On this spot in the Gregorian year 1996, Alfred Morris announced to an assembly of war survivors the hypothalamic block. His stirring words were, "This new drug selectively halts at the thalamic brain the upward flow of unconscious stimuli and the downward flow of unconscious motivations. It acts as a screen between the cerebrum and the psychosomatic discharge system. Using hypothalamic block, we will not act emotively, we will initiate acts only from the logical demands of situations."This announcement and the subsequent wholehearted action of the war-weary people made the taking of hypothalamic block obligatory. This put an end to the powerful play of unconscious mind in the public and private affairs of the ancient world. It ended the great paranoid wars and saved mankind.
On this spot in the Gregorian year 1996, Alfred Morris announced to an assembly of war survivors the hypothalamic block. His stirring words were, "This new drug selectively halts at the thalamic brain the upward flow of unconscious stimuli and the downward flow of unconscious motivations. It acts as a screen between the cerebrum and the psychosomatic discharge system. Using hypothalamic block, we will not act emotively, we will initiate acts only from the logical demands of situations."
This announcement and the subsequent wholehearted action of the war-weary people made the taking of hypothalamic block obligatory. This put an end to the powerful play of unconscious mind in the public and private affairs of the ancient world. It ended the great paranoid wars and saved mankind.
In the strange evening light, the letters seemed alive, a centuries-old condemnation of any who might try to go back to the ancient pre-pharmacy days. Of course, it was not really possible to go back. Without drugs, everybody and all society would fall apart.
The ancients had first learned to keep endocrine deviates such as the diabetic alive with drugs. Later they learned with other drugs to "cure" the far more prevalent disease, schizophrenia, that was jamming their hospitals. The big change came when the ancients used these same drugs on everyone to control the private and public irrationality of their time and stop the wars.
In this new, drugged world, the schizophrene thrived better than any, and the world became patterned on him. But, just as the diabetic was still diabetic, the schizophrene was still himself, plus the drugs. Meanwhile, everyone had forgotten what it was the drugs did to you—that the emotions experienced were blurred emotions, that insight was at an isolated level of rationality because the drugs kept true feelings from ever emerging.
How inconceivable it would be to Helen and the other people of his world to live on as little drug as possible ... to experience the conflicting emotions, the interplay of passion and logic that almost tore you apart! Sober, the ancients called it, and they lived that way most of the time, with only the occasional crude and clublike effects of alcohol or narcotics to relieve their chronic anxiety.
By taking as little hypothalamic block as possible, he and Clara were able to desire their fantastic attachment, to delight in an absolutely illogical situation unheard of in their society. But the society would judge their refusal to take hypothalamic block in only one sense. The weight of this judgment stood before him in the smoldering words, "It ended the great paranoid wars and saved mankind."
When Clara did appear, she was searching myopically in the wrong vicinity of the statue. He did not call to her at once, letting the sight of her smooth out the tensions in him, convert all the conflicts into this one intense longing to be with her.
Her halting search for him was deeply touching, like that of a tragic little puppet in a darkening dumbshow. He saw suddenly how like puppets the two of them were. They were moved by the strengthening wires of a new life of feeling to batter clumsily at an implacable stage setting that would finally leave them as bits of wood and paper.
Then suddenly in his arms Clara was at the same time hungrily moving and tense with fear of discovery. Little sounds of love and fear choked each other in her throat. Her blonde head pressed tightly into his shoulder and she clung to him with desperation.
She said, "Conrad was disturbed by my tension this morning and made me take a sleeping compound. I've just awakened."
They walked to her home in silence and even in the darkened apartment they used only the primitive monosyllables of apprehensive need. Beyond these mere sounds of compassion, they had long ago said all that could be said.
Because Bill was the hyperalter, he had no fear that Conrad could force a shift on him. When later they lay in darkness, he allowed himself to drift into a brief slumber. Without the sleeping compound, distorted events came and went without reason. Dreaming, the ancients had called it. It was one of the most frightening things that had begun to happen when he first cut down on the drugs. Now, in the few seconds that he dozed, a thousand fragments of incidental knowledge, historical reading and emotional need melded and, in a strange contrast to their present tranquility, he was dreaming a frightful moment in the 20th century.These are the great paranoid wars, he thought. And it was so because he had thought it.
He searched frantically through the glove compartment of an ancient automobile. "Wait," he pleaded. "I tell you we have sulfonamide-14. We've been taking it regularly as directed. We took a double dose back in Paterson because there were soft-bombs all through that part of Jersey and we didn't know what would be declared Plague Area next."
Now Bill threw things out of his satchel onto the floor and seat of the car, fumbling deeper by the flashlight Clara held. His heart beat thickly with terror. Then he remembered his pharmacase. Oh, why hadn't they remembered sooner about their pharmacases. Bill tore at the belt about his waist.
The Medicorps captain stepped back from the door of their car. He jerked his head at the dark form of the corporal standing in the roadway. "Shoot them. Run the car off the embankment before you burn it."
Bill screamed metallically through the speaker of his radiation mask. "Wait. I've found it." He thrust the pharmacase out the door of the car. "This is a pharmacase," he explained. "We keep our drugs in one of these and it's belted to our waist so we are never without them."
The captain of the Medicorps came back. He inspected the pharmacase and the drugs and returned it. "From now on, keep your drugs handy. Take them without fail according to radio instructions. Do you understand?"
Clara's head pressed heavily against Bill's shoulder, and he could hear the tinny sound of her sobbing through the speaker of her mask.
The captain stepped into the road again. "We'll have to burn your car. You passed through a Plague Area and it can't be sterilized on this route. About a mile up this road you'll come to a sterilization unit. Stop and have your person and belongings rayed. After that, keep walking, but stick to the road. You'll be shot if you're caught off it."
The road was crowded with fleeing people. Their way was lighted by piles of cadavers writhing in gasoline flames. The Medicorps was everywhere. Those who stumbled, those who coughed, the delirious and their helping partners ... these were taken to the side of the road, shot and burned. And there was bombing again to the south.
Bill stopped in the middle of the road and looked back. Clara clung to him.
