Igor was led forward. He was suddenly very calm. It was the numbed composure of despair. His country had surrendered a second province to the threat of force, and the province had been occupied by an army capable of sweeping away any conceivable resistance in the rest of the nation. And therefore, the surrender of this province had merely saved the invaders a few lives. That was all. The army had not fought with its new weapons. It craved to be tested against a suitably inferior antagonist, so that it could taste the pride of victory. So—Igor knew that his country’s yielding had been quite useless. It meant only that fighting would begin nearer the heart of the smaller nation, against an enemy already flushed with triumph, and with the smaller and weaker nation already stunned by disaster, crowded with refugees, and convinced of its coming doom.
The general regarded Igor with lack-lustre eyes. He was a high-ranking general, Igor knew. He recognized him from photographs seen long before. But in his strange, despairing calmness Igor saw more than an enemy. He saw that the general was a wholly commonplace man, pompous and strutting because that was the tradition of his army, but without conviction. He was a puppet of his government, without will or conscience of his own, and therefore he would be more merciless, more ruthlessly brutal, more hideously inhuman in his commands than a man who dared to think for himself.
“You were sent,” said the general, “to detonate atomic bombs when our troops should have taken their positions. Tell me your orders and the position of the mines.”
“I had no orders,” he said stiffly. “I know of no mines.”
Igor hated himself that he had to moisten his lips to reply. “I stayed behind with a radio transmitter to broadcast an account of the entry of your troops, for recording and rebroadcast to make my fellow countrymen ashamed that they had surrendered.”
The general waved his hand impatiently.
“You are not in uniform. There is no reason why you should not be shot out of hand. What are your orders and where are the mines?”
“I have no orders!” repeated Igor fiercely. “There are no mines! I am ashamed that there are no mines!”
The general frowned. An officer behind him murmured softly.
“No,” said the general without emotion. “He would say anything at all, merely to escape the pain. Drug him and question him under the drugs. Make sure he tells all he knows. Then hang him.”
He dismissed Igor from his mind. Igor was dragged away. And he had thought that he hated his country’s enemies before, but it was as nothing to the rending passion that filled him now. He said thickly to his guards:
“You’ll get nothing out of me! I’m not needed to take care of you! You’ll destroy yourselves!”
And then he ragingly filled his mind with pictures of destruction such as he longed to have fall upon the invaders. He imagined death raining from the skies upon them. Death rising from the bowels of the earth to engulf them. He trembled with his hatred. He had no hope, of course, that he himself would live to see the sunset. But he lashed himself into a veritable frenzy of hate, and he thrust away most fiercely of all the secret thought that gave him sound reason for just this passion.
He blanked his mind to all but hatred as, held fast in the counter-intelligence-service truck that was especially equipped for the questioning of prisoners, he felt the needles inject the drugs which should rob him of all resistance to questioning. He did not expect to wake. He expected to be dangling at the end of a rope before the hypnotic drugs wore off. And therefore he hated the enemy, and envisioned all that could destroy them and every disaster that could befall.
It worked. The adrenalin of fury fought the soporific drugs. The world became a dim land in which he raged futilely but triumphantly against the invaders. Soothing voices asked questions, and he panted joyously of cataclysms which would destroy them all.
He was very, very cold and sick when consciousness came back to him. There had been no compassion whatever in the treatment given him. It did not matter whether he died while being questioned or afterward. He remembered groggily that he’d shouted at them until they drugged him almost to unconsciousness, and then he’d whispered gleeful prophecies of what would happen as they found out the peril which awaited every invading soldier. It seemed to him—but he was sick and dizzy and confused—that he’d told them that their own actions would set off the devices that were to annihilate them. And from a misty memory of questions about radio, he believed that he’d given them the impression that their own inter-vehicle radios were to be the means by which their destruction would be released.
That, of course, could very well have been arranged, but he was bitterly sure that there was no death-trap set to harm the invading soldiers at all.
He realized that the surface on which he lay was moving. It bumped and lurched and swayed. He was in a vehicle of some sort, a truck perhaps, moving down a metal road. Then he heard voices. Guards, no doubt.
“…Lucky…own radio sets working some kind of timers… not too much detail…plays the devil, though…general ordered all short-wave communication stopped…”
Nausea overwhelmed Igor, lying on the floor of a bumping truck. But he felt a silly sick triumph nevertheless. They thought their own short-wave radios would ultimately set off atomic bombs hidden somewhere. So they’d stopped using short-waves. He’d accomplished that much. He’d made that much confusion among the invaders. Of course, it would make no difference in the end. His country would be overwhelmed and extinguished. It would have been better to have fought from the beginning; to go down in a welter of atomic flame. But, puny as was his revenge, at least he’d done that much! He’d made the conquerors a little bit ridiculous…
Then weakness swept over him like a flood. He blanked out, as the enemy vehicle carried him somewhere unguessable. Undoubtedly, though, he thought in a last flicker of indifferent consciousness, undoubtedly he was on the way to wherever it might be that they would hang him.
