Worst of all, that hundred-times-bigger-than-life illusion doesn't depend on size alone, as I've pointed out. It depends on the over-all magnification of reality that takes place in a big screen spectacle, the disorientation that makes the real world seem to shrivel into insignificance.
It seldom takes longer than five hours to complete the brain-washing. You pass through three stages. At the end of an hour—or two, at most—when the torment becomes almost unbearable you start to hallucinate a little, but you're still sane enough to answer most of the questions they ask you. Then you become so hopelessly psychotic that your answers can no longer be relied on. But they're satisfied, they've got what they wanted from you when they started the interrogation.
Without wasting any more time they go on to the third stage. They calm you down and "cure" you with the mental-torture equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy. They do that to make sure you'll lose the part of your mind that can resent what's been done to you, and summon enough will power to turn accuser.
And now I was lying flat on my back, unsure of how much strength was left in me, and Glacial Stare was threatening me with that! Not just an hour or two with the barrel-chested lads—on rare occasions they stopped just short of the third stage—but the full, deep-cut treatment.
[14]
He'd made it plain that he was representing Wendel. But he hadn't come right out and identified himself, and I had no way of knowing exactly what kind of Wendel agent he was. The worst kind, beyond a doubt. But what I would have liked to know took in more territory than that.
Was he ... a replacement? Had he been instructed to step into the shoes of the secret agent the robot had killed in space? If he had, the satisfaction he'd get from killing me would probably exceed the pleasure a run-of-the-mill Wendel police officer would experience.
It would be easier for him to identify with the slain crewman and feel a sense of personal outrage strong enough to make him think of himself as an avenger. The fact that he wasn't wearing a uniform lent support to that grim possibility. When a man has a strong personal reason for wanting you dead it can make the official reason seem twice as urgent. It could also bring into his face the kind of look that Glacial Stare was still keeping trained on me.
There was only one thing I knew with absolute certainty. Answering his questions would do me no good—would only make the danger greater the instant I stopped talking. I'd be signing my own death warrant with a vengeance if I co-operated with him right there in the hospital room and spared him the trouble of having me bound and gagged and smuggled out of the hospital into a Big-Image interrogation room.