I stumble back from the second session of the day, exhausted, eviscerated, to find my contact of the evening already standing outside of my door. I have been in therapy so long that I have missed the eating and relaxation schedule. The contact, a male, number one hundred and ninety-nine, looks at me with contempt. “You can’t even follow your own schedule,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for you for fifteen minutes.”

“I was delayed. I’ve been in therapy all this time.”

“Ah,” the contact says. “Ah. I don’t believe that you were in therapy at all. You were locked up with the captors for hours, describing all of our characteristics to them.”

“No,” I say, somehow piteously. “No, that is not true.” I extend my arms, show him how I am trembling. “I was in therapy all of this time. I was treated with pain. I tell you, they do not trust me for some reason.”

“You are the first to complain of pain in therapy for a long time.”

“But it is true,” I say and fix him with a desperate stare; something penetrates, something connects and his features relax. “I must be trusted now,” I say. “I have more reason than ever to want to escape. I think that somehow they have sensed my inten­tions and are trying to terrorize me. But I am more determined than ever.”

“You look frightened,” the contact agrees. “It does seem to me as if you’ve been through pain.”

“Come,” I say, getting hold of myself through an effort of will, pushing open the door to my rooms. “Come; I will talk to you. You must trust me. You must believe that I truly want to escape.” Listening to myself address him I believe that this is so and that for the first time I am truly committed to a plan which I created, only such a short time ago, of repairing my guilt for Plotar. How much things have changed within the past few days; I do not sit upon the foundations which I previously occupied. Everything is different; even the permanence of the enclosure seems threatened. I can feel the walls wavering around me as if at any instant the enclosure might collapse, revealing a network of posts and the sheer machines of menace, manned by the aliens, gathered outside.

I tell one hundred and ninety-nine of my plans and announce, further, that I have decided to accelerate. Instead of talking to each of them individually, I now wish that the word be passed around through groups. He is to talk to all others involved in the plot whom he can see, and ask them, in turn, to pass it on to those that they know. We will be ready in two nights. In two nights hence. Just two nights from now we will make our assault upon the guards and break for freedom.

“Because I don’t think that I can hold out for three weeks, you see,” I explain to him, somewhat laboriously. “They are put­ting pressure on me out of suspicion. Three weeks will be too late; even one week. We will have to move now and you must trust me.”

“Why must I trust you?” he asks. “Why must you be the leader? Why can we simply not go on without you?”

“Because you are stupid,” I say, my control breaking. “Because you were one hundred ninety-nine and I am one hundred fifty-eight and because I outrank all of you; because I have orig­inated this plan and you know that only I can be trusted to ex­ecute it correctly. Because you cannot ask questions; your stupidity binds you to obedience. Now leave these rooms and obey my orders.”

He stands, he backs off, he scuttles away, dismay in his eyes, in the movement of his hips. I am sorry that I have had to speak to him in this way—it is the first time that I have ever used the sin of Misplaced Hierarchy, something for which I could not forgive Plotar—but I can now understand the pressures which must have tenanted the master of rituals as he sat in my room.

I think of the pain jolts of therapy; the sensation in my hands when I did not give certain facts in an understandable fashion. I remember the feeling in my legs when I garbled formulae and missed the mathematics of a simple metamorphic formation. When I was finished the therapist smiled and then, removing cer­tain articles from his desk, laughed at me.

It is strange how, now that they have set against me (and what was my misdeed anyway? I cannot understand this) I have brutalized another. This was the original purpose of the enclosure anyway; to turn us on one another like animals in the pens; to make the fear of each become the betrayer of all the others. And now I have enacted that pattern.

I tell my contact once again of the plot, urge him to make speed and tell the others. Escorting him to the door it is all I can do not to break down in tears and beg his forgiveness but somehow I stop myself from doing that and maintain a stern front. He leaves rapidly, not looking back, and I wonder ifhe is the traitor; if he will now carry back reports of my misdeeds to the therapists for further pain treatment.

I smile then, counsel myself perspective, remind myself that this is precisely the kind of thinking from which I must break free, and that I must maintain trust. As Plotar trusted me, so must I trust all the others, although, I hope, to a better end.