The Far Side of Evil

by Sylvia Engdahl

  There are two kinds of brainwashing, that designed to convert the victim and that meant merely to extract information, and while they naturally prefer to accomplish both at the same time, in my case conversion is secondary. They want the information, and they want it now—or rather, they wanted it some days ago—so they don’t really care whether or not I repent of my sins and embrace their political system. Oh, they go through all the standard indoctrination speeches; that’s automatic with them, they could not turn it off if they tried, and perhaps they think it’ll throw me off guard. But mainly they are trying to get a confession. A full confession, of course, not merely my signature on the text they have written out for me. They’ve got to have the details about the bomb. That’s to my advantage, because it means they have to keep me in shape to remember the details and communicate them.

  They’ve assigned their top man to me: Commander Feric. He has never had a failure. He is neither uncivilized nor sadistic, but rather a professional man who is sincerely interested in his work. He considers it highly valuable work, not at all degrading. To be sure, he doesn’t resort to having me beaten up or anything that crude. People who respond to that sort of handling never get anywhere near Commander Feric’s office; he simply doesn’t bother with them.

  By now, Commander Feric has learned a little about what he’s up against, and he is, I believe, impressed. Though I told him he couldn’t hurt me, he didn’t think I meant it literally! And he still doesn’t think so; he can’t, for he has no notion that there are such things as psychic defenses. He must be very puzzled indeed. But he is a long way from giving up, particularly now that his personal self-image is involved. I feel sorry for him, in a way, because he has built his whole life around the philosophy that force always wins, and when in the end I disprove it, he will be cast adrift.

  It’s not strictly true, of course, that he can’t hurt me, since there are certain conditions under which I would have to let him. Those conditions haven’t arisen yet, both because he dares not risk my life and because after I do talk, which he’s still convinced I will, the government wants a public trial for propaganda purposes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were planning to televise it. It’s too bad we’ll never reach that stage; it would be a nice way of informing the starship where I am.

  From the beginning, Commander Feric and I have been more or less frank with each other. By the time we met, I had already been subjected to the usual sort of grilling by less prominent interrogators, and it was an accepted fact that I was neither naïve, stupid, nor easily intimidated. “Let’s not beat around the bush,” he said at our first interview. “It’s my job to secure your cooperation, and I’ll get it, one way or another, as we both know. What’s already established may as well be acknowledged. You’re an admitted saboteur, and we’re aware that you are not with the Resistance but are instead a Libertarian agent—”

  “I am not a Libertarian agent,” I interrupted. After all, I wasn’t, and unless I consistently denied it the Libertarians would be blamed for the nonexistent sabotage plot. Probably they would be anyway, but the slightest trace of evidence, such as my taped concession of the point, might lead to retaliations that could trigger war.

  “Why do you lie to me?” he demanded. “It can’t help you, since you’ll be executed in either case—and we have proof. Your passport is a blatant forgery. There is no record of either you or your parents in the city you claim as your birthplace. I must say, it was a clumsy job; your people’s intelligence agencies are usually more adroit.”

  I said nothing. They had been bound to find out about the passport, and from their standpoint only lack of efficiency had prevented it from being unmasked sooner. Those men who interviewed me in the hospital and failed to follow through are now, I suppose, in a labor camp; among Younglings, there must always be a scapegoat.

  “You yourself, however,” my interrogator went on, “are far from dull-witted. Anybody able to fool the entire staff of a major hospital with a fake illness and fake amnesia is very bright indeed. I’ll grant that, and I shall not waste my time telling you that you are nobody and nothing; you would not be taken in. Let me use a less orthodox approach: You are important. You are so important that we will spare no trouble, no resource, in getting what we want from you. And you are bright enough to know what that will entail.”

  That was where I made my little speech about how the human mind can’t be forced, more out of pride and bravado, I suppose, than for any legitimate reason. Commander Feric simply laughed. “I’ve acknowledged your intelligence,” he said, “so the least you can do is to credit me with as much. Young though you seem, you’re obviously no amateur. You’ve shown neither surprise nor shock at anything that’s happened to you, and that means you’ve had training. It’s not possible that you’re unaware of the fact that we will force you, and that the only question concerns how long it will take.”

  “Longer than you have to devote to it, anyway,” I murmured.

  He glared at me, for the first time slightly nonplussed. “I could threaten to punish you for your insolence,” he said thoughtfully, “but it would be an empty threat since there are no punishments worse than those you’ll receive anyway. You know that, I suppose. Oh, well, I’ll not stand on formalities. Perhaps it will be more entertaining for us both if I let you say what you please.”

  It was, which was why I kept up with it. I didn’t have to make any replies at all; I could have just sat there, and he could have made no meaningful threat then, either. But, knowing that I was in for a good many grueling hours of questioning, I decided to make a game of it: I decided to tell the closest to the absolute truth that I could without actually giving away any secrets, even to the extent of being completely frank about my methods of defense. The Commander thought that I was simply whistling in the dark, but he found it difficult to keep the discussion moving in the direction that he was used to.

