“Twenty nine.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“Children?”
“None.”
“Nearest of kin?”
“An aunt.”
“Name?”
She gave him the name and he wrote it down, with address, age and classification of the aunt.
“Any others?”
“None at all.”
“Your parents?”
Her parents had been dead for years, she said; she was an only child. She gave her parents’ names, their classifications, their ages at the time of death, their last place of residence, their place of burial.
“You’ll check on all of this?” she asked.
“We check on everything.”
Here was the place where most of the applicants—even those who had nothing in their life to hide—would show some nervousness, would frantically start checking back along their memories to unearth some possible, long-forgotten incident which might turn up in the course of investigation to embarrass or impede them.
Lucinda Silone was not nervous; she sat there, waiting for the other questions.
Norman Blaine asked them: The number of her guild, her card number, her immediate superior, last medical exam, physical or psychic defects or ailments—all the other trivia which went into the details of daily life.
Finally he was finished and laid the pencil down. “Still no doubts?”
She shook her head.
“I keep harking back to that,” said Blaine, “to make absolutely certain we have a willing client; otherwise we have no legal status. But aside from that, there is the matter of ethics …”
“I understand,” she said, “that you are very ethical.”
It might have been mockery; if so, it was very clever mockery. He tried to decide if it were or not, but he wasn’t sure.
He let it drop. “We have to be,” he told her. “Here is a setup which, to survive, must be based on the highest code of ethics. You give your body into our hands for our safekeeping over a number of years. What is more, you give your mind over to us, to a lesser extent. We gain much intimate knowledge of your life in the course of our work with you. To continue in the job we’re doing, we must enjoy the complete confidence not only of our clients, but of the general public. The slightest breath of scandal …”
“There has never been a scandal?”
“In the early days, there were a few. They’ve been forgotten now, or we hope they have. It was those early scandals which made our guild realize how important it was that we keep ourselves free of any professional taint. A scandal in any of the other guilds is no more than a legal matter which can be adjudicated in the courts and then forgiven and forgotten. But with us there’d be no forgiving or forgetting; we’d never live it down.”
Sitting there, Norman Blaine thought of his pride in the work he did—a bright and shining pride, a comfortable and contented pride in a job well done. And this feeling was not confined to he himself alone, but was held by everyone at Center. They might be flippant when they talked among themselves, but the pride was there, hidden deep beneath the flippancy and the workaday approach.
“You almost sound,” she said, “like a dedicated people.”
Mockery again, he wondered. Or was it flattery to match his own. He smiled a little at it. “Not dedicated,” he said. “At least, we never think of ourselves as dedicated.”
And that was not quite right, he knew, for there were times when every one of them must have thought of themselves as dedicated. It was not a thing, of course, that one could say aloud—but the thought was there.
It was a strange situation, he thought—the pride of work, the fierce loyalty to the guild itself, and, then, the cutthroat competition, and the vicious Center politics which existed in the midst of that pride and loyalty.
Take Roemer for example. John Roemer, after years of work, was on his way out. That had been the talk for days—the open secret which had been whispered through the Center. Farris had something to do with it, Lew Giesey was involved in some way, and there were others who were mentioned. Blaine himself, for example, had been mentioned as one of the men who might be chosen to step up into Roemer’s position. Thank goodness, he had steered clear of Center politics all these years. There was too much headache in Center politics. Norman Blaine’s work had been enough for him.
Although it would be fine, he thought, if he were picked to take over Roemer’s job. It was higher up the ladder; the pay was better; and maybe if he got more money he could talk Harriet into giving up her newspaper job and …
He pulled himself back to the job at hand.
“There are certain considerations which you should take into account,” he told the woman across the desk. “You should realize all the implications of what your decision means before you go ahead. You must realize that once you go to sleep, you will awaken in a culture different than your own. The planets will not stand still while you sleep; they will advance—or at least we hope they will. Much will be different. Styles will change, in clothing and in manners. Thought and speech and perspective—all will change. You will awaken an alien in a world that has left you far behind; you will be old fashioned.
“There will be public issues of which there now is not the faintest inkling. Governments may have evolved, and customs will be different. What is illegal today may have become quite acceptable; what is acceptable and legal today may have become outrageous or illegal then. Your friends will all be dead …”
“I have no friends,” Lucinda Silone said.
He disregarded her and went on: “What I am trying to impress upon you is that once you wake you cannot step from here straight back into the world, for it will be your world no longer. Your world will have died many years before; you will have to be readjusted, will have to take a course in reorientation. In certain instances, depending upon the awakened person to some extent, to the cultural changes to an even greater extent, this matter of reorientation may take quite some time. For we must give you not only the facts of the changes which have occurred while you were asleep—we must gain your acceptance of those changes. Until you have readjusted not only your data, but your culture as well, we cannot let you go. To live a normal life in that world in which you wake you must accept it as if you had been born into it—you must become, in fact, part of it. And that must often be a long and painful process.”
“I realize all that,” she said; “I’m ready to abide by all the conditions you lay down.”
She had not hesitated once. Lucinda Silone had shown no regret or nervousness. She was as cool and calm as when she’d walked into the office.
“Now,” Blaine said, “the reason.”
“The reason?”
“The reason why you wish to take the Sleep; we must know.”
“You’ll investigate that, too?”
“We shall; we must be sure, you see. There are many reasons—many more than you’d think there’d be.”
He kept on talking, to give her a chance to steel herself and tell him the reason. More often than not this was the hardest thing of all that a client faced. “There are those,” he said, “who take the Sleep because they have a disease which at the moment is incurable. They do not contract for a Sleep of any specified length, but only till the day when a cure has been discovered.
“Then there are those who wish to wait out the time against the return of a loved one who is traveling to the stars—waiting out on Earth the subjective time of the faster-than-light flights. And there are those who wish to sleep out an investment which they are sure, given time, will make them a fortune. Usually we try to talk them out of it; we call in our economists, who try to show them …”