"There are hundreds of planets only in theory, in reality they are just one after the other. We pluck them in that manner, they fall before us, we cannot be stopped, and the process is an accelerating one. As our empire expands we move faster and faster."
"And there is a limit to that speed," I broke in, trying to work a sneer into my words. "I know how your invasion technique works You don't invade a planet until they have already lost. Isn't that right?"
"Perfectly correct." He nodded agreement and I rushed on.
"You find a planet that is ripe for the picking with some dissident element in the population; there are people who would complain about paradise so you have no problem in finding a group on any world. Here on Burada it was the men, the Konsolosluk party. They were hot for male rule. You backed them with whatever they needed. Your underground operators supplied them with money, weapons, propaganda, all the essentials of a takeover—and it worked. And you asked nothing in return for all this aid, other than only a token resistance when the invasion began. Your agents saw to it that the armed forces surrendered after only the briefest show of force. This invasion was won before it began! No wonder your military people aren't used to taking losses."
"Very observant of you. This is exactly what we do, your analysis is a masterly description of the way in which we operate."
"There, I have you," I said happily.
"On the contrary—we have you. You are the only one who knows about our techniques and you will never report them to your superiors."
"Oh, I don't know," I said with a bravado I did not feel.
"Perhaps you do not know, but we do. We have intercepted the report you made and it will never be sent. They will wait in vain for any word from you and time will pass and soon it will be too late for them to do anything because we will move into phase two of our operation. With the many allies we have gained by occupying planets with governments now friendly to us, we will have a considerable number of troops available to us. Mercenaries I believe they are called. They will be invasion troops and great numbers of them will be killed, but we will always win because our supply will be relatively inexhaustible. It presents an interesting picture, does it not?"
"It will never work," I shouted, with the sinking feeling at the same time that it would. "The Corps will stop you." How, with their only agent run to earth and trapped? I was having a hard job convincing myself and getting nowhere at all in convincing him.
Kraj rose and started around the desk.
"Now it is time for your indoctrination to begin."
I cannot express the fear that overwhelmed and possessed me when I heard those words.
Chapter 14
I was taken to a cell. A bare, windowless room whose only furnishing was an empty bucket. A ceiling hook had recently been installed here and my attendant gray man obligingly hooked me up to it.
"There is little chance of my starving to death," I told him. "Because I'll die of thirst first."
He gave no spoken answer but he did return with a soft plastic water bottle and a standard Cliaand field ration. Not the world's most inspiring food, but it would keep me alive.
As I chewed and sipped I clamped hard on that last thought. Keep me alive. They would do anything except kill me. They wanted me, actually needed me. They knew that the Special Corps was breathing hot on their trail and they would have to exert an all-out effort to stop them. Kraj had talked big and half convinced me; I looked at my wrists and shuddered. He had convinced me. But why had he tried so hard?
Because I was obviously more than a pawn in this game. I was the factor that could swing the outcome either way. Right now Cliaand was doing well in the invasion business—but they could be stopped. With what I knew the Special Corps could start work as counterinsurgents and prevent expansion to other planets. Cliaand might even be stopped here. If I were to change sides my specialized knowledge might not defeat the Corps, but it could surely slow it down long enough for the second phase of the invasion operation to go into effect.
Which means the gray men had made a mistake. They should have killed me as soon as they discovered who I was. If I could be tortured and convinced to change my mind I might be a weapon in their hands. Two maybes. That ignored the fact that as long as I was alive I was the most deadly and potent weapon against them.
They had made a mistake. I grabbed to that conclusion and worried it just as I worried the law-breaking ration. I did not consider that I was their prisoner in every way. Every way? Ha! Physically, yes. Mentally—a resounding no. They had almost had me there for a while with the nerve torture and the positive assurance that I would fall into their hands. At the thought of amputation my stomach gave a heave and I suddenly lost my appetite. I had put the sight of my severed hands out of my mind. For good reasons.
Now I would have to remember and think about it. But not in the way they wanted. It was a trick, it had to be a trick, and that was the supposition I must hold on to. While I chewed and glugged down the rest of my unappetizing meal I gave myself the hard sell. Listen diGriz, you know enough about reality to be able to tell when it has been tampered with. You are always tampering with it yourself for your own benefit and others' discommoding. So now someone has turned the same trick on you. The severed wrists pumping blood! Down, boy. Drain away some of the emotion. We'll get to the memories after a while. But let us first look at the realities.
Reality. Marvelous as medicine is it cannot repair amputation in a couple of hours or a couple of days.
Now where did that figure come from? At some unconscious level I felt that only a brief time had passed between the amputation and the recovery. We all have a clock ticking away down deep in the brain, it controls the circadian rhythms of sleeping and waking and it works all of the time. Right now it was trying to tell me that only a brief time had passed since I had been brought here by the gray men. But did I have any real evidence to back it up? I felt my face and my hair. I needed a shave, but not badly, and my hair felt about the right length. But I could have had a haircut and a shave, no evidence there.
My fingernails? I kept them trimmed short, and one trimmed fingernail looks like any other one. Wait, think. Memory. Something. Small. Yes—during the landing, plenty of tension, plenty of distractions. I had broken the little fingernail on my left hand. No, don't look yet, sit on the thing and remember. Broken nail… distraction… bit it off. A rather unappetizing bit of self-consumption that most of us indulge in at one time or another. The offending particle of nail torn free, right down to the quick, a minor ouch and a tiny drop of blood. Completely forgotten in the rush of subsequent events.
With careful motions I released my left hand from its prisoning buttock and held it before me. Little finger, short nail—and a tiny clot of blood.
Got you, Kraj, you old faker!
From the look of the thing I had been a prisoner for a day or two at the most, surely no longer than that. The red marks on my wrists were just that—red marks on my wrists. There were a hundred different ways this could have been done. And the amputation? Kraj had tampered with my reality, hypnosis perhaps, it didn't really matter.
Kraj and his crew were not as bright as they looked. They had undoubtedly used this mind-cracking torture many times before and had really impressed themselves with the success of the technique. Perhaps this was the way they converted recruits to their nasty ends on the planets they were to invade. Very possible. But Kraj's cutthroats were used to working on solid citizens, one dimensional peasants who mistook the painted flats and props of their existence as the only reality. Their world was the only real world, their town the really best town. Pull them out of the familiar environment and put pressure on their minds and their brains ran out of their ears, like jelly. Jelly men, prey for the gray men.