I flushed with indignation. “Do you suppose I am going to bribe you—?” I began loudly.
The clerk leaped back. “This subject is a brach!” he yelled, and gave the figures to a clerk at the next desk, who made a note on a form and looked at me with intense disgust.
So I was set down as broad-headed. Then I was made to sit before a Binet board, containing wooden blocks of various shapes, which had to be set in corresponding holes within a period timed on a stop-watch. Word associations followed, a childish game at which I had played during the course of my medical training; we had regarded this as one of those transitory fads born in Germany and conveyed to us through the American medium, which came and went and left no by-products except a little wasted enthusiasm on the part of our younger men. I accomplished both tasks easily, and I thought the physicians seemed disappointed.
Finally I received a suit of bluish-gray color, the strangers’ uniform, I was informed, and a pair of high, soft shoes. A metal badge, stamped with letters and figures, was hung about my neck by a cord, and I was turned over to the charge of a blue-clad, grizzled man of shortish stature, with a kindly look in the eyes that strongly affected me. For I realized by now that all these persons about me, all whom I had seen, with whom I had conversed, had lacked something more than good-will; they gave me the impression of being animated machines, reservoirs of intense energy, and yet not ... what? I could not determine them.
There was a patient humility about his bearing, and yet, I fancied, a sort of stubborn power, a consciousness of some secret strength that radiated from him.
He came up to me after conversing with the doctors, blue-clad men with white capes about their shoulders, all of whom had eyed me curiously during their speech with him.
“I am the District Strangers’ Guard,” he said to me. “You are a foreigner, I understand, and waiting to be ascribed by the Council. It is not necessary to make any explanation to me. I am the guard, and nothing more, and it is my task to provide you with food and lodging in the Strangers’ House until you are sent for, S6 1845.”
“I beg your pardon?” I asked, before I realized that he was addressing me by the number on the brass badge that hung from my neck.
“My pardon?” he answered, looking at me with a puzzled expression. “That is an antique word, is it not?”
“I mean, I did not know the significance of these numbers,” I replied.