The last of them filed in, and the masters--two of them, carrying long metal tubes--shut the door. The Alberts were alone. The door's clang was followed by other sounds as the lock was thrown. The new noises, and the strangeness of bare metal walls and artificial light, still novel after only a single day's training, gave rise to something very like a panic, and a confused babble of voices arose from the crowd. "What is this?" "What place is this?" "It is a training place." "My name Hortat. My name Hortat." "What is training?" "There is food here." "What place is this?" "Where are elders?" "Are masters here?" "My food." "Is this a place for sleeping?" "Training is to do what a master says. Training--" "There are no elders. My name Hortat." "My place." "My food." "Where is this?" "Where is this place?" Like the stirring of a child in sleep, the panic lasted only a little while, and gave way to an apathetic peace. Here and there an Albert munched on a leaf, holding it up before his wide mouth in the pose of a giant squirrel. Others sat quietly looking at the walls or the door or the window, or at nothing. One, whose name was Cadnan, stirred briefly and dropped the leaf he was eating and turned to the Albert next to him. "Marvor," he said. "Are you troubled?" Marvor seemed slighter than Cadnan, and his single eye larger, but both looked very much alike to humans, as members of other races, and particularly such races as the human in question judges inferior, are prone to do. "I do not know what happens," he said in a flat tone. "I do not know what is this place, or what we do." "This is the place of masters," Cadnan said. "We train here, and we work here, and live here. It is the rule of the masters." "Yet I do not know," Marvor said. "This training is a hard thing, and the work is also hard when it comes." Cadnan closed his eye for a second, to relax, but he found he wanted to talk. His first day in the world of the masters had been too confusing for him to order it into any sensible structure. Conversation, of whatever kind, was a release, and might provide more facts. Cadnan was hungry for facts. He opened his eye again. "It is what the masters say," he told Marvor. "The masters say we do a thing, and we do it. This is right." Marvor bent toward him. "Why is it right?" he asked. "Because the masters say it is right," Cadnan told him, with the surprised air of a person explaining the obvious. "The elders, too, say it before we come to this place." He added the final sentence like a totally unnecessary clincher--unimportant by comparison with the first reason, but adding a little weight of its own, and making the whole story even more satisfying. Marvor, however, didn't seem satisfied. "The masters always speak truth," he said. "Is this what you tell me?" "It is true," Cadnan said flatly.