The door opened, and a very tall, thin elderly man walked in, and Rossoff got quickly to his feet. "It's not Rube," the man said, "and my hands weren't on Alice, I'm sorry to say."
"It was the other way around," the nurse said, reaching into the office for the doorknob; she closed the door, smiling.
Rossoff introduced us. This was Dr. E.E. Danziger, Director of the project, and we shook hands. His hand, big and hairy and with prominent veins, wrapped right around mine, it was so large, and his eyes stared at me, excited, fascinated, wanting to know all about me in one look. The words spilling out, he said, "How does he test?" and while Rossoff told him, it was my turn to study him.
He was a man you'd know again if you saw him just once. He was sixty-five or — six, I thought, his forehead and cheeks heavily lined; the cheek lines were a series of three curved brackets beginning at the corners of his mouth and extending up to the cheekbones, widening and deepening when he smiled. He was bald and tanned, the top of his head freckled, his side hair still black, or possibly dyed. He must have been six feet five inches tall, maybe more; and he was thin and lanky, wide-shouldered but stooped. He wore a jaunty polka-dotted, blue bow tie; an old-style double-breasted tan suit, the coat hanging open; and a brown button-up sweater under the coat. He was well into his sixties but he looked strong, he looked masculine and virile; I had a hunch that he might not at all mind getting his hands on Alice, and that maybe she wouldn't mind either.
To Rossoff, speaking slowly, he said, "You say yes?" And when Rossoff nodded, he said, "Then I do, too. I've gone over all we have on him, and he sounds right." He turned and stood looking at me soberly and searchingly for some seconds; during this Rube stepped into the office and very quietly closed the door. I was beginning to feel a little embarrassed by Dr. Danziger's stare when he suddenly grinned. "All right!" he said. "And now you'd like to know what you've got yourself into. Well, first Rube will show you, then I'll try to tell you." He gripped his coat lapels in his big freckled fists, his arms hanging loosely, and stood staring at me again, smiling a little, nodding slowly; in approval, I felt, and was more pleased than I'd have thought.
"I'm in charge of this establishment," Danziger continued then. "I began it, in fact. But just now I envy you. I'm sixty-eight years old, and two years ago when I understood that this project was going to become real, I began taking care of my health for the first time in my life. I quit smoking. I never thought I could and never much wanted to, but I quit" — he snapped his fingers — "like that. I miss it." His hand returned to his lapel. "But I'm not going to start again. I drink moderately; medicinally, actually. And I once drank a lot on occasion. Frequent occasion. Because I liked it. But no more now, and I follow a diet besides. Why all this nonsense?" He raised a hand, forefinger pointing up. "Because I want to live and be with this project just as long as I possibly can. I've had an interesting life, I haven't been cheated; I've been in two wars, lived in five countries, had two wives, a great many friends of both sexes, and once for four years I was rich. No children, though; you can't have everything." Again Dr. Danziger stared at me, eyes friendly and envious, hands hung on his lapels. "But if this project should succeed, it will be the most remarkable thing mortal man has ever done, and I'll give up anything, I'd follow a diet of raw turnips and horse manure, just to get an extra year or even an extra month of life for it. No matter how carefully a man lives, though, at sixty-eight his remaining years are numbered, while you — you're what: twenty-eight?" I nodded. "Well, you've got forty years on me then, and if I could steal them from you I'd do it, cheerfully and without compunction. I even envy you this day. Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?"
"Yes, sir; Huckleberry Finn."
"Right. Well, that's how I feel about the day you're going to have now. Take him away, Rube. There's lots to show him, and we're in a hurry now." He raised a wrist to look at his watch. "Bring him to the cafeteria at noon."
3
Out in the corridors as I walked along with Rube, people passed us, moving to and from offices. They were men and women, mostly young, and whenever one walked by, speaking or nodding to Rube, he or she would glance at me curiously. Rube was watching me, I saw, smiling a little, and when I looked at him he said, "What do you think you're going to see?"
I tried to find an answer but had to shake my head. "I haven't a glimmering, Rube."
"Well, I'm sorry to be so damn mysterious. But it's the director who explains this, not me. And you have to see it before he can explain it." We turned a corner and then another, into a corridor considerably narrower than the others. We turned once more, and now we were walking along a narrow aisle that stretched ahead for a considerable distance.
One wall of the aisle was blank. The other was a series of tinted windows through which we could see into what Rube told me were instruction rooms. The first three were empty and were fitted out as ordinary classrooms. There were six or eight one-armed wooden chairs in each, the arms widening into writing surfaces; there were blackboards, bookshelves, teachers' desks and chairs. At the fourth window two men were sitting in the same kind of room, one at the desk, the other in a wooden chair facing him, and we stopped to watch. "We can see in, they can't see out," Rube said. "Everyone knows it; it's just a matter of not disturbing people at work."
The man in the student's chair was talking, steadily but with frequent pauses, sometimes rubbing his face in thought. He was about forty, thin and dark, and wore a navy-blue sweater and a white shirt open at the collar. The instructor at the desk was younger and wore a brown tweed sport coat. Beside the window on a stainless-steel wall plate was a pair of buttons. Rube pushed one and now we could hear the speaking man's voice from a loudspeaker behind a grill over the window.
It was a foreign language, and after a dozen seconds or so I thought I recognized it and was about to say so, then I stopped. I'd thought it was French, a language I can recognize, but now I wasn't sure. I stood listening carefully; some of the words were French, I was almost certain, but pronounced not quite correctly. He kept on, fluently enough, the instructor occasionally correcting pronunciation, which the other would repeat a few times before continuing. "Is it French?"
From the way Rube smiled I knew he'd been waiting for the question. "Yep. But medieval French; no one has talked like that in four hundred years." He pressed the other button, and the loudspeaker went silent, the man's lips continuing to move, and we walked on. At the next window Rube jabbed the speaker button, I heard a stifled grunt and the clash of wood on wood, then I stopped beside him and stood looking into the room.
It was completely bare, the walls padded and faced with heavy canvas; in it two men were fighting with bayonet-tipped rifles. One wore the shallow helmet, high-necked khaki blouse, and roll-puttees of a First World War American uniform. The other wore the black boots, gray uniform, and deep flared helmet of the Germans. The bayonets were an odd false-looking silver, and I saw that they were painted rubber. The men's faces were shiny with sweat, their uniforms stained at armpits and back, and as we watched they parried and riposted, heaved and shoved, grunting as the rifles clashed. Suddenly the German stepped back fast, feinted, sidestepped a counterthrust, and drove his rifle straight into the other's stomach, the rubber bayonet bending double against the khaki. "You're dead, pig of an American!" he yelled, and the other shouted, "Hell I am, that's just a little stomach wound!" They both started laughing, jabbing away at each other, and Rube stood glaring in at them, muttering, "Wrong, wrong, the bastards! An absolutely wrong attitude!" I glanced at him: He looked mean and dangerous, his lips set, eyes narrowed. For a moment longer he stared in silence, then punched the cutoff button hard with his thumb and swung away from the window.