Dismembering Wards."

The car whirred them away. The next station, gleaming white rooms, shining and sterile. Danton felt the perspiration streaming down his throat.

Electronic machinery examined the bodies, mechanical hands removed them from the conveyor belts with deft selectivity, deposited them on wheeled, white slabs.

"You will notice," Rhone said calmly, "that the bodies have come through an antiseptic room, and their clothing dissolved. Now they are ready for dismembering."

Men in white moved silently down the line and did their work with sharp, quick strokes. Scalpels and tiny whirring saws and the bodies slowly dwindling into isolated parts. There was no blood, no mess, everything was efficient and thorough and clean.

"The usable body-parts are selected here," Rhone said. "Notice the departments along the walls by each slab? They are refrigerated. They contain separate sections for each of the salvaged body-parts that are worth preserving."

Behind glass in the walls, Danton saw neatly placed parts of the bodies. Hearts, fingers, hands, legs, feet, bone sections, eyes and interior organs. Kidneys, spleens, livers, carefully preserved, neatly arranged and labeled and waiting.

Danton slowly licked his lips. Her voice seemed far away now, droning like an insect on a lazy day far from anywhere, and the endless length of that room seemed dust-mantled and still, so still, he thought, and unreal; but it was real.

"From here, any part of a human body can be replaced by our surgeons. Here is the source of our immortality. When any body organ becomes worn, it is replaced. We are stocking our body-banks, soldier. As you can see."

Danton could see. What he saw was blurring a little though, and his legs seemed numb when he tried to move them.

"Why does it affect you so?" she was asking him then, and he turned and looked at her.

"Why?"

He didn't really know, or else his brain wasn't functioning at the moment. Why? It was beyond horror. It was alien, and yet why should it be alien? As a soldier, why should he find it disturbing? He had been conditioned, and his conditioning had allowed him to destroy millions by pressing buttons, by directing missiles he never saw in flight to a target 

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