The man was No. 4901. He hadn’t been here so long. His face was thin and gray. His hair was dark, and he was about the same size and build as Marquis. His mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were closed and there was a slight quivering at the ends of the fingers which were laced across his stomach.
“Hello,” Marquis said. The man shivered, then opened dull eyes and looked up at Marquis. “I just got in. Name’s Charles Marquis.”
The man blinked. “I’m—I’m—No. 4901.” He looked down at his chest, repeated the number. His fingers shook a little as he touched his lips.
Marquis said. “What’s this indoctrination?”
“You—learn. The bells ring—you forget—and learn—”
“There’s absolutely no chance of escaping?” Marquis whispered, more to himself than to 4901.
“Only by dying,” 4901 shivered. His eyes rolled crazily, then he turned over and buried his face in his arms.
The situation had twisted all the old accepted values squarely around. Preferring death over life. But not because of any anti-life attitude, or pessimism, or defeatism. None of those negative attitudes that would have made the will-to-die abnormal under conditions in which there would have been hope and some faint chance of a bearable future. Here to keep on living was a final form of de-humanized indignity, of humiliation, of ignominy, of the worst thing of all—loss of one’s-self—of one’s individuality. To die as a human being was much more preferable over continuing to live as something else—something neither human or machine, but something of both, with none of the dignity of either.
The screening process hadn’t detected the capsule of poison in Marquis’ tooth. The capsule contained ten grains of poison, only one of which was enough to bring a painless death within sixteen hours or so. That was his ace in the hole, and he waited only for the best time to use it.
Bells rang. The prisoners jumped from their beds and went through a few minutes of calisthenics. Other bells rang and a tray of small tins of food-concentrates appeared out of a slit in the wall by each bed. More bells rang, different kinds of bells, some deep and brazen, others high and shrill. And the prisoners marched off to specialized jobs co-operating with various machines.
You slept eight hours. Calisthenics five minutes. Eating ten minutes. Relaxation to the tune of musical bells, ten minutes. Work period eight hours. Repeat. That was all of life, and after a while Marquis knew, a man would not be aware of time, nor of his name, nor that he had once been human.
Marquis felt deep lancing pain as he tried to resist the bells. Each time the bells rang and a prisoner didn’t respond properly, invisible rays of needle pain punched and kept punching until he reacted properly.
And finally he did as the bells told him to do. Finally he forgot that things had ever been any other way.
Marquis sat on his bed, eating, while the bells of eating rang across the bowed heads in the gray uniforms. He stared at the girl, then at the man, 4901. There were many opportunities to take one’s own life here. That had perplexed him from the start—why hasn’t the girl, and this man, succeeded in dying?
And all the others? They were comparatively new here, all these in this indoctrination ward. Why weren’t they trying to leave in the only dignified way of escape left?
No. 4901 tried to talk, he tried hard to remember things. Sometimes memory would break through and bring him pictures of other times, of happenings on Earth, of a girl he had known, of times when he was a child. But only the mildest and softest kind of recollections….
Marquis said, “I don’t think there’s a prisoner here who doesn’t want to escape, and death is the only way out for us. We know that.”
For an instant, No. 4901 stopped eating. A spoonful of food concentrate hung suspended between his mouth and the shelf. Then the food moved again to the urging of the bells. Invisible pain needles gouged Marquis’ neck, and he ate again too, automatically, talking between tasteless bites. “A man’s life at least is his own,” Marquis said. “They can take everything else. But a man certainly has a right and a duty to take that life if by so doing he can retain his integrity as a human being. Suicide—”
No. 4901 bent forward. He groaned, mumbled “Don’t—don’t—” several times, then curled forward and lay on the floor knotted up into a twitching ball.
The eating period was over. The lights went off. Bells sounded for relaxation. Then the sleep bells began ringing, filling up the absolute darkness.
Marquis lay there in the dark and he was afraid. He had the poison. He had the will. But he couldn’t be unique in that respect. What was the matter with the others? All right, the devil with them. Maybe they’d been broken too soon to act. He could act. Tomorrow, during the work period, he would take a grain of the poison. Put the capsule back in the tooth. The poison would work slowly, painlessly, paralyzing the nervous system, finally the heart. Sometime during the beginning of the next sleep period he would be dead. That would leave six or seven hours of darkness and isolation for him to remain dead, so they couldn’t get to him in time to bring him back.
He mentioned suicide to the girl during the next work period. She moaned a little and curled up like a fetus on the floor. After an hour, she got up and began inserting punch cards into the big machine again. She avoided Marquis.
Marquis looked around, went into a corner with his back to the room, slipped the capsule out and let one of the tiny, almost invisible grains, melt on his tongue. He replaced the capsule and returned to the machine. A quiet but exciting triumph made the remainder of the work period more bearable.
Back on his bed, he drifted into sleep, into what he knew was the final sleep. He was more fortunate than the others. Within an hour he would be dead.
Somewhere, someone was screaming.
The sounds rose higher and higher. A human body, somewhere… pain unimaginable twisting up through clouds of belching steam… muscles quivering, nerves twitching… and somewhere a body floating and bobbing and crying… sheets of agony sweeping and returning in waves and the horror of unescapable pain expanding like a volcano of madness….
Somewhere was someone alive who should be dead.
And then in the dark, in absolute silence, Marquis moved a little. He realized, vaguely, that the screaming voice was his own.
He stared into the steamy darkness and slowly, carefully, wet his lips. He moved. He felt his lips moving and the whisper sounding loud in the dark.
I’m alive!
He managed to struggle up out of the bed. He could scarcely remain erect. Every muscle in his body seemed to quiver. He longed to slip down into the darkness and escape into endless sleep. But he’d tried that. And he was still alive. He didn’t know how much time had passed. He was sure of the poison’s effects, but he wasn’t dead. They had gotten to him in time.
Sweat exploded from his body. He tried to remember more. Pain. He lay down again. He writhed and perspired on the bed as his tortured mind built grotesque fantasies out of fragments of broken memory.
The routine of the unceasing bells went on. Bells, leap up. Bells, calisthenics. Bells, eat. Bells, march. Bells, work. He tried to shut out the bells. He tried to talk to 4901. 4901 covered up his ears and wouldn’t listen. The girl wouldn’t listen to him.
There were other ways. And he kept the poison hidden in the capsule in his hollow tooth. He had been counting the steps covering the length of the hall, then the twenty steps to the left, then to the right to where the narrow corridor led again to the left where he had seen the air-lock.