To Pay the Piper
THE MAN in the white jacket stopped at the door marked Re-Education ProjectCol. H. H. Mudgett, Commanding Officer and waited while the scanner looked him over. He had been through that door a thousand times, but the scanner made as elaborate a job of it as if it had never seen him before.
It always did, for there was always in fact a chance that it had never seen him before, whatever the fallible human beings to whom it reported might think. It went over him from gray, crew-cut poll to reagent-proof shoes, checking his small wiry body and lean profile against its stored silhouettes, tasting and smelling him as dubiously as if he were an orange held in storage two days too long.
“Name?” it said at last.
“Carson, Samuel.”
“Business?”
“Medical director, Re-Ed One.”
While Carson waited, a distant, heavy concussion came rolling down upon him through the mile of solid granite above his head. At the same moment, the letters on the doorand everything else inside his cone of visionblurred distressingly, and a stab of pure pain went lancing through his head. It was the supersonic component of the explosion, and it was harm-lessexcept that it always both hurt and scared him.
The light on the door-scanner, which had been glowing yellow up to now, flicked back to red again and the machine began the whole routine all over; the sound bomb had reset it.
Carson patiently endured its inspection, gave his name, serial number, and mission once more, and this time got the green.
He went in, unfolding as he walked the flimsy square of cheap paper he had been carrying all along.