They did, and he braced himself against the bulkhead. He was twisting the top button even as he punched it home, and it caught.
The deck rushed up with smashing force.
CHAPTER XVIII
The white, sterile room seemed to have closed in upon itself since she had been first brought to it so many hours before, and the heavy desk was now just a great mass of steel, its curved lines no longer distinct, but trailing off somewhere in an incomprehensible geometry of their own. There was movement behind the desk, white, blurry movement that blended with the walls, but the flesh-colored mask that hovered above it did not seem to move at all. Dot's eyes could no longer focus for the fatigue of the tests had sucked the well of her physical energy dry, but she knew the face.
He was Mannix, director of the S-Council, they had told her.
The tests had torn her soul from her, turned it inside out, stripped it naked, examined it beneath their microscopes of unending questions asked in a thousand different ways with a thousand different inflections, connotations.... The sterile white rooms, the lights, the darkness....
To hear what she and they had known from the beginning, and what the blurred, unmoving face was telling her now.
"... tests have been evaluated according to Section 679, Sub-section B of Commandment Seventeen, Part E, as amended, and you have been found to be unquestionably sane. It is my duty therefore to interpret the law with a finding of guilty of acts of heresy, as charged in each of the counts cited, committed with the premeditated deliberation of a sound, and therefore fully responsible mind."
Dot no longer felt fear, only a terrible tiredness. It did not matter what Mannix said. Nor of course, could it matter what she might say. There was the truth, of course, but it would be doubly incriminating, and would spell disaster for Doug.