"No one knows, really. A machine tears your mind apart and puts it together again--differently." Lanny shivered as he remembered the half-dozen readjustment cases he had seen in the Santa Barbara treaty area--living shells, with all initiative and individuality drained from their souls. He moved to the barred door of his cell. For a split-second of panic he seized the bars and futilely tried to pry them apart. Slowly edging into his consciousness came a vague awareness of the structural pattern of the energy units in the metal. It was the same extension of his integrated community of cells which he had with his hunting club. His panic vanished; he felt a little ashamed because he had been afraid. It would be no problem to escape. He held the bars and allowed his mind to feel through the pattern of energy organization. The metal was very different from any of the familiar substances Lanny knew, but far less complex because the arrangement was so rigidly disciplined. There were two things that Lanny might do. He could fit the energy units of his own body past the space intervals of the metal--in effect, passing through the metal barrier. But that would be slow and exacting work. It would require a considerable concentration to move the specialized cells of his body across the metal maze. The second method was easier. As he extended his cerebral integration into the metal, he could rearrange the energy unit pattern. The bars should fragment and fall apart. Lanny was amazed how rapidly the change took place. Before he could adjust the pattern of more than half a dozen energy units, a chain reaction began. Lanny found he had to absorb an enormous flow of superfluous energy to prevent an explosion. As soon as he crossed into the corridor, watching photo-electric cells sent an alarm pulsing into the guard room on the tier above. The metal-walled corridor throbbed with the deafening cry of a siren. Lanny darted toward his father's cell. "Hold the metal and make it over with your mind--just as we integrate with our clubs. It's the same principal, father." Pendillo shrugged. "I can't, Lanny. I don't know how." Lanny had no time to weigh the significance of what his father said for the scream of the siren stopped and a guard appeared at the head of the corridor. The guard wrapped himself hastily in the shell of a force-field capsule. He fired his energy gun. The knife of flame arched through the corridor and struck Lanny's face. His body reacted instinctively, absorbing and storing part of the charge and re-constructing the rest so that it became a harmless combination of inert gasses. But as the blinding flame splashed bright in Lanny's eyes--the way it had once before, when he murdered old Barlow--Lanny's mind faced the traumatic shock of remembering. Lanny had murdered Barlow--he knew that, now--murdered him with a blaze of energy which he had stored when he brushed against the force-field capsule surrounding Tak Laleen.