they looked like different things , but ralph thought they were really all the same thing : the faint , sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third , people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled , people whose only crime had been to be born in the random ... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel .