The Inquisitor by Robert Silverberg

In a grim authoritarian future, Interrogator Conway Kroll performs his duty with cold certainty, greeting three accused traitors and defending torture as a necessary function of the State. Florence Horniman refuses to confess and is subjected to the merciless Inquisitor, while Chester Wengrove eventually breaks, is declared "exonerated," and then sent to quarantine in a cruel parody of mercy. The machinery of punishment is orderly, bureaucratic, and absolute, turning pain into policy. But Neil Leslie endures the Inquisitor longer than anyone before him, resisting until death and leaving Kroll with a devastating question about righteousness, certainty, and who has the right to judge. That question seeds the first doubt Kroll has ever known, and by morning his brief self-assurance collapses in a sharp reversal: the State turns on him, accusing him of treason with his own words. Stark and unsettling, this tale exposes the brutality of blind loyalty and the ease with which oppressive systems devour even their most faithful servants. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.