THEY KILLED THE WRONG MAN

CHAPTER TWO

Ethan

The Registry Bureau was precisely the type of building that had been constructed to make people feel as though they are asking something.

High ceilings. Long counters. The light in the particular institutions that flatten everything it touches so that you come already small. When I came in there were thirty or forty persons in the line, most of whom had the appearance of persons who had practised what they were going to say, and were still not quite certain that it would be sufficient. I was familiar with the pose. I had put it on in the offices of landlords and in the billing departments of hospitals and in every room of my last life where someone had the information and you were there to be judged.

I took a number. I waited.

The evaluation procedure, when my name was called, was packaged as normal. I was sent by a technician, young, efficient, and, with a gesture of implacable disinterest, directed me to a black panel, fastened to a wall, at the end of a short corridor. It was sleek, about the size of a door. She instructed me to lay my palm flat on it and to keep still till it was finished.

“How long will it take?” I asked.

“Thirty seconds,” she said. "Usually."

I laid my palm on the panel.

“It was warm.” I said to myself, like a living thing is warm, and I felt a pulling in my palm, not exactly magnetic, not exactly suction, but somewhere between the two, as though it were tugging information out from under the skin.

Twenty seconds passed. Thirty. The technician was looking at her tablet. Then she ceased to look into her tablet and looked into the panel.

Forty seconds. Fifty.

She tapped something on her tablet. A minute passed. Another technician came in through a side door, glanced at the panel, glanced at me and left again. The first technician was typing at a great rate, and not looking at my eyes, which was a habit I had learned to interpret properly long ago: it meant that something had happened that she had no right to explain.

"Is there a problem?” I said.

"Just wait, please."

I waited. Six hours, which I know because there was a clock on the wall which I watched with the attentive care which a man would give to a watch. People were coming and leaving. The technician who was assessed by me did not reappear. Various individuals went in and out of the corridor and when they saw me they moved on. No one had brought water. No one explained.

A man in a jacket worth more than a month of my past life, walked down the corridor and sat down in the chair opposite me at the six-hour hour. He was in his fifties, and his features were of that type which has been so long written that it ceased to need writing. He made his presentation as the Director Harmon. He had pronounced it like people say titles not as a statement but as a command.

“Your evaluation had come up with inconclusive findings.” he said, “was sometimes the case with late awakeners and also with those who had travelled from parts of the world which had varied environmental calibrations.” He told me that I would receive, in the mean time, a provisional unregistered classification, and would be scheduled to receive the secondary assessment within thirty days, after which the proper process would be completed.

He said all this in the easy, non-hurried manner of a man, reading an internal document which he has memorized. He was not taking questions. How I was, he did not ask. When he had spoken he looked at me once not, indeed, the deliberate and consistent gaze of the bureaucrat but a person under him, quick and judgmental--and then he walked away.

One of the junior employees arrived to have me wear the gray band on my wrist. Gray meant unregistered. She didn’t have to say it before I understood. The rest of the individuals in the lobby would look at the gray band just like they had looked at my bare wrists, which was to say that they would no longer be looking.

A pamphlet on the outer districts was given to me. I was not given anything else.

---

It was forty minutes by transit, about which I could not say, because the transit system required a registered band, which would be forty minutes. When I asked a man outside the Bureau who was smoking next to the service entrance, he gave me directions in that casual generous way of his, which betrays the spectator into thinking it is his own feelings he is observing, and that he is merely a spectator.

The Warrens were thick and noisy and had the special odor of a district once functional and permitted to become something different. The streets were smaller than those around the Bureau, the buildings shorter and more crowded, the signs older. The people here had mostly white or faint-yellow bands, F and E rank, and a majority of them moved very efficiently as people who had learned not to take up more room than was necessary.

I was able to rent a room in a Chapel Street building at sixty credits per week. I liked the fact that the man who rented it to me took the money without inquiring where I had come out of. The room contained a cot, a window, the latch of which was broken, and a view of the opposite wall of the alley.

I sat on the cot.

I had been dead. I was quite sure of that. I had the knife and the concrete and the flickering light and the man walking away, and I had come here to find that it was not the same world I had left, but it was not too different to be recognized. Something had touched me. I had no idea of what or why, and listing the possibilities seemed less helpful than listing the facts.

The fact I had been lied to by the Bureau. The face of the technician, the six-hour wait, the rehearsed delivery of Harmon, inconclusive results failed to evoke such a reaction. There had been something on that panel which they had decided to hide.

I had found myself in a world that put human beings into the order of their capabilities, and the people at the bottom of that hierarchy are housed in precisely the type of place I was now sitting in. This was not new information as far as structure is concerned. It was only the mechanism that had been transformed.

I had been alive, which was more than I had been twelve hours ago.

A noise in the alley below--voices being raised, a falling. I came to the window and peeped over. Three men had a fourth one backed against the wall. The fourth was perhaps twenty, with a white band and the look of one who had already figured out that he was not going to win this. The man who was talking had a yellow-green band on that I had not seen before, and he was doing the talking, which had the rhythm of a script “what you owe, the date it was due, the cost of being late.”

I watched.

The fourth man paid. He handed them something out of his jacket pocket, a little card transfer payment, I thought, and they went off without any haste, because people who have done a thing many times do not hurry, they merely move on to the next thing.

The fourth man stood in front of the wall for some time, with his eyes shut. Then he pulled himself straight and went away in the opposite direction.

I drew aside the window.

I wondered about the face of Harmon in that passage. The short, actual evaluation below the performance of routine. He had looked at me as you looked at what you have determined must be enclosed.

He had chosen the wrong thing as to what I was. And people had been making that decision about me the whole of my life, and I had allowed them to, and it had ended in a knife in a Wednesday alley and forty-three dollars and a man who did not run.

I lay across on the cot and stared at the water stain on the ceiling and wondered what was next.

And whatever I was bearing, they had endeavoured to bury them before I knew they were.

That was a mistake. I was going to discover which mistake in particular it was.