"

It was 4901's longest and most coherent speech. Maybe I can get
somewhere with him, Marquis thought. I can find out something.

But 4901 wouldn't say any more. Marquis kept on trying. No one, he knew,
would ever realize what that meant--to keep on trying to die when no one
would let you, when you kept dying, and then kept waking up again, and
you weren't dead. No one could ever understand the pain that went
between the dying and the living. And even Marquis couldn't remember it
afterward. He only knew how painful it had been. And knowing that made
each attempt a little harder for Marquis.

He tried the poison again. There was the big stamping machine that had
crushed him beyond any semblance of a human being, but he had awakened,
alive again, whole again. There was the time he grabbed the power cable
and felt himself, in one blinding flash, conquer life in a burst of
flame. He slashed his wrists at the beginning of a number of sleep
periods.

When he awakened, he was whole again. There wasn't even a scar.

He suffered the pain of resisting the eating bells until he was so weak
he couldn't respond, and he knew that he died that time too--from pure
starvation.

_But I can't stay dead!_

"_... You'll have to give in!_"

* * * * *

He didn't know when it was. He had no idea now how long he had been
here. But a guard appeared, a cold-faced man who guided Marquis back to
the office where the fat, pink-faced little Manager waited for him
behind the shelf suspended by silver wires from the ceiling.

The Manager said. "You are the most remarkable prisoner we've ever had
here. There probably will not be another like you here again."

Marquis' features hung slack, his mouth slightly open, his lower lip
drooping. He knew how he looked. He knew how near he was to cracking
completely, becoming a senseless puppet of the bells. "Why is that?" he
whispered.

"You've tried repeatedly to--you know what I mean of course. You have
kept on attempting this impossible thing, attempted it more times than
anyone else here ever has! Frankly, we didn't think any human psyche had
the stuff to try it that many times--to resist that long."

The Manager made a curious lengthened survey of Marquis' face. "Soon
you'll be thoroughly indoctrinated. You are, for all practical purposes,
now. You'll work automatically then, to the bells, and think very little
about it at all, except in a few stereotyped ways