“What about light?”

“No light,” Tirin said. He spoke with authority about things like this, because his imagination put him straight into them. What facts he had, he used, but it was not fact that lent him his certainty. “They let prisoners sit in the dark, in the Fort in Drio. For years.”

“Air, though,” Shevek said. “That door fits like a vacuum coupling. It’s got to have a hole in it.”

“It’ll take hours to bore through foamstone. Anyhow, who’s going to stay in that box long enough to run out of air!”

Chorus of volunteers and claimants.

Tirin looked at them, derisive. “You’re all crazy. Who wants to actually get locked into a place like that? What for?” Making the prison had been his idea, and it sufficed him; he never realized that imagination does not suffice some people, they must get into the cell, they must try to open the unopenable door.

“I want to see what it’s like,” said Kadagv, a broadchested, serious, domineering twelve-year-old.

“Use your head!” Tirin jeered, but the others backed Kadagv. Shevek got a drill from the workshop, and they bored a two-centimeter hole through the “door” at nose height. It took nearly an hour, as Tirin had predicted.

“How long you want to stay in, Kad? An hour?”

“Look,” Kadagv said, “if I’m the prisoner, I can’t decide. I’m not free. You have to decide when to let me out.”

“That’s right,” said Shevek, unnerved by this logic.

“You can’t stay in too long, Kad. I want a turn!” said the youngest of them, Gibesh. The prisoner deigned no reply. He entered the cell. The door was raised and set in place with a bang, and the props wedged against it, all four jailers hammering them into place with enthusiasm. They all crowded to the air hole to see their prisoner, but since there was no light inside the prison except from the air hole, they saw nothing.

“Don’t suck all the poor fart’s air out!”

“Blow him in some.”

“Fart him in some!”

“How long’ll we give him?”

“An hour.”

“Three minutes.”

“Five years!”

“It’s four hours till lights-out. That ought to do it.”

“But I want a turn!”

“All right, we’ll leave you in all night.”

“Well, I meant tomorrow.”

Four hours later they knocked the props away and released Kadagv. He emerged as dominant of the situation as when he had entered, and said he was hungry, and it was nothing; he’d just slept mostly.

“Would you do it again?” Tirin challenged him.

“Sure.”

“No, I want second turn—”

“Shut up, Gib. Now, Kad? Would you walk right back in there now, without knowing when we’ll let you out?”

“Sure.”

“Without food?”

“They fed prisoners,” Shevek said. “That’s what’s so weird about the whole thing.”

Kadagv shrugged. His attitude of lofty endurance was intolerable.

“Look,” Shevek said to the two youngest boys, “go ask at the kitchen for leftovers, and pick up a bottle or something full of water, too,” he turned to Kadagv. “We’ll give you a whole sack of stuff, so you can stay in that hole as long as you like.”