“A little excitable, but pretty good.”
“Oh, excitable. We can fix that.” Harvey Blood turned to Washington. “It wouldn’t do to have him excited on the airplane. Jumping around, disturbing the other passengers…”
“No,” Washington said, reaching to the floor, bringing up a black physician’s bag, opening it on the bar table.
“No,” agreed the two men, watching as Washington removed a syringe, filled it, held it to the light.
“Listen,” Clark said, finding his voice at last. “This is all some kind of mistake. I know these two men. They are Harvey Blood and George Washington. They—”
“We know Dr. Blood and Dr. Washington,” one man said calmly. “We know all about everything. You know, we’ve been following you in the bulletins for days. Never thought we’d see you here, though.”
“Bulletins?”
One of the men asked Blood, “How’d you know he was going to be here?”
“Someone in Nassau spotted him,” Blood said.
“Nassau! How’d he get down there?”
“We traced him from Los Angeles,” Blood said. “Found the girl who sold him the ticket. He flew to Nassau five days ago.”
“Pretty tricky,” the man said, looking at Clark and shaking his head. “Pretty clever.”
Washington took Clark’s arm, held it out, rolled up the sleeve. Clark began to struggle just as he felt the coolness of the alcohol swab.
“You can’t do this—”
The needle stung.
“—to me, you can’t do this.”
Another swab of alcohol. His sleeve was rolled down.
“He’ll be fine now,” Harvey Blood said. “Just fine.”
PART III: Madness
“It is indeed harmful to come under the sway of utterly new and strange doctrines.”
17. THE SCIENTIFIC COMING
HE HEARD A SOUND like the roar of a huge forestfire, and he smelled smoke. The sound was very loud, deafening, but somehow familiar at the same time.
He opened his eyes, and looked to the direction of the sound. He was lying on a couch, fully dressed, in some kind of office. There was a window to his right. He got up slowly and walked over to look out.
Traffic.
A freeway, thick with automobiles. Yellow-gray sky and faint, diffuse sunlight.
“Los Angeles,” he said, and shook his head. He didn’t remember what had happened. There was something about boarding an airplane, and later, being met at the airport by a limousine—
“My God, you look awful,” Harvey Blood said.
Clark turned. Blood was standing just inside the door.
“You’re…you’re an absolute mess,” Blood said, gesturing to Clark’s clothes. “You can’t go like that.”
He came up and pushed Clark into a chair.
“No, that would ruin everything,” he said. “Just a minute.”
He went to the door, and came back with two girls. One began to comb Clark’s hair while the other shaved him with an electric razor. A boy came in with a suit on a hanger, a fresh shirt, and a tie; he hung it on the back of the door and walked out. Blood stood in the center of the room and watched the girls working on Clark.
“Hurry it up, girls,” he said. “We’re behind schedule already.”
Clark said, “Behind schedule for what?”
“The audition,” Blood said.
“What audition?”
“For Project GG,” he said. “The Angela Sweet mockup.”
Clark said nothing. He didn’t understand what Blood was talking about.
Blood seemed to realize this. “It’s all strange at first,” he said. “And of course you’re tired from your journey. But that will pass.”
Clark said, “Where are we?”
“Advance. We landed in LA last night. Do you remember that?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, it went very smoothly. Let’s go, girls.”
The girls finished and stepped back. Clark stood; they helped him out of his clothing, and handed him the clean clothes. He dressed slowly.
“Clark, come on, come on,” Blood said.
Roger Clark knotted his tie as slowly as he could.
“Look,” Blood said. “This kind of funny business won’t go. You’d better understand that. You’re in trouble and you need me.”
“I do?”
“You’re damned right you do. Now hurry it up.”
Walking down the steps to the waiting limousine, Clark said, “Why do I need you?”
“Because you’re in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
Harvey Blood glanced at his watch and entered the limousine. Clark followed him; two men were already there, sitting on the little fold-down seats. They had charts and briefcases opened, papers out.
The limousine started off.
Clark said, “What kind of trouble?”
“Later,” Blood said. He turned to the two men.
“We’ve got it down to twenty, Harvey,” one said. “They’re a pretty good group.” He laughed. “Some of them can even sing.”
“The hell with that,” Blood said. He looked at the other.
“Psychological testing is completed,” the man said. “On all twenty finalists. The correlation with somatotyping of body form is quite precise. You’ve got a split into two basic groups, really. What we call the projection-affective group, with high raw scores on scales twelve, delta, and nine. Then there’s the ego-flexor group, which scored high on scales five, beta, and two. It’s hard to say which would be the better choice.”
“I see,” Blood nodded.
The first man said, “We’ve got standardized costumes waiting, and the pattern is set. All it requires is your final decision.”
“How about the costume for GG?”
“We have a preliminary model. All the girls will wear it. The plastics people have just finished wiring them.”
“Fine. And the sound?”
“We’ll go there afterward. The mixing studios are doing fine work, I think you’ll agree. And the boys are coming together nicely.”
Blood nodded and sat back. The second man handed him a sheaf of graphs, with points plotted on peculiar circular axes. It was a kind of graph Clark had never seen before.
There were also several pages of photographs, but they were also peculiar. One page was the faces of twenty girls, but the other pages were isolated photos of legs, elbows, shoulders, feet. Each page was stamped: “PROJECT GLOW.”
“What’s that?” Clark said.
“Shut up,” Harvey Blood said. “I’m thinking.”
An auditorium, empty, the rows of wooden seats stretching back into darkness. In front of them, a bare and lighted stage.
Harvey Blood slumped down in the front row and looked up at the stage. The two men sat on either side of him; Clark sat next to one of them.
Nobody said anything, but after a moment, a man in a dark suit came onto the stage, carrying a microphone on a heavy base. He set the microphone down in the middle of the stage, right in front of Blood.
“Are you ready now, sir?” he asked.
“Ready,” Blood said. He took out a pair of glasses, wiped them on his tie, and put them on. He folded his hands across his chest and looked up expectantly.
“There are three runs,” one of the men said, leaning over to Clark. “Dr. Blood can eliminate at any time. Do you understand?”
“No,” Clark said.
“You’ll get the hang of it, after a while,” the man said.
The stage lights went down. A voice said, “Number one,” and a girl walked out. She was tall and slender, with dark hair and a gentle face. She wore black slacks and a frilly white blouse.