During the rest of the day and the long night that followed, Kesley, alone in the darkness, had plenty of time to think.
He was in complete isolation, somewhere in the depths of Winslow's palace. He had been thrust in; microrelays had clicked, and a heavy metal door had whirred creakingly closed. Air came filtering in from a dimly-visible grid in the ceiling, twelve feet above. There was no furniture in the cell, not even a cot. He could stand, or he could lie.
He stood for a while, pacing the length and breadth of the cell until that palled, and then he stretched out full length to wait for morning. There was no point wasting energy in fruitless escape tries; he had determined very quickly that his cell was proof to any attempts.
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.