The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [58]
He wound up being led, still blindfolded, into some sort of building, down a hall, and into a room where his captors sat him down. Then one of them spoke to him in a gruff, accented English: “Hold out hands in front of you. No, with palms up!” And when he did, he was struck on the palms with something brutally heavy.
The pain was sharp. Ranjit couldn’t help crying out. Then the voice again: “Now you tell truth. What is name?”
That was the first question Ranjit was asked under duress, and the one asked most often of all. His questioners did not choose to believe the simple fact that he was Ranjit Subramanian, who chanced to be wearing some garments belonging to somebody else, whose name, as shown by the labels stitched to the garments, was Kirthis Kanakaratnam. Each time he gave the truthful answer, they exacted the penalty for lying.
This was different for each of the questioners. When it was the stubby, sweaty man named Bruno asking the questions, his favorite weapon for gaining truth was a length of electrical cable, four or five centimeters thick and capable of inflicting extreme pain wherever it was employed. Alternatively Bruno would give Ranjit a violent open-handed slap on his bare belly; this was not only painful, it made Ranjit wonder every time it was applied if it might not be rupturing his appendix or spleen. But there was something comforting about Bruno’s technique. No fingernails were extracted, no bones broken, no eyes gouged out; it seemed, hopefully, to Ranjit that they were not doing anything that would leave a permanent mark, and what that suggested to Ranjit was that they might ultimately be planning to let him go.
That hope, however, didn’t last. It vanished when, one day, Bruno exasperatedly threw his electrical cable across the room, grabbed up a short wooden club from the table of useful implements, and repeatedly smashed Ranjit across the face with it. That cost Ranjit a black eye and a knocked-out front tooth, as well as most of his tenuously held hope for ultimate release.
The other main torturer was an elderly man who never gave a name but had one eye always half-closed. (Ranjit thought of him as “Squinty.”) He seldom left a mark on Ranjit, and he was curiously reassuring in his conversation. On the very first day Ranjit met him, Ranjit held by two powerful assistants flat on his back, Squinty held up a square of cloth. “What we will do to you now,” he warned politely, “will make you think you are going to die. You won’t. I won’t let that happen. Only you must answer my questions truthfully.” And then he spread the cloth over Ranjit’s face and poured cold water over it from a metal pitcher.
Ranjit had never experienced anything quite like it. The effect wasn’t so much pain as brutalizing, incapacitating terror. Ranjit had not failed to hear and understand that Squinty had promised he wouldn’t die of this experience, but his body had understandings of its own. It knew that it was being terminally, lethally drowned, and it wanted the process stopped at once. “Help!” Ranjit cried, or tried to cry. “Stop! Let me up!” And all that came out was a bubbly, choky splatter of watery parts of sound, none of them like any English words—
The trickle of poured water stopped, the cloth was pulled off his face, and Ranjit was lifted to sitting position. “Now, what is your name?” Squinty asked politely.
Ranjit tried to stop coughing long enough to get the words out. “I’m Ranjit Sub—” he began, but he didn’t even finish saying his name before his shoulders were slammed back onto the floor, the cloth was over his face again, and the terrible pouring of water began once more.
Ranjit managed to hold out four times more before the heart was gone out of him, further resistance was impossible, and he gasped