There was a knock on the door.
The tall, silver-haired man in the beige coverall had a genial face, dominated by sympathetic gray eyes. He was big-boned and heavy, but he carried himself easily. His voice had an impressive rumble.
"Good evening, TRH-247," he said. "You've had quite a day, haven't you?"
The emblem on his sleeve, brown with a white background, showed a design of staff-and-serpent. Lettered in brown stitching were the words Morale Investigator.
"You will come with me," the Investigator said. With a faintly indulgent smile he added, "I trust you are not going to give us any trouble?"
Hendley shook his head. He had stopped running. As he stepped from his room into the bright corridor, he felt an odd tug of regret for the close security he was leaving. The room was too small, blind-walled, impersonal, uninviting. But it was a place familiar and known. It held no surprises.
4
Naked, TRH-247 sat on a cool white plastic bench and repressed a shiver. The room was not cold, but gooseflesh stood out on his arms. Though he was now alone in one of a series of examination rooms to which he had been taken, he felt ill at ease in his nakedness—an effect no doubt carefully calculated, he reflected, to increase the insecurity anyone must feel in the Morale Investigation Center.
Everything in the Center was designed to create the impression that here nothing was—nothing could be—concealed. The walls, the ceilings, the floors, the spare furnishings, the instruments—all were a gleaming, immaculate white plastic, bathed in clear white light. Even the attendants and nurses, as well as the gray-haired Investigators, donned white robes over their uniforms when they entered the Center.
Hendley had not seen the first Investigator since they parted at the beginning of his processing. But in the course of his tests—psychological, intelligence and reaction tests, a humiliatingly thorough physical examination, along with other tests unfamiliar to him—he had met two other men identified as Investigators. Each might have been cast from a single mold. In the small interrogation rooms they seemed to grow, looming larger to the eye like figures on a viewscreen expanding as the camera moved in for a closeup. They were all big men, all distinguished, all gray-haired, all easy of manner—big, handsome, confident men, like idealized father-images.