“As long as you like,” Kadagv corrected.

“All right. Get in there!” Kadagv’s self-assurance brought out Tirin’s satirical, play-acting vein. “You’re a prisoner. You don’t talk back. Understand? Turn around. Put your hands on your head.”

“What for?”

“You want to quit?”

Kadagv faced him sullenly.

“You can’t ask why. Because if you do we can beat you, and you have to just take it, and nobody will help you. Because we can kick you in the balls and you can’t kick back. Because you are not free. Now, do you want to go through with it?”

“Sure. Hit me.”

Tirin, Shevek, and the prisoner stood facing one another in a strange, stiff group around the lantern, in the darkness, among the heavy foundation walls of the building.

Tirin smiled arrogantly, luxuriously. “Don’t tell me what to do, you profiteer. Shut up and get into that cell!” And as Kadagv turned to obey, Tirin pushed him straight-arm in the back so that he fell sprawling. He gave a sharp grunt of surprise or pain, and sat up nursing a finger that had been scraped or sprained against the back wall of the cell. Shevek and Tirin did not speak. They stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their role as guards. They were not playing the new role now, it was playing them. The younger boys returned with some holum bread, a melon, and a bottle of water. They were talking as they came, but the curious silence at the cell got into them at once. The food and water was shoved in, the door raised and braced. Kadagv was alone in the dark. The others gathered around the lantern. Gibesh whispered, “Where’ll he piss?”

“In his bed,” Tirin replied with sardonic clarity.

“What if he has to crap?” Gibesh asked, and suddenly went off into a peal of high laughter.

“What’s so funny about crapping?”

“I thought—what if he can’t see—in the dark—” Gibesh could not explain his humorous fancy fully. They all began to laugh without explanation, whooping till they were breathless. All were aware that the boy locked inside the cell could hear them laughing.

It was past lights-out in the children’s dormitory, and many adults were already in bed, though lights were on here and there in the domiciles. The street was empty. The boys careened down it laughing and calling to one another, wild with the pleasure of sharing a secret, of disturbing others, of compounding wickednesses. They woke up half the children in the dormitory with games of tag down the halls and among the beds. No adult interfered; the tumult died down presently.

Tirin and Shevek sat up whispering together for a long time on Tirin’s bed. They decided that Kadagv had asked for it, and would get two full nights in prison.

• • •

Their group met in the afternoon at the lumber recycling workshop, and the foreman asked where Kadagv was. Shevek exchanged a glance with Tirin. He felt clever, he felt a sense of power, in not replying. Yet when Tirin replied coolly that he must have joined another group for the day, Shevek was shocked by the lie. His sense of secret power suddenly made him uncomfortable: his legs itched, his ears felt hot. When the foreman spoke to him he jumped with alarm, or fear, or some such feeling, a feeling he had never had before, something like embarrassment but worse than that: inward, and vile. He kept thinking about Kadagv, as he plugged and sanded nail holes in three-ply holum boards and sanded the boards back to silky smoothness. Every time he looked into his mind there was Kadagv in it. It was disgusting.