He had forgotten the beer again. He remembered that he had forgotten only as he opened the apartment door. A wave of smoke and onions and hamburger flowed past him into the dingy corridor and he stumbled on the garbage pail, plunked right in the doorway for him to lug along the passage to the chute. The bed was not made in one of their two rooms and newspapers littered the other. Elsie was in the kitchen.  
"Fred! Fred, did you remember my beer?"
He closed the door so that the neighbors would not hear the row to come, except through the walls.
"Didja, Fred?"
She stood akimbo in the kitchen doorway, a cigarette hanging from her lips, her dressing gown loose and spotted, her feet in old scuffs.
"I forgot," he mumbled. "I'll go now."
Oh, no, he wouldn't. Not until he had heard a full resumé of his lack of character, lack of enterprise, ambition, decency, thoughtfulness, manhood, semblance of virtue.
"I said I was going, Elsie. I said I was going, didn't I?"
"Well, my day! You remembered my name!"
It was true he rarely used her name or called her any husbandly term such as dear or darling instead, and rarely looked at her at all if he could avoid it inconspicuously. Ten years of marriage—ten years of legal proximity, rather, for nothing in him was married to anything in her any more.
"I don't know why you married me," he said.
"Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Go on, get out."
He almost knocked the man over as he left the apartment. The man was standing there, about to ring the bell. Well dressed, clean, expensive overcoat, polished shoes, black hat and a mild friendly face.
"Mr. Frederick Williams?" the man asked.
"Yes," said Fred.
"You entered the Sunday News competition for a free space ride?"
"Yes. Did I win it?"
"Unfortunately, no," said the man.
"Oh. Well, excuse me, I've got to go and get something."
"I'll come with you. My name is Howard Sprinnell, Mr. Williams, and I've been examining the entries to that competition. Frankly, we think you have considerable talent."
"Mister," said Fred over his shoulder as they went down the stairs, "if you're trying to sell me something—"
"I don't want a penny from you, Mr. Williams."
"Then what—"
"We would merely appreciate a few hours of your time, at your convenience."
"A few hours?" Fred said, distressed. By working double shift in the automation-parts supply house, he could just keep going, financially and physically. The question of mental fatigue was exclusively Elsie's province and there he had a rough working technique for responding without really listening. His job called for no mental effort greater than reading a shipping list, and his home life certainly didn't. Most of the time he had nothing in his mind at all; the days passed faster that way. But Elsie and the job kept him tired. Odd how just not listening wrung you out and drained you off.
"We are, of course, very glad to offer you compensation for your time, Mr. Williams," said the man.
Elsie would just drink it away. He'd have to haul crates of bourbon instead of cans of beer, that's all.
"Not interested," he said.
That was it. That was the way to keep a salesman stalled. Just "not interested." Keep saying it and nothing else. They all said they were not salesmen and weren't selling anything. Every salesman he had ever met at the door said that. Galactic Encyclopedia, Nuclear Brush, Your Venus Vacation, video subscriptions, even the Federal numbers game, they all started out by offering you a special opportunity and were not selling you anything. The man was still talking.
"Not interested," Fred said.
"Fred," said the man as they reached the bottom of the stairs, "I'm doing you a favor. I'm not supposed to tell you this, but either you come voluntarily or you'll come anyway. Why not get paid for it?"
"Not interested. And if anyone wants me, they can come and get me. I don't care. I just don't care."
He slouched off into the rain toward the supermarket.
As Dr. Howard Sprinnell watched him go he took a small silver case from his top-coat pocket. He raised the case to his lips and said quietly: "Sprinnell here. No. A clear case, but no. Pick him up."
The squad car arrived silently on its jets as Fred Williams reached the door of the apartment house. He was carrying a pack of beer in each hand and was glad to see the man had gone. That's all you had to do—just keep saying "not interested" until they went away.
"O.K., bud."
The troopers took him on both sides, grasped his arms, and levered him round.
"Hey!" Fred protested. "The beer's for my wife. She's waiting for it. Please, fellers, I'll never hear the end of it if she doesn't get her beer."
"Joe," said the trooper on Fred's right, jerking his head in the direction of the door behind them.
