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Mars is My Destination

<h2>13</h2> 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. 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. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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