e a revolt. Still, he supposed
the grim-faced guards had a symbolic value. They reminded the newly
awakened men of the most important fact of their lives: that they were
prisoners.

After a few minutes, a man in a somber uniform stepped out on the
balcony. He held up his hand for attention, although the prisoners were
already watching him fixedly. Then, though he had no visible means of
amplification, his voice boomed hollowly through the auditorium.

"This is an indoctrination talk," he said. "Listen carefully and try to
absorb what I am about to tell you. These facts will be very important
for your existence."

The prisoners watched him. The speaker said, "All of you have, within
the last hour, awakened in your cells. You have discovered that you
cannot remember your former lives--not even your names. All you possess
is a meager store of generalized knowledge; enough to keep you in touch
with reality.

"I will not add to your knowledge. All of you, back on Earth, were
vicious and depraved criminals. You were people of the worst sort, men
who had forfeited any right to consideration by the State. In a less
enlightened age, you would have been executed. In our age, you have been
deported."

The speaker held out his hands to quiet the murmur that ran through the
auditorium. He said, "All of you are criminals. And all of you have one
thing in common: an inability to obey the basic obligatory rules of
human society. Those rules are necessary for civilization to function.
By disobeying them, you have committed crimes against all mankind.
Therefore mankind rejects you. You are grit in the machinery of
civilization, and you have been sent to a world where your own sort is
king. Here you can make your own rules, and die by them. Here is the
freedom you lusted for; the uncontained and self-destroying freedom of a
cancerous growth."

The speaker wiped his forehead and glared earnestly at the prisoners.
"But perhaps," he said, "a rehabilitation is possible for some of you.
Omega, the planet to which we are going, is _your_ planet, a place ruled
entirely by prisoners. It is a world where you could begin again, with
no prejudices against you, with a clean record! Your past lives are
forgotten. Don't try to remember them. Such memories would serve only to
restimulate your criminal tendencies. Consider yourselves born afresh as
of the moment of awakening in your cells."

The speaker's slow, measured words had a certain hypno