  Finally, after getting nowhere with the “soft” approach, in which he insinuated that anyone as bright as I would do well to sell out her friends and perhaps receive not only a pardon but a lucrative position as an agent of his own organization, he got down to business. “Look, Elana,” he told me. “I like you. I admire your spirit. Don’t force me to turn you into a vegetable! You are resigned to death, I’m sure, but you still have your pride. I can break that pride, if I have to, but how much better it will be for you to die with it intact—” He broke off, watching my face. “All right. It would not be intact if you confessed voluntarily. But you’ll confess eventually—you know it, and I know it—and all I’m saying is, don’t wait too long. Don’t wait till we’ve destroyed your mind. The freedom of that mind is evidently of importance to you, the very thing you’re holding out for.”

  “If you destroyed my mind,” I reminded him, “you would not get much information from it.”

  “You know all the answers. You know, then, that we won’t use the slow, sure method, the method that would bring you around to our way of thinking. A hundred days or so of treatment, the appropriate drugs, and you would no longer have the same set of values. You would beg for the chance to help us in any way you could; it would no longer seem a self-betrayal.” He sighed and, pressing a buzzer on his desk, continued, “It would be far less painful, in the long run. But unfortunately we must proceed more quickly than that.”

  Guards appeared; I was strapped firmly into my chair, which was equipped to pick up my heartbeat, respiration rate, and the like, displaying them on a scope before my interrogator. During this preparation he talked on in a vein designed, obviously, to unnerve me. “Pain has been used to compel obedience since the beginning of history,” he said conversationally. “There were, however, undesirable side effects. There were limits to intensity and duration; the subject, if brave enough, sometimes expired before being persuaded to cooperate. Perhaps that’s what you are counting on. If so, you will be disappointed, for recently we have developed a method that does not have such disadvantages.”

  “
Yes, I know,” I commented, and at my smile it was he who was unnerved. I forced myself to relax while the guards attached electrodes to various points on my body, reminding myself that the shiver of fear spreading through me was necessary and good.

  Commander Feric met my eyes. “This machine may look simple,” he went on, “but don’t let its appearance fool you. It is capable of producing the most severe pain the human body can feel, since it stimulates the nerves directly. Yet it inflicts no injury. Tomorrow, the next day, as many days as this takes—each morning we start afresh. We could keep it up indefinitely without weakening your body in any way.” He paused and added significantly, “The mind, of course, is less durable.”

  Which just goes to show how little Younglings know about things.

  That first time he used the machine on me, I was a bit apprehensive, not having actually met such a thing under field conditions before. I could not shield myself from the electric current, for if I did his instruments wouldn’t register properly; I would have to deal with the pain itself. Still, I had no real doubt of my ability to do so. During the course of an Academy education we’re prepared for any eventuality, prepared in the same way as we’re trained to use the rest of our psychic powers: through experience.

  That’s not as terrible as it sounds. The experience isn’t fun, but it isn’t awfully bad, either; not nearly so bad as it would seem if I were to describe it. It is given in a way that is absolutely harmless, and you have plenty of moral support—telepathic support, even, in the early stages while that’s needed. What’s more, by the time you come to it you have learned that the experiences provided for you invariably turn out well, so you are not really afraid.

  And it does turn out well. It gives you a tremendous lift because you learn things you never suspected about the powers of your mind. You are not asked to be stoic; you’re taught that you don’t need to be, that you don’t need to suffer at all. You can feel pain and not mind. The feeling is indescribable, like the difference between knowing how to use psychokinesis and not knowing. But once you have it, you never lose it. Before I took the training I heard all sorts of scare stories that made me wonder whether it would be worth going through. It wasn’t till afterwards that I realized the comments had all come from people who hadn’t been yet undergone it rather than those who had.

  There’s a difference, of course, between being safe in the hands of sympathetic instructors and being at the mercy of an interrogator who is out to break you. But actually that difference works to your advantage. The biggest problem in the training is that after the early stages you tend not to be frightened enough, and your instructors work hard to overcome that, because a certain amount of fear is good for you; it’s what enables your mind to perform effectively. Fear and panic, however, are two different things. If you panic, you lose control and suffer. I was on the edge a couple of times during that first interrogation session; it was not an episode I would care to repeat.

  Needless to say, Commander Feric thinks I am absolutely phenomenal. I’ve had to act some; otherwise he would be convinced that his machine wasn’t working. He did call in technicians to check it, that first day, and he also called in a psychiatrist to verify that I was not in a hypnotic trance. Now I scream (convincingly, I hope) when we reach the high points. I can tell when they come, for I do feel and discriminate; it’s simply that I’m emotionally detached from the physical sensations. They just don’t bother me. The Commander has never before met anyone whom it does not bother. He knows in his heart that it would bother him, so he finds the whole business most upsetting.

  I have met the psychiatrist, Dr. Sturn, on several other occasions. It is his aim to analyze me in order to find out my hidden terrors. This game, too, I play voluntarily (they could hardly force me, any more than they can force me to do anything else) because I’m sure that I am learning more from it than he is. I have drawn the line at describing my childhood for him, since I don’t know quite enough about Toris to invent a good one. But other than that, I answer his questions honestly, and he is very confused.

