Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

many of them thought in their hearts that they would be set free now that the center of power was gone, or at the very least that their lives would change in some magnificent way and they would be free at last of the man’s mechanical tyranny; some of them even thought that candy would be passed out to them. But they learned. Very quickly there was another administrative head to the orphanage and he was different in appearance only. So it was an intangible; not a man, a set of rules. It would not even do any good to steal the rules away from the office and burn them, because there wasn’t even a book in which the rules were kept. It was just that the authorities knew the rules. You could kill them all and the rules would remain. This was the great virtue of rules, they were told in somewhat different context.