Keith-Ingram's lips moved soundlessly; he was talking to one of the high executives on another circuit. Then the sound cut in and he said, "All ready at this end, Spangler. Go ahead."
"Right, sir." Distastefully, Spangler turned his head toward Pembun. "Mr. Pembun?"
Pembun spoke quietly into his intercom. A moment later, the vines at the left side of the room parted and Cassina stepped into view.
His face was pale and he looked acutely uncomfortable. Under forced healing techniques he had made a good recovery, but he still looked unwell. He glanced down at the interlaced vines that concealed the true floor, took two steps forward, turned to face the motionless Rithian, and assumed the "at ease" position, hands behind his back. His stiff face eloquently expressed disapproval and discomfort.
No one in the viewing room moved or seemed to breathe.
Even the restless Leclerc sat statue-still, gazing intently at the screen.
How does Cassina feel, Spangler wondered irrelevantly, with a bomb inside his skull?
Leclerc had set his watch to announce seconds. The tiny ticks were distinctly audible.
Three seconds went by, and nothing happened. Theoretically, if the buried message in Cassina's brain were triggered by the situation, the buried material would come out verbally, with compulsive force.
Four seconds.
Pembun bent forward over his intercom and murmured. In the room of the image the Rithian dummy moved slightly— tentacles gripped and relaxed, shifting its weight minutely; the head turned. A high-pitched voice, apparently coming from the dummy, said, "Enter and be at peace."
Six seconds.
The watch ticked once more; then the dummy spoke again, in the sibilants and harsh fricatives of the Rithian language.
Nine seconds. Ten. The dummy spoke once more in Rithian.
Twelve seconds.
Cassina's expression did not change; his lips remained shut.
Pembun sighed. "It's no use going on," he said. "I'm afraid it's a failure."
"No luck, Chief," said Spangler. "Pembun says that's all he can do."
Keith-Ingram nodded. "Very well. I'll contact you later. Clearing." His screen went blank.
Pembun was speaking into the intercom. A moment later a voice from behind the vines called, "That's all, Colonel." Cassina turned and walked stiffly out. "Clearing," said the voice; and the big screen faded to silvery blankness.
Spangler sat still, savoring his one victory, while the others stood up and moved murmuring toward the door. Vines, he thought mockingly. Dummy monsters. Smells!
The next time, it was very different.
Cassina lay clipped and swathed in the interrogation harness. His glittering eyes stared with an expression of frozen terror at the ceiling.
Spangler, at the bedside, was only partly conscious of the other men in the room and of the avid bank of vision cameras. He watched Cassina as one who marks the oily ripples of the ocean's surface, knowing that fathoms under, a gigantic submarine battle is being fought.
In the submerged depths of Cassina's mind, a three-sided struggle had been going on for more than half an hour without a respite. The field of battle centered around a locked and sealed compartment of Cassina's memory. The three combatants were the interrogation machine, the repressive complex which guarded the sealed memory, and Cassina's own desperate will to survive.
The dynamics of the battle were simple and deadly. First, through normal interrogation, Cassina's attention had been directed to the memory-sector in question. The pattern of that avenue of thought was reproduced in the interrogation machine—its jagged outline performed an endless, shuddering dance in the scope—and fed back rhythmically into Cassina's brain, so that his consciousness was redirected, like a compass needle to a magnet, each time it tried to escape. This technique, without the addition of truth drugs or suggestion, was commonly used to recover material suppressed by neurosis or psychic trauma; the interval between surges of current was so calculated that stray bits of the buried memory would be forced out by the repressive mechanism itself— each successive return of attention, therefore, found more of the concealed matter exposed, and complete recall could usually be forced in a matter of seconds.
In Cassina's case, the repressive complex was so strong that these ejected fragments of memory were being reabsorbed almost as fast as they were emitted. The repression was survival-linked, meaning to say that the unreasoning, magical nine-tenths of Cassina's mind was utterly convinced that to give up the buried material was to die. Therefore the battle was being fought two against one: the repressive complex, plus the will to survive, against the interrogation machine.
The machine had two aids: the drugs in Cassina's system, and the tireless, pitiless mechanical voice in his ears: "Tell! … Tell! … Tell! … Tell!"
And the power of the machine, unlike that of Cassina's mind, was unlimited.
Cassina's lips worked soundlessly for an instant; then his expression froze again. Spangler waited for another few seconds, and nodded to the technician.
The technician moved his rheostat over another notch.
Seventy times a second, blasting down Cassina's feeble resistance, the feedback current swung his mind back to a single polarity. Cassina could not even escape into insanity, while that circuit was open; there was no room in his mind for any thought but the one, amplified to a mental scream, that tore through his head with each cycle of the current.
The repression complex and the will to survive were constants; the artificial compulsion to remember was a variable.
Spangler nodded again; up went the power.
Cassina's waxen face was shiny with sweat, and so contorted that it was no longer recognizable. Abruptly his eyes closed, and the muscles of his face went slack. The technician darted a glance to one of the dials on his control board, and slammed over a lever. Two signal lights began to flash alternately; Cassina's heart, which had stopped, was being artificially controlled.
An attendant gave Cassina an injection. In a few moments his face contorted again, and his eyes blinked open.
The silence in the room was absolute. Spangler waited while long minutes ticked away, then nodded to the technician again. The power went up. Again: another notch.
Without warning, Cassina's eyes screwed themselves shut, his jaws distended, and he spoke: a single, formless stream of syllables.
Then his face froze into an icy, indifferent mask. The signal lights continued to flash until the technician, with a tentative gesture, cut the heart-stimulating current; then the steady ticking of the indicator showed that Cassina's heart was continuing to beat on its own. But his face might have been that of a corpse.
Spangler felt his body relax in a release of tension that was almost painful. His fingers trembled. At his nod, the technician cut his master switch and the attendant began removing the harness from Cassina's head and body.
Spangler glanced once at the small vision screen that showed Keith-Ingram's intent face, then took the spool the technician handed him, inserted it into the playback in front of him, and ran it through again and again, first at normal speed, then slowed down so that individual words and syllables could be sorted out.
Cassina had shouted, "You will forget what I am about to tell you and will only remember and repeat the message when you see a Rithian and smell this exact odor. If anyone else tries to make you remember, you will die. Vuyoum fowkip tüma Kreth Grana yodg pirup pet shop vuyown geckyg odowa coyowod, cpgnvib btui fene book store ikpyu. Nobcyeu kivpi cyour myoc. Aoprosu…