One

by David Karp

  The report was completed by a few minutes past ten. Because he was anxious to get to the tattered, carefully hidden books he had been reading, Burden forwent the ritual of rereading what he had written. He placed his report into the thick, plain envelope, addressed it to the central office of the Department of Internal Examination, and then went downstairs. Emma was reading by the fire in the living room. She took off her glasses as she saw him go into the hall.

  “Are you going out for your walk, dear?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Burden said, struggling into his coat. He wrapped the muffler around his neck and reached up for his hat. Emma came into the hall, carrying her book with her, her glasses in her other hand.

  “It’s so miserable and raw outside. Couldn’t you skip your walk this once?”

  “Emma, my darling, I’m a creature of habit, and creatures of habit have no more sense about their habits than do the habits themselves. I don’t go out to enjoy the weather. I go out because, mysteriously enough, I get restless at this time of the night and I have to walk a little while, fair weather or foul.”

  Emma came forward to pull his coat more tightly about his muffler. “You’re getting to act more and more like a professor every day.”

  “Is it so dull for you?” Burden asked kindly.

  “It would be if I didn’t play a little game of the mind with myself. I pretend you’re going out to do something I know nothing about. Sometimes I pretend it’s another woman, and sometimes I pretend it’s something magical or forbidden.” Emma’s smile disappeared as she looked at Burden. “It’s only a game, dear.”

  “Emma,” Burden said gently, taking her into his arms, “I would never do anything wrong. You know that.”

  “Of course,” she said warmly, “but it would be dull if I couldn’t pretend that you might.”

  “My darling Emma,” Burden said quietly, “I’m nothing more or less than the man you’ve known since he was nineteen.”

  “Are you?” she asked in a tone that Burden didn’t understand. Did she suspect that he was an informer? There had never been any notes needed in his work but the mental ones. He was too well-adjusted and too healthy to talk in his sleep and he knew Emma never disturbed the papers on his desk. Then could she suspect anything? Had he been acting differently? Any differently than he had acted for ten years? Burden kissed his wife, opened the door, and stepped out into the dark, damp street. Smoke and fog curled sensually along the lamp-posts. A fine rain was falling, its drops so light that they floated in front of his face. He suddenly felt curiously frightened and alone, as if he were a tiny bit of aquatic life caught in a dark and cold current. There was something about him that had changed, something that Emma had noticed. But what? Burden finally came up to the mailbox. It bore a coat of rain on its official gray paint. The envelope with its report gave a thick, satisfyingly heavy crackle under his fingers as he pinched it. He hesitated before the box. Some instinct made him wonder about the report. It revealed much of the life that went on about him in the college. It reported the heresies of others. But what did it tell the reader about him?

  With a swift, guilty gesture he pulled open the chute, inserted the letter, and closed the chute. The letter fell inside without a sound. Burden turned back toward the house, walking quickly, like a man who is not certain that he has not heard a strange and sinister sound behind him.

  4

  Burden’s letter came in with the truckload of mail sacks and was dumped unceremoniously on the unloading platform of the Department of Internal Examination’s outer perimeter building. The Department’s great physical plant was built in the shape of an immense honeycomb, great circles of buildings shrinking back in against themselves like a gigantic target on the landscape. The complex and efficient sorting system routed Burden’s report finally into a box labeled simply “Miss Hennessey.”

  At a quarter of nine in the morning a slender girl with glasses, flat heels, mousy brown hair, and a thin mouth came into the sorting room and presented her identification badge to a uniformed officer. The officer then went along the row of boxes filled with reports, selected Miss Hennessey’s box, and brought it back to her.

  Miss Hennessey walked to her glassed-in cubicle on flat rubber heels, her face expressionless. Once inside with the door closed she placed the reports box on her desk. After seating herself comfortably and adjusting her chair, she took all the reports out of the box and quickly, professionally stripped them flat, crimping her fingernail against the creases that their senders had put in them. She thumbed them for a moment with the deftness that a professional gambler uses on a deck of cards and began to count them. When she reached ten she pulled out the tenth report and tossed it aside without glancing at the name of the sender. It was Burden’s.

  Carefully she aligned the remaining reports. Satisfied with their alignment, she turned her cold, blue-eyed attention to Burden’s report, but only long enough to attach to it a small red plastic tab. Then she placed it in a long envelope large enough to accommodate it in its freshly flattened state.

  The envelope containing Burden’s report was placed on her desk, comfortably apart from all else. The legend on the envelope read “Special Service.” There the envelope remained until ten o’clock in the morning when a bright, handsome young man wearing a long linen duster came in after ceremoniously rapping on the door. Miss Hennessey favored the young man with a brief, mechanical smile. The young man picked up the envelope for Special Service and left.

