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....
[Illustration]
Mom fried pork sausages in the morning, you loved the smell of
pumpernickel from the bakery in Vesey Street.
Mr. Watsisname the English teacher with the mustache wanted you to go to
college--
_Nay, ye can not, though ye had Argus eyes,
In abbeyes they haue so many suttyll spyes;
For ones in the yere they have secret vvsytacyons,
And yf ony prynce reforme...._
--but the stockyard job was closer, they needed breakdown men--