There was a searing, bright light above her and it sent stabbing tentacles of pain through her head, and they lashed at her flagging brain.
They had lain her prone on a cold, flat surface, and their faces circled her, blurred as Mannix' had been, and infinitely far above her.
There was the murmur of voices, and the bright light was divided and divided again into myriads of white, stabbing lances as it was broken into glittering bits upon the edges of the slender instruments they held.
Let them, let them....
No, scream—scream or something, you idiot!
In a second there would be the hypodermic or the anaesthesia and she would not be able to scream—
"You're so—so stupid ..." she heard her voice saying, a dimly audible echo off the edges of infinity itself. "Sterilize me. Keep me from breeding. What I want, you fools! They all do, they all do, you know. And you, yourselves, give the answer to it. To our question, how much longer, how many, many more...."
She could not be sure if she spoke waking or dreaming, in the delirium of exhaustion or in the unintelligibility of anaesthesia. But she was thinking the words, and she could still feel the motion of her tongue, its fuzzy touch against her teeth.
The glittering instruments were immobile.
"If heresy brings us this—this relief from a fear of forever being only a machine of flesh and blood to produce—to produce as any machine with no value whatever other than to produce until it falls into wreckage—then, then heresy will some day flourish, and you'll all be wrinkled and old, and there will be no young voices."