Drug of Choice

Harvey Blood glanced at his watch and entered the limousine. Clark followed him; two men were already there, sitting on the little fold-down seats. They had charts and briefcases opened, papers out.

The limousine started off.

Clark said, “What kind of trouble?”

“Later,” Blood said. He turned to the two men.

“We’ve got it down to twenty, Harvey,” one said. “They’re a pretty good group.” He laughed. “Some of them can even sing.”

“The hell with that,” Blood said. He looked at the other.

“Psychological testing is completed,” the man said. “On all twenty finalists. The correlation with somatotyping of body form is quite precise. You’ve got a split into two basic groups, really. What we call the projection-affective group, with high raw scores on scales twelve, delta, and nine. Then there’s the ego-flexor group, which scored high on scales five, beta, and two. It’s hard to say which would be the better choice.”

“I see,” Blood nodded.

The first man said, “We’ve got standardized costumes waiting, and the pattern is set. All it requires is your final decision.”

“How about the costume for GG?”

“We have a preliminary model. All the girls will wear it. The plastics people have just finished wiring them.”

“Fine. And the sound?”

“We’ll go there afterward. The mixing studios are doing fine work, I think you’ll agree. And the boys are coming together nicely.”

Blood nodded and sat back. The second man handed him a sheaf of graphs, with points plotted on peculiar circular axes. It was a kind of graph Clark had never seen before.

There were also several pages of photographs, but they were also peculiar. One page was the faces of twenty girls, but the other pages were isolated photos of legs, elbows, shoulders, feet. Each page was stamped: “PROJECT GLOW.”

“What’s that?” Clark said.

“Shut up,” Harvey Blood said. “I’m thinking.”

An auditorium, empty, the rows of wooden seats stretching back into darkness. In front of them, a bare and lighted stage.

Harvey Blood slumped down in the front row and looked up at the stage. The two men sat on either side of him; Clark sat next to one of them.

Nobody said anything, but after a moment, a man in a dark suit came onto the stage, carrying a microphone on a heavy base. He set the microphone down in the middle of the stage, right in front of Blood.

“Are you ready now, sir?” he asked.

“Ready,” Blood said. He took out a pair of glasses, wiped them on his tie, and put them on. He folded his hands across his chest and looked up expectantly.

“There are three runs,” one of the men said, leaning over to Clark. “Dr. Blood can eliminate at any time. Do you understand?”

“No,” Clark said.

“You’ll get the hang of it, after a while,” the man said.

The stage lights went down. A voice said, “Number one,” and a girl walked out. She was tall and slender, with dark hair and a gentle face. She wore black slacks and a frilly white blouse.

“You see,” one of the men whispered to Clark, “on the first run, the girls wear whatever they want. The next two runs are standardized. But this run is important to personality projection and affect penetrance.”

“Oh.”

The girl walked slowly across the stage, oblivious to the men in the front row. She reached the opposite side, turned, and walked back. Clark looked over to see what Blood was doing. He was frowning.

Blood said, “Why slacks?”

“Ego interference,” one man said. “Subconscious withdrawal complex. She relies on conveyed fragility.”

Blood continued to frown. “Cut her.”

The aide picked up a small hand walkie-talkie. “Cut one,” he said.

There was a pause, and then a voice said, “Number two,” and a second girl walked across the stage. This one was short, with large breasts and hips, and a pert face. She wore a miniskirt and sweater.

“Projection-affective,” one of the men whispered. “Written all over her.”

“Oh,” Clark said.

This girl Blood seemed to like. He smiled slightly, and said nothing. The girl walked off the stage and a third one came on, a dark-haired girl in a leather skirt, vest, boots.

“Strangely enough, this one is ego-flexor, though she doesn’t look it.”

Clark leaned over to see Blood’s reaction, but his face was enigmatic.

The fourth girl wore a jumper; she had large breasts and blond hair.

“Look at the way she walks,” Blood said. “Terrible. Cut her.”

And so it went, through all twenty girls. Clark tried to make sense of what was happening, but he could not. Every once in a while, one of the men would lean over to explain things, but the explanations never helped. About all he understood was that they were selecting a girl.

For something.

At the end of the first run, Blood said, “How many?”

“Thirteen left”

“All right. Let’s get on with it.”

The new sequence began, this time starting with number two, since number one was eliminated. Number two wore a brief black bikini. She had not taken two steps onto the stage before Blood hissed: “She has a scar!”

“Yes,” one of the men said, “appendix…”

“You knew that? And you kept her? That’s absurd.”