Up close and personal you can see the truth: they are hume/taheen hybrids who take the matter of their becoming with a religious fervor.
The easiest way to find yourself wrapped in a low-man bearhug loith a set of murderous low-man teeth searching for your carotid artery is to aver that the only two things they are becoming is older and uglier. The red marks on their foreheads-the Eye of the King-usually disappear when they are America-side (or dry up, like temporarily dormant pimples), and the masks take on a weird organic quality, except for behind the ears, where the hairy, tooth-scabbed underflesh shows, and inside the nostrils, where one can see dozens of little moving cilia. But who is so impolite as to look up a fellow's snot-gutters?
Whatever they think, up close and personal there's something definitely wrong with them even when they 're America-side, and no one wants to scare the new fish before the net's properly in place. So it's humes
(an abbreviation the can-toi won't even use; they find it demeaning, like "nigger" or "vamp") at the exams, humes in the interview rooms, nothing but humes until later, when they go through one of the working America-side doorways and come out in Thunderclap.
Ted is tested, along with a hundred or so others, in a gymnasium that reminds him of the one back in East Hartford. This one has been filled with rows and rows of study-hall desks (wrestling mats have been considerately laid down to keep the desks' old-fashioned round iron bases from scratching the varnished hardwood), but after the first round of testing-a ninety-minute diagnostic full of math, English, and vocabulary questions-half of them are empty. After the second round, it's three quarters. Round Two consists of some mighty iveird questions, highly subjective questions, and in several cases Ted gives an answer in which he does not believe, because he thinks-maybe knows-that the people giving the test want a different answer from the one he (and most people) would ordinarily give. For instance, there's this little honey:
23. You come to a stop near an over-turned car on a littletraveled road. Trapped in the car is a Young Man crying for rescue. You ask, "Are you hurt, Young Man?" to which he responds, "I don't think so!" In the field nearby is a Satchel filled with Money. You: a. Rescue the Young Man and give him back his Money b. Rescue the Young Man but insist that the Money be taken to the local Police c. Take the Money and go on your way, knowing that although the road may be little traveled, someone will be along eventually to free the Young Man d. None of the above Had this been a test for the Sacramento PD, Ted would have circled "b" in a heartbeat. He may be little more than a hobo on the road, but his mama didn't raise no fools, thank you oh so very much. That choice would be the correct one in most circumstances, too-the play-it-safe choice, the can't-go-wrong choice. And, as a fall-back position, the one that says "I don't have a frigging clue what this is about but at least I'm honest enough to say so,"there's "d."
Ted circles "c, "but not because that is necessarily what he'd do in that situation. On the whole he tends to think that he'd go for "a, "presuming he could at least ask the "Young Man "a few questions about where the loot came from. And if outright torture wasn't involved (and he would know, wouldn't he, no matter what the "Young Man" might have to say on the subject), sure, here's your money, Vaya con Dios. And why? Because Ted Brautigan happens to believe that the owner of the defunct candystore had a point: THEIR KILLING THE LITTLE MAN.
But he circles "c", and five days later he finds himself in the anteroom of an out-of-business dance studio in San Francisco (his train-fare from Sacramento prepaid), along with three other men and a sullenlooking teenage girl (the girl's the former Tanya Leeds of Bryce, Colorado, as it turns out). Better than four hundred people showed up for the test in the gym, lured by the honeypot ad. Goats, for the most part.
Here, however, are four sheep. One per cent. And even this, as Brautigan will discover in the full course of time, is an amazing catch.
Eventually he is shown into an office marked PBRKTE. It is mostly filled with dusty ballet stuff. A broad-shouldered, hard-faced man in a brown suit sits in a folding chair, incongruously surrounded by filmy pink tutus. Ted thinks, A real toad in an imaginary garden.
The man sits forward, arms on his elephantine thighs. "Mr.
Brautigan, "he says, "I may or may not be a toad, but I can offer you the job of a lifetime. I can also send you out of here with a handshake and a much-obliged. It depends on the answer to one question. A question about a question, in fact."
