The druggist returned shortly from the rear and handed her a small cardboard box. She noticed that the box had no label to identify either its contents or its source.
“I’m taking a chance doing this, miss,” he said. “I could get into a lot of trouble.”
She accepted this as an oblique request for a bonus in compensation for the risk, though it was almost certainly a risk he took frequently and considered negligible. Nevertheless, establishing the lie of her desire to avoid a doctor’s fee, she gave him a ten dollar bill and turned without waiting for any gesture on his part to make change.
“Thank you very much,” she said, and she walked up past the fountain and out across the park with the cast-iron man to the street on the other side. She retraced her way along the street past the drug store she had entered earlier, walking much more slowly now, and so back to her apartment. In the apartment, she sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the box. The tablets inside were green, the coating hard and bright. Green dragons, they were called. She had never taken barbiturates herself, even though sleepless nights had become common in her life, but she had encountered addicts and had picked up some of their slang terminology. She counted the tablets and discovered that there was an even dozen.
She wondered how many she should take. Two, perhaps? Being in possession of the coveted soporifics, she had now a morbid fear of taking too much, of sleeping beyond her appointment. Possibly one would be sufficient. Yes, she would take no chances. She would take only one, and if that were not enough, she would just have to stay awake and deal as best she could with corrosive time. Getting up, she went into the bathroom and washed a tablet down her throat with tepid tap water, leaving the remaining eleven on a shelf in the medicine cabinet. Back in the bedroom, she got her alarm clock and set the alarm for four o’clock, checking the setting twice to be certain that she’d made no error. Then she placed the clock on a bedside table not more than two feet from where her head would lie and stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes.
In the darkness behind her lids, the floating fear that she had kept diffused by physical activity halted and gathered and stared at her with yellow eyes. She lay quietly, forcing herself to keep her lids lowered, and after a long time the gathered fear loosened again and moved, washing through her sluggishly. How long would the tablet take? How long before the green dragon took her into its arms? Or would it, perhaps, not be effective at all?
His hair, his hair, the color of his hair, they’re taking him to prison for the color of his hair. But no! Not his. Hers. They would come, and they would get her, and they would take her away. They would take her to prison for the color of her hair. It was very essential to keep the gender straight, though keeping the gender straight was sometimes quite a problem. One had to try, however, one had always to try, and if the attempt came out bad, came out murder, that was unfortunate but really quite incidental, for it was only the color of the hair that mattered, and everything else, even murder, was only a ramification, a damned, damned consequence of the color of the hair.
But she had, for a moment, forgotten something, and she almost laughed aloud in the darkness behind her lids when she remembered again what she had, for a moment, forgotten. She had very foolishly forgotten Jacqueline, and that was the reason she almost laughed aloud in hysterical relief, because Jacqueline didn’t object to the color of her hair at all and would never permit them to come and get her because of it. Jacqueline was very wise, and she would know precisely how to restore everything immediately to sanity and to reduce a dead body to a few cents’ worth of chemicals that should disturb no one very much or for very long. She was sitting right now with a kind of cool omnipotence behind her blond desk, and probably she was saying something crisp and definitive into the ivory telephone, just as she had been the day Kathy had gone into the office to see her.
She had been called into the office, as a matter of fact. She had just come on a week before from Burlington College for girls, and she had applied at the personnel section of the department store for a clerking job, more just to have something to do than because she was in immediate need of money. Stella had left her enough to preclude worry over money for a long time, but she had discovered that it was a little better somehow if one were occupied, and so she had applied for the job of clerking because it was the only kind of work she could think of that didn’t require any particular training. The department store being progressive in its approach to personnel problems, she had been given some tests that were supposed to indicate whether it would be worthwhile hiring her. As it turned out, the tests indicated that she was not only worthwhile hiring but that she might profitably be hired to do something better than selling perfume or costume jewelry or ladies’ lingerie. So she had been called into Jacqueline’s office, and Jacqueline in the gray chalkstripe was talking into the ivory telephone, and after a minute she cradled the instrument and smiled at Kathy, and the understanding that was later verified was a thing immediately felt.
“Miss Galt?” she said. “Sit down, please.”
Kathy sat down primly with her knees together and her hands folded on her knees. She pushed the recurrent and disturbing thought of Vera Telsa from her mind and returned Jacqueline’s smile. Jacqueline picked up some papers from the surface of her desk and tapped them with the pointed nails of one hand. Kathy could see that the papers had long columns of little squares on them. Some of the squares had neat little checks in them, and she recognized the answer sheets to the tests she had taken.
Jacqueline said, “You are trying for a position with us, I believe, Miss Galt.”
“Yes.”
“What, exactly, do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. Nothing in particular, I guess. I thought maybe a clerking job.”
Jacqueline’s smile grew in an instant into a soft laugh, and she dropped the papers onto the desk. “My dear, I’m afraid you’re underselling yourself. I believe we can do a little better for you and for ourselves by using you in a different capacity. Can you take shorthand?”
“No.”
“Do you type?”
“A little. I’m not very good.”
“Well, no matter. There are other ways of utilizing you. Before we make an assignment, however, it will be necessary to administer a few more tests. Just to be certain that we do the right thing, you understand. Would you object to that?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Very well, then. Please report back to the gentleman who sent you here. He will know how to go ahead.”
She had reported back to the gentleman, and the gentleman had administered the additional tests, and one of the tests was something called a personality inventory. Kathy had taken a personality inventory once before, when she had entered Burlington College, and she understood that there was a mysterious sort of lie detector in the construction of it and that it was just as well in the end to tell the truth strictly, and so she had. It was this inventory that later verified for Jacqueline what was originally only felt. She told Kathy about it after quite a long time, after she had taken her to lunch several times, and to dinner, and to a kind of place that Kathy had never heard of, and eventually to the cold ivory room.
Although she was placed in a job with a future and fairly attractive pay, Kathy didn’t stay with the department store long. Just as she hadn’t stayed long at Burlington College. It was an unfortunate element of her personality that she was a drifter, if not from place to place, at least from thing to thing. She simply couldn’t sustain interest in anything for any considerable length of time. So she had given up her job with the idea that she would look for something more to her liking, but somehow she never got down
