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"The one whose face I cannot see," I explained. "It's a historical or literary reference."
"Oh." She shrugged. "You'd better go back to your cell now."
"But I don't know anything about you," I protested. "Why are you here? Have they ?"
"I don't know why I'm here," she said. "The mem-wash, remember? Yes, they used the pain-box on me,
but they didn't ask me any questions, they just made me hurt. I don't know what they want of me."
"Any lesson-sessions?"
"They showed me how to bake bread. I knew it was for prisoners, so I slipped some rivets into it, so
maybe they could use them. I don't know."
"You put those rivets in?" I asked. "I chewed on one!"
"I didn't know how else to do it. Did you get any use of it?"
"I thought of using it to scratch a message on the wall, but there was already a message there."
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"Oh? What did it say?"
"Well, it was in code. It took me a while to figure it out, but, of course, I had plenty of time and few
distractions. Then it turned out to be only advice not to hope."
She laughed. "How can you, of all people, abandon hope? It's your name!"
"It may be good advice, anyway. This is a sub, a ship hidden in space. It's impossible to escape."
"But there has to be hope," she said.
I shrugged. "Maybe so. I haven't found it yet."
"Now you'd really better go. A guard could come anytime."
She was correct, of course. I used my bar to jimmy the door again, exited, and got back into my own
cell. I restored the bar to the toilet fixture, then lay on my hammock. It had been quite a little adventure;
soon I would learn whether I had gotten away with it.
Nothing happened. Gradually I relaxed. It seemed that our cells were not being monitored.
But sleep did not come. Something was bothering me, and as the first nervousness abated, that
secondary concern loomed larger. What was it?
First, my excursion had been too easy. There should have been an alarm of some sort. This was a
modern sub, whatever kind of yacht it might have been before conversion; the modernity had to do with
the technology of concealment, not of vessel construction. They wouldn't be primitive about observation
procedures, external or internal. My captors had to know when I left the cell. Why hadn't they pounced
on me?
Second, there was something about my dialogue with Dorian Gray. I had noticed it on one level of
attention while conversing with her on another. In a moment I had it: We had not exchanged names. I
had asked her, and she hadn't answered, so I had named her myself. I had not told her mine. Yet she had
known it. How?
Oh, there could be explanations. A guard could have told her. She could have been a captive longer than
I, or at least longer than the time since my mem-wash. She could have sent me a rivet before my wash,
enabling me to scratch my message to myself. She could have seen my name written on a cell door or
something. But I doubted it. For one thing, she had not been telling the truth. I had been touching her
when she told of her own mem-wash and pain-box treatment, and her body reactions had suggested that
she was lying or, at any rate, not telling the whole truth.
Third, the facility with which I had escaped the cell. A latch that could be jimmied, a rod available to do
it. It was almost as if my captors had wanted me to escape.
To get out, thinking myself unobserved, and meet my fellow captive, who just happened to be a lovely
young Hispanic woman who had helped me make messages to myself? Perhaps I would have believed
that, if I had remained mem-washed to the extent my captors believed me to be. But my secret message
to myself the one not intended for my captors to read had triggered the recollection of a major
sequence, and that substantially modified my outlook. For one thing, I now remembered my association
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with Megan, the woman I loved. That canceled any romantic interest I might have had in a mysterious
young woman.
If this had been set up for me, what course did my captors plan? It fell into place readily enough. Their
program was threefold. First, they washed out my memories and tortured me, making me vulnerable to
change. Second, they addicted me to a drug, making me dependent on them for gratification. And, third,
they meant to literally seduce me from my prior associations. They wanted me to cleave to my fellow
captive, to know her and love her, so that I would be emotionally compromised before my memory of
Megan returned.
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