The man, whose name turns out to be Frank Armitage, hands Ted a sheet of paper. On it, blown up, is Question 23, the one about the Young Man and the Satchel of Money.
"You circled ‘c,' "Frank Armitage says. "So now, luith absolutely no hesitation whatever, please tell me why."
"Because ‘c' was what you wanted," Ted replies with absolutely no hesitation whatever.
"And how do you know that?"
"Because I'm a telepath," Ted says. "And that's what you 're really looking for. "He tries to keep his poker face and thinks he succeeds pretty well, but inside he's filled with a great and singing relief. Because he's found a job? No. Because they'll shortly make him an offer that would make the prizes on the new TV quiz shows look tame? No.
Because someone finally wants what he can do.
Because someone finally wants him.
SEVEN
The job offer turned out to be another honeypot, but Brautigan was honest enough in his taped memoir to say he might have gone along even if he'd known the truth.
"Because talent won't be quiet, doesn't know how to be quiet," he said. "Whether it's a talent for safe-cracking, thoughtreading, or dividing ten-digit numbers in your head, it screams to be used. It never shuts up. It'll wake you in the middle of your tiredest night, screaming, 'Use me, use me, use me! I'm tired of just sitting here! Use me, fuckhead, use me!'"
Jake broke into a roar of pre-adolescent laughter. He covered his mouth but kept laughing through his hands. Oy looked up at him, those black eyes with die gold wedding rings floating in them, grinning fiendishly.
There in the room filled with the frilly pink tutus, his fedora hat cocked back on his crewcut head, Armitage asked if Ted had ever heard of "the South American Seabees." When Ted replied that he hadn't, Armitage told him that a consortium of wealthy South American businessmen, mostly Brazilian, had hired a bunch of American engineers, construction workers, and roughnecks in 1946. Over a hundred in all. These were the South American Seabees. The consortium hired them all for a fouryear period, and at different pay-grades, but the pay was extremely generous-almost embarrassingly so-at all grades.
A 'dozer operator might sign a contract for $20,000 a year, for instance, which was tall tickets in those days. But there was more: a bonus equal to one year's pay. A total of $100,000. If, that was, the fellow would agree to one unusual condition: you go, you work, and you don't come back until the four years are up or the work is done. You got two days off every week, just like in America, and you got a vacation every year, just like in America, but in the pampas. You couldn't go back to North America (or even Rio) until your four-year hitch was over. If you died in South America, you got planted there-no one was going to pay to have your body shipped back to Wilkes-Barre. But you got fifty grand up front, and a sixty-day grace period during which you could spend it, save it, invest it, or ride it like a pony. If you chose investment, that fifty grand might be seventy-five when you came waltzing out of the jungle with a bone-deep tan, a whole new set of muscles, and a lifetime of stories to tell. And, of course, once you were out you had what the limeys liked to call "the other half to put on top of it.
This was like that, Armitage told Ted earnestly. Only the front half would be a cool quarter of a million and the back end half a million.
"Which sounded incredible," Ted said from the Wollensak.
"Of course it did, byjiminy. I didn't find ovit until later how incredibly cheap they were buying us, even at those prices.
Dinky is particularly eloquent on the subject of their stinginess … "they" in this case being all the King's bureaucrats. He says the Crimson King is trying to bring about the end of all creation on the budget plan, and of course he's right, but I think even Dinky realizes-although he won't admit it, of course-that if you offer a man too much, he simply refuses to believe it.
Or, depending on his imagination (many telepaths and precogs have almost no imagination at all), be unable to believe it. In our case the period of indenture was to be six years, with an option to renew, and Armitage needed my decision immediately. Few techniques are so successful, lady and gentlemen, as the one where you boggle your target's mind, freeze him with greed, then blitz him.
"I was duly blitzed, and agreed at once. Armitage told me that my quarter-mil would be in the Seaman's San Francisco Bank as of that afternoon, and I could draw on it as soon as I got down there. I asked him if I had to sign a contract. He reached out one of his hands-big as a ham, it was-and told me that was our contract. I asked him where I'd be going and what I'd be doing-all questions I should have asked first, I'm sure you'd agree, but I was so stunned it never crossed my mind.