"There is a plague here we haven't any drug for," he said, and realized he was crying. "We are all mad."
Clara was crying too. "Darling, what have you done? Where are the drugs?"
The water of the Hudson hung as it had in the late afternoon, ice crystals in the stratosphere. The high, high sheet flashed and glowed in the new bombing to the south, where multicolored pillars of flame boiled into the sky. But the muffled crash of the distant bombing was suddenly the steady click of the urgent signal on a bedside visiophone, and Bill was abruptly awake.
Clara was throwing on her robe and moving toward the machine on terror-rigid limbs. With a scrambling motion, Bill got out of the possible view of the machine and crouched at the end of the room.
Distinctly, he could hear the machine say, "Clara Manz?"
"Yes." Clara's voice was a thin treble that could have been a shriek had it continued.
"This is Medicorps Headquarters. A routine check discloses you have delayed your shift two hours. To maintain the statistical record of deviations, please give us a full explanation."
"I ..." Clara had to swallow before she could talk. "I must have taken too much sleeping compound."
"Mrs. Manz, our records indicate that you have been delaying your shift consistently for several periods now. We made a check of this as a routine follow up on any such deviation, but the discovery is quite serious." There was a harsh silence, a silence that demanded a logical answer. But how could there be a logical answer?
"My hyperalter hasn't complained and I—well, I have just let a bad habit develop. I'll see that it—doesn't happen again."
The machine voiced several platitudes about the responsibilities of one personality to another and the duty of all to society before Clara was able to shut it off.
Both of them sat as they were for a long, long time while the tide of terror subsided. When at last they looked at each other across the dim and silent room, both of them knew there could be at least one more time together before they were caught.
Five days later, on the last day of her shift, Mary Walden wrote the address of her appointed father's hypoalter, Conrad Manz, with an indelible pencil on the skin just below her armpit.
During the morning, her father and mother had spoiled the family rest day by quarreling. It was about Helen's hypoalter delaying so many shifts. Bill did not think it very important, but her mother was angry and threatened to complain to the Medicorps.
The lunch was eaten in silence, except that at one point Bill said, "It seems to me Conrad and Clara Manz are guilty of a peculiar marriage, not us. Yet they seem perfectly happy with it and you're the one who is made unhappy. The woman has probably just developed a habit of taking too much sleeping compound for her rest day naps. Why don't you drop her a note?"
Helen made only one remark. It was said through her teeth and very softly. "Bill, I would just as soon the child did not realize her relationship to this sordid situation."
Mary cringed over the way Helen disregarded her hearing, the possibility that she might be capable of understanding, or her feelings about being shut out of their mutual world.
After the lunch Mary cleared the table, throwing the remains of the meal and the plastiplates into the flash trash disposer. Her father had retreated to the library room and Helen was getting ready to attend a Citizen's Meeting. Mary heard her mother enter the room to say good-bye while she was wiping the dining table. She knew that Helen was standing, well-dressed and a little impatient, just behind her, but she pretended she did not know.
"Darling, I'm leaving now for the Citizen's Meeting."
"Oh ... yes."
"Be a good girl and don't be late for your shift. You only have an hour now." Helen's patrician face smiled.
"I won't be late."
"Don't pay any attention to the things Bill and I discussed this morning, will you?"
"No."
And she was gone. She did not say good-bye to Bill.
Mary was very conscious of her father in the house. He continued to sit in the library. She walked by the door and she could see him sitting in a chair, staring at the floor. Mary stood in the sun room for a long while. If he had risen from his chair, if he had rustled a page, if he had sighed, she would have heard him.
It grew closer and closer to the time she would have to leave if Susan Shorrs was to catch the first school hours of her shift. Why did children have to shift half a day before adults?
Finally, Mary thought of something to say. She could let him know she was old enough to understand what the quarrel had been about if only it were explained to her.
Mary went into the library and hesitantly sat on the edge, of a couch near him. He did not look at her and his face seemed gray in the midday light. Then she knew that he was lonely, too. But a great feeling of tenderness for him went through her.
"Sometimes I think you and Clara Manz must be the only people in the world," she said abruptly, "who aren't so silly about shifting right on the dot. Why, I don'tcareif Susan Shorrsisan hour late for classes!"
Those first moments when he seized her in his arms, it seemed her heart would shake loose. It was as though she had uttered some magic formula, one that had abruptly opened the doors to his love. It was only after he had explained to her why he was always late on the first day of the family shift that she knew something was wrong. Hedidtell her, over and over, that he knew she was unhappy and that it was his fault. But he was at the same time soothing her, petting her, as ifhe was afraid of her.
He talked on and on. Gradually, Mary understood in his trembling body, in his perspiring palms, in his pleading eyes, that he was afraid of dying, that he was afraidshewould kill him with the merest thing she said, with her very presence.
This was not painful to Mary, because, suddenly, something came with ponderous enormity to stand before her:I would just as soon the child did not realize her relationship to this sordid situation.
Her relationship. It was some kind of relationship to Conrad and Clara Manz, because those were the people they had been talking about.
The moment her father left the apartment, she went to his desk and took out the file of family records. After she found the address of Conrad Manz, the idea occurred to her to write it on her body. Mary was certain that Susan Shorrs never bathed and she thought this a clever idea. Sometime on Susan's rest day, five days from now, she would try to force the shift and go to see Conrad and Clara Manz. Her plan was simple in execution, but totally vague as to goal.
Mary was already late when she hurried to the children's section of a public shifting station. A Children's Transfer Bus was waiting, and Mary registered on it for Susan Shorrs to be taken to school. After that she found a shifting room and opened it with her wristband. She changed into a shifting costume and sent her own clothes and belongings home.
Children her age did not wear makeup, but Mary always stood at the mirror during the shift. She always tried as hard as she could to see what Susan Shorrs looked like. She giggled over a verse that was scrawled beside the mirror ...
Rouge your hair and comb your face;Many a third head is lost in this place.
Rouge your hair and comb your face;Many a third head is lost in this place.
Rouge your hair and comb your face;
Many a third head is lost in this place.
