The Far Side of Evil

by Sylvia Engdahl

  The thing that impressed me, I guess, was that he honestly believed what he said, or at least he thought he did. I’ve read through reams of the official propaganda his cohorts put out, and I’m afraid I’ve considered it just that: propaganda. Ballyhoo for Our Glorious Dictator, and that sort of thing. But to this man it’s not a mere sales pitch, but literal truth. He is, in his own eyes, a champion of truth, and it is his so-called scientific objectivity that makes him so cold-blooded. Unlike some of his assistants, he is not a sadist; when he tells me that he has no wish to inflict pain on me, he is incredibly sincere. It is all for my own good! I am not sure just why he thinks himself such an expert judge of other people’s good, but then that’s characteristic of Younglings.

  “You Libertarians are fighting a lost cause,” he told me seriously. “The modern world is too complex to allow people to have independent thoughts; the State must make the decisions for the good of all. It is a matter of historical necessity.”

  I was near exhaustion; they had been questioning me in relays for some hours, and naturally they see to it that you are not feeling your best during these sessions. Though I can protect myself against pain, it’s not an effortless defense, and I have found it necessary to save it for the times when it’s really needed. The relatively minor things must be endured. So my head was splitting, my muscles ached intolerably from the awkward position in which I was being forced to stand, and for a moment I forgot that he was a Youngling and as such was entitled to my compassion. Impatiently I burst out, “You know nothing of history. History will prove you wrong; people will go right on thinking. They will have thoughts wiser than yours when you are dead.”

  He thought this, of course, mere empty defiance. Yet it got to him; perhaps I slipped and let something through telepathically. For the first time it dawned on him that I truly wasn’t afraid of him, and since in his view all relationships are based on fear, he began to suspect, secretly, that he was afraid of me. I could tell, even without picking up his thoughts, for the long harangue he began was aimed more at his own doubts than at mine.

  “Anyone who thinks himself independently wise is insane,” he wound up. “You are insane, Elana. If you were not, you would repent of your crimes and tell us what we need to know; you would want to tell us. Who but a sick person would endure needless pain? Who else would willfully separate herself from the State, when only as members of the State can citizens’ existence have value and meaning?”

  That was a perfectly natural question from his standpoint, and since he had provided his own answer it was obvious that he didn’t want one from me. Foolishly, I replied, “If that is the only meaning your existence has, I feel sorry for you! It’s lucky that most people know better, because if they were all like you this human race would never get anywhere at all.”

  You should never allow yourself to be drawn into an argument with your interrogators; it is very dangerous, because they cannot afford to let you win. Their ideas are well-fixed; they are not interested in logic, and their only aim is to make you angry. Anger, fear, pain—scientists of Toris are beginning to learn the power of these things; they are starting to perceive the relationships between emotions and the mind. But they have barely scratched the surface, and, as is usual with Younglings, they misuse their limited knowledge. Just as they use nuclear energy for bombs before they put it to constructive uses, they use psychological conditioning techniques to break people down long before they utilize them for building people up.

  The Academy uses conditioning, too—even conditioning involving stress—but its methods are designed to make a person stronger, not weaker. Since I therefore know a good deal more about such techniques than my interrogator does, I don’t fall into his traps; the one that caught me was of my own making. I thought that I was safe in saying what I did, because I was more exasperated than angry and I spoke from factual knowledge rather than from a need to prove myself right. Unfortunately, I didn’t stop to consider his need to be right. That is what happens to you when you forget about empathy.

  I shall pay for my unthinking cruelty. He will redouble his efforts, for he has to break me now; if he doesn’t, he will never be sure again himself. Oh, I can resist. There is no danger of a disclosure, since he hasn’t the power to tap my subconscious mind. (If Torisian science were that advanced, I could not, of course, have allowed myself to be arrested.) But I’m probably in for some highly unpleasant episodes.

  Well, I’ll have only myself to blame. When you are on an observation mission, you are not supposed to assert yourself before Younglings; you are supposed to be completely passive. You are supposed to listen and not answer, even when there’s no disclosure involved. But that’s hard. My passive role has been my greatest trial on Toris, right from the very beginning.

  *

  I came to Toris nearly half a year ago, on the eve of the vernal equinox, and on that night I was left alone to face an ordeal that was none the less frightening for being planned. I had been landed in semidarkness; the chill of early spring dawn soaked into me as I stood trembling, knee-deep in stiff, wet grass. I couldn’t watch the small spherical landing craft rise noiselessly upward, for the sky overhead was black and it had used no lights. A veil of cloud hung between me and the stars.

