mpleteness of the
drugging or the hypnosis.... It had been there that both Giles and
Culpepper had been very, very interested to learn if anything a
prisoner said at this point was admissible in a court of law.

The general now understood their relief at Thornberry's explanation:
Anything a man said while under the influence of psychological
conditioning was considered as obtained under duress.

* * * * *

Bennington was still meditating on what Rooney could reveal as he
walked around the mess hall in the center of the compound. Then he
turned to consider again his prison's routine.

He leaned against the south wall of the mess hall and looked across at
the four barrack buildings bulking against the darkness. They were the
two-story type the Army erects for temporary purposes and uses
permanently.

The smell from the overcrowded buildings hit his nose again as
strongly as it had in the afternoon.

And sounds hit his ears, soft sounds that had been muffled by the long
mess hall between him and their source, low sounds further kept from
him by the light wind from the north.

The lights in the barracks had been off since 2100, except, of course,
for the eerie-blue night lights, and the prisoners should be in their
bunks, asleep or at least silent, immobile.

_But why were all the lights off in the compound_, and Bennington
damned himself for not seeking the answer to the question before.

_Thornberry would tell me there is no need for light; that the
prisoners can't escape because their drugging has made them unable, or
their conditioning has made them afraid, to leave the prison._

The sounds, the flickering like fireflies or carefully thumbed
flashlights, didn't come from his near right, Number One, minor
crimes, or Number Two, major crimes exclusive of murder.

They came from between Three and Four.

Number Three. Psychos, sex deviates and murderers, with a couple of
padded cells and barred windows needed upstairs, even though the
inmates were conditioned.

Number Four changed by the addition of an extra latrine for the second
floor. Females on the first, juvenile delinquents on the second.

Bennington had learned to move like a ghost, move quietly or die, on
the almost forgotten battlefields of a police action in Korea. He had
had a post-graduate course in the South-East Asian jungles. On the
Chilean desert he had added to his skills.

He moved now as he had then.

Bu