VI
After the initial struggle, Pembun had relaxed. He was breathing shallowly now, his eyes half open and unfocused.
"Have you got enough test patterns?" Spangler asked, using a finger-code.
"Yes, I think so, Commissioner," the young technician replied in the same manner. "His basics are very unusual, though. I may have some trouble interpreting when we get into second-orders."
"Do the best you can." He leaned forward, close to Pembun's head. "Can you still hear me, Pembun?" he said aloud.
"Yes."
"State your full name."
"Jawj Pero Pembun."
"How long have you been an agent of the Rithians?"
A pause. "I never was."
Spangler glanced at the technician, who signaled, "Emotional index about point six."
Spangler tried again. "When and where did you last meet a Rithian before coming to Earth?"
"In April, twenty-five fourteen, at the Spring Art Show in Espar, Man'aven."
"Describe that meeting in detail."
"I was standing in the crowd, looking at a big canvas called 'Yeastley and the Tucker.' The Rithch came up and stood beside me. 'E pointed to the painting and said, "Very amusing.' 'E was looking at the picture through a transformer, so the colors would make sense to 'im. I said, I've seen Rithi collages that looked funnier to me.' Then 'e showed me 'ow, by changing the transformer settings, you could make it look like Yeastley 'ad a mouldy face with warts on it, and the Tucker 'ad a long tail. I said…"
Pembun went on stolidly to the end of the incident; he and the Rithch, whose name he had never learned, had exchanged a few more remarks and then parted.
The emotional index of his statement did not rise above point nine on a scale of five.
"Before that, when and where was your last meeting with a Rithch?
"On the street in Espar, early in December, twenty-five thirteen."
"Describe it."
Spangler went grimly on, taking Pembun farther and farther back through innumerable casual meetings. At the end of half an hour, Pembun's breathing was uneven and his forehead was splotched with perspiration. The technician gave him a second injection. Spangler resumed the questioning. Finally:
"… Describe the last meeting before that."
"There was none."
Spangler sat rigid for a long moment, then abruptly clenched his fists.
He stared down at Pembun's tortured face. At that moment he felt himself willing to risk the forcing procedures he had planned to use on Cassina, forgetting the consequences; but there would be no profit in it. In Cassina's case, the material was there; it was only a question of applying enough force on the proper fulcrum to get it out. Here, either the material did not exist, or it was so well hidden that the most advanced Empire techniques would never find a hint of it. But there had to be something: if not espionage, then treason.
Spangler said, "Pembun, in a war between the Rithians and the Empire, which side would you favor?"
"The Empire."
Hoarsely: "But as between the Rithian culture and that of the Empire, which do you prefer?"
"The Rithi."
"Why?"
"Becawse they 'aven' ossified themselves."
"Explain that."
"They 'aven' overspecialized. They're still yuman, in a sense of the word that's more meaningful than the natural-history sense. They're alive in a way that you can't say the Empire is alive. The Empire is like a robot brain with 'alf the connections soldered shut. It can't adapt, so it's dying; but it's still big enough to be dangerous."
Spangler flicked a glance of triumph toward the technician. He said, "I will repeat, in the event of war between the Rithians and the Empire, which side would you favor?"
Pembun said, "The Empire."
Spangler persisted angrily, "How do you justify that statement, in the face of your admission that you prefer Rithian culture to Empire culture?"
"My personal preferences aren' important. It would be bad for the 'ole yuman race if the Empire cracked up too soon. The Outworlds aren' strong enough. It's too much to expect them to 'urry up and make themselves self-sufficient, w'en they can lean on the Empire through trade agreements. The Empire 'as to be kept alive now. In another five centuries or so, it won' matter."
Spangler stared a question at the technician, who signaled: "Emotional index one point seven."
One seven: normal for a true statement of a profound conviction. A falsehood, spoken against the truth-compulsion of the drug, would have generated at least 3.0.
So it had all slipped out of his hands again. Pembun's statement was damaging; it would be a black mark on his dossier: but it was not criminal. There was nothing in it to justify the interrogation: it was hardly more than Pembun had given freely in that report of his.
Spangler made one more attempt. "From the time I met you at the spaceport to the present, have you ever lied to me?"
A pause. "Yes."
"How many times?"
"Once."
Sp angler leaned forward eagerly.
"Give me the details!"
"I tol' you the song, Odum Pawkee Mont a Mutting, was kind of a saga.' That was true in a way, but I said it to fool you. There's an old song with the same name, that dates from the early days on Man'aven, but that's in the old languages. Wat I sang was a modern version. It's not a folk song, or a saga, it's a political song. Old Man Pawkey is the Empire, an' the cup of cawfee is peace. 'E climbs a mounting, and 'e wears 'imself out, and 'e fights a 'undred battles, and 'e lets 'is farm go to forest, jus' to get a cup of cawfee—instead of growing the bean in 'is own back yard."
A wave of anger towered and broke over Spangler. When it passed, he found himself standing beside the interrogation table, legs spread and shoulders hunched. There was a stinging sensation in the palm of his right hand and the inner surfaces of the fingers; and there was a dark-red blotch on Pembun's cheek.
The technician was staring at him, but he looked away when Spangler turned.
"Bring him out of it and then let him go," Spangler said, and strode out of the room.
The screen filled one wall of the room, so that the three-dimensional orthocolor image appeared to be physically present beyond a wall of non-reflecting glass.
Spangler sat a little to right of center, with Gordon at his left. To his right was Colonel Leclerc with his aide; at the far left, sitting a little apart from the others, was Pembun.
Spangler had spoken to Pembun as little as possible since the interrogation; to be in the same room with him was almost physically distasteful.
On the ancillary screen before Spangler, Keith-Ingram's broad gray face was mirrored. The circuit was not two-way, however; Keith-Ingram was receiving the same tight-beam image that appeared on the big wall screen, and so were several heads of other departments and at least one High Assembly member.
The pictured room did not look like a room at alclass="underline" it looked almost exactly like the Rithian garden-city Spangler had seen in the indoctrination film. There were the bluish light, the broad-leaved green vines and the serpentine blossoms, with the vague feeling of space beyond; and there, supported by a crotch of the vine, was a Rithian.
The reconstruction was uncannily good, Spangler admitted; if he had not seen the model at close hand, he would have believed the thing to be alive.
But something was subtly off-key: some quality of the light, or configuration of the vine stalks, or perhaps even the attitude of the lifelike Rithian simulacrum. The room as a whole was like a museum reconstruction: convincing only after you had voluntarily taken the first step toward belief.
Leclerc was chatting noisily with his aide: his way of minimizing tension, evidently. The aide nodded and coughed nervously. Gordon shifted his position in the heavily-padded seat, and subsided guiltily when Spangler glanced at him.