Inside the rotunda a burly man in blue, with the white shield on his breast, was standing on guard in front of a second swinging door, above which was painted something in the same strange characters. A few words to him from my captors apparently secured us precedence, for he stared at me curiously, opened the door, and bawled to some person inside. I was pushed into a large courtroom. It contained no seats, however, for spectators or witnesses. The only occupants were the magistrate and his clerk, and a group of policemen who lounged at one end of the room, joking among themselves. The clerk, a little, obsequious man in blue, was seated at a desk immediately opposite that of his chief, a pompous, surly fellow in white, wearing about his shoulders a lusterless black cape, which seemed to be a truncation of the old legal gown. Placing me on a platform near the clerk’s desk, the two policemen who were in charge of me stepped forward and began an explanation in low tones which was not meant to meet my ears, and did not.

The magistrate started nervously, and, putting his hand beneath his desk, pulled up a truncheon similar to those that I had seen in the cellar. He handled this nervously during our interview.

“Well, what have you to say, you filthy defective?” he shouted at me, when the police had ended.

I heard a suppressed chuckle behind me, and then became aware that all the police had gathered about me, convulsed with amusement at my rags.

“Stand back, you swine!” bellowed the magistrate. “Give me the Escaped Defectives Book,” he added, to his clerk.

The clerk handed up to him a small publication which I could see contained numerous miniature photographs in color. He began studying it, looking up at me from time to time. Occasionally, at his nod, one of the policemen would seize my face and push it into profile. At last the magistrate thrust the book away petulantly.

“This isn’t one of them,” he announced to the policemen. “Who are you?” he continued, glaring at me. “You’re not on the defectives’ list. Where do you come from? Tell the truth or I’ll commit you to the leathers. Why are you in masquerade? Where’s your brass? Your print? Your number? Your district?”

The clerk wagged his middle finger at me and, drawing a printed form from a pile, pushed it toward me. I took it, but I could make nothing of it, for it was in the same unknown characters.

“I can only read the old-fashioned alphabet,” I said.

The room echoed with the universal laughter. The magistrate almost jumped out of his chair.

“What!” he yelled. “You’re lying! You know you are. You have an accent. You’re from another province. What’s your game?”

The clerk, ignoring his superior’s outburst, pulled back the form, and, taking in his hand a sort of fountain pen, began to fill it in with a black fluid that dried the instant it touched the paper.

“Number, district, province, city, print, and brass?” he inquired. He paused and looked up at me. “Brach or dolicoph? Whorl, loop, or median? Facial, cephalic, and color indexes? Your Sanson test? Your Binet rating?”

But, since I made no attempt to answer these utterly baffling questions, the clerk ceased to ply me with them and looked up at the magistrate for instructions. The magistrate, who had been leaning forward, watching me attentively, now smiled as if he had suddenly grasped the situation.

“I’ll tell you what you are,” he said, shaking his finger at me. “You’re a Spanish spy, masquerading as a defective in order to get into the workshops and corrupt the defectives there.”

“Now I should call him a Slav,” said the clerk complacently. “He’s a brach, you see, Boss. And that makes his offense a capital one,” he added complacently.

“Put him up for the Council, then,” growled the magistrate. “Standardize him,” he added to the policemen, “and commit him to the Strangers’ House pending the Council’s ascription.”

My captors hurried me away. In the street a large crowd, which had assembled to see me emerge, greeted me with noisy hooting. And, looking again into these hard faces, I began to realize that some portentous change had come over mankind since my long sleep, whose nature I did not understand; but, whatever it was, it had not made men better.

However, the moving platform quickly carried us away, and the mob dwindled, so that when we reached our destination only a nucleus remained. This, however, followed me persistently, gathering to itself other idlers, who ran beside me, peering up into my face, and fingering my tattered clothes, and pulling at the tails of my coat in half-infantile and half-simian curiosity.

The building which we entered contained a single large room on the ground floor, with desks ranged around the walls. Behind each desk a clerk in blue was seated, either contemplating the scene before him or listening disdainfully to applications. I was taken to a desk near the door. One of the policemen now left me, and the other, who had contrived, without my knowledge, to possess himself of the gold watch that had been in my pocket for the last century, placed it upon the desk before the clerk, who came back slowly and resentfully from a fit of abstraction.

“Committed stranger?” he inquired.

“Yap,” said the policeman. “He had this.”

