"Doctor Garson, with his 169 I.Q.? Doctor Garson, with his Ph.D., D.Sc., and his Ph. and D. I-don't-know-what-else? Him?"
"Yeah, Ma. Him."
"Him? Doctor Garson? Jimmy, son, boy - have you seen the bags under his eyes? Have you seen the lines in his face? He's carryin' the world around on his shoulders, Jimmy. That's what a high I.Q. got him, Doctor Garson. Do you know how old he is?"
"An awful old man, Ma."
"He's ten years younger than your Pa, Jimmy. That's what brains got him."
Pa came in at that moment, wearing the brassard of a Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps Asphalt Leveler, First Class. He was cheery, pink, in first-rate health. "Hi, there, folks," he said. "Everything hunky-dory in my little old home, eh?"
Jimmy exchanged glances with his mother, and smiled oddly. "Yessir, reckon it is. I mean, you're darn right it is!"
In came the organ music, the announcer, and the washless, rinseless wash powder, and Paul turned down the volume.
The door chimes were ringing, and Paul wondered how long they'd been at it. He might have turned on the televiewer, to see if the bell ringer was worth opening the door for, but he was hungry for companionship - just about any kind - and he went to the door gladly, gratefully.
A policeman looked at him coldly. "Doctor Proteus?"
"Yes?"
"I'm from the police."
"So I see."
"You haven't registered."
"Oh." Paul smiled. "Oh - I've been meaning to do that." And he had meant to do it, too.
The policeman did not smile. "Then why haven't you?"
"I haven't found the time."
"You better start looking for it, hard, Doc."
Paul was annoyed by this rude young man, and he was inclined, as he had been inclined with the bartender at the Meadows, to put him in his place. But he thought better of it this time. "All right. I'll be down to register tomorrow morning."
"You'll be down to register in an hour, today, Doc." The honorific Doc, Paul was learning, could be spoken in such a way as to make a man wish to God he'd never come within ten miles of a university.
"Yes - all right, whatever you say."
"And your industrial identification card - you've failed to turn that in."
"Sorry. I'll do that."
"And your firearms and ammunition permit."
"I'll bring that."
"And your club membership card."
"I'll find it."
"And your airline pass."
"All right."
"And your executive security and health policy. You'll have to get a regular one."
"Whatever you say."
"I think that's all. If anything else comes up, I'll let you know."
"I'm sure you will."
The young policeman's expression softened suddenly, and he shook his head. "Lo! How the mighty are fallen, eh, Doc?"
"Lo! indeed," said Paul.
And an hour later Paul reported politely at the police station, with a shoebox full of revoked privileges.
While he waited for someone to notice him, he interested himself in the radiophoto machine behind glass in one corner, which was fashioning a portrait of a fugitive, and noting beside it a brief biography. The portrait emerged from a slit in the top of the machine bit by bit - first the hair, then the brows, on line with the word WANTED, and then, on line with the large, fey eyes, the name: Edgar Rice Burroughs Hagstrohm, R&R-131313. Hagstrohm's sordid tale emerged along with his nose: "Hagstrohm cut up his M-17 home in Chicago with a blow-torch, went naked to the home of Mrs. Marion Frascati, the widow of an old friend, and demanded that she come to the woods with him. Mrs. Frascati refused, and he disappeared into the bird sanctuary bordering the housing development. There he eluded police, and is believed to have made his escape dropping from a tree onto a passing freight -"
"You!" said the desk sergeant. "Proteus!"
Registration involved the filling out of a long, annoyingly complicated form that started with his name and highest classification number, investigated his reasons for having fallen from grace, asked for the names of his closest friends and relatives, and ended with an oath of allegiance to the United States of America. Paul signed the document in the presence of two witnesses, and watched a coding clerk translate it, on a keyboard, into terms the machines could understand. Out came a card, freshly nicked and punched.
"That's all," said the police sergeant. He dropped the card into a slot, and the card went racing through a system of switches and sidings, until it came to rest against a thick pile of similar cards.
"What does that mean?" said Paul.
The sergeant looked at the pile without interest. "Potential saboteurs."
"Wait a minute - what's going on here? Who says I am?"
"No reflection on you," said the sergeant patiently. "Nobody's said you are. It's all automatic. The machines do it."
"What right have they got to say that about me?"
"Oh, they know, they know," said the sergeant. "They've been around. They do that with anybody who's got more'n four years of college and no job." He studied Paul through narrowed lids. "And you'd be surprised, Doc, how right they are."
A detective walked in, perspiring and discouraged.
"Any break on the Freeman case, Sid?" said the sergeant, losing interest in Paul.
"Nah. All the good suspects came off clean as a whistle on the lie detector."
"Did you check the tubes?"
"Sure. We put in a whole new set, had the circuits checked. Same thing. Innocent, every damn one of 'em. Not that every damn one of 'em wouldn't of liked to of knocked him off." He shrugged. "Well, more leg work. We've got one lead: the sister says she saw a strange man around the back of Freeman's house a half-hour before he got it."
"Got a description?"
"Partial." He turned to the coding clerk. "Ready, Mac?"
"All set. Shoot."
"Medium height. Black shoes, blue suit. No tie. Wedding ring. Black hair, combed straight back. Clean-shaven. Warts on hands and back of neck. Slight limp."
The clerk, expressionless, punched keys as he talked.
"Dinga-dinga-dinga-ding!" went the machine, and out came a card.
"Herbert J. van Antwerp," said Mac. "Forty-nine fifty-six Collester Boulevard."
"Nice work," said the sergeant. He picked up a microphone. "Car 57, car 57 - proceed to . . ."
As Paul walked into the bright sunlight of the street, a Black Maria, its siren silent, its tires humming the song of new rubber on hot tar, turned into the alleyway that ran behind the station house.
Paul peered curiously at it as it stopped by a barred door.
A policeman dismounted from the back of the shiny black vehicle and waved a riot gun at Paul. "All right, all right, no loitering there!"
Paul started to move on, lingering an instant longer for a glimpse of the prisoner, who sat deep in the wagon's dark interior, misty, futile, between two more men with riot guns.
"Go on, beat it!" shouted the policeman at Paul again.
Paul couldn't believe that the man would actually loose his terrible hail of buckshot on a loiterer, and so loitered a moment longer. His awe of the riot gun's yawning bore was tempered by his eagerness to see someone who had made a worse botch of getting along in society than he had.
The iron door of the station house clanged open, and three more armed policemen waited to receive the desperado. The prospect of his being at large in the alley for even a few seconds was so harrowing, seemingly, that the policeman who had been badgering Paul now gave his full attention to covering the eight or ten square feet the prisoner would cross in an instant. Paul saw his thumb release the safety catch by the trigger guard.