CHAPTER 3
“Look here,” said Igor carefully, to the white-coated, blank-eyed psychologists who regarded him in completely inhuman meditativeness. “After what I’ve been through, you can’t expect me to be afraid of being shot! And you know that you’ve gotten just about everything that my conscious or subconscious mind can give you! There simply isn’t anything more to be had from me. I don’t know any more! So there’s no use!”
There was silence. A figure said detachedly:
“We merely debate what to do next. Under the first hypnotics, you spoke of destruction awaiting our army. Now you deny all knowledge of anything of the sort.”
“Naturally,” said Igor, “at the time I was ashamed and raging. I was to be hung. Anybody would say anything to do all the damage he could under such circumstances. I worked on your counter-intelligence men to make them believe there was something drastic in store for them and all your army. Who wouldn’t have tried to do that? And,” he added in grim triumph, “I managed it. I’d had a short-wave radio, and you people thought I’d have touched off something with it, somehow, so I’ve gotten your army afraid to use its field-sets for fear they’ll set off booby-traps! You marched thirty divisions into my country, when one would have been enough to take over the province you demanded. I think they were going to go right on and annex the rest of the nation, too. But they’re stopped, now. They’re sitting tight right where they are. They’re even using wire-telegraph and couriers and ground-to-plane signalling for communications. Quite a bit of accomplishment for one man, don’t you think?”
One of the white-coated figures said reflectively:
“If you lie, now, it is to get your traps exploded by our actions in the field. If you tell the truth, it is because you know we will not believe you. We must plan something quite decisive, to make quite sure just what you have managed to hide from us.”
Igor licked his lips. He had been in the enemy capital for thirty-six hours. He had been examined in every fashion that science could devise. Physical torture had been limited only by the
fear that—after the course of hypnotic drugs designed to shatter all normal controls—too much agony might make him simply go mad and be useless for further questioning. He was a jangling mass of quivering nerves. He was weak. He was exhausted. He had suffered all that they dared do to him. And if he had courage now, it was because he had no hope whatever. He was possessed by the terrible exhausted composure of a man who has already experienced the worst that they would dare to do.
“The President of our Council of Ministers,” he said as carefully as before, “said that our nation would not consent to be gobbled up province by province. He said that we would not attempt to fight a total war, with the certain death of many or most of our citizens an inevitable consequence, but that any alien soldier who entered our territory did so at his peril.” Igor paused. “I can’t add anything to that. I hope that it was not only a bluff. I think that your army had orders to go on and occupy our entire country, if it looked practical. I hope that if they had such orders, or if they carry them out, that they will be killed to the last man, and that you and all your fellow countrymen die as horribly as it is possible for human beings to die.”
He said it without anger. There was no longer any strength in him for fury, and these enemies would kill him presently in any case. If it suited their purpose to kill him by slow torture they would do so, and if it did not suit their purpose they would not do so. Nothing that he could say or do would make his death easier or harder. Certainly he could do nothing to avoid it.
They waited, looking at him with the same abstracted, unhuman speculation. They were the leading psychologists of the enemy nation, but they were frightened men. They were required to find out, from Igor, the nature of the threat the invading army faced. And so far they had not found out. They couldn’t. He didn’t know. But they did not dare kill him without finding out. Now he saw a faint, hidden hope beginning to appear among them. He had begun to talk of his own volition. They listened, in the hope that something would slip that violence and science had previously failed to extract.
“I have guessed,” said Igor, wearily, but only because they would do no more to him while they had hope of a slip on his part, “I have guessed that our President made his speech only to keep his hand from being forced by those like myself who wanted to fight to the death. He made the speech in order to accomplish the surrender to you. He hoped despairingly that you might be content. When I felt sure of that, I rebelled even though it was too late. I tried to do my small bit to make sure that not he nor anyone else would ever surrender to you again.”
They watched him. It was intended to be unsettling—to make him nervous. He understood and was drearily amused.
“It still seems most likely, to me, that our President merely bluffed. But I hope that I am wrong. We have atomic energy, as you have. We have only large power-installations, that I know of, but we may have atomic bombs and other forms of atomic-energy missiles. Or it is possible that our scientists have found a deadly form of radiation that you do not know how to detect. Perhaps your army is actually already dead, in that every man may have been exposed to deadly radiation as he crossed the border, and his death is already certain.”
One of the white-coated figures said flatly:
“The most careful check of a large number of our soldiers has shown no sign of injury from any sort of radiation.”
“Perhaps,” said Igor, “there are monstrous atomic bombs placed so deeply underground that no detector can discover them.”
“We have used detectors,” said another man shortly, “which would detect a critical mass at more than a mile, behind the most effective shielding yet devised.”
