Advertisement
Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up,
it unlocks many cool features!
- THE INTERROGATION TEAM
- The man the patrol brought in was about forty, bearded, and dressed in loose garments—sandals, trousers, and a vest that
- left his chest and thick arms bare. Even before he was handed from the back of the combat car, trussed to immobility in sheets
- of water-clear hydorclasp, Griffiths could hear him screaming about his rights under the York Constitution of '03.
- Didn't the fellow realize he'd been picked up by Hammer's Slammers?
- "Yours or mine, Chief?" asked Major Smokey Soames, Griffiths' superior and partner on the interrogation team—a slim
- man of Afro-Asian ancestry, about as suited for wringing out a mountaineer here on York as he was for swimming through
- magma. Well, Smokey'd earned his pay on Kanarese. . . .
- "Is a bear Catholic?" Griffiths asked wearily. "Go set the hardware up, Major."
- "And haven't I already?" said Smokey, but it had been nice of him to make the offer. It wasn't that mechanical interrogation
- required close genetic correspondences between subject and operator, but the job went faster and smoother in direct relation to
- those correspondences. Worst of all was to work on a woman, but you did what you had to do. . . .
- Four dusty troopers from A Company manhandled the subject, still shouting, to the command car housing the interrogation
- gear. The work of the firebase went on. Crews were pulling maintenance on the fans of some of the cars facing outward
- against attack, and one of the rocket howitzers rotated squealingly as new gunners were trained. For the most part, though,
- there was little to do at midday so troopers turned from the jungle beyond the berm to the freshly snatched prisoner and the
- possibility of action that he offered.
- "Don't damage the goods!" Griffiths said sharply when the men carrying the subject seemed ready to toss him onto the lefthand
- couch like a log into a blazing fireplace. One of the troopers, a noncom, grunted assent; they settled the subject in
- adequate comfort. Major Soames was at the console between the paired couches, checking the capture location and relevant
- intelligence information from Central's data base.
- "Want us to unwrap 'im for you?" asked the noncom, ducking instinctively though the roof of the command car, cleared his
- helmet. The interior lighting was low, however, especially to eyes adapted to the sun hammering the bulldozed area of the
- firebase.
- "Listen, me 'n my family never, I swear it, dealt with interloping traders!" the York native pleaded.
- "No, we'll take care of it," said Griffiths to the A Company trooper, reaching into the drawer for a disposable-blade scalpel
- to slit the hydorclasp sheeting over the man's wrist. Some interrogators liked to keep a big fighting knife around, combining
- practical requirements with a chance to soften up the subject through fear. Griffiths thought the technique was misplaced: for
- effective mechanical interrogation, he wanted his subjects as relaxed as possible. Panic-jumbled images were better than no
- images at all; but only just better.
- "We're not the Customs Police, old son," Smokey murmured as he adjusted the couch headrest to an angle which looked
- more comfortable for the subject. "We're a lot more interested in the government convoy ambushed last week."
- Griffiths' scalpel drew a line above the subject's left hand and wrist. The sheeting drew back in a narrow gape, briefly
- iridescent as stresses within the hydorclasp readjusted themselves. As if the sheeting were skin, however, the rip stopped of its
- own accord at the end of the scored line. "What're you doing to me?"
- "Nothing I'm not doing to myself, friend," said Griffiths, grasping the subject's bared forearm with his own left hand so
- that their inner wrists were together. Between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand he held a standard-looking stim cone
- up where the subject could see it clearly, despite the cocoon of sheeting still holding his legs and torso rigid. "I'm George, by
- the way. What do your friends call you?"
- "You're drugging me!" the subject screamed, his fingers digging into Griffiths' forearm fiercely. The mountaineers living
- under triple-canopy jungle looked pasty and unhealthy, but there was nothing wrong with this one's muscle tone.
- "It's a random pickup," said Smokey in Dutch to his partner. "Found him on a trail in the target area, nothing suspicious—
- probably just out sap-cutting—but they could snatch him without going into a village and starting something."
