"Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!" barked the guard. The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed.
We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story building. A sign on the door said, simply, "Admissions. Knock and Remove Hat." The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our faces annoyingly.
As soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the image.
The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark, overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered such a specimen.
"I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to," he said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise, clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp, immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man.
"What did you do on the Outside, shnook?" he snapped at me.
"Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of work a month," I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of humility.
"Hah! Another low-hour man. I don't see how the hell you could afford to come here. Well, anyway—we've got work for climbers like you. Real work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy in a place like this—ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't forget that!"
Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons behind me had fetched me a solid clout on the side of the head with her sap.