SECURITY
BY BRYCE WALTON
If secrecy can be carried to the brink
of madness, what can happen when imprisonment
and time are added to super secrecy?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
We, Sam Lewis thought as he lay in the dark trying to sober up, are the living dead.
It was a death without honor. It was a death of dusty, sterile stupidity. It was wretched, shameful, a human waste, and far too ridiculous a business to bear any longer.
The hell with the war. The hell with the government. The hell with Secret Project X, Y, Z, or D, or whatever infantile code letter identified the legalized tomb in which Sam and the others had been incarcerated too long.
He flung his hand around in the dark in a gesture of self-contempt. And his hand found the soft contours of a woman's breast. Her warm body moved, sighed beside him as he turned his head and stared at the dim outline of Professor Betty Seton's oval face, soft and unharried in sleep. Unharried, and unmarried, he thought.