- "Right in one," Griffiths agreed in soothing English as he squeezed the cone at the juncture of his and the subject's wrist
- veins. The dose in its skin-absorbed carrier—developed from the solvent used with formic acid by Terran solifugids for
- defense—spurted out under pressure and disappeared into the bloodstreams of both men: thrillingly cool to Griffiths, and a
- shock that threw the subject into mewling, abject terror.
- "Man," the interrogator murmured as he detached the subject's grip from his forearm, using the pressure point in the man's
- wrist to do so, "if there was anything wrong with it, I wouldn't have split it with you, now would I?"
- He sat down on the other couch, swinging his legs up and lying back before the drug-induced lassitude crumpled him on
- the floor. He was barely aware of movement as Smokey fitted a helmet on the subject and ran a finger up and down columns of
- touch-sensitive controls on his console to reach a balance. All Griffiths would need was the matching helmet, since the
- parameters of his brain were already loaded into the database. By the time Smokey got around to him, he wouldn't even feel the
- touch of the helmet.
- Though the dose was harmless, as he'd assured the subject, unless the fellow had an adverse reaction because of the
- recreational drugs he'd been taking on his own. You could never really tell with the sap-cutters, but it was generally okay. The
- high jungles of York produced at least a dozen drugs of varying effect, and the producers were of course among the heaviest
- users of their haul.
- By itself, that would have been a personal problem; but the mountaineers also took the position that trade off-planet was
- their own business, and that there was no need to sell their drugs through the Central Marketing Board in the capital for half the
- price that traders slipping into the jungle in small star-ships would cheerfully pay. Increasingly violent attempts to enforce
- customs laws on men with guns and the willingness to use them had led to what was effectively civil war—which the York
- government had hired the Slammers to help suppress.
- It's a bitch to fight when you don't know who the enemy is; and that was where Griffiths and his partner came in.
- "Now I want you to imagine that you're walking home from where you were picked up," came Smokey's voice, but
- Griffiths was hearing the words only through the subject's mind. His own helmet had no direct connection to the hushed
- microphone into which the major was speaking. The words formed themselves into letters of dull orange which expanded to
- fill Griffiths' senses with a blank background.
- The monochrome sheet coalesced abruptly, and he was trotting along a trail which was a narrow mark beaten by feet into
- the open expanse of the jungle floor. By cutting off the light, the triple canopies of foliage ensured that the real undergrowth
- would be stunted—as passable to the air-cushion armor of Hammer's Slammers as it was to the locals on foot.
- Judging distance during an interrogation sequence was a matter of art and craft, not science, because the "trip"—though
- usually linear—was affected by ellipses and the subject's attitude during the real journey. For the most part, memory was a blur
- in which the trail itself was the major feature and the remaining landscape only occasionally obtruded in the form of an
- unusually large or colorful hillock of fungus devouring a fallen tree. Twice the subject's mind—not necessarily the man himself
- —paused to throw up a dazzlingly sharp image of a particular plant, once a tree and the other time a knotted, woody vine which
- stood out in memory against the misty visualization of the trunk that the real vine must wrap.
- Presumably the clearly defined objects had something to do with the subject's business—which was none of Griffiths' at
- this time. As he "walked" the Slammer through the jungle, the mountaineer would be mumbling broken and only partly
- intelligible words, but Griffiths no longer heard them or Smokey's prompting questions.
- The trail forked repeatedly, sharply visualized each time although the bypassed forks disappeared into mental fog within a
- meter of the route taken. It was surprisingly easy to determine the general direction of travel: though the sky was rarely visible
- through the foliage, the subject habitually made sunsightings wherever possible in order to orient himself.
- The settlement of timber-built houses was of the same tones—browns, sometimes overlaid by a gray-green—as the trees
- which interspersed the habitations. The village glowed brightly by contrast with the forest, however, both because the canopy
- above was significantly thinner and because the place was home and a goal to the subject's mind.
