V
–
Flandry’s office, if that was the right name for it, seemed curiously
spare amidst the sybaritic arrangements Kossara had observed elsewhere
aboard. She wondered what his private quarters were like. But don’t ask.
He might take that as an invitation. Seated in front of the desk behind
which he was, she made her gaze challenge his.
“I know this will be painful to you,” he said. “You’ve had a few days to
rest, though, and we must go through with it. You see, the team that
‘probed you appears to have made every imaginable blunder and maybe
created a few new ones.” She must have registered her startlement, for
he continued, “Do you know how a hypnoprobe works?”
Bitterness rose in her. “Not really,” she said. “We have no such vile
thing on Dennitza.”
“I don’t approve either. But sometimes desperation dictates.” Flandry
leaned back in his chair, ignited a cigarette, regarded her out of eyes
whose changeable gray became the hue of a winter overcast. His tone
remained soft: “Let me explain from the ground up. Interrogation is an
unavoidable part of police and military work. You can do it on several
levels of intensity. First, simple questioning; if possible, questioning
different subjects separately and comparing their stories. Next,
browbeating of assorted kinds. Then torture, which can be the crude
inflicting of pain or something like prolonged sleep deprivation. The
trouble with these methods is, they aren’t too dependable. The subject
may hold out. He may lie. If he’s had psychosomatic training, he can
fool a lie detector; or, if he’s clever, he can tell only a misleading
part of the truth. At best, procedures are slow, especially when you
have to crosscheck whatever you get against whatever other information
you can find.
“So we move on to narcoquiz, drugs that damp the will to resist. Problem
here is, first, you often get idiosyncratic reactions or nonreactions.
People vary a lot in their body chemistry, especially these days when
most of humanity has lived for generations or centuries on worlds that
aren’t Terra. And, of course, each nonhuman species is a whole separate
bowl of spaghetti. Then, second, your subject may have been immunized
against everything you have in your medicine chest. Or he may have been
deep-conditioned, in which case no drug we know of will unlock his
mind.”
Between the shoulderblades, Kossara’s back hurt from tension. “What
about telepathy?” she snapped.
“Often useful but always limited,” Flandry said. “Neural radiations have
a low rate of information conveyance. And the receiver has to know the
code the sender is using. For instance, if I were a telepath, and you
concentrated on thinking in Serbic, I’d be as baffled as if you spoke
aloud. Or worse, because individual thought patterns vary tremendously,
especially in species like ours which don’t normally employ telepathy. I
might learn to read your mind–slowly, awkwardly, incompletely at
best–but find that everybody else’s was transmitting gibberish as far
as I was concerned. Interspecies telepathy involves still bigger
difficulties. And we know tricks for combatting any sort of brain
listener. A screen worn on the head will heterodyne the outgoing
radiation in a random fashion, make it absolutely undecipherable. Or,
again, training, or deep conditioning, can be quite effective.”
He paused. Wariness crossed his mobile countenance. “There are
exceptions to everything,” he murmured, “including what I’ve said. Does
the name Aycharaych mean anything to you?”
“No,” she answered honestly. “Why?”
“No matter now. Perhaps later.”
“I am a xenologist,” Kossara reminded him. “You’ve told me nothing new.”
“Eh? Sorry. Unpredictable what somebody else does or does not know about
the most elementary things, in a universe where facts swarm like gnats.
Why, I was thirty years old before I learned what the Empress Theodora
used to complain about.”
She stared past his smile. “You were going to describe the hypnoprobe.”
He sobered. “Yes. The final recourse. Direct electronic attack on the
brain. On a molecular level, bypassing drugs, conditionings, anything.
Except–the subject can have been preconditioned, in his whole organism,
to die when this happens. Shock reaction. If the interrogation team is
prepared, it can hook him into machines that keep the vital processes