New Folks' Home: And Other Stories

  She interrupted him. “Would ennui be enough?” she asked. “Just simple ennui?”

  He wrote ennui for the reason and shoved the application to one side. “You can sign it later.”

  “I can sign it now.”

  “We’d prefer you wait a little.”

  Blaine fiddled with the pencil, trying to think it out—wondering why this client should disturb him so. Lucinda Silone was wrong and he couldn’t place the wrongness; yet, he knew he should be able to, for he met all sorts of clients.

  “If you wish,” he said, “we could discuss the Dream. Usually we don’t but…”

  “Let’s discuss it,” she said.

  “A Dream is not necessary,” he told her. “There are those who take the Sleep without one. I don’t wish to appear to be arguing against a Dream; in many cases it appears to me to be preferable. You would not be conscious of the time—an hour or a century is no longer than a second. You go to sleep; then you wake, and it is as if there had been no time at all…”

  “I want a Dream,” she said.

  “In that case, we are glad to serve you. Have you thought what kind?”

  “A friendly dream. A restful one and friendly.”

  “No excitement? No adventure?”

  “Some; perhaps, it might get monotonous otherwise. But genteel, if you please.”

  “A polite society, perhaps,” suggested Blaine. “Let’s say, one much concerned with manners.”

  “And no competition, if you can manage it; no rushing about to beat out someone else.”

  “An old, established home,” continued Blaine. “Good position in the community, high family traditions; sufficient income to banish money worries.”

  “It sounds a bit archaic.”

  “It’s the kind of Dream you asked for.”

  “Of course,” she said. “What am I thinking of? It will be lovely. It’s the sort of thing, the sort…” she laughed. “The sort of thing you dream of.”

  He laughed with her.

  “You like it? We can change it, bring it up to date.”

  “Don’t you dare, it’s just what I want.”

  “You’ll want to be young, I suppose, younger than twenty-nine—sixteen or seventeen.”

  She nodded.

  “And pretty, of course, you would be beautiful despite anything we did.”

  She did not answer.

  “Plenty of admirers,” he said. “We could put in lots of them.”

  She nodded.

  “Sexual adventures?”

  “A few, don’t overdo it, though.”

  “We’ll keep it dignified,” he promised. “You’ll have no regrets; we’ll give you a Dream you’ll need not be ashamed of—one you can look back upon with a lot of happiness. There naturally will have to be some disappointments, a few heartaches; happiness can’t run on forever without getting stale. There must be something, even in a Dream, upon which you can establish comparative values.”

  “I’ll leave that all to you.”

  “All right, then, we’ll get to work on it. Could you come back, say in three days’ time? We’ll have it roughed out then and we can go over it together. It may take half a dozen—well, let us call them fittings, before we have what you want.”

  Lucinda Silone rose and held out her hand. Her clasp was firm and friendly. “I’ll stop at the cashier’s and pay the fee,” she said. “And thanks, so very much.”

  “There’s no need to pay the fee this soon.”

  “I’ll feel better when I do.”

  Norman Blaine watched her go, then sat back down again. The intercom buzzed. “Yes, Irma.”

  His secretary said, “Harriet called. You were with the client, and couldn’t be disturbed; she left a message.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Just to let you know she can’t have dinner with you tonight. She said something about an assignment, some big bug from Centauri.”

  He said: “Irma, let me give you a tip. Never fall in love with Communications. You can’t depend on them.”

  “You keep forgetting, Mr. Blaine; I married Transportation.”

  “So I do,” said Blaine.

  “George and Herb are out here waiting. They’ve been slapping one another on the back and rolling on the floor. Take them off my hands before I go stark raving.”

  “Send them in,” he said.

  “Are they all right?”

  “George and Herb?”

  “Who else?”

  “Certainly, Irma; it’s just the way they work.”

  “It’s a comfort to know that,” she said, “I’ll shoo them in.”

  He settled back and watched the two come in. They sprawled themselves in chairs.

  George shied a folder at him. “The Jenkins Dream; we got it all worked out.”

  “He’s a jerk who wants to hunt big game,” said Herb; “we cooked up some dillies for him.”

  “We made it authentic,” George declared with pride; “we didn’t skip a thing. We put him in the jungle, and we put in mud and insects and the heat; we crammed the place with ravenous nightmares. There’s something thirsting for his blood behind every bush.”

  “It’s no hunt,” said Herb; “it’s a running battle. When he isn’t scared, he’s jumpy. Damned if I can figure out a guy like that.”

  “It takes all kinds,” said Blaine.

  “Sure; and we get them all.”

  “Some day,” Blaine told them drily, “you guys will lay it on so thick you’ll get booted to Conditioning.”

  “They can’t do that,” said Herb. “You got to have a medical degree to get into Conditioning. And George and me, we couldn’t bandage a finger the way it should be done.”

  George shrugged. “We haven’t a thing to worry about; Myrt takes care of that. When we go too hog wild, she tames it down.”

  Blaine laid the folder to one side. “I’ll feed it in before I leave tonight.” He picked up the pad. “I have something different here. You’ll have to slick down your hair and get on good behavior before I turn you loose on it.”

