by David Karp
“Then call them and say you’ve changed your mind.” Emma was upon him, clutching, dragging, holding him back.
“Emma, that’s out of the question,” Burden said, wondering now if he could possibly revoke his request. He had the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps he couldn’t, that now the die was cast and he had no choice in the matter but to go through with the hearing. Now, quite suddenly, he wished that he could change his mind. But that wish was checked by another fear—the fear that he would be told that he couldn’t. Somehow it seemed more desirable if he could retain the feeling that the hearing was being held at his own request. It seemed safer. Safe from what? The thought caught at his throat, but he did his best not to communicate that sudden, wild scratch of terror to Emma.
When he was able to calm her he left the house and took the train. This time the small, calm suburban houses didn’t look quite so innocent. It seemed to him that the blinds were closely drawn in all the houses and that he actually saw no one in the streets. True, it was cold and gray and bleak, but still, not to see anyone appeared improbable, sinister, as if all the people had remained discreetly indoors, perhaps fearing to go out. Fearing what? Again the word and the emotion. Of what was he afraid? What could the hearing possibly turn up but that he had done the best job he possibly could? What else was there to turn up? Surely he had omitted nothing from his reports, distorted no facts. He had taken the job voluntarily and the worst that could happen would be that he would lose the job of correspondent. Well, what harm in that? He had never been paid any money for the job, nor had he received an ounce of extra privilege for his work. It seemed to him that he had been entirely on the giving end of the relationship and that he had never asked for or received any benefit from his work. It was entirely too one-sided.
The hearing room, like the Special Service Office, was disappointingly small. At a small, simply painted rostrum three men in ordinary business suits were seated, papers in front of them. A stenographer sat between Burden and the three examiners. Burden took no oath; he did not, in fact, move from the chair which he was given when he entered the room. There were no spectators and the plain monk’s cloth curtains were drawn over the windows. The only sound came from the stenography machine the girl used and the occasional rattle of paper or a cough from one of the examiners. Behind the examiners was a long mirror in which Burden could watch himself. He thought he looked well when he spoke.
The questioning seemed, to Burden, to be flat and uninspired. No one seized on his remarks the way Conger had done in the first interview. In fact Burden found the examiners extremely fair. They allowed him to develop his points at great length, only occasionally interrupting to ask him to elaborate or to clarify a statement.
“My own feeling in the matter,” Burden said, aware that he was doing extremely well thus far, “is that my relationship with the Department has been a good one—although one-sided.”
“How, one-sided, Professor Burden?” the center examiner asked. Although none of the examiners seemed to take the lead in questioning, Burden had the feeling that the center examiner was the one of greatest authority. He also had seemed the most sympathetic.
“Well, I’ve done work for the Department for ten years now. It has been, to the best of my knowledge, conscientious and honest work. I have turned in complete reports, reports that have been selective, balanced, judicious.” The center examiner nodded understandingly. “I have had no one to guide me in my work for those ten years. In the absence of criticism or suggestion I have applied my own standards to my reports, constantly seeking to improve my work for the Department. If I have taken the wrong direction somewhere along the line during those years, it seems to me that my superiors should have pointed it out to me. If I had been doing so badly for ten years why wasn’t I directed correctly sooner than this?” Burden paused but the examiners offered no answer although the center examiner smiled encouragingly.
“Will you explain further what you mean by your description of your relationship with the Department as being one-sided, Mr. Burden?” the examiner with the fair mustache on the left said. He glanced at his papers as if something had occurred to him. “I beg your pardon. Did I say Mr. Burden? Of course, I meant Professor Burden.”
“That’s quite all right,” Burden said, smiling back. “Yes, I’ll explain what I mean. In the relationship between servant and master, if I may use that analogy, the servant has his obligations but the master, too, has his obligations to his servant. And one of the obligations of the master is to praise or correct the work of his servant. In ten years I have received neither. I have been completely in the dark as to the feelings of my superiors. My only conclusion was that I was doing well. Perhaps not superlatively well, but adequately. At least that much.” The examiner with the fair mustache nodded in agreement. “And to have this charge thrown at me for the first time—a general charge—without specific point I mean—it’s unfair. It’s uncharitable. It’s worse than that—it’s downright ungrateful.”
“Ungrateful?” the center examiner asked quizzically.
