"I'm not dead yet," the prisoner said brokenly. Suddenly he mustered some strength and managed to look up. "Tell me something, Kroll. I want to know something."

"Yes?"

"Why do you do what you do?"

"You mean--Interrogate?"

"I mean torture," Leslie said.

"I am an Interrogator because it is my duty to the State. Treason must be unmasked, the enemies of the State destroyed. It is necessary."

Leslie looked up, and there seemed to be pity in his eyes. "Just one question, Kroll. Doesn't it bother you, when you go home? How do you know you're right and we're wrong?"

Kroll started to say something, then saw there was no point in bothering.

"Prisoner is dead," said the Inquisitor.

"Take him away," ordered Kroll. The day was over.

What Leslie had said preyed on Kroll's mind all the way home. He got out of the tube and made his way to his austere room with his mind fixed on one question--the snarling words the dying prisoner had hurled at him: How do you know you're right and we're wrong?

They had to be wrong, Kroll told himself firmly. The State had to be right. It was necessary; it was logical; it was the way things had always been.

But the thought obsessed him, and the image of Neil Leslie's face, bloody but undefeated, hung before him as he went about his evening's activities. The face was still in his mind as he prepared to go to bed.

Odd, Kroll thought. This was the first time he had been disturbed after a torture session. He had seen hundreds--no, thousands--pass through the Inquisitor, come out shambling rags of bone and flesh, and it had never bothered him, because they were enemies of the State and deserved no more.

He dropped off into an uneasy sleep. But suddenly, in the small hours of the night, he sat bolt upright in bed, a cold, clammy perspiration breaking out on him.

Leslie had just asked the question for the hundredth time. And Kroll had had no 

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