging with Endicott Fuel and all of the
colonists who were being forced to wildcat in a commodity field so
explosive that it could turn them into killers of the dream and blow
them apart for good measure.
But let's go back to the Big-Image interrogation room for a moment.
You're sitting there, staring up at the Neanderthaler-type giants
and they're staring down at you. Their eyes are slitted and they're
stripped to the waist and there is a fine sheen of sweat on their
chests. There is nothing trim or athletic looking about them. They're
heavyset, almost muscle-bound, with the outsize, very ugly-looking kind
of physical massiveness you see in some wrestlers, but hardly ever in a
professional boxer even in the heavyweight class.
"Well, pal!" one of them says, winking at you.
"I have an idea he'd like to high-hat us," another chimes in, winking
also, but at Muscle Bound Number One instead of at you.
"We'll have to do something about that," Muscle Bound Number Three
insists.
"Oh, we will ... we will. But we ought to give him a little time to get
better acquainted with us. Maybe we can soften him up a little just by
talking to him. What do you say?"
"Sure, why not? You see a guy flat on his face, with his skull bashed
in, and you start feeling sorry for him. Right off, that's bad. It
keeps you from really setting to work on him."
At first you can laugh, almost, because who ever heard of a screen
giant stepping out from the screen and slashing you across the chest
with a five-pronged metal whiplash? But if you know what's coming you
don't feel much like laughing, even at first.
Because ... it goes on and on and on. It builds up and there's no way
you can shut it out, because they inject a drug just under your eyelids
which forces you to keep your eyes open. You can't close them no matter
how hard you try. And you can't turn your head aside, because you're
strapped to the seat and there's a clamp at the back of your head that
prevents you from moving it.
It goes on and on, and after a while the giants are no longer on the
screen, but right in the interrogation room with you. One of them is
raising and lowering his arm, bringing the whiplash down on your bare
shoulders.... You can feel the thongs cutting into your flesh, and not
even screaming will put a stop to it, because you can't put a stop to
an illusion that is ripping your mind apart and letting all of the
sanity drain out of you.
It's the hundred-times-bigger-than-life gimmick that does it, although
that slang-neat little word doesn't begin to do justice to what a
Big-Image interrogation can do to you. They're big, _big_, BIG, with
all the brutishness blown up, and showing on their faces. And they seem
to be leaning out from the screen before they emerge from it and you
can hear the whiplash swishing through the air and the sound of it is
magnified too, and just the whiplash alone seems large enough to rip
the hide off a mastodon.
Worst of all, that hundred-times-bigger-than-life illusion doesn't
depend on size alone, as I've pointed out. It depends on the over-all
magnification of reality that takes place in a big screen spectacle,
the disorientation that makes the real world seem to shrivel into
insignificance.
It seldom takes longer than five hours to complete the brain-washing.
You pass through three stages. At the end of an hour--or two,
at most--when the torment becomes almost unbearable you start
to hallucinate a little, but you're still sane enough to answer
most of the questions they ask you. Then you become so hopelessly
psychotic that your answers can no longer be relied on. But they're
satisfied, they've got what they wanted from you when they started the
interrogation.
Without wasting any more time they go on to the third stage. They
calm you down and "cure" you with the mental-torture equivalent of a
prefrontal lobotomy. They do that to make sure you'll lose the part of
your mind that can resent what's been done to you, and summon enough
will power to turn accuser.