After the bells stopped ringing and the darkness was all around him, he got up. He counted off the steps. No guards, no alarms, nothing to stop him. They depended on the conditioners to take care of everything. This time he would do it. This time they wouldn’t bring him back.
No one else could even talk with him about it, even though he knew they all wanted to escape. Some part of them still wanted to, but they couldn’t. So it was up to him. He stopped against the smooth, opaque, up-curving glasite dome. It had a brittle bright shine that reflected from the Moon’s surface. It was night out there, with an odd metallic reflection of Earthlight against the naked crags.
He hesitated. He could feel the intense and terrible cold, the airlessness out there fingering hungrily, reaching and whispering and waiting.
He turned the wheel. The door opened. He entered the air-lock and shut the first door when the air-pressure was right. He turned the other wheel and the outer lock door swung outward. The out-rushing air spun him outward like a balloon into the awful airless cold and naked silence.
His body sank down into the thick pumice dust that drifted up around him in a fine powdery blanket of concealment. He felt no pain. The cold airlessness dissolved around him in deepening darkening pleasantness. This time he was dead, thoroughly and finally and gloriously dead, even buried, and they couldn’t find him. And even if they did finally find him, what good would it do them?
Some transcendental part of him seemed to remain to observe and triumph over his victory. This time he was dead to stay.
This time he knew at once that the twisting body in the steaming pain, the distorted face, the screams rising and rising were all Charles Marquis.
Maybe a dream though, he thought. So much pain, so much screaming pain, is not real. In some fraction of a fraction of that interim between life and death, one could dream of so much because dreams are timeless.
Yet he found himself anticipating, even through the shredded, dissociated, nameless kind of pain, a repetition of that other time.
The awful bitterness of defeat.
He opened his eyes slowly. It was dark, the same darkness. He was on the same bed. And the old familiar dark around and the familiar soundlessness that was now heavier than the most thunderous sound.
Everything around him then seemed to whirl up and go down in a crash. He rolled over to the floor and lay there, his hot face cooled by the cold metal.
As before, some undeterminable interim of time had passed. And he knew he was alive. His body was stiff. He ached. There was a drumming in his head, and then a ringing in his ears as he tried to get up, managed to drag himself to an unsteady stance against the wall. He felt now an icy surety of horror that carried him out to a pin-point in space.
A terrible fatigue hit him. He fell back onto the bed. He lay there trying to figure out how he could be alive.
He finally slept pushed into it by sheer and utter exhaustion. The bells called him awake. The bells started him off again. He tried to talk again to 4901. They avoided him, all of them. But they weren’t really alive any more. How long could he maintain some part of himself that he knew definitely was Charles Marquis?
He began a ritual, a routine divorced from that to which all those being indoctrinated were subjected. It was a little private routine of his own. Dying, and then finding that he was not dead.
He tried it many ways. He took more grains of the poison. But he was always alive again.
“You—4901! Damn you—talk to me! You know what’s been happening to me?”
The man nodded quickly over his little canisters of food-concentrate.
“This indoctrination—you, the girl—you went crazy when I talked about dying—what—?”
The man yelled hoarsely. “Don’t… don’t say it! All this—what you’ve been going through, can’t you understand? All that is part of indoctrination. You’re no different than the rest of us! We’ve all had it! All of us. All of us! Some more maybe than others. It had to end. You’ll have to give in. Oh God, I wish you didn’t. I wish you could win. But you’re no smarter than the rest of us. You’ll have to give in!”
It was 4901’s longest and most coherent speech. Maybe I can get somewhere with him, Marquis thought. I can find out something.
But 4901 wouldn’t say any more. Marquis kept on trying. No one, he knew, would ever realize what that meant—to keep on trying to die when no one would let you, when you kept dying, and then kept waking up again, and you weren’t dead. No one could ever understand the pain that went between the dying and the living. And even Marquis couldn’t remember it afterward. He only knew how painful it had been. And knowing that made each attempt a little harder for Marquis.
He tried the poison again. There was the big stamping machine that had crushed him beyond any semblance of a human being, but he had awakened, alive again, whole again. There was the time he grabbed the power cable and felt himself, in one blinding flash, conquer life in a burst of flame. He slashed his wrists at the beginning of a number of sleep periods.
When he awakened, he was whole again. There wasn’t even a scar.
He suffered the pain of resisting the eating bells until he was so weak he couldn’t respond, and he knew that he died that time too—from pure starvation.
But I can’t stay dead!
“…You’ll have to give in!”
He didn’t know when it was. He had no idea now how long he had been here. But a guard appeared, a cold-faced man who guided Marquis back to the office where the fat, pink-faced little Manager waited for him behind the shelf suspended by silver wires from the ceiling.
The Manager said. “You are the most remarkable prisoner we’ve ever had here. There probably will not be another like you here again.”
Marquis’ features hung slack, his mouth slightly open, his lower lip drooping. He knew how he looked. He knew how near he was to cracking completely, becoming a senseless puppet of the bells. “Why is that?” he whispered.
“You’ve tried repeatedly to—you know what I mean of course. You have kept on attempting this impossible thing, attempted it more times than anyone else here ever has! Frankly, we didn’t think any human psyche had the stuff to try it that many times—to resist that long.”
The Manager made a curious lengthened survey of Marquis’ face. “Soon you’ll be thoroughly indoctrinated. You are, for all practical purposes, now. You’ll work automatically then, to the bells, and think very little about it at all, except in a few stereotyped ways to keep your brain and nervous system active enough to carry out simple specialized work duties. Or while the New System lasts. And I imagine that will be forever.”
“Forever….”
“Yes, yes. You’re immortal now,” the Manager smiled. “Surely, after all this harrowing indoctrination experience, you realize that!”
Immortal. I might have guessed. I might laugh now, but I can’t. We who pretend to live in a hell that is worse than death, and you, the Managerials who live in paradise. We two are immortal.
“That is, you’re immortal as long as we desire you to be. You’ll never grow any older than we want you to, never so senile as to threaten efficiency. That was what you were so interested in finding out on Earth, wasn’t it? The mystery behind the Managerials? Why they never seemed to grow old. Why we have all the advantage, no senility, no weakening, the advantage of accumulative experience without the necessity of re-learning?”