ould have been artificial.

His work provided no refuge for his thought. It was demanding, but
only mechanically so. Strictly speaking, he did not know what he was
doing. No one did, apparently. He did not have the satisfaction of
knowing that what he did was real. He filled large sheets of plastic
with tracings of intricate, interconnected schematic hieroglyphs. But
he knew that in another place a template would be laid over his work.
An irregular portion like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle would be cut out
of it and the rest, perhaps more than half of his work, would be
destroyed.

It was even possible that all of it was destroyed.

Dewforth worked for a firm which made components. Of what, no one
said, no one asked. _Components, Inc._, the firm was called. He knew
that the finished products were small, heavy and very complicated.
Their names were mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by
hyphens or separated by virgules. Some said that these components
performed no functions. Others said that they worked, but their
operations corresponded to no known human need. It was known that some
of the finished products themselves were destroyed. Some maintained
that they were dissolved in vats of hydrofluoric acid. Others argued
that they were encased in cement, then taken out to sea in speedboats
on moonless nights and jettisoned. The favorite rumor was that the
entire firm was a decoy to bewilder agents of foreign powers and
pre-empt their espionage efforts. There was neither proof of this nor
evidence to the contrary.

The penalty for circulating this last rumor was immediate dismissal
with prejudice.

In another place, another time, Dewforth might have spread the burden
of his mood by confiding in other workers, but not under the
circumstances so painstakingly arranged by _Components, Inc._ in the
interest of what was called _The Inter-loathing Index_, or I.I. It was
an axiom of modern industry that a high I.I. meant high productivity
and also tighter security. The latter was as much the measure of the
importance of an industry as what it made or how much. That there was
design in the egg-box compartmentation of workspaces, for example, was
obvious enough. Less overt were the lengths to which Personnel had
gone to discourage the exchange of information, or confidences, among
employees.

Under the guise of aptitude testing, the psychologists had been able
to select and organize teams consisting entirely of mut