Chapter 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.