"As soon as possible, sir."
He hung up. "Damn," he said. "Damn it to hell anyway!"
"Doug, can I do anything?"
"No, honey, no. We've just got to sweat it out until that pack gets here. It'll be all right." He forced a smile, sank to a chair, put his head in his hands. She knelt beside him. "The film-strips, that you saw—they must have been—horrible."
He looked up. "Horrible isn't the word. God, what people. And at first they seemed so—What a cold-blooded, ruthless—"
"Easy, mister." She came closer to him and he felt himself relax slowly at the warmth of her touch.
"What a system.... I guess I read over those reports a dozen times. They know there is no possible way to tell how long such an awful mental shock will stay—even in the impressionable mind of a half-grown child. Yet they accept it as full-blown conditioning process—they believe in it! They believe in everything around here—they worship the government, the Prelate General, the Director—even me! And because there's no war and hasn't been since the first Prelatinate, they keep right on believing that from the day you fight in the games—if you survive—till the day you die, you're thoroughly conditioned against physical violence—" He let the sentence taper off into silence.
"Just rest awhile, darling," she murmured.
He smiled. "Thanks, Dot. But I've got to get that mess downstairs cleaned up. I'll be all right."
The equipment—the neat sorted rows of resistors, condensers, vacuum tubes and the rest of it glittered on the long, wide expanse of the workbench he'd installed. At one end was a half-completed framework, and at the other—was the blackened ruin of what had been a transformer.