- Sunlight, blocked only by the foliage of very large trees which the settlers had not cleared, dappled streets which had been
- trampled to the consistency of coarse concrete. Children played there, and animals—dogs and pigs, probably, but they were
- undistinguished shadows to the subject, factors of no particular interest to either him or his interrogator.
- Griffiths did not need to have heard the next question to understand it, when a shadow at the edge of the trail sprang into
- mental relief as a forty-tube swarmjet launcher with a hard-eyed woman slouched behind it watching the trail. The weapon
- needn't have been loot from the government supply convoy massacred the week before, but its swivelling base was jury-rigged
- from a truck mounting.
- At present, the subject's tongue could not have formed words more complex than a slurred syllable or two, but the
- Slammers had no need for cooperation from his motor nerves or intellect. All they needed were memory and the hard-wired
- processes of brain function which were common to all life forms with spinal cords. The subject's brain retrieved and correlated
- the information which the higher centers of his mind would have needed to answer Major Soames' question about defenses—
- and Griffiths collected the data there at the source.
- Clarity of focus marked as the subject's one of the houses reaching back against a bole of colossal proportions. Its roof was
- of shakes framed so steeply that they were scarcely distinguishable from the vertical timbers of the siding. Streaks of the moss
- common both to tree and to dwelling faired together cut timber and the russet bark. On the covered stoop in front, an adult
- woman and seven children waited in memory.
- At this stage of the interrogation Griffiths had almost as little conscious volition as the subject did, but a deep level of his
- own mind recorded the woman as unattractive. Her cheeks were hollow, her expression sullen, and the appearance of her skin
- was no cleaner than that of the subject himself. The woman's back was straight, however, and her clear eyes held, at least in the
- imagination of the subject, a look of affection.
- The children ranged in height from a boy already as tall as his mother to the infant girl looking up from the woman's arms
- with a face so similar to the subject's that it could, with hair and a bushy beard added, pass for his in a photograph. Affection
- cloaked the vision of the whole family, limning the faces clearly despite a tendency for the bodies of the children to mist away
- rather like the generality of trees along the trail; but the infant was almost deified in the subject's mind.
- Smokey's unheard question dragged the subject off abruptly, his household dissolving unneeded to the answer as a section
- of the stoop hinged upward on the end of his own hand and arm. The tunnel beneath the board flooring dropped straight down
- through the layer of yellowish soil and the friable rock beneath. There was a wooden ladder along which the wavering oval of a
- flashlight beam traced as the viewpoint descended.
- The shaft was seventeen rungs deep, with a further gooseneck dip in the gallery at the ladder's end to trap gas and
- fragmentation grenades. Where the tunnel straightened to horizontal, the flashlight gleamed on the powergun in a niche ready to
- hand but beneath the level to which a metal detector could be tuned to work reliably.
- Just beyond the gun was a black-cased directional mine with either a light beam or ultrasonic detonator—the subject didn't
- know the difference and his mind hadn't logged any of the subtle discrimination points between the two types of fuzing. Either
- way, someone ducking down the tunnel could, by touching the pressure-sensitive cap of the detonator, assure that the next
- person across the invisible tripwire would take a charge of shrapnel at velocities which would crumble the sturdiest body
- armor.
- "Follow all the tunnels," Smokey must have directed, because Griffiths had the unusual experience of merger with a psyche
- which split at every fork in the underground system. Patches of light wavered and fluctuated across as many as a score of
- simultaneous images, linking them together in the unity in which the subject's mind held them.
- It would have made the task of mapping the tunnels impossible, but the Slammers did not need anything so precise in a
- field as rich as this one. The tunnels themselves had been cut at the height of a stooping runner, but there was more headroom
- in the pillared bays excavated for storage and shelter. Flashes—temporal alternatives, hard to sort from the multiplicity of
- similar physical locations—showed shelters both empty and filled with villagers crouching against the threat of bombs which
- did not come. On one image the lighting was uncertain and could almost have proceeded as a mental artifact from the
- expression of the subject's infant daughter, looking calmly from beneath her mother's worried face.
