by Stephen King
The gaunt man had said something to him.
Richards blinked. “Huh?”
“Booth 6,” the gaunt man said reprovingly.
“Oh.”
He went to Booth 6. There was a table inside, and a large wall clock mounted at eye level beyond it. On the table was a sharpened G-A/IBM pencil and a pile of unlined paper. Cheap grade, Richards noted.
Standing beside all this was a dazzling computer-age priestess, a tall, Junoesque blonde wearing iridescent short shorts which cleanly outlined the delta-shaped rise of her pudenda. Roughed nipples poked perkily through a silk fishnet blouselet.
“Sit down, please,” she said, “I am Rinda Ward, your tester.” She held out her hand.
Startled, Richards shook it. “Benjamin Richards.”
“May I call you Ben?” The smile was seductive but impersonal. He felt exactly the token rise of desire he was supposed to feel for this well-stacked female with her well-fed body on display. It angered him. He wondered if she got her kicks this way, showing it off to the poor slobs on their way to the meat grinder.
“Sure,” he said. “Nice tits.”
“Thank you,” she said, unruffled. He was seated now, looking up while she looked down, and it added an even more embarrassing angle to the picture. “This test today is to your mental faculties what your physical yesterday was to your body. It will be a fairly long test, and your luncheon will be around three this afternoon—assuming you pass.” The smile winked on and off.
“The first section is verbal. You have one hour from the time I give you the test booklet. You may ask questions during the examination, and I will answer them if I am allowed to do so. I will not give you any answers to test questions, however. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
She handed him the booklet. There was a large red hand printed on the cover, palm outward. In large red letters beneath, it said:
STOP!
Beneath this: Do not turn to the first page until your tester instructs you to proceed.
“Heavy,” Richards remarked.
“Pardon me?” The perfectly sculpted eyebrows went up a notch.
“Nothing.”
“You will find an answer sheet when you open your booklet,” she recited. “Please make your marks heavy and black. If you wish to change an answer, please erase completely. If you do not know an answer, do not guess. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Then please turn to page one and begin. When I say stop, please put your pencil down. You may begin.”
He didn’t begin. He eyed her body slowly, insolently.
After a moment, she flushed. “Your hour has begun, Ben. You had better—”
“Why,” he asked, “does everybody assume that when they are dealing with someone from south of the Canal they are dealing with a horny mental incompetent?”
She was completely flustered now. “I…I never…”
“No, you never.” He smiled and picked up his pencil. “My Christ, you people are dumb.”
He bent to the test while she was still trying to find an answer or even a reason for his attack; she probably really didn’t understand.
The first section required him to mark the letter of the correct fill-in-the-blank answer.
One———does not make a summer.
a. thought
b. beer
c. swallow
d. crime
e. none of these
He filled in his answer sheet rapidly, rarely stopping to deliberate or consider an answer twice. Fill-ins were followed by vocabulary, then by word-contrasts. When he finished, the hour allotted still had fifteen minutes to run. She made him keep his exam—legally he couldn’t give it to her until the hour was up—so Richards leaned back and wordlessly ogled her nearly naked body. The silence grew thick and oppressive, charged. He could see her wishing for an overcoat and it pleased him.
When the time was up, she gave him a second exam. On the first page, there was a drawing of a gasoline carburetor. Below:
You would put this in a
a. lawnmower
b. Free-Vee
c. electric hammock
d. automobile
e. none of these
The third exam was a math diagnostic. He was not so good with figures and he began to sweat lightly as he saw the clock getting away from him. In the end, it was nearly a dead heat. He didn’t get a chance to finish the last question. Rinda Ward smiled a trifle too widely as she pulled the test and answer sheet away from him. “Not so fast on that one, Ben.”
“But they’ll all be right,” he said, and smiled back at her. He leaned forward and swatted her lightly on the rump. “Take a shower, kid. You done good.”
She blushed furiously. “I could have you disqualified.”
“Bullshit. You could get yourself fired, that’s all.”
“Get out. Get back in line.” She was snarling, suddenly near tears.
He felt something almost like compassion and choked it back. “You have a nice night tonight,” he said. “You go out and have a nice six-course meal with whoever you’re sleeping with this week and think about my kid dying of flu in a shitty three-room Development apartment.”
He left her staring after him, white-faced.
His group of ten had been cut to six, and they trooped into the next room. It was one-thirty.
…Minus 091 and COUNTING…
The doctor sitting on the other side of the table in the small booth wore glasses with tiny thick lenses. He had a kind of nasty, pleased grin that reminded Richards of a half-wit he had known as a boy. The kid had enjoyed crouching under the high school bleachers and looking up girls’ skirts while he flogged his dog. Richards began to grin.
“Something pleasant?” the doctor asked, flipping up the first inkblot. The nasty grin widened the tiniest bit.
“Yes. You remind me of someone I used to know.”
“Oh? Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Very well. What do you see here?”
Richards looked at it. An inflated blood pressure cuff had been cinched to his right arm. A number of electrodes had been pasted to his head, and wires from both his head and arm were jacked into a console beside the doctor. Squiggly lines moved across the face of a computer console.