... and then the shift came, doubly frightening because of what she knew she was going to do.
Especially if you were a hyperalter like Mary, you were supposed to have some sense of the passage of time while you were out of shift. Of course, you did not know what was going on, but it was as though a more or less accurate chronometer kept running when you went out of shift. Apparently Mary's was highly inaccurate, because, to her horror, she found herself sitting bolt upright in one of Mrs. Harris's classes, not out on the playgrounds, where she had expected Susan Shorrs to be.
Mary was terrified, and the ugly school dress Susan had been wearing accented, by its strangeness, the seriousness of her premature shift. Children weren't supposed to show much difference from hyperalter to hypoalter, but when she raised her eyes, her fright grew. Children did change. She hardly recognized anyone in the room, though most of them must be the alters of her own classmates. Mrs. Harris was a B-shift and overlapped both Mary and Susan, but otherwise Mary recognized only Carl Blair's hypoalter because of his freckles.
Mary knew she had to get out of there or Mrs. Harris would eventually recognize her. If she left the room quietly, Mrs. Harris would not question her unless she recognized her. It was no use trying to guess how Susan would walk.
Mary stood and went toward the door, glad that it turned her back to Mrs. Harris. It seemed to her that she could feel the teacher's eyes stabbing through her back.
But she walked safely from the room. She dashed down the school corridor and out into the street. So great was her fear of what she was doing that her hypoalter's world actually seemed like a different one.
It was a long way for Mary to walk across town, and when she rang the bell, Conrad Manz was already home from work. He smiled at her and she loved him at once.
"Well, what do you want, young lady?" he asked.
Mary couldn't answer him. She just smiled back.
"What's your name, eh?"
Mary went right on smiling, but suddenly he blurred in front of her.
"Here, here! There's nothing to cry about. Come on in and let's see if we can help you. Clara! We have a visitor, a very sentimental visitor."
Mary let him put his big arm around her shoulder and draw her, crying, into the apartment. Then she saw Clara swimming before her, looking like her mother, but ... no, not at all like her mother.
"Now, see here, chicken, what is it you've come for?" Conrad asked when her crying stopped.
Mary had to stare hard at the floor to be able to say it. "I want to live with you."
Clara was twisting and untwisting a handkerchief. "But, child, we have already had our first baby appointed to us. He'll be with us next shift, and after that I have to bear a baby for someone else to keep. We wouldn't be allowed to take care of you."
"I thought maybe I was your real child." Mary said it helplessly, knowing in advance what the answer would be.
"Darling," Clara soothed, "children don't live with their natural parents. It's neither practical nor civilized. I have had a child conceived and borne on my shift, and this baby is my exchange, so you see that you are much too old to be my conception. Whoever your natural parents may be, it is just something on record with the Medicorps Genetic Division and isn't important."
"But you're a special case," Mary pressed. "I thought because it was a special arrangement that you were my real parents." She looked up and she saw that Clara had turned white.
And now Conrad Manz was agitated, too. "What do you mean, we're a special case?" He was staring hard at her.
"Because...." And now for the first time Mary realized how special this case was, how sensitive they would be about it.
He grasped her by the shoulders and turned her so she faced his unblinking eyes. "I said, what do you mean, we're a special case? Clara, what in thirty heads does this kid mean?"
His grip hurt her and she began to cry again. She broke away. "You're the hypoalters of my appointed father and mother. I thought maybe when it was like that, I might be your real child ... and you might want me. I don't want to be where I am. I want somebody...."
Clara was calm now, her sudden fear gone. "But, darling, if you're unhappy where you are, only the Medicorps can reappoint you. Besides, maybe your appointed parents are just having some personal problems right now. Maybe if you tried to understand them, you would see that they really love you."
Conrad's face showed that he did not understand. He spoke with a stiff, quiet voice and without taking his eyes from Mary. "What are you doing here? My own hyperalter's kid in my house, throwing it up to me that I'm married to his wife's hypoalter!"
They did not feel the earth move, as she fearfully did. They sat there, staring at her, as though they might sit forever while she backed away, out of the apartment, and ran into her collapsing world.
Conrad Manz's rest day fell the day after Bill Walden's kid showed up at his apartment. It was ten days since that strait jacket of a conference on Santa Fe had lost him a chance to blast off a rocket racer. This time, on the practical knowledge that emergency business conferences were seldom called after lunch, Conrad had placed his reservation for a racer in the afternoon. The visit from Mary Walden had upset him every time he thought of it. Since it was his rest day, he had no intention of thinking about it and Conrad's scrupulously drugged mind was capable of just that.
So now, in the lavish coolness of the lounge at the Rocket Club, Conrad sipped his drink contentedly and made no contribution to the gloomy conversation going on around him.
"Look at it this way," the melancholy face of Alberts, a pilot from England, morosely emphasized his tone. "It takes about 10,000 economic units to jack a forty ton ship up to satellite level and snap it around the course six times. That's just practice for us. On the other hand, an intellectual fellow who spends his spare time at a microfilm library doesn't use up 1,000 units in a year. In fact, his spare time activity may turn up as units gained. The Economic Board doesn't argue that all pastime should be gainful. They just say rocket racing wastes more economic units than most pilots make on their work days. I tell you the day is almost here when they ban the rockets."
"That's just it," another pilot put in. "There was a time when you could show that rocket races were necessary for better spaceship design. Design has gone way beyond that. From their point of view we just burn up units as fast as other people create them. And it's no use trying to argue for the television shows. The Board can prove people would rather see a jet-skiing meet at a cost of about one-hundredth that of a rocket race."
Conrad Manz grinned into his drink. He had been aware for several minutes that pert little Angela, Alberts' soft-eyed, husky-voiced wife, was trying to catch his eye. But stranded as she was in the buzzing traffic of rockets, she was trying to hail the wrong rescuer. He had about fifteen minutes till the ramp boys would have a ship ready for him. Much as he liked Angela, he wasn't going to miss that race.
Still, he let his grin broaden and, looking up at her, he lied maliciously by nodding. She interpreted this signal as he knew she would. Well, at least he would afford her a graceful exit from the boring conversation.
