. You've got your pistol."

The old master sergeant was stating a fact, not asking a question.

"Ha!"

Bennington's barked reply arose from memory of his first argument with
Thornberry. The assistant warden-chief psychologist had been astounded
to learn that the general did not trust the conditioning process as a
solid basis for prison security. Beginning there, the opening
engagement in the battle of ideas, their contrasting philosophies had
deployed and made the entire prison a battleground.

But Bennington dismissed his chief assistant from his thoughts as soon
as he stood in the darkness on the little knoll outside his house. He
concentrated on orienting himself.

* * * * *

The camp had not been changed much when it had been made over from a
ground-to-air missile station, protecting the freight yards of
Harrisburg, into the processing prison for six states.

They had tapped the Juniata a few hundred yards northwest of where it
joined the Susquehanna, for the water that filled the moat encircling
three sides of the prison. The union of the two rivers formed the
water barrier on the east.

_What was it Thornberry had said about the moat? Oh, yes, not to keep
the poor misguided inmates imprisoned, but to keep unwanted people
out...._

When his eyes were accustomed to the darkness, Bennington walked east
and came to the first of the two new additions to the camp. A long
building, used by psychological and medical men to determine the total
amount of usefulness to society left in a man convicted of a crime.

Beyond it, the second addition, a barbed-wire-enclosed building called
The Cage, where prisoners where first received and conditioned.

He turned and began retracing his steps, at the same time mentally
following what happened to a prisoner in each of the two buildings.
When the official party accompanying him to his new post had arrived
late yesterday, for the second time he had followed a man through the
procedure.

The quick frisking and the slow interview with two purposes, by
visual, oral and written tests determining the amount of
suggestibility to hypnotic conditioning plus the quicker giving of a
card to denote a temporary classification.

Light gray for minor offenses; yellow for major crimes; pink for
lifers, psychos and killers; blues for juvenile delinquents; green for
all females, with a colored clip-tab denoting the weight of the
offense.

A temporary c