“Number, district, province, city, print, and brass?” he inquired. He paused and looked up at me. “Brach or dolicoph? Whorl, loop, or median? Facial, cephalic, and color indexes? Your Sanson test? Your Binet rating?”
But, since I made no attempt to answer these utterly baffling questions, the clerk ceased to ply me with them and looked up at the magistrate for instructions. The magistrate, who had been leaning forward, watching me attentively, now smiled as if he had suddenly grasped the situation.
“I’ll tell you what you are,” he said, shaking his finger at me. “You’re a Spanish spy, masquerading as a defective in order to get into the workshops and corrupt the defectives there.”
“Now I should call him a Slav,” said the clerk complacently. “He’s a brach, you see, Boss. And that makes his offense a capital one,” he added complacently.
“Put him up for the Council, then,” growled the magistrate. “Standardize him,” he added to the policemen, “and commit him to the Strangers’ House pending the Council’s ascription.”
My captors hurried me away. In the street a large crowd, which had assembled to see me emerge, greeted me with noisy hooting. And, looking again into these hard faces, I began to realize that some portentous change had come over mankind since my long sleep, whose nature I did not understand; but, whatever it was, it had not made men better.
However, the moving platform quickly carried us away, and the mob dwindled, so that when we reached our destination only a nucleus remained. This, however, followed me persistently, gathering to itself other idlers, who ran beside me, peering up into my face, and fingering my tattered clothes, and pulling at the tails of my coat in half-infantile and half-simian curiosity.
The building which we entered contained a single large room on the ground floor, with desks ranged around the walls. Behind each desk a clerk in blue was seated, either contemplating the scene before him or listening disdainfully to applications. I was taken to a desk near the door. One of the policemen now left me, and the other, who had contrived, without my knowledge, to possess himself of the gold watch that had been in my pocket for the last century, placed it upon the desk before the clerk, who came back slowly and resentfully from a fit of abstraction.
“Committed stranger?” he inquired.
“Yap,” said the policeman. “He had this.”