He got up and went over and took her hand. Her full lips parted a little and she kissed him on the mouth.
Conrad turned to Alberts and interrupted him. "Angela and I would like to spend a little time together. Do you mind?"
Alberts was annoyed at having his train of thought broken and rather snapped out the usual courtesy. "Of course not. I'm glad for both of you."
Conrad looked the group over with a bland stare. "Have you lads ever tried jet-skiing? There's more genuine excitement in ten minutes of it than an hour of rocket racing. Personally, I don't care if the Board does ban the rockets soon. I'll just hop out to the Rocky Mountains on rest days."
Conrad knew perfectly well that if he had made this assertion before asking Alberts for his wife, the man would have found some excuse to have her remain. All the faces present displayed theaficionado'sdisdain for one who has just demonstrated he doesn'tbelong. What the straitjacket did they think they were—some ancient order of noblemen?
Conrad took Angela's yielding arm and led her serenely away before Alberts could think of anything to detain her.
On the way out of the lounge, she stroked his arm with frank admiration. "I'm so glad you were agreeable. Honestly, Harold could talk rockets till I died."
Conrad bent and kissed her. "Angela, I'm sorry, but this isn't going to be what you think. I have a ship to take off in just a few minutes."
She flared and dug into his arm now. "Oh, Conrad Manz! You ... you made me believe...."
He laughed and grabbed her wrists. "Now, now. I'm neglecting you toflya rocket, not just to talk about them. I won't let you die."
At that she could not suppress her husky musical laugh. "I found that out the last time you and I were together. Clara and I had a drink the other day at the Citizen's Club. I don't often use dirty language, but I told Clara she must be keeping you in astraitjacketat home."
Conrad frowned, wishing she hadn't brought up the subject. It worried him off and on that something was wrong with Clara, something even worse than that awfuldreamingbusiness ten days ago. For several shifts now she had been cold, nor was it just a temporary lack of interest in himself, for she was also cold to the men of their acquaintance of whom she was usually quite fond. As for himself, he had had to depend on casual contacts such as Angela. Not that they weren't pleasant, but a man and wife were supposed to maintain a healthy love life between themselves, and it usually meant trouble with the Medicorps when this broke down.
Angela glanced at him. "I didn't think Clara laughed well at my remark. Is something wrong between you?"
"Oh, no," he declared hastily. "Clara is sometimes that way ... doesn't catch a joke right off."
A page boy approached them where they stood in the rotunda and advised Conrad that his ship was ready.
"Honestly, Angela, I'll make it up, I promise."
"I know you will, darling. And at least I'm grateful you saved me from all those rocket jets in there." Angela raised her lips for a kiss and afterward, as she pushed him toward the door, her slightly vacant face smiled at him.
Out on the ramp, Conrad found another pilot ready to take off. They made two wagers—first to reach the racing course, and winner in a six-lap heat around the six-hundred-mile hexagonal course.
They fired together and Conrad blasted his ship up on a thunderous column of flame that squeezed him into his seat. He was good at this and he knew he would win the lift to the course. On the course, though, if his opponent was any good at all, Conrad would probably lose because he enjoyed slamming the ship around the course in his wasteful, swashbuckling style much more than merely winning the heat.
Conrad kept his drive on till the last possible second and then shot out his nose jets. The ship shuddered up through another hundred miles and came to a lolling halt near the starting buoys. The other pilot gasped when Conrad shouted at him over the intership, "The winner by all thirty heads!"
It was generally assumed that a race up to the course consisted of cutting all jets when you had enough lift, and using the nose brakes only to correct any over-shot. "What did you do, just keep your power on and flip the ship around?" The other racer coasted up to Conrad's level and steadied with a brief forward burst.
They got the automatic signal from the starting buoy and went for the first turn, nose and nose, about half a mile apart. Conrad lost 5000 yards on the first turn by shoving his power too hard against the starboard steering Jets.
It made a pretty picture when a racer hammered its way around a turn that way with a fan of outside jets holding it in place. The Other fellow made his turns cleanly, using mostly the driving jets for steering. But that didn't look like much to those who happened to flip on their television while this little heat was in progress. On every turn, Conrad lost a little in space, but not in the eye of the automatic televisor on the buoy marking the turn. As usual, he cut closer to the buoys than regulations allowed, to give the folks a show.
Without the slightest regret, Conrad lost the heat by a full two sides of the hexagon. He congratulated his opponent and watched the fellow let his ship down carefully toward earth on its tail jets. For a while Conrad lolled his ship around near the starting buoy and its probably watching eye, flipping through a series of complicated maneuvers with the steering jets.
Conrad did not like the grim countenance of outer space. The lifeless, gemlike blaze of cloud upon cloud of stars in the perspectiveless black repelled him. He liked rocket racing only because of the neat timing necessary, and possibly because the knowledge that he indulged in it scared poor old Bill Walden half to death.
Today the bleak aspect of the Galaxy harried his mind back upon its own problems. A particularly nasty association of Clara with Bill Walden and his sniveling kid kept dogging Conrad's mind and, as soon as stunting had exhausted his excess of fuel, he turned the ship to earth and sent it in with a short, spectacular burst.
Now that he stopped to consider it, Clara's strange behavior had begun at about the same time that Bill Walden started cheating on the shifts. That kid Mary must have known something was going on, or she would not have done such a disgusting thing as to come to their apartment.
Conrad had let the rocket fall nose-down, until now it was screaming into the upper ionosphere. With no time to spare, he swiveled the ship on its guiding jets and opened the drive blast at the up-rushing earth. He had just completed this wrenching maneuver when two appalling things happened together.
Conrad suddenly knew, whether as a momentary leak from Bill's mind to his, or as a rapid calculation of his own, that Bill Walden and Clara shared a secret. At the same moment, something tore through his mind like fingers of chill wind. With seven gravities mashing him into the bucket-seat, he grunted curses past thin-stretched lips.
"Great blue psychiatrists! What in thirty straitjackets is that three-headed fool trying to do, kill us both?"
