"Look at me, Martin! Look at me!"
Stan looked and felt the sweat pop out on his forehead and his stomach knot into a small, hard ball.
Mr. Ainsworth was fading, the frames slipping past so slow Stan could count them. And the image that was building up in Mr. Ainsworth's place....
Stan screamed and staggered back against the bulkhead, his arm raised before his eyes.
"You're going to help us," the creature said in a horribly liquid voice. "You're going to help us because you want to. We need advance men to soften this planet up. You're going to be one of them. And after you've done your work, our fleet will arrive!"
It paused dryly.
"But I see you've still got some indoctrination to go through!"
They took him back to one of the cells and starved him and let him live in his own filth until he wasn't sure if he was a human being or some sort of animal. They made him horribly afraid of pain until he screamed in agony when they merely laid the knives on the table. And with pain as a wedge, they took his personality apart piece by piece and flayed it and tortured it until it no longer resembled the personality that had once been Stanley Martin.
He was cut off from all contact with human beings—or creatures who had masqueraded as human. Tanner had disappeared and Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm no longer bothered to appear as homo sapiens. They saw him every waking day and if their interviews had been harsh before, now they were brutal beyond belief.
He believed what they said and he thought what they wanted him to think.