Then, slowly, he became accustomed to it, and
accustomed to all the strange things that happened in the closed
classroom.

He _learned_. The machines taught on deep, unconscious levels. The
machines intertwined their lessons with the basic drives, weaving a
pattern of learned behavior with the life instinct. They taught, then
blocked off conscious knowledge of the lessons, sealed it--and fused it.

What had he been taught? _For the social good, you must be your own
policeman and witness. You must assume responsibility for any crime
which might conceivably be yours._

The face of the informer stared impassively at him. It was Barrent's own
face, reflected back from a mirror on the wall.

He had informed on himself. Standing with the gun in his hand that day,
looking down at the murdered man, learned unconscious processes had
taken over. The presumption of guilt had been too great for him to
resist, the similarity to guilt had turned into guilt itself. He had
walked to the robot-confessor's booth, and there he had given complete
and damning evidence against himself, had indicted himself on the basis
of probability.

The robot-confessor had passed the obligatory sentence and Barrent had
left the booth. Well-trained in the lessons of the classroom, he had
taken himself into custody, had gone to the nearest thought-control
center in Trenton. Already a partial amnesia had taken place, keyed to
and triggered by the lessons of the closed classroom.

The skilled android technicians in the thought-control center had
labored hard to complete this amnesia, to obliterate any remnants of
memory. As a standard safeguard against any possible recovering of his
memory, they had implanted a logical construct of his crime beneath the
conscious level. As the regulations required, this construct contained
an implication of the far-reaching power of Earth.

When the job was completed, an automatized Barrent had marched out of
the center, taken a special expressway to the prison ship depot, boarded
the prison ship, entered his cell, and closed the door and left Earth
behind him. Then he had slept until the checkpoint had been passed,
after which the newly arrived guards awakened the prisoners for
disembarkation on Omega....

Now, staring at his own face in the mirror, the last of the conscious
lessons of the classroom became conscious:

_The lessons of the closed classroom must never be consciously known by
the individual. If they b