"Half the world," Mr. Ainsworth said slowly. "One half of your whole,
wide world!"
Stan stared at him coldly for a full minute, then started to
laugh--laughter that ripped out of him like waves and washed against
the sides of the room.
Sick laughter, because he knew the price he was going to have to pay
for it.
He sobered. There was a time, he thought, when every human being had to
stand up and be counted as a brave man or a coward. This was his.
"And you thought I would take it! You thought I would sell out the
whole human race!" His face was seamed with hate and he thumped his
chest proudly, suddenly not caring what happened to himself. His voice
was hoarse. "I'm one of the apes, remember? They're _my_ people and
it's _my_ planet...."
Mr. Ainsworth's face looked like it was carved from a block of ice.
"Look at me, Martin! _Look at me!_"
Stan looked and felt the sweat pop out on his forehead and his stomach
knot into a small, hard ball.
Mr. Ainsworth was fading, the frames slipping past so slow Stan could
count them. And the image that was building up in Mr. Ainsworth's
place....
Stan screamed and staggered back against the bulkhead, his arm raised
before his eyes.
"_You're going to help us_," the creature said in a horribly liquid
voice. "_You're going to help us because you want to. We need advance
men to soften this planet up. You're going to be one of them. And after
you've done your work, our fleet will arrive!_"
It paused dryly.
"_But I see you've still got some indoctrination to go through!_"
They took him back to one of the cells and starved him and let him live
in his own filth until he wasn't sure if he was a human being or some
sort of animal. They made him horribly afraid of pain until he screamed
in agony when they merely laid the knives on the table. And with pain
as a wedge, they took his personality apart piece by piece and flayed
it and tortured it until it no longer resembled the personality that
had once been Stanley Martin.
He was cut off from all contact with human beings--or creatures who
had masqueraded as human. Tanner had disappeared and Mr. Ainsworth and
Mr. Malcolm no longer bothered to appear as homo sapiens. They saw him
every waking day and if their interviews had been harsh before, now
they were brutal beyond belief.
He believed what they said and he thought what they wanted him to think.
Not to have done so would have meant death.
But there was still ... resistance. The personality that had been
Stanley Martin wasn't entirely gone. There were still shattered
fragments of memories and wishes and desires that hadn't been entirely
obliterated. Tiny fragments that made him unreliable.
* * * * *
On the last day, he was strapped into a machine with clamps that
fastened tightly to his head and chest.
The lights dimmed and he was alone in the darkness.
"What is your name?"
The tiny fragments of personality struggled and thought and then
collapsed in bewilderment.
"I ... I'm not sure."
The voices from nowhere continued.
"You have a family. You hate that family."
A faint, drifting haze of memories. Of a woman who had cooked his
meals and tucked him into bed at night when he was very young. Of
somebody named Larry who had once bailed him out of a street fight by
making like Bob Feller with some good-sized rocks....
But what was bed?
What was street-fights?
What was Bob Feller?
"I ... guess so."
The room exploded in blinding light that seared his eyes and lanced his
brain.
"Are you sure?"
"_Oh yes! Oh God, yes!_"
The agony was over and once again the room was mercifully black.
"You hate the cities."
The cities.
The decaying houses and the rotting tenements. The stinking alleys and
the littered parks and the filthy buildings.
And the lawns and the happy kids and the beaches....
He didn't answer.
Somewhere within his mind a wheel started to spin. Slow. Then faster
and faster until he was sweating and shaking with nausea and then
it felt like he was flying apart into small fragments that tore and
buffeted each other and pained....
_Of course he hated the cities._
For a moment, peace.
"The apes. You hate the apes. You hate the human race."
The human race. _His_ race. The pieces that were Stanley Martin started
to flow together, to coalesce once more into a single individual....
And then his nerve endings and ganglions felt sharp, searing pain. Pain
that threaded along his nerves and burned into every segment of his
body, pain that threatened to fry his cortical centers.
Pain that scattered the particles of personality that were Stanley
Martin and shriveled them to nothingness. Pain that obliterated the
last traces of conscience and memory.
"You hate the human race," a voice repeated smoothly.
"Yes," Stan said, not hesitating. "I hate the human race." And then he
started to sweat and shake with an unreasoning anger that flooded him
as suddenly as if somebody had turned on a hose. The pain.... The pain
for which the apes were responsible.
"_I hate the apes! I hate their goddamned guts!_"
A silent wave of exultation swept the compartment. They had fashioned
the mold and had made their monster....
Five minutes later, the space ship departed for its home system.
"I hate the human race." And....