[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding ScienceFiction May 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
She was a young, enthusiastic worker for the Welfare Department.She liked helping people ... only she really-but-good helped them!
The office wasn't very bright or sunny, but that didn't matter. In thefirst place, if Gloria really wanted sun, she could always get some bytuning in on a mind outside, someone walking the streets of downtown NewYork. And, in the second place, the weather wasn't important; whatmattered was how you felt inside. Gloria took off her beret and crammedit into a drawer of her desk. She sat down, feeling perfectly ready forwork, her bright eyes sparkling and her whole twenty-one-year-old bodyeager for the demands of the day.
It was ten minutes to nine in the morning.
On the desk was a mass of reports and folders. Gloria looked at them andsighed; the cleaning woman, she thought, must have upset everythingagain.
But neatness was the keystone of good, efficient work in any field.Gloria set to work rearranging everything in a proper order. The jobtook her nearly twenty minutes and, by the time she was finished, theoffice was full.
Mr. Fredericksohn hadn't arrived yet, naturally. He always came inaround nine-thirty. But all of the case workers were ready for the day'swork. Gloria looked around the office at them, beaming. It was good tobe able to help people and to know that what you were doing was right.
She remembered wondering how you could be sure you were right aboutsomebody else, if you couldn't read minds. But, then, there were rulesto go by, and all of the fine classes and textbooks that a social caseworker had to have. If you paid attention, and if you really wanted tohelp people, Gloria supposed, it was all right. Certainly everything inher own office seemed to run smoothly.
Not that she would ever do anything about another worker, no matterwhat. Gloria remembered what Mr. Greystone, a teacher of hers had said,a year or so before: "Never interfere with the case load of anotherworker. Your sole job is represented by your own case load."
That was good advice, Gloria thought. And, anyhow, her assistance didn'tseem to be too badly needed, among the others. She had quite enough todo in taking care of her own clients.
And here she was, wasting time! She shook her head and breathed a littlesigh, and began on the first folder.
Name: GIRONDE, JOSE R.
Name: Wladek, Mrs. Marie Posner. She was no fool. She knew about thereports they had to make, and the sheets covered with all the details ofyour very own private life; she had seen them on a desk when she hadcome to keep her appointment. Mrs. Wladek was her name, and that was howthe report would look, with her name all reversed in order right on thetop. And underneath that there would be her address and her story, allthat she had told the case workers, set right down in black and whitefor anybody at all to read.
When you were poor, you had no privacy, and that was the truth. Mrs.Wladek shook her head. A poor old woman, that was all that she was, andprivacy was a luxury not to be asked for. Who said the United States wasdifferent from the old country?
Cossacks, she thought. In the old country, one still heard the oldstories, the streets paved with gold and the food waiting for such asyourself; oh, the war had not changed that in the least. Now the Voiceof America was heard in the old country—she had a letter, smuggled out,from her own second-cousin Marfa, telling her