Conrad just managed to raise his leaden hand and set the plummeting racer for automatic pilot before Bill Walden forced him out of the shift. In his last moment of consciousness, and in the shock of his overwhelming shame, Conrad felt the bitter irony that he could not cut the power and kill Bill Walden.
When Bill Walden became conscious of the thunderous clamor of the braking ship and the awful weight of deceleration into which he had shifted, the core of him froze. He was so terrified that he could not have thought of reshifting even had there been time.
His head rolled on the pad in spite of its weight, and he saw the earth coming at him like a monstrous swatter aimed at a fly. Between his fright and the inhuman gravity, he lost consciousness without ever seeing on the control panel the red warning that saved him:Automatic Pilot.
The ship settled itself on the ramp in a mushroom of fire. Bill regained awareness several seconds later. He was too shaken to do anything but sit there for a long time.
When at last he felt capable of moving, he struggled with the door till he found how to open it, and climbed down to the still-hot ramp he had landed on. It was at least a mile to the Rocket Club across the barren flat of the field, and he set out on foot. Shortly, however, a truck came speeding across to him.
The driver leaned out. "Hey, Conrad, what's the matter? Why didn't you pull the ship over to the hangars?"
With Conrad's makeup on, Bill felt he could probably get by. "Controls aren't working," he offered noncommittally.
At the club, a place he had never been to before in his life, Bill found an unused helicopter and started it with his wristband. He flew the machine into town to the landing station nearest his home.
He was doomed, he knew. Conrad certainly would report him for this. He had not intended to force the shift so early or so violently. Perhaps he had not intended to force it at all this time. But there was something in him more powerful than himself ... a need to break the shift and be with Clara that now acted almost independently of him and certainly without regard for his safety.
Bill flew his craft carefully through the city traffic, working his way between the widely spaced towers with the uncertain hand of one to whom machines are not an extension of the body. He put the helicopter down at the landing station with some difficulty.
Clara would not be expecting him so early. From his apartment, as soon as he had changed makeup, he visiophoned her. It was strange how long and how carefully they needed to look at each other and how few words they could say.
Afterward, he seemed calmer and went about getting ready with more efficiency. But when he found himself addressing the package of Conrad's clothes to his home, he chuckled bitterly.
It was when he went back to drop the package in the mail chute that he noticed the storage room door ajar. He disposed of the package and went over to the door. Then he stood still, listening. He had to stop his own breathing to hear clearly.
Bill tightened himself and opened the door. He flipped on the light and saw Mary. The child sat on the floor in the corner with her knees drawn up against her chest. Between the knees and the chest, the frail wrists were crossed, the hands closed limply like—like those of a fetus. The forehead rested on the knees so that, should the closed eyes stray open, they would be looking at the placid hands.
The sickening sight of the child squeezed down on his heart till the color drained from his face. He went forward and knelt before her. His dry throat hammered with the words,what have I done to you, but he could not speak. The question of how long she might have been here, he could not bear to think.
He put out his hand, but he did not touch her. A shudder of revulsion shook him and he scrambled to his feet. He hurried back into the apartment with only one thought. He must get someone to help her. Only the Medicorps could take care of a situation like this.
As he stood at the visiophone, he knew that this involuntary act of panic had betrayed all that he had ever thought and done. He had to call the Medicorps. He could not face the result of his own behavior without them. Like a ghostly after-image, he saw Clara's face on the screen. She was lost, cut off, with only himself to depend on.
A part of him, a place where there were no voices and a great tragedy, had been abruptly shut off. He stood stupidly confused and disturbed about something he couldn't recall. The emotion in his body suddenly had no referent. He stood like a badly frightened animal while his heart slowed and blood seeped again into whitened parenchymas, while tides of epinephrine burned lower.
Remembering he must hurry, Bill left the apartment. It was an apartment with its storage room door closed, an apartment without a storage room.
From the moment that he walked in and took Clara in his arms, he was not worried about being caught. He felt only the great need for her. There seemed only one difference from the first time and it was a good difference, because now Clara was so tense and apprehensive. He felt a new tenderness for her, as one might feel for a child. It seemed to him that there was no end to the well of gentleness and compassion that was suddenly in him. He was mystified by the depth of this feeling. He kissed her again and again and petted her as one might a disturbed child.
Clara said, "Oh, Bill, we're doing wrong! Mary was here yesterday!"
Whoever she meant, it had no meaning for him. He said, "It's all right. You mustn't worry."
"She needs you, Bill, and I take you away from her."
Whatever it was she was talking about was utterly unimportant beside the fact that she was not happy herself. He soothed her. "Darling, you mustn't worry about it. Let's be happy the way we used to be."
He led her to a couch and they sat together, her head resting on his shoulder.
"Conrad is worried about me. He knows something is wrong. Oh, Bill, if he knew, he'd demand the worst penalty for you."
Bill felt the stone of fear come back in his chest. He thought, too, of Helen, of how intense her shame would be. Medicorps action would be machinelike, logical as a set of equation; they were very likely to take more drastic steps where the complaints would be so strong and no request for leniency forthcoming. Conrad knew now, of course. Bill had felt his hate.
It was nearing the end. Death would come to Bill with electronic fingers. A ghostly probing in his mind and suddenly....
Clara's great unhappiness and the way she turned her head into his shoulder to cry forced him to calm the rising panic in himself, and again to caress the fear from her.
Even later, when they lay where the moonlight thrust into the room an impalpable shaft of alabaster, he loved her only as a succor. Carefully, slowly, smoothing out her mind, drawing it away from all the other things, drawing it down into this one thing. Gathering all her mind into her senses and holding it there. Then quickly taking it away from her in a moaning spasm so that now she was murmuring, murmuring, palely drifting. Sleeping like a loved child.
For a long, long time he watched the white moon cut its arc across their window. He listened with a deep pleasure to her evenly breathing sleep. But slowly he realized that her breath had changed, that the body so close to his was tensing. His heart gave a great bound and tiny moths of horror fluttered along his back. He raised himself and saw that the eyes were open in the silver light. Even through the makeup he saw that they were Helen's eyes.