The clerk stared at the watch, raised it, and let it fall on its face. The glass splintered, and he jumped in his seat as if a pistol had been discharged.

“What is it?” he screamed.

“It looks like an antique chronometer,” said the policeman, examining it curiously. “See the twelve hours on the dial.”

“Well, they aren’t listed,” the clerk grumbled.

“You lie, you thief,” retorted the policeman.

With some reluctance, but without resentment, the clerk opened a large book in a paper cover, closely printed in fine hieroglyphics interspersed with figures. He turned from place to place until he found what he was trying not to find.

“Museum chronometers, first century B.C. Listed at two hektones,” he mumbled, and began unlocking a drawer.

“B. C.!” I exclaimed. “What do you mean?”

He paused in the act of pulling the drawer out and glared at me.

“I said ‘museum chronometer of the first century before civilization,’ you fool!” he snarled. “That’s what it is, and that’s what it’s listed at. Here!”

Extracting some metal counters from the drawer, which he closed with a bang, he thrust them toward me.

“What am I to do with these?” I asked.

The policeman winked at him, and I caught the word “Spain.” The clerk’s amazement changed to malignant mirth.

“The value of your chronometer,” he screamed in my ear, as if I were deaf.

“But I don’t intend to sell it,” I retorted.

A shriek of laughter at my side apprised me that the crowd had gathered about me. The space about the desk was packed with the same sneering, mirthless faces, and fifty hands were raised in mimicry or gesticulation.

“What a barbarian!” murmured a young woman with a typewriter badge on her shoulder.

The clerk looked at her and winked maliciously. Then he addressed me again.

“If you don’t understand now, you will before the Council ends ascribing you,” he said. “However, I’ll explain. Your museum chronometer, not being an object of necessity, is the property of this Province. This is a civilized country, and you can’t have hoard-property here, whatever you can do in Spain. Strangers’ effects are bought by the Province at their listed value, and your chronometer is listed at two hundred labor units, or ones—in other words, if you have ever heard of the metric system, two hektones.”

“Ah, give him the Rest Cure!” said the girl with the typewriter badge, swinging about and stalking away contemptuously.

I picked up the metal counters and began examining them. They were crudely made, and without milled edges. Two of them appeared to be of aluminum; on one side was an ant in relief, and under it the inscription,

on the other side, in bold letters, were the words,

There were two smaller pieces, of a yellowish-gray, each stamped,

It did not take me more than a moment’s calculation to see that if the hektone was a hundred units of currency, or labor hours, I had only a hektone and a half instead of two. I told the clerk of the deficiency.

“Don’t lie! Sign that!” he shouted, pushing an inkpad and printed form toward me.

“I shall not sign, and I shall bring this theft to the attention of—Doctor Sanson,” I said, suddenly recollecting the name.

It was a chance shot, but its effect was extraordinary. The mob, which had begun to jostle me, suddenly scurried away in the greatest confusion. The clerk turned white; he picked up the money with trembling fingers.

“Why, that is so!” he exclaimed. “It was a mistake, Boss. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I—I thought you were a blue,” he muttered, looking up at me beseechingly. And he returned me a whole half-hektone too much.

I tossed this back to him and returned no answer. I was looking about for a pen with which to sign the receipt when the policeman took hold of my thumb in a comically obsequious manner and pressed the inkpad against it. So I made my mark upon the paper.

In the corridor outside he turned toward me humbly.

“Are you a trapper, Boss?” he asked.

“A what?”

“A switch. A wipe. I mean a council watcher.”

“A spy, you mean?” I asked. “Certainly not.”

He shook his head in perplexity, and seemed uncertain whether to believe me or not. “He thought you were,” he said. “That was an old list he used. You should have had more. Of course I couldn’t get in bad with him by telling you, but you’d have had nothing if I hadn’t stood up for you. Isn’t that worth something, Boss?”

I offered him one of the smaller pieces, rather in fear of giving offense, but he pocketed it at once, and then, with a new aggressiveness toward the gathering crowd, took me upstairs to the Strangers’ Bureau. Here I was stripped and examined by two physicians, and photographed in three positions; my finger prints were taken, and the three indexes. Then a dapper little clerk in blue passed a tape measure in several ways about my head and beckoned to me mysteriously to come to his desk.

“It’s too bad,” he exclaimed.

“What is too bad?” I inquired.

“The difference is five centimeters, and—well, I’m afraid you’re a brach. I’d like to help you out, but—well, if I can—”

The meaning of the word suddenly revealed itself to me. “You mean my head is brachycephalic?” I asked.