  Take the ink blot test. Well, what one of those blots looked like to me was a certain reptilian creature from the tenth planet of the star Zentha, and I was trying to think of a better answer, because naturally I couldn’t say that—when suddenly I thought, Why not? So I said it, and Dr. Sturn turned purple. Commander Feric laughed; I don’t believe there’s much love lost between those two. “I told you, Sturn,” he said somewhat triumphantly, “that you would not get typical responses.”

  Not all of the tests are so amusing, for my captors are searching for ways to horrify me, and they know what is likely to horrify the average person. Some of what I’ve been exposed to has been distasteful, but hardly shocking in the sense that they mean to shock me, because that kind of shock depends on the ways you have been made to feel guilty as a child; besides which, it’s largely culture-dependent, and an agent who has studied the customs of many worlds has a certain objectivity in such matters. A lot of it is just plain ridiculous. For instance, most Torisians have strong taboos regarding particular words in their language. I don’t mean merely that such words are considered rude by polite society—which they unquestionably are—but people get highly emotional over them. Well, when these words started to show up on the word-association tests Dr. Sturn gave me, I didn’t recognize them, because I had encountered them neither in the broadcasts we had monitored nor in my reading. So my outward reaction was just what he expected: I froze and said nothing; but he frowned and shook his head over my pulse and respiration rates, which weren’t showing any change at all. When I finally caught on to what sort of words they were, I burst out laughing at the idea that he thought he could gain any power over me through such a silly trifle.

  I’m making resistance sound too easy, perhaps. Matching wits with them may be a game, and handling the pain an exciting challenge, but in between come hunger and cold and loneliness. I am not allowed much sleep; what little I do get is restful only because my mind is able to shut out distractions. And there are various other discomforts that I shall not dwell on, not all of which can be dismissed so easily.

  And of course, there are the drugs. The slow-acting ones I throw off—Meleny herself, after all, had to hypnotize me to keep my subconscious defenses from throwing off the illness she wanted me to have—but it’s a strain, and I don’t ever feel well. Besides, I have to fake the effects to some extent, and that means letting myself feel those effects long enough to determine what sort of stuff I’ve been given. It varies from day to day, but I’ve learned that whenever I begin to feel more tense or anxious or depressed than usual, it’s a safe bet that the drugs have something to do with it.

  But none of these ordeals endanger my secrets. If I have to endure them, I can. My only real fear is that the Neo-Statists will get tired of waiting and will chance using the ship.

  They are not to that point yet, though. They think I’m part of a major operation, the uncovering of which has top priority. “One thing is sure,” Commander Feric said on the phone this morning, “whatever organization is behind her, it’s a big one; and they certainly trained her thoroughly.”

  And with that, I had to agree!

  *

  I have just survived a truly harrowing experience. Commander Feric tried a new technique on me, something calculated to unhinge me completely. The results weren’t quite what he was expecting. During the course of it, though, I didn’t know what was going to happen, and I must confess that he had me pretty scared.

  He has finally conceded that he isn’t going to get anywhere with his pain machine. “Don’t delude yourself,” he told me. “If I gave you enough, at maximum intensity, uninterrupted—well, it would take some time, no doubt, but despite your abnormally high threshold, you’d eventually go to pieces. Unfortunately, you would then be unreachable, incapable of remembering your own name, much less those of your fellow conspirators. So we must approach this from a different angle.”

  The angl
e that he went on to discuss did not sound encouraging. “I’ve never used this method before,” he admitted. “It is highly experimental, and as you’re already aware, I don’t want to destroy your mind. Dr. Sturn believes that the risk is within acceptable limits, but we must remember that the doctor is more interested in compiling test results than in redeeming enemies of the State. He assures me that in a matter of hours he can safely accomplish what would require many weeks of conventional treatment. If so, he may revolutionize this department; but if he’s wrong, he’ll be held accountable. I warned him. All the same, he is willing to proceed, and since time is of the essence, I have decided to take the chance.”

  I wondered how much of that was sheer fabrication aimed at undermining my nerve. Commander Feric’s frankness can be very disarming, which is the secret of his success in his profession. He rarely contradicts himself with telepathic overtones; for when he says something, he really believes it, at least while he’s talking.

  “We do not have the necessary facilities in this building,” he informed me. “You will therefore be taken elsewhere, but you’ll be back soon—with a more pliable personality, I trust.”

  I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven some distance from the prison. The Commander did not accompany us. In spite of myself, I got more and more apprehensive during the long ride. By the time I was led into an elevator and out—many floors below—into a room with a faint hospital-like smell, I was weak with terror; and when at last the blindfold was removed, revealing a laboratory filled with all manner of horrendous-looking apparatus, my knees nearly gave way under me.

  The guards were dismissed; they were scarcely needed, since at least ten white-coated technicians were present. Dr. Sturn came toward me. “Don’t be frightened, my dear,” he said smoothly. “This will not be painful. I’m afraid it may be rather unpleasant for you, but you will feel no pain. You will not feel anything at all.”