He did the only thing left for him. He shifted. But in that terrible instant he understood something he had not anticipated. In Helen's eyes there was not only intense shame over shifting into her hypoalter's home; there was not only the disgust with himself for breaking communication codes. He saw that, as a woman of the 20th Century might have felt, Helen hated Clara as a sexual rival. She hated Clara doubly because he had turned not to some other woman, but to the other part of herself whom she could never know.
As he shifted, Bill knew that the next light he saw would be on the adamant face of the Medicorps.
Major Paul Grey, with two other Medicorps officers, entered the Walden apartment about two hours after Bill left it to meet Clara. Major Grey was angry with himself. Important information on a case of communication-breaks and drug-refusal could be learned by letting it run its course under observation. But he had not intended Conrad Manz's life to be endangered, and certainly he would not have taken the slightest chance on what they found in the Walden apartment if he had expected it this early.
Major Grey blamed himself for what had happened to Mary Walden. He should have had the machines watching Susan and Mary at the same time that they were relaying all wristband data for Bill and Conrad and for Helen and Clara to his office.
He had not done this because it was Susan's shift and he had not expected Mary to break it. Now he knew that Helen and Bill Walden had been quarreling over the fact that Clara was cheating on Helen's shifts, and their conversations had directed the unhappy child's attention to the Manz couple. She had broken shift to meet them ... looking for a loving father, of course.
Still—things would not have turned out so badly if Captain Thiel, Mary's school officer, had not attributed Susan Shorrs' disappearance only to poor drug acclimatization. Captain Thiel had naturally known that Major Grey was in town to prosecute Bill Walden, because the major had called on him to discuss the case. Yet it had not occurred to him, until 18 hours after Susan's disappearance, that Mary might have forced the shift for some reason associated with her aberrant father.
By the time the captain advised him, Major Grey already knew that Bill had forced the shift on Conrad under desperate circumstances and he had decided to close in. He fully expected to find the father and daughter at the apartment, and now ... it sickened him to see the child's demented condition and realize that Bill had left her there.
Major Grey could see at a glance that Mary Walden would not be accessible for days even with the best treatment. He left it to the other two officers to hospitalize the child and set out for the Manz apartment.
He used his master wristband to open the door there, and found a woman standing in the middle of the room, wrapped in a sheet. He knew that this must be Helen Walden. It was odd how ill-fitting Clara Manz's softly sensual makeup seemed, even to a stranger, on the more rigidly composed face before him. He guessed that Helen would wear color higher on her cheeks and the mouth would be done in severe lines. Certainly the present haughty face struggled with its incongruous makeup as well as the indignity of her dress.
She pulled the sheet tighter about her and said icily, "I will not wear that woman's clothes."
Major Grey introduced himself and asked, "Where is Bill Walden?"
"He shifted! He left me with.... Oh, I'm so ashamed!"
Major Grey shared her loathing. There was no way to escape the conditioning of childhood—sex relations between hyperalter and hypoalter were more than outlawed, they were in themselves disgusting. If they were allowed, they could destroy this civilization. Those idealists—they were almost all hypoalters, of course—who wanted the old terminology changed didn't take that into account. Next thing they'd want children to live with their actual parents!
Major Grey stepped into the bedroom. Through the bathroom door beyond, he could see Conrad Manz changing his makeup.
Conrad turned and eyed him bluntly. "Would you mind staying out of here till I'm finished? I've had about all I can take."
Major Grey shut the door and returned to Helen Walden. He took a hypothalamic block from his own pharmacase and handed it to her. "Here, you're probably on very low drug levels. You'd better take this." He poured her a glass of pop from a decanter and, while they waited for Conrad, he dialed the nearest shifting station on the visiophone and ordered up an emergency shifting costume for her.
When at last they were both dressed, made up to their satisfaction and drugged to his satisfaction, he had them sit on a couch together across from him. They sat at opposite ends of it, stiff with resentment at each other's presence.
Major Grey said calmly, "You realize that this matter is coming to a Medicorps trial. It will be serious."
Major Grey watched their faces. On hers he saw grim determination. On Conrad's face he saw the heavy movement of alarm. The man loved his wife. That was going to help. "It is necessary in a case such as this for the Medicorps to weigh your decisions along with the scientific evidence we will accumulate. Unfortunately, the number of laymen directly involved in this case—and not on trial—is only two, due to your peculiar marriage. If the hypoalters, Clara and Conrad, were married to other partners, we might call on as many as six involved persons and obtain a more equitable lay judgment. As it stands, the entire responsibility rests on the two of you."
Helen Walden was primly confident. "I don't see how we can fail to treat the matter with perfect logic. After all, it is notwewho neglect our drug levels.... Theywererefusing to take their drugs, weren't they?" she asked, hoping for the worst and certain she was right.
"Yes, this is drug refusal." Major Grey paused while she relished the answer. "But I must correct you in one impression. Your proper drug levels do not assure that you will act logically in this matter. The drugged mindislogical. However, its fundamental datum is that the drugs and drugged minds must be protected before everything else." He watched Conrad's face while he added, "Because of this, it is possible for you to arrive logically at a conclusion that ... death is the required solution." He paused, looking at their white lips. Then he said, "Actually, other, more suitable solutions may be possible."
"But theywererefusing their drugs," she said. "You talk as if you are defending them. Aren't you a Medicorps prosecutor?"
"I do not prosecutepeoplein the ancient 20th Century sense, Mrs. Walden. I prosecute theactsof drug refusal and communication breaks. There is quite a difference."
"Well!" she said almost explosively. "I always knew Bill would get into trouble sooner or later with his wild, antisocial ideas. I neverdreamedthe Medicorps would takehisside."
Major Grey held his breath, almost certain now that she would walk into the trap. If she did, he could save Clara Manz before the trial.