A third trooper climbed out of the squad car, took the packs from Fred's hands and walked into the apartment house. He climbed the stairs swiftly, wrinkling his nose at the stale thickness of the air, knocked on the apartment door and waited for Elsie to open it.
"Here's your beer," he said shortly.
"Where's Fred?"
"Your husband is being detained in connection with a robbery at his office."
"Fred! Are you kidding? Fred hasn't the sense or the guts! How long will he be gone?"
"Two or three weeks."
"Oh," said Elsie, scratching herself disinterestedly. "Well, thanks for the beer."
She shut the door and the trooper returned to the squad car. He looked at Fred sympathetically but said nothing. The squad car took off, then turned on its sirens.
"What's this all about?" asked Fred Williams from the back seat.
"Just excitement, bud. We live a dull life."
You think you do, you should live mine. I don't care anyway. If I ask them what I'm doing in this squad car, I'll get a silly answer.
"A guy called Spinner or something send for you?"
"We don't get sent for, bud. Where have you been, the Middle Ages?"
He had a point there. Security troopers were under direct control of the President and came and went as they pleased. The satellite stations gave them general directives and the President directed the stations. Fred Williams grinned at the thought of Spinner, or whatever his name was, calling the President to call a satellite station to call these cops to come and get him. He would have been shocked and frightened if anyone had told him this was almost exactly what had happened.
They shot into the garage of an ordinary Federal police station, a large tiled vault smelling of hoses, soap and water. The troopers took him upstairs, along wax-polished corridors, through swinging doors and out of the muttered voices, footsteps, paper rattling and telephone tinkle of the station, into the smooth silence of a surgery. That fellow Spinner was waiting in a white doctor's coat.
"They pick you up too?" Fred Williams said.
The Security troopers hoisted him into a dentist's chair, saluted the other man and went away.
"You can leave any time you wish, Fred. If you do, though, I'll have you brought back. I'm Dr. Howard Sprinnell."
"Funny, I thought your name was Cloud Spinner or something," Fred confessed.
"That's very interesting." The doctor leaned forward across his desk. "What made you think that?"
"I just remembered it that way, that's all."
"Ah. You have an unusual mind, Fred. No, I mean it. And just to show you this is not fooling, I have a call here for you from the President."
"From Jake?"
"From President Jackson, yes."
Dr. Sprinnell pressed a green button on the video control on his desk. The wall panel lit and President Jackson's familiar face looked at Fred Williams.
"Mr. Williams," said the President. "The nation has called you to an unusual task. On your complete cooperation and absolute discretion in not mentioning to anyone—to anyone at all—what you may now learn depend matters of the utmost consequence to us all. I wish you good luck and Godspeed."
The panel went dark and the doctor switched off.
"That was Jake himself," Fred Williams said. "Talking to me."
Like the many thousand million in the System, Fred referred to the President familiarly as Jake, but he never thought he would get to talk to him, or be talked to personally.
"What did he want to talk to me for?" Fred asked, dazed.
"That's what I want to show you," said Dr. Sprinnell. "You understood what the President said about keeping this entirely confidential?"
"Hell, no one would believe it if I said I'd been talking to the President, anyway."
"That's what we figure," said the doctor, smiling slightly. He picked up a pack of cards and flipped five of them onto the desk, a circle, a cross, two wavy lines, a rectangle and a star. "These are Zener cards, Fred. Ever see them before?"
No, but they didn't look like much. This was cockeyed, the whole situation—having the President call him so that he and a quack could play cards.
"It will be clearer in a little while," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said. "But first we must run this little check. Please point to one of these cards every minute when I say 'now.'"
Fred shifted himself in the high chair and pointed to one of the five cards obediently every minute. After twenty minutes, the doctor increased the rate. He noted every selection.
"Last lap now, Fred."
He was sick of this, but it was better than sitting in the apartment with Elsie. Fred pointed to a card for the last time.
"And now," the doctor said, standing up and feeding his notations into a machine in the corner of the room, "we have here the results."
He pulled a tape from the machine as it purred out, and showed it to Fred. It was a score of some sort.
"In another room," Dr. Howard Sprinne............