SECURITY BY BRYCE WALTON _If secrecy can be carried to the brink of madness, what can happen when imprisonment and time are added to_ super _secrecy_? [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We, Sam Lewis thought as he lay in the dark trying to sober up, are the living dead. It was a death without honor. It was a death of dusty, sterile stupidity. It was wretched, shameful, a human waste, and far too ridiculous a business to bear any longer. The hell with the war. The hell with the government. The hell with Secret Project X, Y, Z, or D, or whatever infantile code letter identified the legalized tomb in which Sam and the others had been incarcerated too long. He flung his hand around in the dark in a gesture of self-contempt. And his hand found the soft contours of a woman's breast. Her warm body moved, sighed beside him as he turned his head and stared at the dim outline of Professor Betty Seton's oval face, soft and unharried in sleep. Unharried, and unmarried, he thought. Good God. He detached his hand, slipped out of bed and stood in the middle of the floor, found his nylon coverall and sandals, dressed silently, and opened the door to get out of Betty's apartment, but fast. He glanced back, his face hot with bitterness and his mouth twisting with disgust. She moved slightly, and he knew she was awake and looking at him. "Darling," she said thickly, "don't go." She was awake but still drifting in the euphoria of Vat 69. He felt both sad and very mean. Then he shut the door behind him, ran out into the desert night. The line of camouflaged barracks on one side, the grounds including the lab buildings, all loomed up darkly under the starlight. He took a deep breath. Now, he asked himself, have you the guts to get out, tell them off, make the gesture? It won't do any good. Nobody else will care or understand. They're too numb and resigned. You'll never get past the fence. The Guards will haul you in to the Wards and work you over. They'll work over what's left until what's left won't be worth carrying over to the incinerator with the other garbage in the morning. You'll be brainwashed and cleared until you're on mental rock bottom and won't even know what direction up is, and you won't give a damn. But don't you have the guts even to make the gesture, just for the sake of what's left of your integrity, before they dim down your futile brain cells to a faint glow of final and perpetual mediocrity? Betty and he had clung to some integrity, had made a point of not getting too intimate, a kind of challenge, a hold-out against the decadence of the Project. What was left now of any self-respect?