A lift with a grimy brass gate took them up three floors (which seemed silly, as they had just walked up at least eight in the hotel): he was led across a hallway and shoved (one of his sandals slipped and he went down on one bare knee; he was wearing only shorts and a light V-shirt) into a cement-floored room with paint-peeled plaster walls. The door shut behind him; as he stood up, rubbing his knee (yes, the one he’d sprained last year), there were loud clicks and clashes as bars and locks and catches were thrown. The window was too high to see out, even if you (which he didn’t because his knee hurt) jumped. The metal door was dull-gray, with scuffs and scratches at ... kicking level! The room was maybe ten feet by eight.

There was no furniture.

He stayed in it almost five hours.

Getting hungrier, getting thirstier, finally he had to go to the bathroom. Beside the door, set in the corner of the cement floor, was a green, metal drain. He urinated in it and wondered where he was supposed to do anything else.

He was sitting in the corner across from it, when the door, clattering its sunken locks, pushed open. Two red and black uniformed guards stepped in, yanked him to his feet, and held him flat against the wall, while a portly, bald man in the least comfortable-looking of the three basic styles came in and said: “All right. What do you know about these people?”

Bron really thought he meant the guards.

“The moonie delegation!”

“... nothing—?” Bron said, wonderingly.

“Tell us, or we’ll fish it out of you—and the places in your brain we fish it out from won’t ever be much good for anything again: because of the scar tissue—that’s assuming you ever get a chance to use it again, where we’ll be sending you for the rest of your life when we’re finished.”

Bron was suddenly angry and terrified. “What ... what do you want to know?”

“Everything you know. Start at the beginning.”

“I ... I just know it’s a political mission of ... of some sort. I really don’t know anything else about it. Sam is ... Sam just asked me to come along as part of the ... the entourage.”

“It’s funny,” one of the guards said to nobody in particular. “The moonies always sit in the corner soon as you leave ’em alone. Marsies and Earthmen always sit at the center of the wall. I’ve always wondered why.”

The portly man looked askance, muttered, “Shit ...” and suddenly one of the guards punched Bron, hard, in the side, so that he crumpled down the wall, gasping and blinking—as they left.

The door slammed.

Locks clashed.

Both guards had been women.

Three hours later the locks clashed again.

As the two guards marched in, Bron struggled to his feet (from the spot in the center of the wall he’d fi—

nally, after much pacing, chosen to sit). They grabbed him, pulled him up the rest of the way, flattened his back against the wall. (The guards were both men this time.) Another man, less portly and with more hair, came in and asked Bron the identical questions—verbatim, he realized at the same time he realized (and began to worry that) his own answers were at least worded slightly different. At the end, the man took something out of his side pocket that looked like a watch with fangs. He came over and jabbed it against Bron’s shoulder—Bron twisted against the pain, not that it did much good the way the guards held him.

“Don’t wince!” the man said. “It’s supposed to hurt.” Ridiculous as the order and explanation was, Bron found himself trying to obey.

The man jerked the instrument away and looked at it. “Wouldn’t you know. He’s telling the truth. Come on.”

Bron looked down to see twin blood-blots on his V-shirt. Inside, something dribbled down his chest.

“It’s funny,” one of the guards said to nobody in particular. “The moonies always sit in the center of the wall as soon as you leave them alone. Marsies and Earthmen always take the corners.” And when Bron turned to protest, because that seemed just the last, absurd straw, the other guard punched him in the side: he crumpled down the wall, gasping, blinking.

The man opened the door, left; the guards followed. The one who had hit him paused, a hand on the door edge, and frowned at what time and fear and the pain in his gut had forced Bron to leave on the floor by the corner drain.

“Jesus Christ ...” He looked back at Bron. “You moonies are really animals, aren’t you?” Shaking his head, he slammed the door after himself.

Forty minutes later, the same guard came back, alone. Bron’s shoulders stiffened. He pushed back against the plaster.

The guard walked over, took Bron by the arm and pulled him up. “Friend of yours is down the hall waiting for you. It’s all over, boy.” Bron was a head taller than the guard, who looked, Bron realized now, like a somewhat orientalized and beardless Philip.

“What will they ... ?” Bron began.

“Sorry we have to beat up on you guys like that every time we leave. It’s just routine—to get out safe, you know? But then, if you were even connected with what we thought you might be in the middle of ...” He shook his head, chuckled. “Let me tell you\ Just two guards in here? I was one scared son of a bitch.” He pulled at Bron again, who finally came away from the wall. “You were in the meat market on Mars for a while, weren’t vou?” The guard held Bron firmly as he got his legs going at last. “Me too—when I was too young to know better.” He shook his head again. “I told them, us meat-men just aren’t the type to end up in what they thought you were into. / told them not to even bother with you when the report first came in. But I’m a marsie. On Earth nobody listens to marsies. On Mars, nobody listens to earthies. Makes you wonder what we’re doing fighting on the same side, don’t it?” He looked at the feces beside the drain. “Really, you are animals. All you have to do is read the goddamn instructions; they’re printed right inside the—Now I know you didn’t behave like that on Mars. You just pull it up by the ... but then, maybe moonies just aren’t used to the same amenities we’re used to here, huh?” They walked into the hall. The guard’s voice was friendly, his grip firm. “Well, I’ve hosed worse than that off that goddamn floor. And those goddamn walls. And that goddamn ceiling.” He made a face. “And that goddamn ceiling is goddamn high.” He guided Bron through another door, into a large, nondescript office, with several desks, several chairs, and some dozen men and women sitting, standing, walking about, some in red and black, some not.

Sam stood up from one of the chairs. His face seemed to be just recovering from the expression Bron had last seen on it thirteen hours ago.

“Here he is,” the guard said: and to another guard: “Larry, let the nigger sign for him and get him out of here, huh?”

While Sam leaned on the desk to sign, Bron kept waiting for the proper moment to ask what was going to happen to him next. He and Sam were halfway down the hall, when it dawned on Bron he’d been released in Sam’s custody. There was relief, somewhere, yes. More immediate, the sensation of fear descended into the apprehensible from the numb heights it had risen to, to settle finally, like something poisonous, on the back of his tongue, hindering the hundred questions that tried to dart out. In Bron’s brain a hundred broken blue lights flickered.

Pushing open the tiled lobby’s glass door, Sam finally asked: “Are you all right?”

Out on the stone steps, Bron took a deep breath. “Do you know what they did to me! Sam, do you know what they—”

“I don’t know,” Sam said softly. “I don’t want to know. And if you care about either my life, or your own freedom, you will never describe any of what’s just happened, to me or anyone else, so long as this war is on. In fact, just make that a flat never.”