"After all, they have broken every communication code. They have refused the drugs, a defiance aimed at our very lives. They—"
"Shut up!" It was the first time Conrad Manz had spoken since he sat down. "The Medicorps spent weeks gathering evidence and preparing their recommendations. You haven't seen any of that and you've already made up your mind. How logical is that? It sounds as if youwantyour husband dead. Maybe the poor devil had some reason, after all, for what he did." On the man's face there was the nearest approach to hate that the drugs would allow.
Major Grey let his breath out softly. They were split permanently. She would have to trade him a mild decision on Clara in order to save Bill. And even there, if the subsequent evidence gave any slight hope, Major Grey believed now that he could work on Conrad to hang the lay judgment and let the Medicorps' scientific recommendation go through unmodified.
He let them stew in their cross-purposed silence for a while and then nailed home a disconcerting fact.
"I think I should remind you that there are few advantages to having your alter extinguished in themnemonic eraser. A man whose hyperalter has been extinguished must report on his regular shift days to a hospital and be placed for five days in suspended animation. This is not very healthy for the body, but necessary. Otherwise, everyone's natural distaste for his own alter and the understandable wish to spend twice as much time living would generate schemes to have one's alter sucked out by the eraser. That happened extensively back in the 21st Century before the five day suspension was required. It was also used as a 'cure' for schizophrenia, but it was, of course, only the brutal murder of innocent personalities."
Major Grey smiled grimly to himself. "Now I will have to ask you both to accompany me to the hospital. I will want you, Mrs. Walden, to shift at once to Mrs. Manz. Mr. Manz, you will have to remain under the close observation of an officer until Bill Walden tries to shift back. We have to catch him with an injection to keep him in shift."
The young medicop put the syringe aside and laid his hand on Bill Walden's forehead. He pushed the hair back out of Bill's eyes.
"There, Mr. Walden, you don't have to struggle now."
Bill let his breath out in a long sigh. "You've caught me. I can't shift any more, can I?"
"That's right, Mr. Walden. Not unless we want you to." The young man picked up his medical equipment and stepped aside.
Bill noticed then the Medicorps officer standing in the background. The man was watching as though he contemplated some melancholy distance. "I am Major Grey, Bill. I'm handling your case."
Bill did not answer. He lay staring at the hospital ceiling. Then he felt his mouth open in a slow grin.
"What's funny?" Major Grey asked mildly.
"Leaving my hypoalter with my wife," Bill answered candidly. It had already ceased to be funny to him, but he saw Major Grey smile in spite of himself.
"They were quite upset when I found them. It must have been some scramble before that." Major Grey came over and sat in the chair vacated by the young man who had just injected Bill. "You know, Bill, we will need a complete analysis of you. We want to do everything we can to save you, but it will require your cooperation."
Bill nodded, feeling his chest tighten. Here it came. Right to the end, they would be tearing him apart to find out what made him work.
Major Grey must have sensed Bill's bitter will to resist. His resonant voice was soft, his face kindly. "We must have your sincere desire to help. We can't force you to do anything."
"Except die," Bill said.
"Maybe helping us get the information that might save your life at the trial isn't worth the trouble to you. But your aberration has seriously disturbed the lives of several people. Don't you think you owe it to them to help us prevent this sort of thing in the future?" Major Grey ran his hand through his whitening hair. "I thought you would like to know Mary will come through all right. We will begin shortly to acclimatize her to her new appointed parents, who will be visiting her each day. That will accelerate her recovery a great deal. Of course, right now she is still inaccessible."
The brutally clear picture of Mary alone in the storage room crashed back into Bill's mind. After a while, in such slow stages that the beginning was hardly noticeable, he began to cry. The young medicop injected him with a sleeping compound, but not before Bill knew he would do whatever the Medicorps wanted.
The next day was crowded with battery after battery of tests. The interviews were endless. He was subjected to a hundred artificial situations and every reaction from his blood sugar to the frequency ranges of his voice was measured. They gave him only small amounts of drugs in order to test his reaction to them.
Late in the evening, Major Grey came by and interrupted an officer who was taking an electroencephalogram for the sixth time after injection of a drug.
"All right, Bill, you have really given us cooperation. But after you've had your dinner, I hope you won't mind if I come to your room and talk with you for a little while."
When Bill finished eating, he waited impatiently in his room for the Medicorps officer. Major Grey came soon after. He shook his head at the mute question Bill shot at him.
"No, Bill. We will not have the results of your tests evaluated until late tomorrow morning. I can't tell you a thing until the trial in any case."
"When will that be?"
"As soon as the evaluation of your tests is in." Major Grey ran his hand over his smooth chin and seemed to sigh. "Tell me, Bill, how do you feel about your case? How did you get into this situation and what do you think about it now?" The officer sat in the room's only chair and motioned Bill to the cot.
Bill was astonished at his sudden desire to talk about his problem. He had to laugh to cover it up. "I guess I feel as if I am being condemned for trying to stay sober." Bill used the ancient word with a mock tone of righteousness that he knew the major would understand.
Major Grey smiled. "How do you feel when you're sober?"
Bill searched his face. "The way the ancient Moderns did, I guess. I feel what happens to me thewayit happens to me, not the artificial way the drugs let it happen. I think there is a way for us to live without the drugs and really enjoy life. Have you ever cut down on your drugs. Major?"
The officer shook his head.
Bill smiled at him dreamily. "You ought to try it. It's as though a new life has suddenly opened up. Everything looks different to you.
"Look, with an average life span of 100 years, each of us only lives 50 years and our alter lives the other 50. Yet even on half-time we experience only about half the living we'd do if we didn't take the drugs. We would be able to feel the loves and hatreds and desires of life. No matter how many mistakes we made, we would be able occasionally to live those intense moments that made the ancients great."
Major Grey said tonelessly, "The ancients were great at killing, cheating and debasing one another. And they were worse sober thandrunk." This time he did not smile at the word.
Bill understood the implacable logic before him. The logic that had saved man from himself by smothering his spirit. The carefully achieved logic of the drugs that had seized upon the disassociated personality, and engineered it into a smoothly running machine, where there was no unhappiness because there was no great happiness, where there was no crime except failure to take the drugs or cross the alter sex line. Without drugs, he was capable of fury and he felt it now.
