"Listen!" It was Perlac's voice indistinct with indignation, "listen to the 'conditioners,' Guerlan!"
"Sleep ... sleep now. Deep, dreamless sleep ... for the conservation of your energy is your noblest effort ... so you may conserve your strength for work ... work ... you must, you absolutely must Achieve ... so that you may fulfill your maximum allotment ... maximum ... and be rewarded.... Sleep ... sleep...."
Endlessly the fiendish mosaic of lies and psychological half-truths went on and on, imbedding itself in the violated minds that slept in the stupor of the utterly exhausted.
Guerlan shivered. A malefic aura of death and torture seemed woven into the matrix of darkness that surrounded them. The very odor of death was in their nostrils as they left the atomo-plane by the light of his torch and faced the narrow, tortuous thoroughfare that wended its way from the wide circle where the plane had come to rest.
Perlac pressed close to him and her slender hand gripped his arm. There were no robot-proctors in sight, none were needed here where no amnesiac ever left alive. No victims were in sight, for the day workers rested and the nocturnal shift toiled in their prisoning workrooms. Behind them, in front of them, from every side, the Conditioners continued their endless chant: "Loyalty ... obedience ... unquestioningly you must achieve ... for our glorious State."
III
In the abysmal darkness their atomo-torch was a pool of light that advanced before them. But Perlac unerringly went directly to a building whose front seemed to be an impenetrable, blank wall. She pressed a hidden mechanism near the far corner of the structure, and presently a door slid aside, revealing a passageway to the beam of the torch. Once within, Guerlan became aware it was some sort of dormitory, for stretched on rows of cots made of cheap plastic, the amnesiacs slept in their leaden tunics. These were the pitchblende workers who had but a brief life-period, due to the radiations.
In another corridor slept the brown-tunics, the organic-matter workers, blood-stained from their gruesome labors, their stertorous breathing witness to their exhaustion. Perlac kept on rapidly going from corridor to corridor until she stopped at a door leading to the cellar, opening it, she scrambled down a plastic ladder, followed by Guerlan, and finally into a sub-cellar gallery that wound tortuously into the very bowels of Neptune.
Here were the sightless wrecks who lived in eternal darkness and whose task was to tend the machinery that air-conditioned and kept reasonably warm the dreadful Fifth Level. Some seemed strangely twisted and had the loathsome whiteness of fungi, others mindlessly tottered by like automatons. Guerlan drew aside in a mixture of nausea and profound pity. A welling, terrible anger strove to rise within him at the sight of these horrors that went by like Dantesque shadows of the damned.