And on this probability line, in our own future? Salsbury asked.
Fascism, the computer said. Man has had his two-hundred-and-eighty-five years of Hitlers. It is not a pleasant place-your future.
Three-hundred years of fascist rule
The men who structured this operation were confident of your cooperation up to this point. It was realized that you would begin to grow less like the Puppet and more as a human being, which you are. Whether you would be anxious to help at this point was not known. If you rejected direct briefing through my sensor plates, then a series of senso-tapes was provided to show you the world of your future, show you what it will be like as a vacii experiment.
A hundred questions had risen now. Why, Salsbury asked, couldn't all this knowledge have been implanted in my mind to start, as well as a complete set of orders?
Because, as you grew younger, all the knowledge in your memory cells would fade. You arrived here with a blank brain and would have arrived blank even if you had been briefed in the future.
Then how did I know to kill Harold Jacobi?
A small chemical tape, impervious to unaging, was built into your brain. It played back your orders on your arrival. While you slept those two weeks in the cave, I filled you in on your background as Victor Salsbury, but there was not time to tell you more, and no room for another chemical tape to have been implanted at the start
The senso-tapes, Lynda said. What are they?
They affect all your senses, the computer said. If you will each put a hand on one of the glow plates, I will transmit them to you. The nerves in your fingertips are enough to guarantee reception.
Salsbury grabbed Lynda's hand as she reached out. He spoke to the computer. This would be a fine moment to indoctrinate both of us, to turn me into a Puppet again.
No, the 810-40.04 said. It would not work. You are no longer receptive.
He looked skeptical.
You are too humanized now, the computer said. Surely you can see that.
He shrugged, reached out as Lynda did, touched the transmission plates on the top of the trunk. They faded into another world.
You are in a cell. Underground. There is no window. Only the gray cement floor, the gray damp walls, and the black iron bars that seal you off from the dimly lighted corridor beyond. You have not been fed your breakfast; it is getting toward the end of the lunch hour as well, and you have had nothing. A rat runs across the floor, stops at your bars and looks in. You realize, for the first time, that you are lying on the floor, on a level with the rat. The rat is looking directly into your eyes, its own eyes gleaming crimson, hot. It shows its teeth, very pointed teeth, in a vicious grin, the grin of every predator since time immemorial. It would like to chew on your eyeballs. You can't let that happen. You try to move and get halfway up, fall back onto the floor. You are so terribly weak. The rat comes closer. You try to think why you are here in this place, why this is happening. You were on the wrong side of some political issue, but you can't remember what it was. It hardly matters in a fascist regime. But it couldn't have been this important, could it? The rat scampers two feet closer. Could it? Closer You scream. But there is no one interested in your plight.
You have been taken from your home in the middle of the night along with a bag of books the local police-a division arm of the Gestapo-have labeled left-wing. The most damning one was the antitotalitarian novel 1984. They rammed the books into the blue denim bag, handcuffed you, and led you out. They kept shoving you all the way to the patrol car. When you tried to strike at them, they knocked you down and kicked you in the hip. Now you are at the police station, in a small room with featureless walls. There is no furniture except a wooden bench to which you have been tied. They have left you alone for an hour now. You are trembling, waiting to find out what will happen. There is the faint smell of vomit and urine in the air. You wonder what they have done to previous prisoners to make these smells permeate the chamber. Then they come in. Four of them. The chief officer, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed man with a belly slung over his black leather belt. They are dressed in dark brown uniforms, wearing shiny, knee-length boots. The chief officer slaps the soles of your shoes with his billy club. The impact jars half your body. He asks you to confess, but when you ask to what, he just slaps your feet again. Well, that will not be too hard to take. Just so they don't go beyond that. But two hours later, your feet are swollen and aching. Your legs are on fire. Another hour, and your feet swell until the seams of your shoes split. You wet yourself. You know where the smells come from. You can feel the vomit in the back of your throat. Slap, slap, slap, slap
There were ten scenes in all, propaganda most certainly, but propaganda at once so horrid and believable that there was no denying its persuasive effect, Salsbury had been willing to cooperate, but had he not been, this would have convinced him. Not only because the entire population (save a handful of dictators and their staffs) of the world was suffering, but because he and Lynda would suffer too if the vacii could break through into this probability line and establish another experimental outpost.
When it was over, they settled back from the computer, trembling, white, perspiring. Whatever future man had been building for himself, no matter what degree of stupidity, it could never match the nightmare of that fascist experiment, of that place where alien vacii maintained the psychotics in power. That was a society various nations had accepted before, eventually to reject it. But if Vic didn't continue with the plan, that insanity would be his own future.
Well? the 810-40.04 asked.
Tell me what I have to do, he said numbly.
After the explanations were given, questioned, and understood, there was a good deal of work to be done. It was not particularly difficult labor, though it was tedious. At the computer's directions, Salsbury brought the two other trunks down from the upstairs bedroom, into the cellar, pressed them down against the floor before the spot in the wall where the vacii had opened their portal. The computer opened the other two trunks with an electric impulse broadcast to their interior locks. The lids popped open, revealing a great many wires and tubes, machine parts. It was Salsbury's job to put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle, following the 810-40.04's directions. He was assembling, he found, a prober exactly like that of the vacii. When the aliens tuned in tonight, Salsbury would lock their beam with the vacii beam and open the bubble between probabilities to the passage of living tissue. This living tissue would be Victor.
The fact that their would-be mechanical assassins waited on the other side didn't help the slimy rollings of his stomach. If there were fifty robots however, he would be ready for them, for the 810-40.04 was equipping him for almost any eventuality.
But did a hero's knees knock together? Or did his breath come difficult?
No, he wasn't feeling much like a hero. He felt more like a little boy who has been playing a game with older kids and then abruptly discovers they're getting too rough for him and that there is no way he can graciously get out of the game. He was trained to fight. The chemical tape that had played itself the night of Harold Jacobi's murder had crammed thousands of pieces of commando combat techniques into his brain. But all the tricks of karate and judo and savate seemed weak when pitted against gray, scaled, sucker-mouthed things from somewhere a few million light-years and a few probability lines off.