One dull gray thought flickered monotonously through his consciousness: tomorrow his life would end. That wasn't so bad, he thought; everyone dies—everyone but the Twelve. What hurt more was the rasping realization that he had never really lived at all.
What had he done, in the twenty-four years he'd had? Twenty of them were blank, cloaked by darkness more complete than the inkiness that surrounded him in the cell. He had lived and farmed in Kansas, he told people, but he knew it was false, and van Alen, whoever he had been, had known it was false.
Van Alen had confronted him with the naked lie he had been living, and it had hurt. Probing the past caused pain. All right. Blot out twenty years, begin life four years ago, ignore the mystery that cried to be solved.
What kind of world is this, he asked himself, where you never start to live?
He had never known the rules. He never knew who made the moves, who played the game. Unseeingly, he had shunted from one pattern of action to another, without ever understanding the world he was in. It was ironic. A world carefully tailored for simplicity, a world scrupulously designed by its proprietors to avoid the complexity that had destroyed the previous civilization—and here he, after twenty-four years, was going to his death uncomprehendingly.
Something was terribly wrong with a world like that, Kesley thought. Perhaps its goals had been good, once. But as the Immortals had moved timelessly on through the years, they had grown remote from the charts and maps of society, and begun to play some inscrutable, unfathomable game of their own.
"It isn't fair!" he said out loud. His protesting voice echoed weirdly in the confines of the cell, bounced back grotesquely from the metal walls. He knew that if there were a light in the cell he would be able to see his own distorted image on their shining surfaces. It would be a mocking clown-face, laughing at him for his own ignorance.
But there was no light. There was only darkness, and the silence of solitude.
And then, after hours passed, there came the faint humming sound of relays clicking in the massive door.
Morning already? Kesley wondered.