“Then possibly,” said Igor, “our President spoke out of his knowledge that your seizure of our provinces is unjust. Perhaps he knows that the unjust do not prosper. Perhaps the peril to your soldiers is not contrived, but is a simple natural law, such as that they who live by the sword will die by it, and they who rule by terror—”
“Military policies,” said one of the white-coated men harshly, “are not determined by superstition. And there is a specific danger. Your President’s threat would not prevent the occupation of territory, and he knew it. Today we sent him a second ultimatum. We had evidence, we told him, that secret devices designed to murder members of our forces had been left behind in the province we occupied. We cited your capture and his speech as evidence that the government of your country was responsible. We demanded immediate information permitting the neutralization and removal of those devices.”
“Well?” said Igor tiredly. Nerve-racked as he was, and playing for time, he was not capable of emotion. But he felt, suddenly, that he would give almost anything for a cup of coffee. It would hearten him and strengthen him. It was not a normal reaction. It had all the irrelevance of hysteria. He recognized it as a symptom of his own weakness and was stern with it.
“Your government replied,” said the psychologist angrily, “that there were no devices or explosives left behind to its knowledge. But it repeated that every man of our army remained on its soil at his peril!”
Igor shrugged. He had reached a stage of mental and emotional exhaustion where it hardly seemed worth while even to continue to play for time. But he thought wistfully that a cup of coffee would be very, very good.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he repeated indifferently. “I did try to raise hell with your cocksureness. Apparently I did. Now I can say that I was bluffing because you won’t believe it, or that our President was bluffing either. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he isn’t bluffing. But I don’t know.”
“You lie!” raged the psychologist, suddenly. “No man would surrender and threaten at the same time! Not unless he could make good his threat! It would be insane! It would be suicide!” He snatched out a revolver. “Now! What is the trick your government holds in reserve? Quick, or I fire!”
Igor looked at him drearily. He didn’t feel anything. Certainly not fear. But it did occur to him that the enemy was in a deplorable state of nerves because of the President’s cryptic warning. Evidently the pressure upon these psychologists to wrest his non-existent secret from him was extreme.
The white-coated man did not shoot. He subsided, biting his lips nervously. They ordered Igor taken out, so they could consult upon further measures to extract his secret from him. He submitted lethargically when he was led away to a cell. He might be waked to further torture, to offers of bribes, or to face a firing-squad. But since for the moment he was left alone, he practically staggered to the cot the cell contained and fell upon it. He was too shaken and tormented to be able to sleep, but too exhausted even to twitch. He lay still and concentrated all his thoughts upon the idea of how good a cup of coffee would taste. It was soothing to think of a cup of good strong coffee, turned brown with cream… He needed soothing.
Time passed, and he lay in something like semi-consciousness. In the enemy capital outside, flags flew bravely in the sunshine and martial music blared from loudspeakers set up everywhere in the streets. From time to time the brassy music stopped so that magnificently resounding proclamations could be read. No citizen could avoid hearing them.
But just the same, there was tension in the air. The invading army had not been resisted, but it had been warned. If the warning was a bluff, national vanity demanded that it be called, that the army already outnumbering the former population of the invaded province move on. That it should overrun the rest of the tiny nation which had dared to defy, if only verbally, the dauntless, unresisted troops of holy something-or-other. Some of the enemy population demanded this drastic action furiously. But on the other hand—
After all, there was that warning. Any invading soldier in the occupied territory remained at his own peril. A small nation should not dare to make a threat it could not make good. But what menace could there be? The threat was not to the larger nation as a whole—in fact, it specifically did not threaten the cities or civilian population of the greater country—but only the invading
troops.
So the warning could only be a bluff. But it could not be a bluff, because by it Igor’s country practically defied the country to which it had just yielded. Yet there could be no explosives or other deadly material in the province! Every square yard of its surface had been checked and checked again! So it must be a bluff! But the time when a monstrous army was on the march against one was no time to bluff! It was inconceivable that a government could risk a bluff at such a moment…
Flags flew in the sunshine, and loud-speakers blared military music, and there were boastful proclamations at frequent intervals. But there was tension. If Igor’s nation really possessed some monstrous new device in the art of destruction, it should not have yielded without using it. But if it did not have something new and unprecedentedly deadly, it would not have dared threaten the invading troops…
The Cabinet of the eastern nation bit its collective fingernails, not knowing what to do. The Premier-President would decide, of course, but the Cabinet worried. The warning, as an insult, justified a declaration of war. Repeated, it was a threat which simply had to be regarded with a certain respect because of its very daring. If the smaller nation could achieve slaughter on a gigantic scale, the invaders should withdraw their army and make peace at any price. But to back down would be to admit a blunder, and the Premier-President could not afford that. So the ruling clique of the eastern nation felt it safer to risk the lives of half a million men than certainly to sacrifice their own prestige. And if risk was taken, they might as well make a glorious campaign and annex the whole of the little western nation. Half-way measures had nothing to recommend them.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 50