“Yes,” Burden said, wondering if perhaps the word had been too strong. Well, never mind. It was time he stood up and spoke back. He had been treated shabbily. “After all, I have assumed a burden working for the Department. I have devoted time and energy and some personal expense. I don’t begrudge these things. I give them freely and willingly, without sense of reservation about them. But a man does want appreciation for what he has done. A man deserves the feeling that his efforts aren’t wasted, that his work is vital.” Burden kept one eye on his image in the mirror and thought he struck a particularly effective pose several times. “After all,” he went on, “the essential dignity of man is the sense of worth, of purpose, of meaning that his life gives him. I am a modest man and I have lived a modest life, but this does not mean that I consider myself worthless or what I have done as trivial. These reports have been an important part of my life and of my work.” Burden’s voice was quite clear and strong in the hearing room. It was equally clear and strong in the adjoining room, but only because his voice was coming through the amplified tones of speakers set into the ceiling. His gestures, his words, and his person had been under careful scrutiny all morning by four men who sat at a long table or lounged in easy chairs looking through the mirror that was on the wall behind the examiners. It was a trick mirror which reflected on one side, the side Burden saw, and was transparent when looked through on the other—the side which the four men faced.
“Remarkably well-buried heresy,” one of the four men said as he watched and listened.
“Conger was right,” another said. “Completely integrated. He doesn’t even know he’s a heretic.”
“Remarkable how they can live separate lives,” the first man said.
“Well, there are such things as completely schizoid personalities,” the fourth man said. He was thin and lanky, with large, pale eyes and hair that was almost too long for a man, thin and silky and disordered. His slender, pale fingers were plunged into his hair in a thoughtful posture as he slumped in his easy chair. His lips were heavy and drooping and slightly parted. His eyes were faintly luminous in their paleness and they seemed oddly possessed as he watched Burden. Now and then his lips moved very faintly as if he were repeating Burden’s words silently, or as if he were praying to himself. His name was Lark and of the four men in the room he was the most important, the most poised.
“Do you notice how he keeps harping on the gratitude theme?” one of the two men at the table asked Lark. The slender, abstracted young man seemed to be lost in his own thought and did not answer.
“As though it were of primary concern to him,” the other man at the table said.
“The question is—how important is gratitude to him and how much of what he calls gratitude is really a bid for recognition as an individual? Don’t you agree, Lark?” Lark remained silent, his eyes fixed on Burden, his long pale face pressed against the bony, long fingers.
“
I don’t think there’s any doubt but that what he calls gratitude is a bid for individual recognition,” one of the men at the table said.
His neighbor nodded. “Absolutely. He’s constantly under pressure to assert himself as an individual as opposed to what he considers the anonymous mass of correspondents.”
“I wonder if he’s indulged in the reverie of identification?” the man in the other easy chair asked.
“No doubt about it,” the man at the table said. “I’m sure he’s told himself that his reports are eagerly looked forward to, that he’s considered quite an ace of a correspondent. I’m also certain that he thinks his superior thinks he’s one devil of a fellow.”
“Odd, the way they want personal attention from their superiors,” the man in the armchair said thoughtfully. “Do you remember Chapman?”
“They fall in love with the internal images,” one of the men at the table said, nodding.
“Chapman was a fascinating subject,” the man in the armchair continued. “Toward the end he started making indecent proposals in his reports and drawing pictures in them. His reader was quite shocked.”
“What was astonishing was that Chapman knew his superior would report him for it,” the man at the table said.
“That’s precisely why he did it, don’t you see? He thought if he could meet his superior he could seduce him, and what better way to meet him than to lay himself open to investigation?” the man in the armchair said.
“Fantastic, what lengths they’ll go to for love,” one of the men at the table said.
“Had enough of this?” Lark asked unexpectedly, turning to the three other men.
The three men nodded quickly. Lark stretched out an incredibly long and lean leg and pressed down on a pearl button with the heel of his shoe. In the hearing room a small light came on under the desk where the examiners sat. It was the signal to conclude the hearing.
“Thank you very much, Professor Burden,” the center examiner said with a smile.
“I want to thank you,” Burden repeated to the three examiners, “for your patience, your kindness, for your gentlemanliness in allowing me to say the things I felt must be said—not in my own defense so much but in protest against such treatment. I’m sure you’ll render a just and compassionate verdict.”
“That is our desire always, Professor Burden,” the youngest examiner with the blond mustache said softly.
“Thank you—” the rest of Burden’s words were lost as the speakers went dead in the adjoining room. The four men had risen and Lark, leaning negligently against the wall, his long legs crossed, had his hands sunk deep in his pockets. Now, straight on, the long, pale face seemed dwarfed by the enormous light eyes, the thick lips, the delicately pointed chin. There was something primitive and dedicated in the face.
“Well?” Lark asked the three men who faced him in a rough semicircle.
“I consider him a heretic with profound compulsions,” one of the men said. The other two nodded their agreement.
“And?” Lark asked, his eyes traveling restlessly among the three men.
“Your chances of obtaining social conformity are practically nil,” another of the three said. The other two stared at Lark gravely.
“Then in your opinion we shouldn’t try for conformity?” Lark asked.
“No,” the man who spoke last said. The other two shook their heads negatively.
