Bennington's barked reply arose from memory of his first argument with Thornberry. The assistant warden-chief psychologist had been astounded to learn that the general did not trust the conditioning process as a solid basis for prison security. Beginning there, the opening engagement in the battle of ideas, their contrasting philosophies had deployed and made the entire prison a battleground.
But Bennington dismissed his chief assistant from his thoughts as soon as he stood in the darkness on the little knoll outside his house. He concentrated on orienting himself.
The camp had not been changed much when it had been made over from a ground-to-air missile station, protecting the freight yards of Harrisburg, into the processing prison for six states.
They had tapped the Juniata a few hundred yards northwest of where it joined the Susquehanna, for the water that filled the moat encircling three sides of the prison. The union of the two rivers formed the water barrier on the east.
What was it Thornberry had said about the moat? Oh, yes, not to keep the poor misguided inmates imprisoned, but to keep unwanted people out....
When his eyes were accustomed to the darkness, Bennington walked east and came to the first of the two new additions to the camp. A long building, used by psychological and medical men to determine the total amount of usefulness to society left in a man convicted of a crime.
Beyond it, the second addition, a barbed-wire-enclosed building called The Cage, where prisoners where first received and conditioned.
He turned and began retracing his steps, at the same time mentally following what happened to a prisoner in each of the two buildings. When the official party accompanying him to his new post had arrived late yesterday, for the second time he had followed a man through the procedure.
The quick frisking and the slow interview with two purposes, by visual, oral and written tests determining the amount of suggestibility to hypnotic conditioning plus the quicker giving of a card to denote a temporary classification.