"Half the world," Mr. Ainsworth said slowly. "One half of your whole,
wide world!"
Stan stared at him coldly for a full minute, then started to
laugh--laughter that ripped out of him like waves and washed against
the sides of the room.
Sick laughter, because he knew the price he was going to have to pay
for it.
He sobered. There was a time, he thought, when every human being had to
stand up and be counted as a brave man or a coward. This was his.
"And you thought I would take it! You thought I would sell out the
whole human race!" His face was seamed with hate and he thumped his
chest proudly, suddenly not caring what happened to himself. His voice
was hoarse. "I'm one of the apes, remember? They're _my_ people and
it's _my_ planet...."
Mr. Ainsworth's face looked like it was carved from a block of ice.
"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.
Not to have done so would have meant death.
But there was still ... resistance. The personality that had been
Stanley Martin wasn't entirely gone. There were still shattered
fragments of memories and wishes and desires that hadn't been entirely
obliterated. Tiny fragments that made him unreliable.
* * * * *
On the last day, he was strapped into a machine with clamps that
fastened tightly to his head and chest.
The lights dimmed and he was alone in the darkness.
"What is your name?"
The tiny fragments of personality struggled and thought and then
collapsed in bewilderment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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