- Griffiths could not identify the contents of most of the stored crates across which the subject's mind skipped, but Central's
- data bank could spit out a list of probables when the interrogator called in the dimensions and colors after the session. Griffiths
- would do that, for the record. As a matter of practical use, all that was important was that the villagers had thought it necessary
- to stash the material here—below the reach of ordinary reconnaissance and even high explosives.
- There were faces in the superimposed panorama, villagers climbing down their own access ladders or passed in the close
- quarters of the tunnels. Griffiths could not possibly differentiate the similar, bearded physiognomies during the overlaid
- glimpses he got of them. It was likely enough that everyone, every male at least, in the village was represented somewhere in
- the subject's memory of the underground complex.
- There was one more sight offered before Griffiths became aware of his own body again in a chill wave spreading from the
- wrist where Smokey had sprayed the antidote. The subject had seen a nine-barreled powergun, a calliope whose ripples of
- high-intensity fire could eat the armor of a combat car like paper spattered by molten steel. It was deep in an underground bay
- from which four broad "windows"—firing slits—were angled upward to the surface. Preparing the weapon in this fashion to
- cover the major approaches to the village must have taken enormous effort, but there was a worthy payoff: at these slants, the
- bolts would rip into the flooring, not the armored sides, of a vehicle driving over the camouflaged opening of a firing slit. Not
- even Hammer's heavy tanks could survive having their bellies carved that way. . . .
- The first awareness Griffiths had of his physical surroundings was the thrashing of his limbs against the sides of the couch
- while Major Soames lay across his body to keep him from real injury. Motor control returned with a hot rush, permitting
- Griffiths to be still for a moment and pant.
- "Need to go under again?" asked Smokey as he rose, fishing in his pocket for another cone of antidote for the subject if the
- answer was "no."
- "Got all we need," Griffiths muttered, closing his eyes before he took charge of his arms to lift him upright. "It's a bloody
- fortress, it is, all underground and cursed well laid out."
- "Location?" said his partner, whose fingernails clicked on the console as he touched keys.
- "South by southeast," said Griffiths. He opened his eyes, then shut them again as he swung his legs over the side of the
- couch. His muscles felt as if they had been under stress for hours, with no opportunity to flush fatigue poisons. The subject
- was coming around with comparative ease in his cocoon, because his system had not been charged already with the drug
- residues of the hundreds of interrogations which Griffiths had conducted from the right-hand couch. "Maybe three kays—you
- know, plus or minus."
- The village might be anywhere from two kilometers to five from the site at which the subject had been picked up, though
- Griffiths usually guessed closer than that. This session had been a good one, too, the linkage close enough that he and the
- subject were a single psyche throughout most of it. That wasn't always the case: many interrogations were viewed as if through
- a bad mirror, the images foggy and distorted.
- "Right," said Smokey to himself or the hologram map tank in which a named point was glowing in response to the
- information he had just keyed. "Right, Thomasville they call it." He swung to pat the awakening subject on the shoulder. "You
- live in Thomasville, don't you, old son?"
- "Wha . . .?" murmured the subject.
- "You're sure he couldn't come from another village?" Griffiths queried, watching his partner's quick motions with a touch
- of envy stemming from the drug-induced slackness in his own muscles.
- "Not a chance," the major said with assurance. "There were two other possibles, but they were both north in the valley."
- "Am I—" the subject said in a voice that gained strength as he used it. "Am I all right?"
- Why ask us? thought Griffiths, but his partner was saying, "Of course you're all right, m'boy, we said you would be, didn't
- we?"
- While the subject digested that jovial affirmation, Smokey turned to Griffiths and said, "You don't think we need an armed
- recce then, Chief?"