  It was rolling, barren country; the ship had come down in a small hollow amid the deserted low hills that surrounded the city of Cerne. Hurrying to the top of a nearby crest, I looked down on the light-studded belt of a major highway. I had barely half an hour to reach it, I knew, and I would have to walk fast. The awkward, unfamiliar Torisian clothes hampered me, particularly the shoes, which felt heavy and tight. Before I got to the road, dizziness had struck me, and I was shuddering from more than cold. I clenched my teeth and forced myself to run. Keeping my sense of direction proved hard, for the hills seemed to be swinging in an endless circle, and I could scarcely tell whether the roaring I heard came from the highway traffic or from my own head. They miscalculated, I thought frantically, they didn’t allow enough time… Then my foot struck pavement and lights flashed in my eyes, disappearing as a vehicle whooshed past. More lights were approaching. At a safe distance from their path I slid to my knees and gave way to nausea. I was aware that I was losing consciousness; but then, I had expected that.

  My briefings had been thorough. During my time aboard the starship I was, in fact, required to cram harder than for any of my exams at the Academy. Every scrap of information gleaned from the Service’s monitoring of Torisian radio and telecasts had to be absorbed. Hypnosis helped, especially for learning the language of the country in which I was to be placed; but the bulk of the material demanded more than mere memorization. Bits and pieces had to be related not only to each other but to what was known of Youngling cultures in general, and that meant extensive review of nearly every subject I had ever studied. When you know that your life may depend on your mastery of the details, you are not tempted to cut corners.

  Throughout the trip I was confined to my quarters, not only because every waking moment had to be devoted to study but because under the rules of solo I wasn’t supposed to know who else was on board. I was permitted to see only my tutors, Meleny and Varned. My cabin was comfortable, with full computer facilities for library reference as well as automated meal service; I did not mind staying in it. Meleny dropped in frequently, though she couldn’t stay long for she was coordinating the landing plans and had a number of other agents to work with.

  Poor Meleny, she wanted desperately to go down herself. She would be retiring from fieldwork soon, and might never again be involved in a mission of this magnitude. But unfortunately she could not pass as Torisian; she would have been spotted as alien immediately since she was of a race quite unlike the native one. “You’re lucky, Elana,” she said to me. “As far as looks go, you might have been born on Toris. We won’t even have to darken your hair. Why, I’ll bet you’d pass a medical exam without any trouble at all—”

  She broke off, with a gleam in her eye that m
ight have been a warning to me had I known the problem uppermost in her mind. It was Meleny’s job to devise cover roles for the various agents she was briefing, a task that was far from easy. She couldn’t follow the usual rule that an agent’s cover should make him unnoticeable, since we would be lucky if we could turn ourselves into Torisians at all, let alone average Torisians. So the only recourse was boldness, and some of Meleny’s plans were very bold indeed.

  My other tutor, Varned, came aboard when our starship went into its Torisian orbit. He had actually been down to the surface; he and two other agents had been dropped off by the ship that had found Toris. By the time we arrived, they had managed to obtain the essential facts for us, facts that couldn’t be learned from telecasts, such as what official identity papers for various nations should look like. He must have taken terrible risks to get his hands on the ones he had brought back as samples.

  Varned talked at length over the ship’s video hookup, and he also met with us individually for the purpose of establishing rapport. He was to be responsible for collecting my reports; and since we might not always be able to meet face-to-face, we had to get acquainted beforehand. Telepathic communication, even when backed by urgent emotion, just isn’t practical over any distance unless the people involved know each other well.

  We communicated silently right from the start, for practice. How do I get in touch with you? I asked.

  You don’t. I get in touch with you.

  But in an emergency—

  You deal with it alone, Elana. I’m simply a channel for passing on information.

  His problems would be much greater than mine, I realized. Aside from the obvious ones connected with the work itself, he would be considered a member of a minority race in many Torisian countries, and on a Youngling world that presents difficulties. Toris, like most Critical Stage planets, is not yet fully integrated.

  Can we meet in public, Varned? I mean, won’t we attract attention if we’re seen together? Hostility, even?

  It’ll work out. You’ll see.

  How often will you contact me?

  I can’t tell you that. You’ll have no advance notice; most of the time I won’t even be in your city.

  What about pickup, when I’m recalled to the ship?

  We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Elana.

  That was all he would say on the subject. It seemed, almost, that I was being kept in the dark on purpose. Well, I was. The Director had mentioned “a desperate scheme to make our handicaps work for us,” and this was part of it.

  Our chief handicap was that we were facing the unknown. Those who were doing the planning couldn’t overcome that, so they decided to capitalize on it. There was some pretty smart psychology involved. For one thing, they were quite frank in admitting that we weren’t being given all the facts as to how we would be contacted, so we remained happily under the illusion that somebody knew, although actually, Varned and the others who were to do the contacting had little notion of what would prove practical.

  The main part of the scheme, however, had to do with expediting the job. We were all volunteers; we had been trained in self-reliance, and our mission was to learn as much as we could in as short a time as possible. So the planners used daring tactics. Knowing that they couldn’t give us security, they did the exact opposite: They sent us in alone without any knowledge of how we were to be rescued in order to force us to look from inside out instead of from outside in. We were to live among the Torisians as Torisians, totally cut off from the ship and from each other, not only for disguise purposes but because that was the fastest way to absorb the Torisian viewpoint. We were forbidden to communicate even if we should happen to meet, which wasn’t likely because no more than two agents would be assigned to the same city. For safety’s sake as well as for maximum coverage of the planet, it was necessary to spread the available people around.

