Curiously, there were no movie records, and no regular radio or television programs. Hart was too busy catching up with history and language at first to wonder why.

His synthetic disease and the physiological strain of growing new tissue left him a little weak. He stayed close to his room and only went out in the hospital gardens on orders of the staff. Nor did he have any visitors except the medical workers. After a while, he began to be lonely.

He was put through a series of psychological tests more exhaustive than the physical checkups. Here, too, he was baffled by the intricacy of a science evolved immensely beyond the older one which itself had puzzled him. Some of it was recognizable—word-association, elaborate questionnaires much of which seemed to be completely irrelevant, long informal talks with a psychiatrist. And the huge machines which studied him seemed remote descendants of the electroencephalographs he had known. But he went through completely bewildering processes—hypnotism, drugging, physical exercises.

“What’s the idea?” he demanded, a little indignantly. “You seem to want to know me better than I know myself. Why?”

“Psychoclassificating,” said the tester. “All citizens undergo it, with periodic rechecks.”

That sounded ominous. What kind of totalitarian state have I landed in? “What do you do with the results?”

“Counsel, advise, straighten uwt conflicts. And, of cuwrse, arra-enge introductions.” The psychiatrist looked troubled. He kept looking at the elaborate data sheets in his hand, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he saw. “Suwcial integrating of individual depend on what psychotype he are, Tov Hart. No, if du will excoose me, must study dese results—”

Hart went back to his reading. He was having trouble finding out what kind of world he lived in. There were plenty of histories, but they said little about the details of daily life, and they grew remarkably uneventful as they neared the present time. There were also plenty of sociological texts, but these were written in a technical language that left his head whirling—much of the material, indeed, was mathematical. He recognized the symbology as descended from the symbolic logic and calculus of statement of his own time, but since his acquaintance with those had been completely superficial, that didn’t help much.

But manners, customs, family relations, all the million little details which make up life—rather than the abstractions of life, such as history and sociology—were nowhere explicitly described. After all, why should a people concern itself with its own mores? Such things are learned in childhood, are absorbed unconsciously as the individual grows through life. Had any twentieth century anthropologist ever described the habits and customs and beliefs of New York as carefully and objectively as he did those of the upper Congo? Hart found himself in the curious position of having learned more about the social organization of the natives of Procyon IV than those of Sol III.

He went back to history. That he could learn objectively, and with such a background feel his way around contemporary Earth until he learned the social ropes.