The mouth at length interrupted, though with courtesy, this reverie which showed signs of going on and on. "Oh, the details are simple enough," it said. "I've already taken the liberty of producing several dozen sets of fool-proof identity files which I can bribe a Civil Servant to slip into the Master Record Section. You would be listed as a research chemist, and given unlimited funds to experiment to your heart's content, and with no control exercised over the work you choose to do."
"Unbelievable," Mr. Harbinger whispered, all the while wanting desperately to believe such a miraculous thing could somehow come to pass.
The mouth smiled. The eyes crinkled. Then the mouth said, "Hmmm, pick a name. Smith, Ackerman, Evans, Daugherty ... all good solid names to fit your appearance."
Mr. Harbinger rose to the delicately extended bait at last. "I imagine, with a little chicanery, I could arrange for you to get into something here too, if you would want to."
He rose from his chair, fired and appalled at once by the notion of bringing a Civil Servant, or some such Romantic dastardy. Pacing the floor, he huffed and puffed to himself in contemplation of intrigue, looking for all the world like a small boy planning a daring raid on a neighbor's pear tree.
"Social Security ..." he mumbled. "Voter's registration ... Income Tax records ... hmmm."
As he paced, the eyes wandered alarmingly over the surface of the wall, but he didn't notice, having long since become more or less accustomed to that small absurdity.
At last he stopped dead, in possession of the solution, and relieved—though he would never admit it, least of all to himself—to see a way around the bribery and such things, Romantic though they doubtless were.
"You can take mine, if you don't mind the name, and all. My record is clean—never been arrested, except once for jay-walking ten years or so ago."
He paused to consider the ramifications of this infinitesimal aberration, but at length decided, with much humming and vacillation, that there was no chance of his fingerprints having been taken for that; and remembering that his state did not require them on a driver's license, either.