"Yes sir." The man hobbled out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Sir Jonathan seems to have been one of the first men to discover the meaning of efficiency and the value of division of labor; I have often read the journal in which he described the manner in which he made the prisoners work. Each man had a certain amount of labor of a special kind to perform. That is, one would blast the ore; another would bring it to the surface. A third would split the stone into workable pieces. A fourth would chip it into rough shape, and so on. Each did his own job ... and nothing else.

Thus each man and woman had a very definite and very circumscribed set of duties to perform each and every day. After twelve or fourteen hours of this, you can imagine that they had little time or energy to think of revolt; instead, they went to their mews and slept like animals.

Late in life, Sir Jonathan had a son whom he sent to Paris to be educated—since he had amassed a considerable fortune by this time. In France, Jonathan, 2nd. made the acquaintance of young Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck and became fired with the latter's still-nebulous ideas about the effect of environment upon heredity.

The second Jonathan rushed back to New Patmos and started experimenting along lines suggested by Lamarck's theories. He set about arranging the marriages of his workers and managing practically every moment of their daily lives. Again there was some trouble, but the aging Jock MacPherson put it down; the details are bloody but they do not matter at this late date.

Sir Jonathan's grandson was able to dispense with guards. By this time the descendants of the original prisoners had lost all initiative. They plodded through their deadly, unvarying tasks and mated as they were told like the automatons they were fast becoming....

Jonathan laid down the letter and stared out at the clanking factory. So this was why? Even as a child he had felt the oppression of this place and had danced with joy on leaving it. The haggard, half-remembered face of his mother floated for a moment before his eyes. No wonder she had seemed always sad.

I was the first Robertson to rebel; I had been educated in England. On my way home I stopped at Jamaica, fell in love with your mother, and, without realizing the hell I was bringing her to, married her. Tom came with us to New Patmos.

I considered myself something of a radical in those days. When 

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