, impenetrable
blackness....

* * * * *

There were voices in the blackness, and a softness under him, but under
his back, when he had been lying on his stomach, as though he were now
on a comfortable bed. They got me alive, he thought; now comes the
brainwashing!

He cracked one eye open imperceptibly. Lights, white and glaring, from a
ceiling far above; walls as white as the lights. Without moving his
head, he opened both eyes and shifted them from right to left. Vaguely,
he could see people and, behind them, machines so simply designed that
their functions were unguessable. He sat up and looked around groggily.
The people, their costumes--definitely not Pan-Soviet uniforms--and the
room and its machines, told him nothing. The hardness under his right
hip was a welcome surprise; they hadn't taken his pistol from him!
Feigning even more puzzlement and weakness, he clutched his knees with
his elbows and leaned his head forward on them, trying to collect his
thoughts.

"We shall have to give up, Gregory," a voice trembled with
disappointment.

"Why, Anthony?" The new voice was deeper, more aggressive.

"Look. Another typical reaction; retreat to the foetus."

Footsteps approached. Another voice, discouragement heavily weighting
each syllable: "You're right. He's like all the others. We'll have to
send him back."

"And look for no more?" The voice he recognized as Anthony faltered
between question and statement.

A babel of voices, in dispute; then, clearly, the voice Benson had come
to label as Gregory, cut in:

"I will never give up!"

He raised his head; there was something in the timbre of that voice
reminding him of his own feelings in the dark days when the UN had
everywhere been reeling back under the Pan-Soviet hammer-blows.

"Anthony!" Gregory's voice again; Benson saw the speaker; short, stocky,
gray-haired, stubborn lines about the mouth. The face of a man chasing
an illusive but not uncapturable dream.

"That means nothing." A tall thin man, too lean for the tunic-like
garment he wore, was shaking his head.

Deliberately, trying to remember his college courses in psychology, he
forced himself to accept, and to assess, what he saw as reality. He was
on a small table, like an operating table; the whole place looked like a
medical lab or a clinic. He was still in uniform; his boots had soiled
the white sheets with the dust of Armenia. He had all his equipment,
in