He stood up and threw open the door into the reception room. A girl sat
typing at the desk. She typed on for a moment, then paused and looked
up.
"How soon will he be ready?" Griffin asked, trying hard to keep the
panic out of his voice.
The girl smiled professionally. "I'm sorry, Mr. Griffin. He won't keep
you waiting long. Can I get you something to read?"
He shook his head. "No--I'll just wait. I'll tell you what you can do,
though. You can tell me what date it is." Suddenly he felt very foolish.
"Certainly. This is the seventeenth of July."
He nodded, feeling slightly numb as he returned to his seat. The
seventeenth of July! It had been December when he had come here. Or
had it been a year ago last December. Or ten years ago? He couldn't
remember. His broad forehead wrinkled into a frown as he tried to
think. They had told him that his memory would be somewhat incoherent
over the period that he was there, but he hadn't realized how helpless
he would feel to have eight months of his life suddenly reduced to a
jumbled series of unconnected events. And how could he straighten them
out? He shook his head, the chill deepening in his chest. Maybe they
never would be straightened out--
He stared at himself in the mirror that hung on the wall, more in the
spirit of appraisal than curiosity. That first shock of looking at
himself was behind him now; not that he could ever forget it as long
as he lived, but he was no longer jolted by the face that peered out
at him from the mirror, the short dark hair without trace of gray, the
broad forehead, the heavy face--not a bad face, really, a curious,
young-old face that looked like that of a twenty-year-old until one
examined it closely, and then utterly defied age-identification with an
infuriating complacency. His face, beyond doubt, but not the face he
had seen in the mirror eight months ago. More like the face that had
looked out at him from the mirror some thirty years before.
* * * * *
The office door banged open, and a tall, gray-haired man walked in,
dropping a pile of papers on the desk. "Hello, Griff! Sorry to keep
you waiting. Never can tell when you'll get stalled in a place like
this." John Cranstead dropped easily into his chair behind the desk and
eyed Griffin quizzically. "Feeling excited? Or just scared out of your
shirt?"
"A little of both," said Griffin, uneasily. "I don't know quite how I
feel."
Cranstead grinned, and popped his glasses out of his pocket. "Ah, well.
Don't worry about it. Martha says you wondered what day it was."