He didn't see the second hand going around and around the clock, but he felt the prejudice-erasing impulses, the objective-appraisal stimuli, revealing memories that had shaped him, humiliations that had twisted him and been forgotten, urgings and longings and guilts that he had never known existed.
He saw himself. It was highly unpleasant.
There was a final buzz and the clock stopped. Joe opened his eyes, both figuratively and literally. He unclamped the helmet with the electrodes and stepped from the chair, holding onto the arm, looking at the mirrored inside walls of the mold.
He had made an image of himself and it had turned on him. Now he had made—what? An image of his image's image of him? It was very confusing, yet somehow clear.
He went slowly up the stairs, smelling the perfume. It wasn't Alice's and that was peculiar, because she had practically swabbed herself with the stuff, knowing he liked it, and she had just left.
It was Vera's perfume.
He remembered her waiting at the station, making her ridiculous bids at the card table, gossiping witlessly with Mrs. Harvey, hitting her thumb when she tried to hang his pictures in the study.
Vera....
He prowled dissatisfiedly through the house, as though in search of something, and then went out to the car. He took the super-pike almost all the way to the Center. There were bright cards on posts every few hundred feet:
IT'S NOT TOO LATETO GET A MATETHE GIRLS ARE GREATAT THE DOMESTIC CENTER
He pulled into the sweeping circular drive at the huge group of buildings. A troupe of singing girls came out, dressed in majorette costumes, opened the door, helped him out, parked the car, escorted him into the lavish reception room. Music came from somewhere, soft and moody. There were murals all over the walls, every one romantic. A dispensing machine held engagement and wedding rings with a series of finger-holes on the left side for matching sizes.
The matron recognized him and said, "Mr. Tullgren has gone home for the day. Is there anything I can do?"
He told her what he wanted and she thumbed through a register.
"Yes, she's still here," the matron said finally. "She's refused exactly thirty-two offers up to yesterday. You were thinking of a—reconciliation?"
Joe nodded with a new humility. "If she'll have me."
The matron smiled. "I think she will. Women are more understanding than men, usually. More romantic, you might say."
Nine-tenths of the building was brightly lighted, one-tenth rather dim. In the dim tenth were the post-intent rooms, the reconciliation chambers.
Joe sat on a yellow love-seat in one of the empty reconciliation chambers, leafing through, but not seeing, a copy of a fashion magazine. Then there were steps in the hall, familiar steps, and he smelled the perfume before she came in.
She stood timidly at the archway, but Joe was even more unsure and weak in the legs and he had trouble with his breathing.
"Joe," Vera said.
"Vera," he answered.
It wasn't much, but it seemed to be what both had in mind.
"Was there something you wanted to tell me?" she asked. "Something important?"
"It's important to me, Vera," he said humbly. "I hope it's just as important to you."
She looked brightly at him.
"I find it very difficult to put into words," he stumbled. "The usual expressions of this emotion are so hackneyed. I would like to find some other way to say it."
"Say what?"
"That I love you."
She ran to him. The impact knocked the breath out of both of them, but neither noticed.
"Isn't the old phrase good enough, silly?" she scolded and kissed him. "I love you too, lover baby."
Behind them, at the key words, the sonic-signal closed the hidden doors in the archway and they were alone in the reconciliation chamber.
Joe discovered that Sam Tullgren, Director of the Domestic Center, had thought of everything to make reconciliations complete.