Stars and comets, ringed planets and crescent moons.
Sometimes a red eye. There was often a hopscotch grid in the same area, but not always. Later on, he said, it all fit together in a crazy sort of way, but not back in the thirties and forties and early fifties, when he was drifting. No, back then he'd been a little bit like Docs One and Two, not wanting to see what was right in front of him, because it was... disturbing.
And then, right around the time Korea was winding down, he saw The Ad. It promised THE JOB OF A LIFETIME and said that if yon were THE MAN WITH THE RIGHT QUALIFICATIONS, there would be ABSOLUTELY NO QUESTIONS ASKED. A number of required skills were enumerated, accountancy being one of them. Brautigan was sure the ad ran in newspapers all over the country; he happened to read it in the Sacramento Bee.
"Holy crap!" Jake cried. "That's the same paper Pere Callahan was reading when he found out his friend George Magruder-"
"Hush," Roland said. "Listen."
They listened.
The tests are administered by humes (a term Ted Brautigan won't know for another few weeks-not until he steps out of the year 1955 and into the no-time of the Algal). The interviewer he eventually meets in San Francisco is also a hume. Ted will learn (among a great many other things) that the disguises the low men wear, most particularly the masks they loear, are not good, not when you 're up close and personal.
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."