lassification it had to be, Bennington decided, for the
weight of the offense in itself never measured the man. How many
repeaters, men inevitable to a life of crime, had come here to be
handed a light gray card in The Cage, while other, different men,
once-upon-a-timers, had come out carrying the yellow or pink?

Could and did happen, the general knew, could and did happen even in
his former military life, where consideration of a man's record was a
prerequisite to deciding the sentence, with review and review and
review automatic not a matter of initiated appeal.

However, here, in the psycho-med building, was what might be called
re-judgment, for here, assisted by the latest advances that could
trickle down through the long bureaucracy above--and aided by ideas
that yeasted up, not down--Dr. Thornberry's staff went back to basics
with the question, what is re-claimable, for the man and for us, in
this man?

But not the first day ... that was routine.

Strip and change to prison clothes.

_Mental memo: What happened to the civilian clothes that the prisoners
surrendered? Was there the smell of a small but lucrative racket
here?_

Then, on the basis of that preliminary in The Cage, through one of two
doors. A few went into the room where a massive injection of sedatives
made them virtually vegetables. Most of them, however, were sent into
the room where Judkins, the new technician who had also arrived only
yesterday, would fit the "tank," the big helmet, down over the
prisoner's head and conditioned the man with mechanical and oral
hypnosis.

The results, from drugging or hypnosis, were the same. From either
room the prisoner came with his face a blank.

[Illustration]

Mud-faces, or in a new use of the words from the Original World War,
"doughboys".

Those two rooms were harder to get into than to leave. The security
precautions of The Cage extended to the moment the prisoner was led to
the door and started out of those rooms. But from there on....

No, Bennington decided, let's drop security for a moment. Something
had happened in the rest of the processing he and the committee had
watched and the meaning of that something had emerged only tonight at
the party.

Not in the physical ... and that had been good, as complete as the
most expensive clinic Bennington had ever seen, a thorough probing for
a structural reason behind the crime or crimes....

But the second mental, that quick recheck of the co