“Then we’ll have to kill Professor Burden.”
“That’s my opinion,” the spokesman said and looked at his two companions who agreed, nodding thoughtfully.
“Thank you very much,” Lark said with a queer smile, and then turned and pulled open the door and stepped through. The three men followed him out of the room but by the time the last man closed the door behind him Lark was gone somewhere down a long, empty corridor.
In the hearing room Burden was shaking hands with the examiners and thanking them again.
“You may have to wait around awhile, Professor Burden,” the center examiner said, “there may be some more questions. But the formal hearings are over.”
“Do you know if I will have to be back tomorrow?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” the examiner said with a doubtful look. “But this afternoon—”
“I’m completely prepared to spend the day here,” Burden said with a smile. It had, after all, turned out well. Of course there was no verdict handed down, but he couldn’t help feeling that he had made a good impression. A very good impression.
7
On the first floor of the building in which he found himself Burden ate in a large, well-lighted restaurant. The atmosphere was quiet and unhurried and the food was excellent and quite cheap. It was apparently a restaurant designed solely for the personnel of the Department working in Building Four.
After the meal, somewhat at a loss what to do next, Burden sat at the table and watched the people about him. Most of them were young and the proportion of men to women seemed fairly equal—far more equal, in fact, than would be found in the student dining halls at the college or in the faculty dining hall. Everyone seemed cheerful and talkative despite the bleak weather outdoors. Burden read lips here and there among the diners about him. But most of the conversations were either overly cryptic with official language or trivial and dull. That struck him as strange. Despite the animated expressions in their faces and the intensity of their conversations, none of the people in the room whose conversations he could follow seemed to be saying anything that sounded remotely interesting or faintly provocative. At one table they were discussing summer vacations with a vivacity and a zest that suggested that all the people had just returned from their holidays just a few days before. But by the calendar that couldn’t possibly be true. Those same people must have eaten together for months since their vacations ended and yet they were apparently pursuing a topic of table talk that must have been exhausted and stale long before this. Still, they showed no lack of interest. Their eyes sparkled, they listened eagerly. At another table, out of boredom, Burden had followed a long and banal discussion on food preferences. The young men and women of that group must have known each other well and yet the discussion had all the air of people baring their inner souls for the first time in their lives. Burden’s eyes swept across the room. Suddenly a thought struck him. To be certain, he looked over the room more slowly, more carefully. Odd, he thought. There was no table in the room, barring his own, where fewer than four people were seated. Indeed, there were no groups of twos or threes. It was always four or more at a table. And yet the restaurant was by no means crowded. Two people could easily find a quiet, softly lit corner for themselves. And yet no two people did. The groups of four and more sat in the center of the restaurant under the brightest lights. What was still more curious, there were no tables where more men than women were seated, nor were there any tables where the opposite condition obtained. Burden’s brows knit with puzzlement. Now, that was odd.
His interest aroused, he counted the number of tables occupied in the restaurant, checking at each table to see the distribution of men to women. It was almost always exactly equal. When he had finished surveying the entire restaurant he was faintly perplexed to discover that the ratio of men to women was exactly equal, one to one. Nowhere was there a table devoted exclusively to men or a table devoted exclusively to women.
Burden leaned back in the chair, awakened by this statistical accident. Perhaps it was common. Perhaps he was being perplexed by something that was not at all unusual. And yet there was something off key about the restaurant. People left while he ate and he noticed that whole parties left at once. Well, that certainly wasn’t uncommon. Their lunch hour over, most of them working in the same offices or departments, groups left together. That was reasonable enough. And yet—Burden chewed his lower lip. No one did any “table-hopping,” as Middleton called it. There was a great deal of that in the faculty dining hall. Burden had found it objectionable because it frequently blocked his view and he could neve
r read the lips of a table hopper who was leaning down to whisper something to a friend or a colleague who was seated. Yet here there was no table hopping. No whispering, in fact. Of course, it was considered impolite to whisper. But still, people did whisper. Not here. Not as far as he could tell.
Burden stirred slightly in his seat. The more closely he examined these people who worked in the Department the more he discovered. For one thing, at no table were there two two-way conversations. At every table the four people conducted a single conversation. All were included in the conversation and all listened attentively. Now, that was odd. It might be the very height of social politeness, but it seemed strained. Burden snapped his fingers. That was the word he had subconsciously been groping for. There was an intense underlying sense of strain in the restaurant. The attention was too pointed, too bright, the politeness too rigid, the balances too equal, the air of conviviality too strenuously maintained. It was as though they felt compelled to act the way they did, to seat themselves like the animals of Noah’s Ark, two by two.
How extremely odd, Burden thought. They acted almost as if they were—Burden checked himself. Then, looking about the restaurant with new eyes he examined the diners again. They acted like badly frightened people.
