"But where in ten thousand Hellacoriums are we?" Guerlan's voice was mutinous. "I've been a pawn in a game ever since I went to the sphere and blasphemed, since you burst the acid vat and exploded Organic 66! By Neptune's Moon I'll be dissolved if I stir another step without knowing what this is all about!" His green eyes were wide and gleaming, his handsome face set in rigid lines. "All right, atavism! You're on Level Five, and you're going to a meeting. I want you to appraise what the Amnesiac treatment does to human beings, and how the condemned live on this level. The third level is sheer luxury compared to this. You Scientists of the First Level have no conception of what happens on the third, fourth and fifth levels, where life ceases to be even existence and becomes...." But words failed her, and she fell back against her mullioned seat breathing heavily. After a pause she asked: "Will you come now?" "No," Guerlan grinned. "I'll lead the way. It was an experience seeing you in a fury; blessed if I thought anything could disturb you!" He stood up and pressed the plane's dome release and the stale, fetid air of the nether regions of the city swept in. Only the conditioners broke the silence with their constantly iterated and reiterated subconscious homily of simple, child-like thought-patterns for the amnesiacs. It was an eternal reiteration of the "Conditioning Controls" which no amnesiac could ever escape, except at intervals when the amnesiac counter-reaction set in as their metabolism building up a resistance to the administered drug rendered them impervious and they regained a measure of their former memories as consciousness returned. That was the period of danger, when they were at the verge of any madness, in their utter hopelessness. Deliberately they invited death. But here in these vast catacombs, their end was but a detail, and the organic vats eventually received them. "Listen!" It was Perlac's voice indistinct with indignation, "listen to the 'conditioners,' Guerlan!" "Sleep ... sleep now. Deep, dreamless sleep ... for the conservation of your energy is your noblest effort ... so you may conserve your strength for work ... work ... you must, you absolutely must _Achieve_ ... so that you may fulfill your maximum allotment ... maximum ... and be rewarded.... Sleep ... sleep...." Endlessly the fiendish mosaic of lies and psychological half-truths went on and on, imbedding itself in the violated minds that slept in the stupor of the utterly exhausted. Guerlan shivered. A malefic aura of death and torture seemed woven into the matrix of darkness that surrounded them. The very odor of death was in their nostrils as they left the atomo-plane by the light of his torch and faced the narrow, tortuous thoroughfare that wended its way from the wide circle where the plane had come to rest.