Hell's Gate

plight.
        
         You have been taken from your home in the middle of the night along with a bag of books the local police-a division arm of the Gestapo - have labeled left-wing. The most damning one was the antitotalitarian novel 1984. They rammed the books into the blue denim bag, handcuffed you, and led you out. They kept shoving you all the way to the patrol car. When you tried to strike at them, they knocked you down and kicked you in the hip. Now you are at the police station, in a small room with featureless walls. There is no furniture except a wooden bench to which you have been tied. They have left you alone for an hour now. You are trembling, waiting to find out what will happen. There is the faint smell of vomit and urine in the air. You wonder what they have done to previous prisoners to make these smells permeate the chamber. Then they come in. Four of them. The chief officer, a fair-skinned, blue-eyed man with a belly slung over his black leather belt. They are dressed in dark brown uniforms, wearing shiny, knee-length boots. The chief officer slaps the soles of your shoes with his billy club. The impact jars half your body. He asks you to confess, but when you ask to what, he just slaps your feet again. Well, that will not be too hard to take. Just so they don't go beyond that. But two hours later, your feet are swollen and aching. Your legs are on fire. Another hour, and your feet swell until the seams of your shoes split. You wet yourself. You know where the smells come from. You can feel the vomit in the back of your throat. Slap, slap, slap, slap…
        
        There were ten scenes in all, propaganda most certainly, but propaganda at once so horrid and believable that there was no denying its persuasive effect, Salsbury had been willing to cooperate, but had he not been, this would have convinced him. Not only because the entire population (save a handful of dictators and their staffs) of the world was suffering, but because he and Lynda would suffer too if the vacii could break through into this probability line and establish another experimental outpost.
        When it was over, they settled back from the computer, trembling, white, perspiring. Whatever future man had been building for himself, no matter what degree of stupidity, it could never match the nightmare of that fascist experiment, of that place where alien vacii maintained the psychotics in power. That was a society various nations had accepted before, eventually to reject it. But if Vic didn't continue with the plan, that insanity would be his own future.
        “Well?” the 810-40.04 asked.
        “Tell me what I have to do,” he said numbly.
        After the explanations were given, questioned, and understood, there was a good deal of work to be done. It was not particularly difficult labor, though it was tedious. At the computer's directions, Salsbury brought the two other trunks down from the upstairs bedroom, into the cellar, pressed them down against the floor before the spot in the wall where the vacii had opened their portal. The computer opened the other two trunks with an electric impulse broadcast to their interior locks. The lids popped open, revealing a great many wires and tubes, machine parts. It was Salsbury's job to put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle, following the 810-40.04's directions. He was assembling, he found, a prober exactly like that of the vacii. When the aliens tuned in tonight, Salsbury would lock their beam with the vacii beam and open the bubble between probabilities to the passage of living tissue. This living tissue would be Victor.
        The fact that their would-be mechanical assassins waited on the other side didn't help the slimy rollings of his stomach. If there were fifty robots however, he would be ready for them, for the 810-40.04 was equipping him for almost any eventuality.
        But did a hero's knees knock together? Or did his breath come difficult?
        No, he wasn't feeling much like a hero. He felt more like a little boy who has been playing a game with older kids and then abruptly discovers they're getting too rough for him and that there is no way he can graciously get out of the game. He was trained to fight. The chemical tape that had played itself the night of Harold Jacobi's murder had crammed thousands of pieces of commando combat techniques into his brain. But all the tricks of karate and judo and savate seemed weak when pitted