The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark, overhanging cliffs--the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra--a wasting, darkening malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered such a specimen. "I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to," he said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl--something not yet language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise, clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp, immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man. "What did you do on the Outside, shnook?" he snapped at me. "Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of work a month," I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of humility. "Hah! Another low-hour man. I don't see how the hell you could afford to come here. Well, anyway--we've got work for climbers like you. Real work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy in a place like this--ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't forget that!" Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons behind me had fetched me a solid clout on the side of the head with her sap. "Mark 'em and put 'em to work," he barked at the guards. Two uniformed men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted my eyes and tried to look blank. "This is indelible," one of them explained. "We have the chemical to take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so." When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. "There is a choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the stump-removal detail, the manure pile...." "How about the steam laundry?" I asked, prompted now by the cold sound of a sudden gust of rain against the wooden side of the building.