"What for?" Dennison bewilderedly asked.
"To get out of this place!" said Ferris. "To escape and give our discoveries to the world. To stop those hopeful little dictators upstairs."
"They must know what you're planning."
"Of course. But they let us live because, every so often, one of us gives up and joins them. And they don't think we can ever break out. They're much too smug. It's the basic defect of all power-elites, and their eventual undoing."
"You said this was the most closely guarded place on Earth?"
"It is," Ferris said.
"And some of you have been trying to break out for fifty years? Why, it'll take forever to escape!"
"Forever is exactly how long we have," said Ferris. "But we hope it won't take quite that long. Every new man brings new ideas, plans. One of them is bound to work."
"Forever," Dennison said, his face buried in his hands.
"You can go back upstairs and join them," Ferris said, with a hard note to his voice, "or you can suicide, or just sit in a corner and go quietly mad. Take your pick."