  Still another reason for isolating us was to make sure that our observations would be independent. Each agent’s reports were supposed to be based on his or her own judgment, free of the influence of the others’ opinions, so that when they were all put together everyone’s ideas would count. That way, the Service would end up with lots of different impressions to compare instead of a composite one that could be wrong.

  “What exactly am I supposed to look for?” I asked Meleny once. “What sort of information, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, “and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Any detail may be important—vital—we have no guidelines. We’ll simply gather all the data we can in the time allotted to us.”

  Our cover roles were all quite different, on the theory that not all the eggs should be put in one basket. I was in an agony of curiosity to know what mine would be, but when Meleny finally told me, I almost wished she hadn’t.

  “Elana,” she began, “we’ve got a cover worked out for you, a good one, but establishing it won’t be fun. It’ll be something of an ordeal, in fact; do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” I assured her, knowing that the question was purely rhetorical.

  “We’re assigning you to Cerne,” Meleny said. “Now, getting into the Neo-Statist cities isn’t going to be easy. They keep close tabs on their citizens; there’s no free travel, as there is in the Libertarian countries. The secret police are very efficient, and they’re on the lookout for people with fake papers.”

  I was silent. Naturally, there would be agents placed in the cities controlled by the dictatorship as well as in the free ones, but I had hoped I wouldn’t be one of them. I should have known better. Having no physical idiosyncrasies in Torisian eyes, I could stand closer inspection than some—even medical inspection, Meleny thought—so despite my relative inexperience, I was bound to be given a difficult post.

  Calmly, she continued, “You can’t hope to avoid questioning by the secret police indefinitely. So your best chance is to get it over with, under circumstances that will lead them to believe that you have nothing to hide.”

  She went on to explain. Cerne was the capital of a country that had recently been taken over by the dictator, and its citizens, who weren’t used to police-state rule, lived in fear. A great many of them were anxious to escape, and for that reason all access to the city was well guarded. Anyone coming or going had to have not only identity papers but a travel permit; and because she didn’t know the exact form of such a permit, she was as yet unable to forge one.

  “Suppose I don’t even get into the place?” I protested. “Can I talk my way past those guards?”

  “No. And you can’t evade them, either; there are roadblocks, and the open country is patrolled.”

  “Then—”

  Meleny met my eyes. “Suppose you were found by the side of the main highway leading into the city, and you were ill, so ill that you required immediate hospitalization? Suppose you weren’t conscious when your rescuers took you past that roadblock?”

  “It might get me through if I could make it convincing enough. But what if I flubbed it? And besides, would they ever let me out of the hospital?”

  “I think so—if when you came to, you didn’t know why you had no travel permit; if you didn’t know where your home was or what jobs you had held. You’d be an amnesia case. It would be obvious to all concerned that you would have to build a whole new life for yourself.”

  The idea was intriguing. They might easily fall for it; no spy would ever call attention to herself by trying anything so brazen! “The only thing is,” I told Meleny, “I’m not sure I’m that good an actress.”

  “Well, you see,” she admitted, “you won’t have to act, at first.”

  The details, when I heard them, were decidedly less intriguing. Just before I left the ship I would receive an injection that would bring on the illness, real illness. I would barely have time to reach the road.

  “What we give you will be entirely harmless,” Meleny assured me, “but it won’t feel harmless. It won’t look harmless, either; there will be no possible
suspicion that it could have been deliberately arranged. That highway is heavily traveled, and someone is bound to stop for you. By the time you reach the checkpoint, you’ll be unconscious and to all appearances an emergency case, so you won’t be held. You’ll wake up in the hospital, and you’ll have time to get your bearings before you’re questioned, because the illness will take several days to run its course.”

  “What if Torisian doctors try to treat it?” I asked feebly. “I mean, they probably aren’t too advanced medically, and—”

  “Nothing they’re likely to try will make any difference one way or the other,” Meleny said. “Don’t worry, there’s not much chance of their killing you through lack of skill.”

  “Just what symptoms am I going to have?” I demanded.

  She smiled sympathetically. “I’m not going to tell you. And that means you’ll feel confused and frightened and very helpless—which is how it should be. Do you understand why, Elana?”

  “To make my ‘amnesia’ look realistic?”

  “That’s part of it. But there are more basic reasons.”

  I hesitated. This was before I had been given the full explanation of the mission’s strategy, so I didn’t realize that it was considered an advantage for the break with my own background to be as complete as possible. “Does it have anything to do with making me cautious?” I ventured.

  She nodded. “You’re safer if you start out thoroughly convinced that you are not a superior, invincible being in comparison to the Younglings, because in reality you’ll have less practical knowledge of how to get along in that society than the children in its kindergartens. You want your confidence to grow as you gain that knowledge, not peter out when you start running into situations that show up your ignorance.”