  “The one who just went out?”

  Blaine nodded.

  “I could cook up a Dream for her,” said Herb.

  “She wants peace and dignity,” Blaine informed them. “Genteel society. A sort of modern version of mid-nineteenth century Old Plantation days. No rough stuff; just magnolia and white columns; horses in the bluegrass.”

  “Likker, “ said Herb. “Oceans of likker. Bourbon and mint leaves and …”

  “Cocktails,” Blaine told him, “and not too many of them.”

  “Fried chicken,” said George, getting into the act. “Watermelon. Moonlight. River boats. Lemme at it.”

  “Not so fast; you have the wrong approach. Slow and easy. Tame down. Imagine slow music. A sort of eternal waltz.”

  “We could put in a war,” said Herb; “they fought polite in those days. Sabers and all dressed up in fancy uniforms.”

  “She doesn’t want a war.”

  “You gotta have some action.”

  “No action—or very little of it. No worry; no competition. Gentility …”

  “And us,” lamented George, “all spattered up with jungle mud.”

  The intercom buzzed. “The b.a. wants to see you,” Irma said.

  “O.K., tell him …”

  “He wants to see you now.”

  “Oh, oh,” said George.

  “I always liked you, Norm,” said Herb.

  “All right,” said Blaine. “Tell him I’ll be right up.”

  “After all these years,” Herb said, sadly. “Cutting throats and stabbing backs to get ahead and now it comes to this.”

  George drew his forefinger across his throat and made a hissing sound, like a blade slashing into fles
h.

  They were very funny.

  II

  Lew Giesey was the business agent of the Dream guild. For years he had run it with an iron fist and disarming smile. He was loyal and he demanded loyalty; he dealt out sharp, decisive discipline as quickly as he rewarded praise.

  He worked in an ornate office, but behind a battered desk to which he clung stubbornly, despite all efforts to provide him with a better one. To him, the desk must have been a symbol—or a reminder—of the bitter struggle to attain his station. He had started with that desk in the early days; it had followed him from office to office as he fought his bare-knuckled way ahead, up the table of organization to the very top. The desk was scarred and battered, unlike the man himself. It was almost as if the desk, in the course of years, might have intervened itself to take the blows aimed at the man behind it.

  But there had been one blow which it could not take for him. For Lou Giesey sat in his chair behind the desk and he was quite dead. His head had fallen forward on his chest and his forearms still rested on the chair’s arms and his hands still clutched the wood.

  The room was at utter peace and so, it seemed as well, the man behind the desk. There was a quietness in the room, as if respite had come from all the years of struggle and of planning. It rested now with a sense of urgency, as if it might have known that the respite could not last for long. In a little while, another man would come and sit behind the desk—perhaps a different one, for no other man would want Giesey’s battered desk—and the struggle and the turmoil would start up again.

  Norman Blaine stopped when he was halfway between the door and desk; it was the quietness of the room, as well as the head sunk upon the chest, that told him what had happened.

  He stopped and listened to the soft whirring of the clock upon the wall, a sound usually lost until this moment in this place. He heard the almost-inaudible flutter of a typewriter from across the hall, the far-off, muffled rumble of wheels rushing along the highway that ran past the Center.

  He thought, with one edge of his mind: Death and peace and quiet, the three of them together, companions hand in hand. Then his mind recoiled upon itself and built up into a tight coil spring of horror.

  Blaine took a slow step forward, then another one, walking across the carpeting that allowed no footfall sound. He had not as yet realized the full impact of what had happened there—that moments before the business agent had asked to speak to him; that he was the one to find Giesey dead; that his presence in the office might lead to suspicion of him.

  He reached the desk and the phone was there in front of him, on one corner of the desk. He lifted the receiver and when the switchboard voice came, he said: “Protection, please.”

  He heard the clicking as the signal was set up. “Protection.”

  “Farris, please.”

  Blaine started to shake, then—the muscles in his forearm jumping, others twitching in his face. He felt breathlessness rising in him, his chest constricting, a choking in his throat, and his mouth suddenly dry and sticky. He gritted his teeth and stopped the jumping muscles.

  “Farris speaking.”

  “Blaine. Fabrication.”

  “Oh, yes, Blaine. What can I do for you?”

  “Giesey called me up to see him; when I got here he was dead.”

  There was a pause—not too long a pause. Then: “You’re sure he’s dead.”

  “I haven’t touched him. He’s sitting in his chair; he looks dead to me.”

  “Anyone else know?”

  “No one. Darrell is out in the reception room, but …”

  “You didn’t yell out that he was dead.”

  “Not a word; I picked up the phone and called you.”

  “Good boy! That’s using your head. Stay right there; don’t tell anyone, don’t let anyone in; don’t touch anything. We’re on our way.”

  The connection clicked and Norman Blaine put the receiver back into the cradle.

  The room was still at rest, squeezing out of the next few moments all the rest it could. Soon the fury would take up again; Paul Farris and his goons would come bursting in.