  At Building Four of the Department’s concentric rings of buildings, the young man with the linen duster got off the intrabuilding shuttle and took an elevator to the sixth floor. He stepped smartly out into the long corridor and headed without hesitation to his right. At an ordinary frosted glass door he paused for a moment to adjust his tie and went in. Here three girls worked constantly at electric typewriters and one sat in front of a teletype machine, sipping coffee and smoking a cigarette. A receptionist got up with a smile and took the reports that the young man handed her.

  “Looks like it might snow,” the young man said to the receptionist as he turned and left.

  “Oh, it’s too early for snow. It’s only the middle of October!” she called after him. Then she turned with the reports to a row of small, partitioned offices at the end of the room. She knocked at the first, poked her head in, and then handed over an envelope. She did the same at each of the offices until she had given out all four envelopes. The envelope containing Burden’s report was given to a man named Conger. Conger accepted the envelope from the receptionist with a smile and a nod and tossed it negligently on his desk.

  Conger was a great mountain of a man with full, rosy cheeks, a rather small mouth, and a generous bulb of a nose. His eyes were shrewd but not unkindly. He fussed trying to light an ancient, fat-bowled pipe with an exceedingly well-bitten and short stem. Finally having lit it and drawing upon it heavily so that clouds of gray smoke filled the small, crowded room and drifted over the top of the partition wall, he pulled over the envelope containing Burden’s report. He opened the clasp that held the flap down and shook the envelope gently so that the top portion of the report came out, bearing Burden’s name, profession, age, address, and the date on which the report had been made.

  Conger dropped the report with its envelope back onto his desk and, still nursing the light in his pipe, reached out a heavy foot, hooked it around a leg of the dictation machine, and pulled the machine on its casters closer to him. Conger’s cheeks puffed and shrank as he worked to keep the pipe drawing. With his free hand he groped for the small hand speaker on the machine. Finally he nodded with satisfaction about the pipe’s drawing power and propped it comfortably into a corner of his mouth.

  Consulting the name on the heading of the report, Conger dictated into the softly humming machine his first letter of the day.

  “To Professor Burden, Templar College, Templar. Sir. You are instructed to report to the Special Service Detail Office, Building Four, sixth floor, on Mon
day, October 12, at 10 a.m. Transportation costs borne by you in connection with travel requested by the Department will be reimbursed to you upon application. Signed, Frank Conger, Special Service Detail Officer.” Conger shook the envelope so that the report fell back into it. He marked the envelope with the date and time of Burden’s appointment in his office and then pulled over his large day book, thumbed forward a few pages, and marked Burden’s name and the time of the appointment on the page headed Monday, October 12. That done, he placed the envelope inside a drawer and closed the drawer with his knee. There the envelope containing Burden’s report rested, unmarked, unread, untouched until a few moments before Burden appeared to meet Mr. Frank Conger on Monday, the twelfth of October.

  5

  The twelfth of October was one of those hard, bright fall mornings that wakes the senses, sharpens the appetite, and makes one voluptuously pleased to be alive. Burden had left the house in fine spirits, mysteriously tickled to be away from the routine of the college for a day, like a schoolboy who has been suddenly presented with a holiday. The letter had said nothing about secrecy but Burden had decided not to tell Emma about the letter. He told her, instead, that his trip had to do with a meeting to discuss an intercollegiate seminar to be held during the spring semester. However, to the chairman of the department, Burden had to be more truthful. He showed Doctor Corning the letter and the chairman at once granted him the day off.

  The trip to the Department was a pleasant three-hour ride by train that Burden would have enjoyed more had not the coach he was riding in been so overheated and overcrowded with commuters to the intermediate stops. By the time Burden reached his destination he was partially put out by the pushing and hauling and crowding. But the moment he stepped off the train his good humor returned with the rush of crisp, sunlit air that came up from the station. He inquired about a taxi but was told he could walk to the Department’s buildings if he was not too much in a hurry.

  The walk was delightful, through winding, carefully kept streets with neat, small homes, their long, rolling lawns raked clean of leaves. Here and there he caught the smell of burning leaves and the comforting sounds of dogs and children. The sight of the outer perimeter building of the Department was completely out of keeping with the pleasant, quiet view of the town. Its marble and glass walls rose sheer and tall out of an enormous tract of land that had been completely cleared of trees. Surrounding the immense outer ring of steel, marble, and glass were grassed areas as huge as football fields. There seemed to be literally miles of paved walks repeating the concentric circle motif. The sight was quite overwhelming.

  Burden’s trip to Building Four, sixth floor, took only a few moments but it seemed so complex, so bewildering, so filled with long, gleaming corridors and doors and lights and people that he began to worry that he would ever be able to find his way out again.