"You should see how foolish these communication codes look when you are undrugged. This stupid hide-and-seek of shifting! These two-headed monsters simpering, about their artificial morals and their endless prescriptions! They belong incrazyhouses! What use is there in such a world? If we are all this sick, we should die...."
Bill stopped and there was suddenly a ringing silence in the barren little room.
Finally Major Grey said, "I think you can see, Bill, that your desire to live without drugs is incompatable with this society. It would be impossible for us to maintain in you an artificial need for the drugs that would be healthy. Only if we can clearly demonstrate that this aberration is not an inherent part of your personality can we do something medically or psycho-surgically about it."
Bill did not at first see the implication in this. When he did, he thought of Clara rather than of himself, and his voice was shaken. "Is it a localized aberration in Clara?"
Major Grey looked at him levelly. "I have arranged for you to be with Clara Manz a little while in the morning." He stood up and said good night and was gone.
Slowly, as if it hurt him to move, Bill turned off the light and lay on the cot in the semi-dark. After a while he could feel his heart begin to take hold and he started feeling better. It was as though a man who had thought himself permanently expatriated had been told, "Tomorrow, you walk just over that hill and you will be home."
All through the night he lay awake, alternating between panic and desperate longing in a cycle with which finally he became familiar. At last, as a rusty light of dawn reddened his silent room, he fell into a troubled sleep.
He started awake in broad daylight. An orderly was at the door with his breakfast tray. He could not eat, of course. After the orderly left, he hastily changed to a new hospital uniform and washed himself. He redid his makeup with a trembling hand, straightened the bedclothes and then he sat on the edge of the cot.
No one came for him.
The young medicop who had given him the injection that caught him in shift finally entered, and was standing near him before Bill was aware of his presence.
"Good morning, Mr. Walden. How are you feeling?"
Bill's wildly oscillating tensions froze at the point where he could only move helplessly with events and suffer a constant, unchangeable longing.
It was as if in a dream that they moved in silence together down the long corridors of the hospital and took the elevator to an upper floor. The medicop opened the door to a room and let Bill enter. Bill heard the door close behind him.
Clara did not turn from where she stood looking out the window. Bill did not care that the walls of the chill little room were almost certainly recording every sight and sound. All his hunger was focused on the back of the girl at the window. The room seemed to ring with his racing blood. But he was slowly aware that something was wrong, and when at last he called her name, his voice broke.
Still without turning, she said in a strained monotone, "I want you to understand that I have consented to this meeting only because Major Grey has assured me it is necessary."
It was a long time before he could speak. "Clara, I need you."
She spun on him. "Have you no shame? You are married to my hyperalter—don't you understand that?" Her face was suddenly wet with tears and the intensity of her shame flamed at him from her cheeks. "How can Conrad ever forgive me for being with his hyperalter and talking about him? Oh, how can I have been somad?"
"They have done something to you," he said, shaking with tension.
Her chin raised at this. She was defiant, he saw, though not toward himself—he no longer existed for her—but toward that part of herself which once had needed him and now no longer existed. "They have cured me," she declared. "They have cured me of everything but my shame, and they will help me get rid of that as soon as you leave this room."
Bill stared at her before leaving. Out in the corridor, the young medicop did not look him in the face. They went back to Bill's room and the officer left without a word. Bill lay down on his cot.
Presently Major Grey entered the room. He came over to the cot. "I'm sorry it had to be this way, Bill."
Bill's words came tonelessly from his dry throat. "Was it necessary to be cruel?"
"It was necessary to test the result of her psycho-surgery. Also, it will help her over her shame. She might otherwise have retained a seed of fear that she still loved you."
Bill did not feel anything any more. Staring at the ceiling, he knew there was no place left for him in this world and no one in it who needed him. The only person who had really needed him had been Mary, and he could not bear to think of how he had treated her. Now the Medicorps was efficiently curing the child of the hurt he had done her. They had already erased from Clara any need for him she had ever felt.
This seemed funny and he began to laugh. "Everyone is being cured of me."
"Yes, Bill. That is necessary." When Bill went on laughing Major Grey's voice turned quite sharp. "Come with me. It's time for your trial."
The enormous room in which they held the trial was utterly barren. At the great oaken table around which they all sat, there were three Medicorps officers in addition to Major Grey.
Helen did not speak to Bill when they brought him in. He was placed on the same side of the table with an officer between them. Two orderlies stood behind Bill's chair. Other than these people, there was no one in the room.
The great windows were high above the floor and displayed only the blissful sky. Now and then Bill saw a flock of pigeons waft aloft on silver-turning wings. Everyone at the table except himself had a copy of his case report and they discussed it with clipped sentences. Between the stone floor and the vaulted ceiling, a subtle echolalia babbled about Bill's problem behind their human talk.
The discussion of the report lulled when Major Grey rapped on the table. He glanced unsmiling from face to face, and his voice hurried the ritualized words: "This is a court of medicine, co-joining the results of medical science and considered lay judgment to arrive at a decision in the case of patient Bill Walden. The patient is hospitalized for a history of drug refusal and communication breaks. We have before us the medical case record of patient Walden. Has everyone present studied this record?"
All at the table nodded.
"Do all present feel competent to pass judgment in this case?"
Again there came the agreement.
Major Grey continued, "It is my duty to advise you, in the presence of the patient, of the profound difference between a trial for simple drug refusal and one in which that aberration is compounded with communication breaks.
"It is true that no other aberration is possible when the drugs are taken as prescribed. After all, the drugsarethe basis for our schizophrenic society. Nevertheless, simple drug refusal often is a mere matter of physiology, which is easy enough to remedy.
"A far more profound threat to our society is the break in communication. This generally is more deeply motivated in the patient, and is often inaccessible to therapy. Such a patient is driven to emotive explorations which place the various ancient passions, and the infamous art ofhistorical gesture, such as 'give me liberty or give me death,' above the welfare of society."
Bill watched the birds flash down the sky, a handful of heavenly coin. Never had it seemed to him so good to look at the sky.If they hospitalize me, he thought,I will be content forever to sit and look from windows.