“Two Negro women. Kissing.”
He flipped up another one. “This?’
“A sports car. Looks like a Jag.”
“Do you like gascars?”
Richards shrugged. “I had a model collection when I was a kid.”
The doctor made a note and flipped up another card.
“Sick person. She’s lying on her side. The shadows on her face look like prison bars.”
“And this last one?”
Richards burst out laughing. “Looks like a pile of shit.” He thought of the doctor, complete with his white coat, running around under the bleachers, looking up girls’ skirts and jacking off, and he began to laugh again. The doctor sat smiling his nasty smile, making the vision more real, thus funnier. At last his giggles tapered off to a snort or two. Richards hiccupped once and was still.
“I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me—”
“No,” Richards said. “I wouldn’t.”
“We’ll proceed then. Word association.” He didn’t bother to explain it. Richards supposed word was getting around. That was good; it would save time.
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
The doctor produced a stopwatch from an inside pocket, clicked the business end of his ballpoint pen, and considered a list in front of him.
“Doctor.”
“Nigger,” Richards responded.
“Penis.”
“Cock.”
“Red.”
“Black.”
“Silver.”
“Dagger.”
“Rifle.”
“Murder.”
“Win.”
“Money.”
�
��Sex.”
“Tests.”
“Strike.”
“Out.”
The list continued; they went through over fifty words before the doctor clicked the stem of the stopwatch down and dropped his pen. “Good,” he said. He folded his hands and looked at Richards seriously. “I have a final question, Ben. I won’t say that I’ll know a lie when I hear it, but the machine you’re hooked up to will give a very strong indication one way or the other. Have you decided to try for qualification status in the Games out of any suicidal motivation?”
“No.”
“What is your reason?”
“My little girl’s sick. She needs a doctor. Medicine. Hospital care.”
The ballpoint scratched. “Anything else?”
Richards was on the verge of saying no (it was none of their business) and then decided he would give it all. Perhaps because the doctor looked like that nearly forgotten dirty boy of his youth. Maybe only because it needed to be said once, to make it coalesce and take concrete shape, as things do when a man forces himself to translate unformed emotional reactions into spoken words.
“I haven’t had work for a long time. I want to work again, even if it’s only being the sucker-man in a loaded game. I want to work and support my family. I have pride. Do you have pride, Doctor?”
“It goes before a fall,” the doctor said. He clicked the tip of his ballpoint in. “If you have nothing to add, Mr. Richards—” He stood up. That, and the switch back to his surname, suggested that the interview was over whether Richards had any more to say or not.
“No.”
“The door is down the hall to your right. Good luck.”
“Sure,” Richards said.
…Minus 090 and COUNTING…
The group Richards had come in with was now reduced to four. The new waiting room was much smaller, and the whole group had been reduced roughly by the same figure of sixty percent. The last of the Y’s and Z’s straggled in at four-thirty. At four, an orderly had circulated with a tray of tasteless sandwiches. Richards got two of them and sat munching, listening to a pal named Rettenmund as he regaled Richards and a few others with a seemingly inexhaustible fund of dirty stories.
When the whole group was together, they were shunted into an elevator and lifted to the fifth floor. Their quarters were made up of a large common room, a communal lavatory, and the inevitable sleep-factory with its rows of cots. They were informed that a cafeteria down the hall would serve a hot meal at seven o’clock.
Richards sat still for a few minutes, then got up and walked over to the cop stationed by the door they had come in through. “Is there a telephone, pal?” He didn’t expect they would be allowed to phone out, but the cop merely jerked his thumb toward the hall.
Richards pushed the door open a crack and peered out. Sure enough, there it was. Pay phone.
He looked at the cop again. “Listen, if you loan me fifty cents for the phone, I’ll—”
“Screw off, Jack.”
Richards held his temper. “I want to call my wife. Our kid is sick. Put yourself in my place, for Christ’s sake.”
The cop laughed: a short, chopping, ugly sound. “You types are all the same. A story for every day of the year. Technicolor and 3-D on Christmas and Mother’s Day.”
“You bastard,” Richards said, and something in his eyes, the stance of his shoulders suddenly made the cop shift his gaze to the wall. “Aren’t you married yourself? Didn’t you ever find yourself strapped and have to borrow, even if it tasted like shit in your mouth?”
The cop suddenly jammed a hand into his jumper pocket and came up with a fistful of plastic coins. He thrust two New Quarters at Richards, stuffed the rest of the money back in his pocket, and grabbed a handful of Richards’s tunic. “If you send anybody else over here because Charlie Grady is a soft touch, I’ll beat your sonofabitching brains out, maggot.”
“Thank you,” Richards said steadily. “For the loan.”
Charlie Grady laughed and let him go. Richards went out into the hall, picked up the phone, and dropped his money into the horn. It banged hollowly and for a moment nothing happened—oh, Jesus, all for nothing—but then the dial tone came. He punched the number of the fifth floor hall phone slowly, hoping the Jenner bitch down the hall wouldn’t answer. She’d just as soon yell wrong number when she recognized his voice and he would lose his money.
