Why this pink-glassy Christmas tree was asking about them, I could not guess, but the reason didn’t matter. The important thing was that it did want to know about them.
That gave me bargaining room. Information is a valuable commodity, worth trading for. I said, “Let’s be reasonable here. I’ll tell you all you want to know about the Scuzzhawks, but first I have a couple of questions of my own. What’s this thing behind my ear?”
The rose-pink one didn’t answer that. It simply rolled away on its little wheels to the chinaware chest, where it extruded enough twiglets to open the chest and take something out, while Greenie rolled forward and grabbed me again.
It was strong, too. It held me tightly, but not painfully. I would have guessed that some of those glassy needles would have punctured my skin where they touched. They didn’t. Retracted, I supposed, like a playful kitten’s claws.
Then I saw what the pink one was carrying toward me, and I felt better right away.
The thing it had taken out of the chest was a helmet of a kind I had seen before. Dopey had given us one when he was our jailer, and it was a truly wonderful little gadget. When I wore it I could tap into the mind of that other Dan Dannerman, the copy of me who had been sent back to Earth, in a marvelous kind of virtual reality. (I’m not talking about the Dan Dannerman who escaped with the others. This was a different one. I’m sorry about that. I know all these copies are confusing … especially to me.) With the helmet on I could see what that other Dan was seeing, feel what he was feeling, hear everything he heard. To all intents and purposes I was there-not counting that I couldn’t do anything, just observe.
It had not occurred to me that the same kind of helmet could be used to give me a sort of briefing lecture instead, but if that was what Pinkie had in mind, I was all for it. I said chattily, “That’s better. There’s no reason for us to argue, is there? We’re both on the same side. You work for the Horch. I was taken prisoner by the Beloved Leaders. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?”
Pinkie wasn’t listening. It was fitting the helmet over my head, and I didn’t resist. I waited complacently until it had flipped the earflaps into position, expecting some sort of lecture with diagrams, or-well, I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I was pretty sure it was going to be helpful in some way.
It wasn’t.
It not only wasn’t helpful at all, it was bloody awful.
As soon as everything was snapped down I found myself indeed in another place, but it was not any place I would have chosen. I was lying flat on my back, and I was looking up at a couple of the Christmas trees. And I was yelling. The one standing over me was an unfamiliar golden color, and it was methodically ripping my clothes off. I was struggling to stop it, but there wasn’t any use to that. I was tightly fettered to a kind of operating table. I couldn’t move a muscle.
Not even when Gold-glass began to operate.
It started by pulling out my toenails, one by one.
Then, as my yells of protest turned to agonized screams of pain, it did even worse. With one set of its twiglets it grasped me by my private parts, and with others it began to hack away.
See, the virtual reality those helmets provided didn’t feel at all virtual. It felt bloody damn real. The pain was real. My screaming was real. I was fully aware that I was, for no reason I could understand, being slowly and painfully tortured to death, and I was bellowing with agony accordingly.
Gold-glass didn’t seem to care about my screaming one way or another. It went right on with what it was doing. And then, as it gouged a slit in the skin of my belly from breastbone to the beginnings of my pubic hair, and then began methodically flaying the skin off my body, the pain passed the point of being endurable.
I endured it, though. I kept on enduring it, for much longer than I would have thought possible, until the machine’s rummagings in my belly seemed to hit something crucial. Then, I think, I died.
And then the other Christmas tree, the real, pink-colored one, lifted the helmet off my head, and I was once again cowering on that chinaware floor, still screaming, but intact.
I had my clothes on again. I was alive again, and-not counting the headache that still persisted-as far as I could tell, in as good shape as I had ever been, toenails, balls, bowels and all.
That is, physically I was all right, though the memory of the pain was nearly as bad as the pain itself. And Pinkie said, “Now you will answer our questions about those conspecific persons called ‘Scuzzhawks.’ “
CHAPTER FOUR
From then on I answered all its questions, all right. I had learned that that was a good idea. When I hesitated, all it had to do was gesture toward the box with the helmet. Then I stopped hesitating right away.
See, no matter what you’ve heard, nobody ever holds out against serious, protracted physical torture. The body doesn’t allow it. When real agony starts, the body cuts the volitional part of the brain right out of the circuit. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are. First you suffer, then you scream, then you do whatever the person inflicting the pain wants you to do, including giving away every secret you ever knew.
Bureau doctrine told us there were things we could sometimes do about it, provided you had a chance to do them-including, as a last resort, biting down on a capsule of one of the Bureau drugs that turn off all physical sensations, so the guy who’s interrogating you can do any horrible thing he likes and you just don’t feel a thing. Provided, that is, that you’ve had a chance to get the capsule into your mouth ahead of time. Even that doesn’t really solve the problem. You know exactly what is happening when the guy starts inflicting major and irreversible damage on the only body you own. Then you almost certainly talk anyway.
I didn’t have to go the way of irreparable body damage. The pain was enough. I talked, and kept on talking, for a very long while.
I don’t know how long, exactly. The only way I had of measuring time was by the internal clocks of my belly, bladder and bowels. By their count, that first round of questioning went on forever. I told the glass machines everything there was to tell about the Scuzzhawks, Green-glass taking it all down with his microphones and lenses. That wasn’t the end of it. Then Pinkie switched without a pause to questions about the precise nature of their smuggling operation, and what “smuggling” meant in the context of Earth’s more or less independent political entities called “nations,” each with its own laws about what was forbidden or taxed. And then it wanted a detailed catalogue of all the sorts of things that were smuggled-dope, money for laundering, weapons-and then what the weapons were used for. Which led to many more questions on some large subjects. Crime. Terrorism. Why such aberrations were permitted to continue when they obviously interfered with the orderly workings of government and commerce.
Then, without warning, the lights went out in the camera lenses. The green-glass machine that had been operating them turned to the wall and a door opened. And the pink one said, “Go through there and attend to your biological needs. We will resume when you have finished.”
I hesitated. Perhaps I hesitated a moment too long, because my headache was still slowing my reflexes, but the machine wasn’t patient. It reached out toward me in a way I didn’t like. I turned and hurried to the doorway.
CHAPTER FIVE
The biological-needs room was a twin of the one I’d just left: bare walls of the same yellow chinaware, no windows, no pictures. The big difference was that there were three doors instead of two-all securely locked against my immediate attempts to open them-and in addition to the chinaware chest against the wall (also unopenable by me), there was a pile of food on a low chinaware table.
The food at least was familiar. I had seen it all before. In fact, I had seen a lot of it. We had been living on identically that same grub for months, me and Pat, in all her copies, and Rosaleen Artzybachova and Jimmy Lin and Martin Delasquez. Apart from a few unfamiliar and unappetizing ropy twists of something smelly and purplish, it was the food Dopey had copied for us when we were his prisoners, duplicated from the stores on the Starlab orbiter we had been snatched from. Apples. Corn chips. Heaps of dried or irradiated meals in cans and jars and cartons, every one of which I was totally sick of. When I first saw that pile of rations it made me suddenly aware that I was, as a matter of fact, pretty hungry. When I realized it was the same boring stuff I’d eaten much too much of already, a lot less so.