The trial was brief.
For three days Hendley was kept in a bare, windowless room in the Judicial Center. There was a single, one-piece pad of plastifoam on which to lie. The foam was designed so that, intact, it was both resilient and comfortable. It was almost impossible to tear, but even if that could have been managed, the damaged web of foam would then have disintegrated. There was no way it could be used as a weapon, either against others or oneself. Because it breathed, it would not even smother if held over the face. The cell was otherwise empty.
He was taken from the room for periodic questionings, some of them under drugs. Before the trial began he knew that the contents of his brain had been thoroughly scooped out and examined. All would be presented in evidence.
His uniform was taken from him, along with the identity disc which had belonged to the visitor. He wondered if he would be led naked into the courtroom.
On the fourth day he was given a nondescript uniform of a kind he had never seen before, a pale gray in color. He was transferred to another room. Here there was one window. It was covered with unbreakable plastic, but he could look out and, through a speaker imbedded in the plastic, listen to the sounds outside. The room was well above street level, looking out upon the vast underground city.
At first, listening and watching with fascination as the familiar activity of the city swarmed through the streets, he felt a peculiar sense of rightness, a feeling of being back in his own element, his senses lulled by sights and sounds he had always known—the soft artificial sky of the illuminated roof, the rumble of walk and tube and hurrying feet, the babble of talk, the faintly discernible odor of chemically cleansed air—most of all the knowledge of being enclosed, contained within the city's gigantic womb.
But in a short time Hendley began to feel unnerved by the jostling, hurrying crowds, even though he was not physically among them. The noise and confusion made his head ache. The city seemed oppressively close and warm. There was nowhere a patch of cool shade on which the eye could rest. He felt a barrenness in the unending surfaces of stone and glass and plastic and metal, unrelieved by any grass or living plant. He missed the irregularities of landscape, the sense of openness, the unexpected breezes which he had so quickly come to take for granted in the Freeman Camp. He began to feel himself a tiny creature caught in the intricately meshing gears of a huge, impersonal machine buried far underground.
He turned off the speaker, welcoming the silence of his cell, and in the end he did not even look out the window.
The trial began on the fifth day. Wearing his gray uniform, Hendley was led into an antiseptically clean, white amphitheater. As he was taken to his seat in the center of the courtroom, spectators, seated behind glass on the balcony level, ogled him. He was surprised to see a second empty chair beside his own. The surprise turned to shocked dismay when a second gray-clad figure was escorted into the court. He rose, dumfounded, as ABC-331 was seated in the chair next to his.
"What are you doing here?" he exclaimed. "How did they find—" He broke off. They had scoured out his mind. They knew everything. Everything from that first forbidden escapade outside the museum.