  The Special Service Detail office looked small and disappointingly plain once he was inside it. He had rather imagined that it would be a huge room filled with all sorts of complicated mechanical things, swarming with people doing mysterious and purposeful jobs, jammed to the ceilings with walls of steel files. But it was, of course, nothing of the sort.

  The four tiny partitioned cubicles at one end of the room looked flimsy, and the three girls at the electric typewriters wore small, plastic ear sets with which they listened to records of dictation. The girl at the teletype machine seemed to have nothing to do but file her nails, and the receptionist was having a difficult time keeping her interest on a magazine she was reading.

  Burden rested against the plain oak bench, waiting for Mr. Conger to see him although it was already ten o’clock on the electric clock on the wall opposite the bench. Ever since he had received the letter Burden had speculated upon the reason for his order to appear. He had told himself that very probably he was being called in for a routine matter. Actually, it was the first time in ten years that the Department had ever taken special and official notice of him. Burden had rejected the notion, but it still clung to the fringes of his mind, that he was being selected for a decoration of a sort—some minor, official award for ten years of service. He smiled to himself. It was the sort of thing that a bureaucratic mind might decide to do. A gold star for attendance, for good conduct, for faithful performance of duty. For some people such attention might be enormously flattering and stimulating. Burden knew that not all the Department’s agents were as sophisticated as he was and might find such an award an immense honor. Well, he thought, no harm done. He would act properly appreciative and pleased and take the medal or the citation or whatever it was home and put it away in a safe place. Burden looked again at the clock. It was seven minutes past the hour for his appointment.

  In one respect Burden was quite right about the reason for his visit. It was routine. His report had been the tenth received by Miss Hennessey on that morning. In twenty other cubicles twenty other readers had counted off the tenth report and the young man with the linen duster had collected twenty other envelopes marked Special Service and in twenty other small cubicles like Conger’s letters had been dictated to twenty other agents instructing them to report. It was routine. But it had nothing to do with medals or citations or decorations.

  Conger reached into his desk drawer and took out the envelope containing Burden’s report. Again he unfastened the clasp, shook the report down so that he could read the name, the profession, the age of the correspondent. He made a few notes on a pad of paper and then took the report out of its envelope completely. For the first time he read it very quickly and made a few other notes. He flipped the appended pages of the report with a heavy hand and placed his palm flatly and lightly on its face. A long-winded man, this one, Conger decided, and rose with a sigh. He walked around his desk and pushed his door open slightly. That done, he returned to his desk, opened a drawer, and took out his pipe. He was stuffing it with tobacco when the door was opened and Burden stepped in. Conger nodded pleasantly, indicating that Burden was to take the chair opposite the desk. Burden sat down, his hat in his lap, his blue eyes watching Conger.

  The lighting of the pipe and the adjustment of the draw were part of a ritual that Conger went through every morning and he skipped none of the steps. He seemed disinterested in Burden but he didn’t miss the slightly condescending smile on his face, nor did he miss the relaxed manner in which he sat, his legs crossed at the ankles. This one, Conger decided, was not afraid. He was very much at ease. A little too much at ease, probably. Self-­satisfied. Well, he would have to be jolted out of that.

  Finally satisfied with his pipe, Conger picked up the report and tossed it forward on his desk toward Burden.

  “This is your report, Professor Burden?”

  Burden picked up the report and examined it. Conger waited, watching the small details. Burden looked at the first page closely, turned the page and looked at the next and then at the next, and then at the fourth and final page. Finally he nodded with a smile and laid the report back on Conger’s desk.

  “Yes, sir, that’s my report.”

  Conger grunted. Burden had touched the small red plastic tab while reading. That was significant. Sometimes the tab terrified them. Sometimes they ignored it. Those who were terrified at the sight of the tab might be anything from heretics to hysterics. Those who ignored the tab were generally too stupid to speculate upon its significance. But Burden had touched the tab. It was a faintly nervous reaction. The close examination of the pages of his own report was significant. A truly cautious man might have read the report word for word. A frightened man would have hardly glanced at it. A timid man might have acknowledged it at once. Burden, evidently, was not any of these. He was sure of himself. But not quite as sure as he was at the moment he had entered the office. The tab had thrown him off slightly. If there had been no tab he might not have examined the report so closely. Perhaps he was now beginning to suspect that there was something wrong with this report. Good, Conger decided.

  Conger picked up the re
port and weighed it in his hand and then turned his eyes on it. Slowly, deliberately, he turned its pages. It was an old, probing trick. Conger was not reading the report. He was listening for any slight changes of position Burden might make in his chair. There were several creaks and a slur of shoes on the floor. Conger was satisfied. The trick had worked. He had made Burden uncomfortable, faintly uneasy. That was better. You could not work well with a man who was too sure of himself.