It rang, six times, and then an unfamiliar voice said: “Hello?”
“I want to talk to Sheila Richards in 5C.”
“I think she went out,” the voice said. It grew insinuating. “She walks up and down the block, you know. They got a sick kid. The man there is shiftless.”
“Just knock on the door,” he said, cotton mouthed.
“Hold on.”
The phone on the other end crashed against the wall as the unfamiliar voice let it dangle. Far away, dim, as if in a dream, he heard the unfamiliar voice knocking and yelling: “Phone! Phone for ya, Missus Richards!”
Half a minute later the unfamiliar voice was back on the line. “She ain’t there. I can hear the kid yellin, but she ain’t there. Like I say, she keeps an eye out when the fleet’s in.” The voice giggled.
Richards wished he could teleport himself through the phone line and pop out on the other end, like an evil genie from a black bottle, and choke the unfamiliar voice until his eyeballs popped out and rolled on the floor.
“Take a message,” he said. “Write it on the wall if you have to.”
“Ain’t got no pencil. I’m hangin up. G’bye.”
“Wait!” Richards yelled, panic in his voice.
“I’m…just a second.” Grudgingly the voice said, “She comin up the stairs now.”
Richards collapsed sweatily against the wall. A moment later Sheila’s voice was in his ear, quizzical, wary, a little frightened: “Hello?”
“Sheila.” He closed his yes, letting the wall support him.
“Ben, Ben, is that you? Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Fine. Cathy. Is she—”
“The same. The fever isn’t so bad but she sounds so croupy. Ben, I think there’s water in her lungs. What if she has pneumonia?”
“It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.”
“I—” She paused, a long pause. “I hate to leave her, but I had to. Ben, I turned two tricks this morning. I’m sorry. But I got her some medicine at the drug. Some good medicine.” Her voice had taken on a zealous, evangelical lilt.
“That stuff is shit,” he said. “Listen: No more, Sheila. Please. I think I’m in here. Really. They can’t cut many more guys because there’s too many shows. There’s got to be enough cannon fodder to go around. And they give advances, I think. Mrs. Upshaw—”
“She looked awful in black,” Sheila broke in tonelessly.
“Never mind that. You stay with Cathy, Sheila. No more tricks.”
“All right. I won’t go out again.” But he didn’t believe her voice. Fingers crossed, Sheila? “I love you, Ben.”
“And I lo—”
“Three minutes are up,” the operator broke in. “If you wish to continue, please deposit one New Quarter or three old quarters.”
“Wait a second!” Richards yelled. “Get off the goddam line, bitch. You—”
The empty hum of a broken connection.
He threw the receiver. It flew the length of its silver cord, then rebounded, striking the wall and then penduluming slowly back and forth like some strange snake that had bitten once and then died.
Somebody has to pay, Richards thought numbly as he walked back. Somebody has to.
…Minus 089 and COUNTING…
They were quartered on the fifth floor until ten o’clock the following day, and Richards was nearly out of his mind with anger, worry, and frustration when a young and slightly faggoty-looking pal in a skintight Games uniform asked them to please step into the elevator. They were perhaps three hundred in all: over sixty of their number had been removed soundlessly and p
ainlessly the night before. One of them had been the kid with the inexhaustible fund of dirty jokes.
They were taken to a small auditorium on the sixth floor in groups of fifty. The auditorium was very luxurious, done in great quantities of red plush. There was an ashtray built into the realwood arm of every seat, and Richards hauled out his crumpled pack of Blams. He tapped his ashes on the floor.
There was a small stage at the front, and in the center of that, a lectern. A pitcher of water stood on it.
At about fifteen minutes past ten, the faggoty-looking fellow walked to the lectern and said: “I’d like you to meet Arthur M. Burns, Assistant Director of Games.”
“Huzzah,” somebody behind Richards said in a sour voice.
A portly man with a tonsure surrounded by gray hair strode to the lectern, pausing and cocking his head as he arrived, as if to appreciate a round of applause which only he could hear. Then he smiled at them, a broad, twinkling smile that seemed to transform him into a pudgy, aging Cupid in a business suit.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve made it.”
There was a huge collective sigh, followed by some laughter and back-slapping. More cigarettes were lit up.
“Huzzah,” the sour voice repeated.
“Shortly, your program assignments and seventh floor room numbers will be passed out. The executive producers of your particular programs will explain further exactly what is expected of you. But before that happens, I just want to repeat my congratulations and tell you that I find you to be a courageous, resourceful group, refusing to live on the public dole when you have means at your disposal to acquit yourselves as men, and, may I add personally, as true heroes of our time.”
“Bullshit,” the sour voice remarked.
“Furthermore, I speak for the entire Network when I wish you good luck and Godspeed.” Arthur M. Burns chuckled porkily and rubbed his hands together. “Well, I know you’re anxious to get those assignments, so I’ll spare you any more of my jabber.”