“There is, unfortunately, no doubt,” he answered, and, coming closer under the pretense of measuring me again, began to whisper. “You know, the measure is flexible,” he said, glancing furtively about him. “The revising clerk passes all my measurements without referring back to the doctors. There’s an understanding between us. Now I could get you into the dolicoph class—”

“The longheads?”

“Yes,” he murmured, looking at me with an expression of mutual understanding.

“But what advantage would that be to me?” I inquired.

“They say,” he whispered, “that the Council is going to penalize the brachs several points. It is Doctor Sanson’s new theory, you know, that the brachs are more defective than the dolicophs. Now I’d risk making you a dolicoph for—would it be worth a hektone to you?”

I flushed with indignation. “Do you suppose I am going to bribe you—?” I began loudly.

The clerk leaped back. “This subject is a brach!” he yelled, and gave the figures to a clerk at the next desk, who made a note on a form and looked at me with intense disgust.

So I was set down as broad-headed. Then I was made to sit before a Binet board, containing wooden blocks of various shapes, which had to be set in corresponding holes within a period timed on a stop-watch. Word associations followed, a childish game at which I had played during the course of my medical training; we had regarded this as one of those transitory fads born in Germany and conveyed to us through the American medium, which came and went and left no by-products except a little wasted enthusiasm on the part of our younger men. I accomplished both tasks easily, and I thought the physicians seemed disappointed.

Finally I received a suit of bluish-gray color, the strangers’ uniform, I was informed, and a pair of high, soft shoes. A metal badge, stamped with letters and figures, was hung about my neck by a cord, and I was turned over to the charge of a blue-clad, grizzled man of shortish stature, with a kindly look in the eyes that strongly affected me. For I realized by now that all these persons about me, all whom I had seen, with whom I had conversed, had lacked something more than good-will; they gave me the impression of being animated machines, reservoirs of intense energy, and yet not ... what? I could not determine them.

There was a patient humility about his bearing, and yet, I fancied, a sort of stubborn power, a consciousness of some secret strength that radiated from him.

He came up to me after conversing with the doctors, blue-clad men with white capes about their shoulders, all of whom had eyed me curiously during their speech with him.

“I am the District Strangers’ Guard,” he said to me. “You are a foreigner, I understand, and waiting to be ascribed by the Council. It is not necessary to make any explanation to me. I am the guard, and nothing more, and it is my task to provide you with food and lodging in the Strangers’ House until you are sent for, S6 1845.”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, before I realized that he was addressing me by the number on the brass badge that hung from my neck.

“My pardon?” he answered, looking at me with a puzzled expression. “That is an antique word, is it not?”

“I mean, I did not know the significance of these numbers,” I replied.

“Your brass,” he said, still more bewildered. “That is, of course, your temporary number until the Council assigns you to your proper place in the community. It means, as you must be aware, Stranger of the Sixth District. My unofficial name is David. What is yours, friend?”

He almost jumped when I told him, and glanced nervously about him. We had just passed through the doorway, and he drew me to one side, looking at me in a most peculiar manner.

“You must know only one name is legal in this Province,” he whispered. “Surely you will not hazard everything by such bravado. I mean—”

He checked himself and searched my eyes, as if he could not understand whether my ignorance was assumed or real.

“Arnold,” he said suddenly, as if he had reached a swift and hazardous decision, “you are to be my private guest. If you are assuming ignorance for safety, you shall learn that there is nothing to fear from me. And when you trust me, you shall give me the news of Paul and all our friends. If you are actually a Spaniard—no, tell me nothing—it is essential that you should learn what all our inmates know, before you go to the Council. Doctor Sanson is not tolerant of strangers unless they learn to conform.... I shall help you in every way that is possible. The Bureau Head has asked me to watch you carefully. It is a special order from headquarters. There is some rumor about you ... but it will be all right in my own apartment.”

I felt too heartbroken more than to thank him briefly. The sense of my isolation in this new world swept over me with poignant power. David must have guessed something of my feeling, for he said nothing more. We halted for a moment at the entrance to the building, and he pulled a watch from his pocket. I saw that the dial, which was not faced with glass, and had the hands inset, was divided into ten main sections, each comprising ten smaller ones.

“Ten hours and seventy-four,” he said. “We dine at one-fifty. Seventy-six minutes to get home.”