ain floor hall, with a pile
of application cards in front of her and a ballpoint pen in one
strong, slender hand. She had red hair with gold lights in it and eyes
so pale blue that they would have seemed the same color as the whites
if she'd been on the stage. Her face would have been beautiful except
for her rigid control of expression; she smiled abruptly, shut it off
just like that, looked me over with all the impersonality and
penetration of an X-ray from the soles to the bald head, exactly as
she'd done with the others. But that skin! If it was as perfect as
that all over her slim, stiffly erect, proudly shaped body, she had no
business off the stage!

"Name, address, previous occupation, social security number?" she
asked in a voice with good clarity, resonance and diction. She wrote
it all down while I gave the information to her. Then she asked me for
references, and I mentioned Sergeant Lou Pape. "Fine," she said.
"We'll get in touch with you if anything comes up. Don't call
us--we'll call you."

I hung around to see who'd be picked. There was only one, an old man,
two ahead of me in the line, who had no social security number, no
references, not even any relatives or friends she could have checked
up on him with.

Damn! _Of course_ that was what she wanted! Hadn't all the starvation
cases been people without social security, references, either no
friends and relatives or those they'd lost track of?

I'd pulled a blooper, but how was I to know until too late?

Well, there was a way of making it right.

* * * * *

When it was good and dark that evening, I stood on the corner and
watched the lights in the brownstone house. The ones on the first two
floors went out, leaving only those on the third and fourth. Closed
for the day ... or open for business?

I got into a building a few doors down by pushing a button and waiting
until the buzzer answered, then racing up to the roof while some man
yelled down the stairs to find out who was there. I crossed the tops
of the two houses between and went down the fire escape.

It wasn't easy, though not as tough as you might imagine. The fact is
that I'm a whole year younger than Lou Pape, even if I could play his
grandpa professionally. I still have muscles left and I used them to
get down the fire escape at the rear of the house.

The fourth floor room I looked into had some kind of wire mesh cage
and some hooded machinery. Nobod