There was a searing, bright light above her and it sent stabbing tentacles of pain through her head, and they lashed at her flagging brain. They had lain her prone on a cold, flat surface, and their faces circled her, blurred as Mannix' had been, and infinitely far above her. There was the murmur of voices, and the bright light was divided and divided again into myriads of white, stabbing lances as it was broken into glittering bits upon the edges of the slender instruments they held. Let them, let them.... _No, scream--scream or something, you idiot!_ In a second there would be the hypodermic or the anaesthesia and she would not be able to scream-- "You're so--so stupid ..." she heard her voice saying, a dimly audible echo off the edges of infinity itself. "Sterilize me. Keep me from breeding. What I want, you fools! They all do, they all do, you know. And you, yourselves, give the answer to it. To our question, how much longer, how many, many more...." She could not be sure if she spoke waking or dreaming, in the delirium of exhaustion or in the unintelligibility of anaesthesia. But she was thinking the words, and she could still feel the motion of her tongue, its fuzzy touch against her teeth. The glittering instruments were immobile. "If heresy brings us this--this relief from a fear of forever being only a machine of flesh and blood to produce--to produce as any machine with no value whatever other than to produce until it falls into wreckage--then, then heresy will some day flourish, and you'll all be wrinkled and old, and there will be no young voices." She let the words bubble from her, not caring, yet somehow caring, somehow fighting with all her being. But it was not a clever ruse, for there was still not strength enough to consciously pit her wits against them. It was something else, this strange fight, something else that stemmed from deep within her. And now the murmur of voices above her had changed tenor, oddly interrupted by jagged bits of silence. Done something. What she had said had done something, and they were hearing her. Hearing her, so she must speak louder, must open her eyes wide and let the bright light send the stabbing flashes of pain deep into her brain, whip it stingingly into consciousness. It hurt, it hurt.... Colored circles, drifting, but it was from the light--and she was thinking now, and in a moment she would be seeing their faces more clearly. Had to talk again.... * * * * * Dot lurched up on her elbows, felt the curious relaxation of a smile on her lips. "Go ahead! The rest of the women know what you're going to do to me! And pretty soon they'll let you do it to them! If we're no good as an underground to stop you, we'll let you use us to stop yourselves--think that one over before next election!" From somewhere very near her a voice said "Madame Blair, please. You are interfering with the operation!"