The registration robot handled routine things routinely. If they were not routine, the card was dropped on the manager's desk. It was then the manager's job to fit everything back into the routine. He grasped the card firmly between thumb and forefinger and stalked out of his office. He took an elevator down to the registration desk. His trouble was that he had seized upon the first thing he saw wrong with the card and saw nothing thereafter. To him, "out of the ordinary" meant "wrong"—which was where he made his mistake.
There was a man waiting impatiently at the desk. He had put the card that had been given him by the registration robot on the desk and was tapping his fingers on it.
The manager walked over to him. "Morgan, Harry?" he asked with a firm but not arrogant voice.
"Is this the city of York, New?" asked the man. There was a touch of cold humor in his voice that made the manager look more closely at him. He weighed perhaps two-twenty and stood a shade over six-two, but it was the look in the blue eyes and the bearing of the man's body that made the manager suddenly feel as though this man were someone extraordinary. That, of course, meant "wrong."
Then the question that the man had asked in rebuttal to his own penetrated the manager's mind, and he became puzzled. "Er ... I beg your pardon?"
"I said, 'Is this York, New?'" the man repeated.
"This is New York, if that's what you mean," the manager said.
"Then I am Harry Morgan, if that's what you mean."
The manager, for want of anything better to do to cover his confusion, glanced back at the card—without really looking at it. Then he looked back up at the face of Harry Morgan. "Evidently you have not turned in your Citizen's Identification Card for renewal, Mr. Morgan," he said briskly. As long as he was on familiar ground, he knew how to handle himself.
"Odd's Fish!" said Morgan with utter sadness, "How did you know?"