casing and stepped clumsily into the sensitizing shower. The huge bag began to shrink and cloud, adhering to his body as though it were another layer of his skin.Since the casing acted as a magnifying extension of his nervous and muscular systems, his body, within the casing, felt nothing. There was no sense of contact as he walked across the floor and opened the bathroom door. As far as feeling went, he was without a body.
He said "hello" experimentally, to see if the distorter was still on. It wasn't. The hard flatness of his voice surprised him. The rosy light was gone also. Something peculiar to women caused the filter to slide over the coldly glowing silver. No man could cause it. No warrior was supposed to want to.

He went through the curtains into the tube-like corridor and joined the other silver warriors on their way to the mess hall. He knew no one of them, yet knew them all. In battle, no friend of his would die, yet no one would die that he did not know. Two hundred years of war in this forgotten bit of the universe had shown the value of this. Some day, if he lived to be old, he would become a civilian. Until then the only faces he would see would be his own and those of the subnormal servers in the mess hall. He had no loyalties except to the fortress. The fortress was his past, present and future.

He nodded a greeting to his server. "How are you today, Teddy?" The voice distorter made him a gentle baritone.
The moron stared at him blankly, not understanding what was spoken, not caring. It was mentally impossible for him to care about anyone and psychologically impossible for anyone to care about him. That was why he was allowed to serve in the mess.
He set Jord's rations before him in their plastic containers. A scientific measure of calories, proteins, vitamins, minerals and hay-like roughage.
Jord wished the idiot was able to talk, but decided against holding a one-sided conversation with him. He used to do it quite often, taking pleasure in the shifting planes of his face, until he'd become sick with longing for a complete human being. He knew no one and only his psychiatrist knew him. The fortress was to him one complete body.
The parts of that body could never be allowed to become more important than the total of those parts. It was the first thing a potential master of a Galbth II learned: The basic lesson in loneliness.
He choked down the measured kilograms of roughage, saving the concentrates until the last when he could suck out the synthetic flavouring and delude himself for a moment that he was eating food. His fare consisted of the precise amount necessary to keep him operating at maximum efficiency and maintain optimum size. A two-pound variation in his 

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