  Blaine stood by the corner of the desk, uncertainly—waiting, too. And now that he had the time to think, now that the shock had partially worn away and the acceptance of the fact began to seep into his mind, new ideas came creeping in to plague him.

  He had found Giesey dead, but would they believe that Blaine had found him dead? Would they ask Blaine how he could prove that he had found Lew Giesey dead?

  What did he want to see you for? they’d ask. How often had Giesey called you in before? Do you have any idea why he called you in this time? Praise? Reprimand? Caution? Discussion of new techniques? Trouble in your department, maybe? Some deviation in your work. How’s your private life? Some indiscretion that you had committed?

  He sweated, thinking of the questions.

  For Farris was thorough. You had to be thorough and unrelenting—and tough—to head up Protection. You were hated from the start, and fear was a necessary factor to counteract the hatred.

  Protection was necessary. The guild was an unwieldy organization for all its tight efficiency, and it must be kept in line. Intrigue must be rooted out. Deviationism—dickering with other unions—must be run down and have an end put to it. There must be no wavering in the loyalty of any members; and to effect all this, there was need of an iron hand.

  Blaine reached out to clutch at the desk, then remembered that Farris had told him not to touch a thing.

  He pulled his hand back, let it hang by his side, and that seemed awkward and unnatural. He put it in his pocket, and that seemed awkward, too. He put both his hands behind his back and clasped them, then teetered back and forth.

  He fidgeted.

  He swung around to look at Giesey, wondering if the head still rested on the chest, if the hands still gripped the chair arms. For a moment, Norman Blaine built up in his mind the little speculative fiction that Lew Giesey would not be dead at all, but would have raised his head and be looking at him. And if that were so, Blaine wondered how he would explain.

  He needn’t have wondered; Giesey still was dead.

  And now, for the first time, Norman Blaine began to see the man in relation to the room—not as a single point of interest, but as a man who sat in a chair, with the chair resting on the carpeting and the carpeting covering the floor.

  Giesey’s uncapped pen lay upon the desk in front of him, resting where it had stopped after rolling off a sheaf of papers. Giesey’s spectacles lay beside the pen; off to one side was a glass with a little water left in the bottom of it; beside it stood the stopper of the carafe from which Giesey must recently have poured himself a drink.

  And on the floor, beside Lew Giesey’s feet, was a single sheet of paper.

  Blaine stood there, staring at the paper, wondering what it was. It was a form of some sort, he could see, and there was writing on it. He edged around the desk to get a better look at it, egged on by an illogical curiosity.

  He bent low to read the writing, and a name came up and struck him in the face. Norman Blaine!

  He bent swiftly and scooped the paper off the carpet. It was an appointment form, dated the day before yesterday and it appointed Norman Blaine as Administrator of Records, Dream Department, effective as of midnight of this day. It was duly signed and stamped as having been recorded.

  John Roemer’s job, Blaine thought, the job that they had whispered about for weeks throughout the Center.

  He had a fleeting moment of triumph. They’d picked him. He had been the man for the job! But there was more than triumph. He not only had the job, but he had the answers to the questions they would ask.

  Why were you called in? they’d ask. Now he could answer them. With this paper in his pocket, he would have the answer.

  But he didn’t have much time.

/>   He laid the paper on the desk and folded it one third over, forcing himself to take the time to do it neatly. Then, just as neatly, he folded the other one third over and thrust it in his pocket. Then he turned again to face the door and waited.

  The next moment, Paul Farris and a half dozen of his goons came stamping in.

  III

  Farris was a smooth operator. He was a top-notch policeman and had the advantage of looking like a college instructor. He was not a big man; he wore his hair slicked down, and his eyes were weak and wavery back of the spectacles.

  He settled himself comfortably in the chair behind his desk and laced his hands over his belly. “I’ll have to ask you some questions,” he told Blaine. “Just for the record, naturally. The death is an open-and-shut one of suicide. Poison. We won’t know what kind until Doc gets the test run through.”

  “I understand,” said Blaine.

  And thought: I understand, all right. I know just how you work. Lull a man to sleep, then belt him in the guts.

  “You and I have worked together for a long time,” said Farris. “Not together, exactly, but under the same roof and for the same purpose. We’ve got along fine; I know that we will continue in exactly the same way.”

  “Why, certainly,” said Blaine.

  “This appointment form,” said Farris; “you say you got it in an inter-office envelope.”

  Blaine nodded. “It was in my basket this morning, I suppose. I didn’t get around to going through the stuff until rather late.”

  Which was true enough, he hadn’t gone through the basket until 10 o’clock or so. And another thing—there was no record of inter-office mail.

  And still another thing: Maintenance came around and emptied the waste baskets at precisely 11:30; it was now a quarter of one, and anything that had been in his basket had long since been burned.

  “And you just put the form in your pocket and forgot about it?”

  “I didn’t forget about it; I had an applicant about that time. Then, when the applicant left, two of the fabricators came in. I was going over a point or two with them when Giesey called and asked me to come up. “

  Farris nodded. “You think he wanted to talk with you about your new position?”