gloriously dead, evenburied, and they couldn't find him. And even if they did finally findhim, what good would it do them?
Some transcendental part of him seemed to remain to observe and triumphover his victory. This time he was dead to stay.
* * * * *
This time he knew at once that the twisting body in the steaming pain,the distorted face, the screams rising and rising were all CharlesMarquis.
Maybe a dream though, he thought. So much pain, so much screaming pain,is not real. In some fraction of a fraction of that interim between lifeand death, one could dream of so much because dreams are timeless.
Yet he found himself anticipating, even through the shredded,dissociated, nameless kind of pain, a repetition of that other time.
The awful bitterness of defeat.
* * * * *
He opened his eyes slowly. It was dark, the same darkness. He was on thesame bed. And the old familiar dark around and the familiarsoundlessness that was now heavier than the most thunderous sound.
Everything around him then seemed to whirl up and go down in a crash. Herolled over to the floor and lay there, his hot face cooled by the coldmetal.
As before, some undeterminable interim of time had passed. And he knewhe was alive. His body was stiff. He ached. There was a drumming in hishead, and then a ringing in his ears as he tried to get up, managed todrag himself to an unsteady stance against the wall. He felt now an icysurety of horror that carried him out to a pin-point in space.
A terrible fatigue hit him. He fell back onto the bed. He lay theretrying to figure out how he could be alive.
He finally slept pushed into it by sheer and utter exhaustion. The bellscalled him awake. The bells started him off again. He tried to talkagain to 4901. They avoided him, all of them. But they weren't reallyalive any more. How long could he maintain some part of himself that heknew definitely was Charles Marquis?
He began a ritual, a routine divorced from that to which all those beingindoctrinated were subjected. It was a little private routine of hisown. Dying, and then finding that he was not dead.
He tried it many ways. He took more grains of the poison. But he wasalways alive again.
"You--4901! Damn you--talk to me! You know what's been happening to me?"
The man nodded quickly over his little canisters of food-concentrate.
"This indoctrination--you, the girl--you went crazy when I talked aboutdying--what--?"
The man yelled hoarsely. "Don't ... don't say it! All this--what you'vebeen going through, can't you understand? All that is part ofindoctrination. You're no different than the rest of us! We've all hadit! All of us. All of us! Some more maybe than others. It had to end.You'll have to give in. Oh God, I wish you didn't. I wish you could win.But you're no smarter than the rest of us. _You'll have to give in!_"
It was 4901's longest and most coherent speech. Maybe I can getsomewhere with him, Marquis thought. I can find out something.
But 4901 wouldn't say any more. Marquis kept on trying. No one, he knew,would ever realize what that meant--to keep on trying to die when no onewould let you, when you kept dying, and then kept waking up again, andyou weren't dead. No one could ever understand the pain that wentbetween the dying and the living. And even Marquis couldn't remember itafterward. He only knew how painful it had been. And knowing that madeeach attempt a little harder for Marquis.
He tried the poison again. There was the big stamping machine that hadcrushed him beyond any semblance of a human being, but he had awakened,alive again, whole again. There was the time he grabbed the power cableand felt himself, in one blinding flash, conquer life in a burst offlame. He slashed his wrists at the beginning of a number of sleepperiods.
When he awakened, he was whole again. There wasn't even a scar.
He suffered the pain of resisting the eating bells until he was so weakhe couldn't respond, and he knew that he died that time too--from purestarvation.
_But I can't stay dead!_
"_... You'll have to give in!_"
* * * * *
He didn't know when it was. He had no idea now how long he had beenhere. But a guard appeared, a cold-faced man who guided Marquis back tothe office where the fat, pink-faced little Manager waited for himbehind the shelf suspended by silver wires from the ceiling.
The Manager said. "You are the most remarkable prisoner we've ever hadhere. There probably will not be another like you here again."
Marquis' features hung slack, his mouth slightly open, his lower lipdrooping. He knew how he looked. He knew how near he was to crackingcompletely, becoming a senseless puppet of the bells. "Why is that?" hewhispered.
"You've tried repeatedly to--you know what I mean of course. You havekept on attempting this impossible thing, attempted it more times thananyone else here ever has! Frankly, we didn't think any human psyche hadthe stuff to try it that many times--to resist that long."
The Manager made a curious lengthened survey of Marquis' face. "Soonyou'll be thoroughly indoctrinated. You are, for all practical purposes,now. You'll work automatically then, to the bells, and think very littleabout it at all, except in a few stereotyped ways to keep your brain andnervous system active enough to carry out simple specialized workduties. Or while the New System lasts. And I imagine that will beforever."
"Forever...."
"Yes, yes. You're immortal now," the Manager smiled. "Surely, after allthis harrowing indoctrination experience, you realize _that_!"
_Immortal. I might have guessed. I might laugh now, but I can't. We whopretend to live in a hell that is worse than death, and you, theManagerials who live in paradise._ We two are immortal.
"That is, you're immortal as long as we desire you to be. You'll nevergrow any older than we want you to, never so senile as to threatenefficiency. That was what you were so interested in finding out onEarth, wasn't it? The mystery behind the Managerials? Why they neverseemed to grow old. Why we have all the advantage, no senility, noweakening, the advantage of accumulative experience without thenecessity of re-learning?"
"Yes," Marquis whispered.
The Manager leaned back. He lit a paraette and let the soothingnerve-tonic seep into his lungs. He explained.
"Every one of you political prisoners we bring here want, aboveeverything else, to die. It was a challenge to our experimental socialorder here. We have no objection to your killing yourself. We havelearned that even the will to die can be conditioned out of the mostdetermined rebel. As it has been conditioned out of you. You try to dieenough times, and you do die, but the pain of resurrection is so greatthat finally it is impossible not only to kill yourself, but even tothink of attempting it."
Marquis couldn't say anything. The memory called up by the mention ofself-destruction rasped along his spine like chalk on a blackboard. Hecould feel the total-recall of sensation, the threatening bursts ofpain. "No...." he whispered over and over. "No--please--no--"
The Manager said. "We won't mention it anymore. You'll never be able totry any overt act of self-destruction again."
The bright light from the ceiling lanced like splinters into the tenderflesh of Marquis' eyeballs, danced about the base of his brain inreddened choleric circles. His face had drawn back so that hischeekbones stood out and his nose was beak-like. His irises became abright painful blue in the reddened ovals of his eyes.
The Manager yawned as he finished explaining. "Each prisoner enteringhere has an identification punch-plate made of his uniqueelectro-magnetic vibratory field. That's the secret of our immortalityand yours. Like all matter, human difference is in the electro-magnetic,vibratory rates. We have these punch-plates on file for every prisoner.We have one of you. Any dead human body we merely put in a tank whichdissolves it into separate cells, a mass of stasis with potentiality tobe reformed into any type of human being of which we have anidentification punch-plate, you see? This tank of dissociated cells issurrounded by an electro-magnetic
field induced from a machine by one ofthe identification punch-plates. That particular human being livesagain, the body, its mind, its life pattern identical to that from whichthe original punch-plate was made. Each time you have died, we reducedyour body, regardless of its condition, to dissociated cells in thetank. The identification punch-plate was put in the machine. Your uniqueelectro-magnetic field reformed the cells into you. It could only beyou, as you are now. From those cells we can resurrect any one of whomwe have an identification plate.
"That is all, No. 5274. Now that you're indoctrinated, you will workfrom now on in the food-mart, because of your experience."
* * * * *
For an undeterminable length of time, he followed the routines of thebells. In the big food-mart, among