“I am Ashe.” He introduced himself baldly; he might have been saying “This is a table and that is a chair.”

Ross’s quick temper took spark from the other’s indifference. “All right—so you’re Ashe!” He strove to make a challenge of it. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

But the other did not rise to the bait. He shrugged. “For the time being we have been partnered—”

“Partnered for what?” demanded Ross, controlling his temper.

“We work in pairs here. The machine sorts us . . .” he answered and consulted his wrist watch. “Mess call soon.”

Ashe had already turned away, and Ross could not stand the other’s lack of interest. Although Murdock refused to ask questions of the major or any others on that side of the fence, surely he could get some information from a fellow “volunteer.”

“What is this place, anyway?” he asked.

The other glanced back over his shoulder. “Operation Retrograde.”

Ross swallowed his anger. “Okay, but what do they do here? Listen, I just saw a fellow who’d been banged up as if he’d been in a concrete mixer, creeping along this hall. What sort of work do they do here? And what do we have to do?”

To his amazement Ashe smiled, at least his lips quirked faintly. “Hardy got under your skin, eh? Well, we do have our failures. They are as few as it’s humanly possible to make, and they give us every advantage that can be worked out for us—”

“Failures at what?”

“Operation Retrograde.”

Somewhere down the hall a buzzer whirred softly.

“That’s mess call. And I’m hungry, even if you’re not.” Ashe walked away as if Ross Murdock had ceased to exist.

But Ross Murdock did exist. As he trailed along behind Ashe he determined that he was going to continue to exist, in one piece and unharmed, Operation Retrograde or no Operation Retrograde. And he was going to pry a few enlightening answers out of somebody very soon.