n, so much screaming pain,
is not real. In some fraction of a fraction of that interim between life
and death, one could dream of so much because dreams are timeless.

Yet he found himself anticipating, even through the shredded,
dissociated, nameless kind of pain, a repetition of that other time.

The awful bitterness of defeat.

* * * * *

He opened his eyes slowly. It was dark, the same darkness. He was on the
same bed. And the old familiar dark around and the familiar
soundlessness that was now heavier than the most thunderous sound.

Everything around him then seemed to whirl up and go down in a crash. He
rolled over to the floor and lay there, his hot face cooled by the cold
metal.

As before, some undeterminable interim of time had passed. And he knew
he was alive. His body was stiff. He ached. There was a drumming in his
head, and then a ringing in his ears as he tried to get up, managed to
drag himself to an unsteady stance against the wall. He felt now an icy
surety of horror that carried him out to a pin-point in space.

A terrible fatigue hit him. He fell back onto the bed. He lay there
trying to figure out how he could be alive.

He finally slept pushed into it by sheer and utter exhaustion. The bells
called him awake. The bells started him off again. He tried to talk
again to 4901. They avoided him, all of them. But they weren't really
alive any more. How long could he maintain some part of himself that he
knew definitely was Charles Marquis?

He began a ritual, a routine divorced from that to which all those being
indoctrinated were subjected. It was a little private routine of his
own. Dying, and then finding that he was not dead.

He tried it many ways. He took more grains of the poison. But he was
always alive again.

"You--4901! Damn you--talk to me! You know what's been happening to me?"

The man nodded quickly over his little canisters of food-concentrate.

"This indoctrination--you, the girl--you went crazy when I talked about
dying--what--?"

The man yelled hoarsely. "Don't ... don't say it! All this--what you've
been going through, can't you understand? All that is part of
indoctrination. You're no different than the rest of us! We've all had
it! All of us. All of us! Some more maybe than others. It had to end.
You'll have to give in. Oh God, I wish you didn't. I wish you could win.
But you're no smarter than the rest of us. _You'll have to give in!_