Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

He couldn't have heard me, because he went on with no change of expression. "Commander Littlefield is within his rights in refusing to permit us to question him as to what took place on board the Mars' rocket. We have no jurisdiction over such ... irregularities in space. If we questioned just one of his officers, the Board would have every right to revoke our charter. But two of the officers have come to us and voluntarily submitted information which we cannot ignore. We believe that the internal security of the Colony is in danger and we intend to take steps to make sure that none of the questions we have a right to ask will remain unanswered."

He was laying it on the line, all right, speaking with an almost surgical kind of precision, so that I couldn't claim later—if I turned stubborn—that I'd failed to understand him. It's funny how a man who's holding all the cards will sometimes do that, just on the off-chance that you may have an ace up your sleeve and may use it to make trouble for him later on.

He must have been pretty sure I didn't have a concealed ace, however, for he backed up what he was saying with the most dangerous kind of threat. Dangerous to him ... if there had been a hidden listening device in the room and a tape with that threat on it had come to the attention of the Board.

"I hope, for your sake," he said, "that you'll keep nothing back. It is very unpleasant to sit in a Big-Image interrogation room and have part of your mind destroyed. The part you value most, that makes you what you are—destroyed, sliced away. Yes ... sliced away is quite accurate, even though no instrument would be needed and not a hand would be laid on you. You can cut deep into the brain with vibrations alone. But nothing ... physical ever takes place in the Big-Image interrogation room. No knife or vibrator, as you know. The destruction is brought about in a quite different way. But it's just as drastic and irreversible as a prefrontal lobotomy."

He stopped talking abruptly, looking past me at the opposite wall, as if he could already see the shadow of a broken and tormented man projected there. I could see it too, and I didn't like to think that I was coming that close to sharing his thoughts. But it was useless to pretend that the man who was casting that shadow might not turn out to be me.

So they had them on Mars, too, with the Wendel police on hand to make sure that the big screen with its multiple sound tracks and the smoothly operating projector were kept carefully hidden from the law. Big-Image interrogation rooms—a cruel vestige of the brain-washing techniques that had so outraged world opinion in the middle decades of the twentieth century that they had been castigated and outlawed by the United Nations, the World Court and every responsible Governmental agency on Earth.

But the criminal mind has very little respect for world opinion or restrictions on brutal practices that are very difficult to enforce. Big-Image interrogation had begun as a police investigation procedure, which made it easy for the wrong kind of police force to resort to it and claim historic precedent and moral justification as a cover-up if their activities ever came to light.

I was sure that Glacial Stare had mentioned it solely to turn the screw as far as it would go, hoping I'd turn pale and answer his questions in a completely cooperative way. I was sure that if I did he'd stop threatening me immediately, listen with attentive ear to what I had to say and apologize for letting me think, even for a moment, that it was just a part of my mind he'd been planning to destroy. Why should he want to upset me that way, when the only thing he'd had in mind from the start was to persuade me to talk and then relieve me of all anxiety by killing me?

He wasn't giving me credit for having the kind of brain it would have been worth taking the trouble to destroy, even in part, but there was nothing to be gained by reminding him of that.

You don't have to be a professional historian or even a data-collecting research specialist in the police procedure field to pinpoint the origin of Big-Image interrogation in the middle years of the twentieth century.