own bed and stopped in front of 4901's bed.

The sleep bells sounded and the dark came again. This would be the final
dark, Marquis knew. This time he had beat the game. The delayed-action
poison would kill him. He had on 4901's clothes with his identification
number. He was on 4901's bed.

He would die--as 4901. The guards would finally check on the missing man
in the food-mart. But they would never find him. They would find 4901
dead, a suicide. And they would put the body labeled 4901 in the tank,
dissolve it into dissociated cells and they would subject those cells to
the electro-magnetic field of 4901.

And they would resurrect--4901.

Not only have I managed to die, Marquis thought, but I've managed the
ultimate suicide. There won't even be a body, no sign anywhere that I
have ever been at all. Even my cells will have been resurrected as
someone else. As a number 4901.

* * * * *

"And that's the way it was," No. 4901 would tell new prisoners coming
in. Sometimes they listened to him and seemed interested, but the
interest always died during indoctrination. But No. 4901's interest in
the story never died.

He knew that now he could never let himself die as a human being either,
that he could never let himself become completely controlled by the
bells. He'd been nearly dead as an individual, but No. 5274 had saved
him from that dead-alive anonymity. He could keep alive, and maintain
hope now by remembering what 5274 had done. He clung to that memory. As
long as he retained that memory of hope--of triumph--at least some part
of him would keep burning, as something had kept on burning within the
heart of 5274.

So every night before the sleep bells sounded, he would go over the
whole thing in minute detail, remembering 5274's every word and gesture,
the details of his appearance. He told the plan over to himself every
night, and told everyone about it who came in to the indoctrination
ward.

Swimming up through the pain of resurrection, he had been a little mad
at 5274 at first, and then he had realized that at least the plan had
enabled one man to beat the game.

"He will always be alive to me. Maybe, in a way, he's part of me. Nobody
knows. But his memory will live. He succeeded in a kind of ultimate
dying--no trace of him anywhere. But the memory of him and what he did
will be alive when the New System and the Managers are dead. That spirit
will assure the Underground o