- "They'd chew up anything short of a company of panzers," Griffiths said flatly, "and even that wouldn't be a lotta fun. It's a
- bloody underground fort, it is."
- "What did I say?" the subject demanded as he regained intellectual control and remembered where he was—and why.
- "Please, please, what'd I say?"
- "Curst little, old son," Smokey remarked. "Just mumbles—nothing to reproach yourself about, not at all."
- "You're a gentle bastard," Griffiths said.
- "Ain't it true, Chief, ain't it true?" his partner agreed. "Gas, d'ye think, then?"
- "Not the way they're set up," said Griffiths, trying to stand and relaxing again to gain strength for a moment more. He
- thought back over the goosenecked tunnels; the filter curtains ready to be drawn across the mouths of shelters; the atmosphere
- suits hanging beside the calliope. "Maybe saturation with a lethal skin absorptive like K3, but what's the use of that?"
- "Right you are," said Major Soames, tapping the consoles preset for Fire Control Central.
- "You're going to let me go, then?" asked the subject, wriggling within his wrappings in an unsuccessful attempt to rise.
- Griffiths made a moue as he watched the subject, wishing that his own limbs felt capable of such sustained motion. "Those
- other two villages may be just as bad as this one," he said to his partner.
- "The mountaineers don't agree with each other much better'n they do with the government," demurred Smokey with his
- head cocked toward the console, waiting for its reply. "They'll bring us in samples, and we'll see then."
- "Go ahead," said Fire Central in a voice bitten flat by the two-kilohertz aperture through which it was transmitted.
- "Got a red-pill target for you," Smokey said, putting one ivory-colored fingertip on the holotank over Thomasville to
- transmit the coordinates to the artillery computers. "Soonest."
- "Listen," the subject said, speaking to Griffiths because the major was out of the line of sight permitted by the hydorclasp
- wrappings, "let me go and there's a full three kilos of Misty Hills Special for you. Pure, I swear it, so pure it'll float on water!"
- "No damper fields?" Central asked in doubt.
- "They aren't going to put up a nuclear damper and warn everybody they're expecting attack, old son," said Major Soames
- tartly. "Of course, the least warning and they'll turn it on."
- "Hold one," said the trooper in Fire Control.
- "Just lie back and relax, fella," Griffiths said, rising to his feet at last. "We'll turn you in to an internment camp near the
- capital. They keep everything nice there so they can hold media tours. You'll do fine."
- There was a loud squealing from outside the interrogators' vehicle. One of the twenty-centimeter rocket howitzers was
- rotating and elevating its stubby barrel. Ordinarily the six tubes of the battery would work in unison, but there was no need for
- that on the present fire mission.
- "We have clearance for a nuke," said the console with an undertone of vague surprise which survived sideband
- compression. Usually the only targets worth a red pill were protected by damper fields which inhibited fission bombs and the
- fission triggers of thermonuclear weapons.
- "Lord blast you for sinners!" shouted the trussed local. "What is it you're doing, you blackhearted devils?"
- Griffiths looked down at him, and just at that moment the hog fired. The base charge blew the round clear of the barrel and
- the sustainer motor roared the shell up in a ballistic path for computer-determined seconds of burn. The command vehicle
- rocked. Despite their filters, the vents drew in air burned by exhaust gases.
- It shouldn't have happened after the helmets were removed and both interrogator and subject had been dosed with antidote.
- Flashback contacts did sometimes occur, though. This time it was the result of the very solid interrogation earlier; that, and
- meeting the subject's eyes as the howitzer fired.
- The subject looked so much like his infant daughter that Griffiths had no control at all over the image that sprang to his
- mind: the baby's face lifted to the sky which blazed with the thermonuclear fireball detonating just above the canopy—
- —and her melted eyeballs dripping down her cheeks.
- The hydorclasp held the subject, but he did not stop screaming until they had dosed him with enough suppressants to turn a
- horse toes-up.
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement