Chapter VI

It had begun when the girl led him through the conference room door. Naturally one had misgivings; naturally one didn’t speak up. But the vault-like door far downstairs was terrifying when it yawned before you and even more so when it closed behind you.

“What is this place?” he demanded at last. “Who are you?”

She said: “Psychology lab.”

It produced on him the same effect that “alchemy section” or “Division of astrology” would have on a well-informed young man in 1950. He repeated flatly: “Psychology lab. If you don’t want to tell me, very well. I volunteered without strings.” Which should remind her that he was a sort of hero and should be treated with a certain amount of dignity and that she could save her corny jokes.

“I meant it,” she said, fiddling busily with the locks of yet another vault-like door. “I’m a psychologist. I’m also by the way, Lee Falcaro--since you asked.”

“The old man--Edward Falcaro’s line?” he asked.

“Simon pure. He’s my father’s brother. Father’s down in Miami, handling the tracks and gaming in general.”

The second big door opened on a brain-gray room whose air had a curiously dead feel to it. “Sit down,” she said, indicating a very unorthodox chair. He did, and found that the chair was the most comfortable piece of furniture he had ever known. Its contact with his body was so complete that it pressed nowhere, it poked nowhere. The girl studied dials in its back nevertheless and muttered something about adjusting it. He protested.

“Nonsense,” she said decisively. She sat down herself in an ordinary seat. Charles shifted uneasily in his chair to find that it moved with him. Still no pressure, still no poking.

“You’re wondering,” she began, “about the word ‘psychology’. It has a bad history and people have given it up as a bad job. It’s true that there isn’t pressure nowadays to study the human mind. People get along. In general what they want they get, without crippling effort. In your uncle Frank Taylor’s language, the Syndic is an appropriately-structured organization of high morale and wide public acceptance. In my language the Syndic is a father-image which does a good job of fathering. In good times, people aren’t introspective.

“There is, literally, no reason why my line of the family should have kept up a tradition of experimental psychology. Way, way back, old Amadeo Falcaro often consulted Professor Oscar Sternweiss of the Columbia University psychology faculty--he wasn’t as much of a dashing improvisor as the history books make him out to be. Eventually one of his daughters married one of Sternweiss’ sons and inherited the Sternweiss notebooks and library and apparatus. It became an irrational custom to keep it alive. When each academic school of psychology managed to prove that every other school of psychology was dead wrong and psychology collapsed as a science, the family tradition was unaffected; it stood outside the wrangling.

“Now, you’re wondering what this has to do with trying to slip you into the Government.”

“I am,” Charles said fervently. If she’d been a doll outside the Syndic, he would minutes ago have protested that all this was foolish and walked out. Since she was not only in the Syndic, but in the Falcaro line, he had no choice except to hear her babble and then walk out. It was all rot, psychology. Id, oversoul, mind-vectors, counseling, psychosomatics--rot from sick-minded old men. Everybody knew--

“The Government, we know, uses deinhibiting drugs as a first screening of its recruits. As an infallible second screening, they use a physiological lie-detector based on the fact that telling a lie causes tensions in the liar’s body. We shall get around this by slipping you in as a young man who hates the Syndic for some valid reason--”

“Confound it, you were just telling me that they can’t be fooled!”

“We won’t fool them. You’ll be a young man who hates the Syndic. We’ll tear down your present personality a gray cell at a time. We’ll pump you full of Seconal every day for a quarter of a year ... We’ll obliterate your personality under a new one. We’ll bury Charles Orsino under a mountain of suggestions, compulsions and obsessions shoveled at you sixteen hours a day while you’re too groggy to resist. Naturally the supplanting personality will be neurotic, but that works in with the mission.”

He struggled with a metaphysical concept, for the first time in his life. “But--but--how will I know I’m me?”

“We think we can put a trigger on it. When you take the Government oath of allegiance, you should bounce back.”

He did not fail to note a little twin groove between her brows that appeared when she said think and should. He knew that in a sense he was nearer death now than when Halloran’s bullet had been intercepted.

“Are you staying with it?” she asked simply.

Various factors entered into it. A life for the Syndic, as in the children’s history books. That one didn’t loom very large. But multiply it by it sounds like more fun than hot-rod polo, and that by this is going to raise my stock sky-high with the family and you had something. Somehow, under Lee Falcaro’s interested gaze, he neglected to divide it by if it works.

“I’m staying with it,” he said.

She grinned. “It won’t be too hard,” she said. “In the old days there would have been voting record, social security numbers, military service, addresses they could check on--hundreds of things. Now about all we have to fit you with is a name and a subjective life.”

It began that spring day and went on into late fall.

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic...

Mom fried pork sausages in the morning, you loved the smell of pumpernickel from the bakery in Vesey Street.