Mars is My Destination, Frank Belknap Long [reading an ebook .TXT] 📗

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.

And now I was lying flat on my back, unsure of how much strength was left in me, and Glacial Stare was threatening me with that! Not just an hour or two with the barrel-chested lads—on rare occasions they stopped just short of the third stage—but the full, deep-cut treatment.

14

He'd made it plain that he was representing Wendel. But he hadn't come right out and identified himself, and I had no way of knowing exactly what kind of Wendel agent he was. The worst kind, beyond a doubt. But what I would have liked to know took in more territory than that.

Was he ... a replacement? Had he been instructed to step into the shoes of the secret agent the robot had killed in space? If he had, the satisfaction he'd get from killing me would probably exceed the pleasure a run-of-the-mill Wendel police officer would experience.

It would be easier for him to identify with the slain crewman and feel a sense of personal outrage strong enough to make him think of himself as an avenger. The fact that he wasn't wearing a uniform lent support to that grim possibility. When a man has a strong personal reason for wanting you dead it can make the official reason seem twice as urgent. It could also bring into his face the kind of look that Glacial Stare was still keeping trained on me.

There was only one thing I knew with absolute certainty. Answering his questions would do me no good—would only make the danger greater the instant I stopped talking. I'd be signing my own death warrant with a vengeance if I co-operated with him right there in the hospital room and spared him the trouble of having me bound and gagged and smuggled out of the hospital into a Big-Image interrogation room.

Why make him a present of the only card I was holding? Why be that charitable when ... God, how silly could you get? If I'd had my strength or there had been anyone within earshot to dispute his authority if I shouted for help—a one in fifty chance of it, even—I might have been holding at least a Jack or a Queen. But never an Ace, or four of a kind or a Royal Flush. About all I was holding was the joker. In some games the joker can be the highest card in the deck, but not in the kind of game the three of us were playing.

It was the third player who was holding all of the really high cards. He was hovering just behind Glacial Stare, with a shroud with my name embroidered on it draped over his arm. He could see my hand clearly, because he was looking straight at me out of eyes like holes in a skull.

That scythe-and-sickle round is almost unbeatable because of the way Death has of just quietly raising the ante until all hope is gone. Sometimes you've no choice but to let him call your bluff, lay your cards face up on the table, and wait for the blow to fall.

Sometimes ... but not always. Death is a weird-o who doesn't really want anyone to live to a crusty old age and that can anger you, and there are no limits to what a certain kind of resentment can do for you. You'll take desperate chances when you know the sands have just about run out.

I came up out of the bed so fast the electricity my body generated made the sheets crackle. It wasn't the helplessly weak body I'd thought it. Not at all. When I whipped back my arm I could feel a thrust of power and resilience in my shoulder muscles that amazed me, because it shouldn't have been there. There was no flabbiness or lack of muscle tone.

I crashed into him before my feet hit the floor, sinking my fist into his mid-section and sending the chair he was sitting in skidding half across the hospital room.

He clung to both arms of the chair, too jolted to straighten up and try to heave himself out of it before I shortened the distance between us by hurling myself directly at him again. I just missed fumbling that crucial follow-up, because my legs were deficient in muscle tone and they almost collapsed under me before I got to him.

I dragged him out of the chair and had him down on the floor and was banging his head against the floor before he could get any kind of grip on me. I wasn't in the least bit gentle about it. If I'd been banging him around for five or ten minutes without stopping I couldn't have heightened the look of shock and absolute horror in his eyes.

The best he could do was twist about under me and try desperately to raise himself a little, thrusting his head forward to keep me from bringing it so violently into contact with the floor. He seemed to be trying so hard to get out from under that I decided to help him. I lifted him clean off the floor and slammed him back against the wall—not once, but several times.

I don't know where my strength came from, but even my legs were doing all right now. They were still the weakest part of me, but they went right on supporting me until I'd finished clouting him with something that was just as good as a sledgehammer—the firm wall itself, completely stationary as it was. If I'd been standing behind it using it as a forward-thrusting shield his skull couldn't have cracked against it any harder.

I suppose it wasn't really the hospital room wall I was clouting him with, because, as I say, it was stationary. But when you're extracting the fangs of a dangerous little reptile who has just threatened you with Big-Image interrogation and know that your strength may give out at any moment cause and effect get swallowed up in an urgency that can distort reality. His face was a confused blur for a moment. But a second or two before all of the expression drained out of it and he slumped jerkily to the floor my vision steadied and I saw that his look of absolute horror had been replaced by the deadliest kind of hatred.

It's always a little jolting, no matter how you slice it, to know that a man who should be incapable of feeling anything but shock and pain can pass out cold with that kind of look in his eyes.

I'd gone berserk for a moment, but when I have to, when there's some compelling reason for it, I can cool off fast. Calm down would be a more