"The Diploids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

A well dressed man came out, flagged a taxi, and drove away without giving them a glance.

“Martian going to lunch,” murmured Nadine.



THEY ate in a nearby drugstore, sitting at a counter looking at the impassive white stone face of the towering building across the street. The separate entrance was a luxury for which the building must have charged high rent. Apparently the National Counseling Service could afford such expensive whimseys. They ate hastily in silence, considering the implications of what they had seen. The National Counseling Service had money and power, and they were interested in him for some reason.

That advertisement was obviously directed at him and others like him. He wondered how many others there were to see the ad.

“Power…” he mused. “A big organization too…”

Nadine set a sliding pointer on the menu and pushed a button at its base. “We don’t know how much space they’ve taken behind that swank front. Maybe it’s just intended to look expensive to frighten off people who are attracted by the ad and genuinely come for counseling.” She sipped a malted milk that came out of the automatic mixer and continued thoughtfully. “If I were using a front like that, I think I’d give a little genuine counseling to make it stand up.”

She had bought another magazine on the way over, and she began flipping through it as she talked. Pictures in fluorescent inks glowed vividly as she flipped past them. Suddenly a page turned up in cool black and grey, the familiar spread hand. “Here it is!” Nadine flattened the magazine and they looked at it together.

“Puzzled?” He read the black letters, “Discontented? We don’t read palms, but we can tell you about yourself—call the National Counseling Service. We find unusual situations for unusual people.”

“Now they’re threatening you with an unusual situation,” Nadine remarked skeptically. They had finished their lunches and it was time to go back to work. “What are you going to do, Mart?” They dropped their meal tabs in the slot and paid the amount the machine rang up. The turnstile yielded and passed them through. They stood on the sidewalk looking at the towering impassive building across the street.

“Go in and look around, I guess. I’ll have to wait till after work. Would you like to come in with me?”

“No.” She looked up at him soberly, the sunlight touching her face in sprinkles of light as it filtered through the elms overhead. “This looks secret, Mart. They probably wouldn’t tell you anything if you had anyone with you, or even said you’d confided in anyone about this. I want to hear about it, but I’d better just spend the time looking some stuff up in the science and technology room at the library. Call me there when you find out anything, will you Mart?”

“Right.” He made his face solemn and asked, “Date?”

“Date,” she smiled. Hurrying together they went down the belt entrance and back toward the afternoon’s work.


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IV
« ^ »
FIVE hours later, with, his hand on the bronze knob of the leather-covered door, he hesitated briefly, looking: in through the small window set in the door. There was still no one inside the waiting room as far as he could see. Was the whole organization waiting for him as a trap waits for a mouse?

Then he thought of Devon, free somewhere, and looking for him with a gun. He glanced anxiously over his shoulder. There was only the stream of brightly clad people, looking wilted in the dusty late afternoon heat, going wherever people go after work. Women, girls, young men, old men—no one familiar, but there was no use standing there like a target. He turned the knob, pushed through the door and was inside. The door shut after him softly.

As it closed, the sounds of the city dwindled and vanished, and he was in a sound-proofed silence as still and remote as the room of a deserted house on some distant hillside.

It was the pine scent that had made him think of mountains, he realized after a moment. A cool drift of air brushed against his face as if somewhere near there were wide windows open to a breeze that had come through an evergreen forest.

The waiting room was comfortably darkened, with recessed lights in the small bookcase, and wide stylized chairs in polished wood and rough dark green cloth with small adjustable spotlights clamped to the left arm of each chair for easy reading.

He felt almost hidden standing in the half dark, and his tension faded. Under the glass coffee table an indirect light shone on a lower shelf, glowing on a scattering of varicolored pamphlets and bound booklets with the name National Counseling Service in script on the cover.

The waiting room remained soundless and peaceful. Apparently no one was going to interrupt or ask him why he was there. Through a small archway he could look down a softly lighted corridor and see the blank wall where it turned. Breden sat down and picked up a pamphlet. The back section was filled by a reassuring collection of honest-looking graphs and statistics. He turned to the front and started at the first page.

A single slogan was blazoned across it: SQUARE HOLES FOR SQUARE PEGS. A small block of print at the bottom, placed like a footnote, stated. “The National Counseling Service is approved by The American Psychometric Association, and The Association for Corrective Psychotherapy, and works in co-operation with the Human Engineering Laboratories of Stevens Institute, Columbia University and the University of Chicago. We have available on request all personal data of public, State and Federal psychometric tests already individually taken.”