repressed a shiver. The room was not cold, but gooseflesh stood out on his arms. Though he was now alone in one of a series of examination rooms to which he had been taken, he felt ill at ease in his nakedness—an effect no doubt carefully calculated, he reflected, to increase the insecurity anyone must feel in the Morale Investigation Center.

Everything in the Center was designed to create the impression that here nothing was—nothing could be—concealed. The walls, the ceilings, the floors, the spare furnishings, the instruments—all were a gleaming, immaculate white plastic, bathed in clear white light. Even the attendants and nurses, as well as the gray-haired Investigators, donned white robes over their uniforms when they entered the Center.

Hendley had not seen the first Investigator since they parted at the beginning of his processing. But in the course of his tests—psychological, intelligence and reaction tests, a humiliatingly thorough physical examination, along with other tests unfamiliar to him—he had met two other men identified as Investigators. Each might have been cast from a single mold. In the small interrogation rooms they seemed to grow, looming larger to the eye like figures on a viewscreen expanding as the camera moved in for a closeup. They were all big men, all distinguished, all gray-haired, all easy of manner—big, handsome, confident men, like idealized father-images.

Suddenly, sitting on the cold white bench, hugging his body with his arms against the unreasonable chill that shook him, Hendley remembered an incident long forgotten, a fragment from that strangely blank period of pre-work—he thought of it that way; not as childhood, but as pre-work. It had been a negative time, like a period of non-existence in preparation for existence. If it had seemed then a time of freedom, that illusion prevailed only because the concept of freedom was not understood. In fact those days had been strictly regimented, filled with classes, recreation hours, group games, prescribed activities from waking to sleeping.

But on one occasion, at least, there had been a kind of escape into life. Hendley hadn't been alone in the daring escapade, although he could not recall the numbers of the other two boys, or even their faces. One had been fat and very blond, with an intense dislike of exercise not of his own choosing. The other had been a small, slender, lively, black-haired boy whose memorable characteristic in Hendley's mind was a flashing smile and a high-pitched, squealing laugh.

The idea had been the 

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