Mnemonic erasure is not merely a punishment, Mrs. Mannion. It's the gateway to rehabilitation for a sick person."

"I—see. May I say goodbye to my husband before you—erase him?"

Going down in the lift tube from the courtroom on the 60th floor of Patrol headquarters to the lab on Level Fourteen, Mannion felt strangely numb inside.

Two Patrol members stood behind him, ready to go for blasters if he made the slightest move toward escaping. But Mannion had no idea of escaping.

He was on his way to be erased.

He wondered what erasure was like. Did it hurt? Did you feel the pain as they stripped away layer after layer of your memory like peelings from an onion? First 2367 would go, but the new year was only two weeks old and he'd spent those two weeks in prison. Then 2366 would vanish—but 2366 was partly gone, at least for the few hours of the Mutiny. Next would go 2365, the year they first landed on Iapetus.

And so, ever backward, they would tear away more and more of the accumulation of memories and experiences that was Dan Mannion. 2364, 2363.

2362. That was the year he met Virginia. They would take away his courtship, his wedding, those wonderful early days of marriage—

The two years as a Patrol Apprentice would go. The four years at the Academy.

Adolescence. Boyhood. Childhood.

Soon there would be nothing left of Dan Mannion but a few vague memories of babyhood, and then even those would be gone. He would emerge from the lab wiped blank, a fresh unmarked slate ready to be given its new identity.

Suddenly, he found himself quivering.

I'm not guilty! I didn't do it! I couldn't have done it!

Too late, a voice said. He saw again the faces of Virginia, of Commander Harkness, of stern-faced Dubrow giving the testimony that damned him.

Too late. Too late to defend yourself.

"Fourteen," the robobrain of the elevator announced. The door slid back. Mannion felt light pressure behind each of his arms as his two guards shoved him gently forward.

A frosted glass door loomed up ahead of him. The sign on the door read Mnemonics Laboratory.

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