They took him back to one of the cells and starved him and let him live in his own filth until he wasn't sure if he was a human being or some sort of animal. They made him horribly afraid of pain until he screamed in agony when they merely laid the knives on the table. And with pain as a wedge, they took his personality apart piece by piece and flayed it and tortured it until it no longer resembled the personality that had once been Stanley Martin.

He was cut off from all contact with human beings—or creatures who had masqueraded as human. Tanner had disappeared and Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm no longer bothered to appear as homo sapiens. They saw him every waking day and if their interviews had been harsh before, now they were brutal beyond belief.

He believed what they said and he thought what they wanted him to think.

Not to have done so would have meant death.

But there was still ... resistance. The personality that had been Stanley Martin wasn't entirely gone. There were still shattered fragments of memories and wishes and desires that hadn't been entirely obliterated. Tiny fragments that made him unreliable.

On the last day, he was strapped into a machine with clamps that fastened tightly to his head and chest.

The lights dimmed and he was alone in the darkness.

"What is your name?"

The tiny fragments of personality struggled and thought and then collapsed in bewilderment.

"I ... I'm not sure."

The voices from nowhere continued.

"You have a family. You hate that family."

A faint, drifting haze of memories. Of a woman who had cooked his meals and tucked him into bed at night when he was very young. Of somebody named Larry who had once bailed him out of a street fight by making like Bob Feller with some good-sized rocks....

But what was bed?

What was street-fights?

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