"Oh, nothing," Mary said hastily. "I just thought maybe he was."
"Let me see your pharmacase," he said rather severely.
Mary slipped the pharmacase off the belt at her waist and handed it
to him. Captain Thiel extracted the prescription card from the back
and threw it away. He slipped a new card in the taping machine on his
desk and punched out a new prescription, which he reinserted in the
pharmacase. In the space on the front, he wrote directions for Mary to
take the drugs numbered from left to right.
Mary watched his serious face and remembered that he had complimented
her about being prettier than Susan. "Captain Thiel, is your hypoalter
as handsome as you are?"
The young medicop emptied the remains of the old prescription from the
pharmacase and took it to the dispensary in the corner, where he slid
it into the filling slot. He seemed unmoved by her question and simply
muttered, "Much handsomer."
The machine automatically filled the case from the punched card on its
back and he returned it to Mary. "Are you taking your drugs exactly as
prescribed? You know there are very strict laws about that, and as soon
as you are fourteen, you will be held to them."
Mary nodded solemnly. Great straitjackets, who didn't know there were
laws about taking your drugs?
There was a long pause and Mary knew she was supposed to leave. She
wanted, though, to stay with Captain Thiel and talk with him. She
wondered how it would be if he were appointed her father.
Mary was not hurt that her shy compliment to him had gone unnoticed.
She had only wanted something to talk about. Finally she said
desperately, "Captain Thiel, how is it possible for a body to change as
much from one Ego shift to another as it does between Susan and me?"
"There isn't all the change you imagine," he said. "Have you had your
first physiology?"
"Yes. I was very good...." Mary saw from his smile that her inadvertent
little conceit had trapped her.
"Then, Miss Mary Walden, how do _you_ think it is possible?"
Why did teachers and medicops have to be this way? When all you wanted
was to have them talk to you, they turned everything around and made
you think.
She quoted unhappily from her schoolbook, "The main things in an
ego shift are the two vegetative nervous systems that translate the
conditions of either personality to the blood and other organs right
from the brain. The vegetative nervous systems change the rate at which
the liver burns or stores sugar and the rate at which the kidneys
excrete...."
Through the closed door to the other room, Mrs. Harris's voice raised
at the visiophone said distinctly, "_But, Mr. Walden...._"
"Reabsorb," corrected Captain Thiel.
"What?" She didn't know what to listen to--the medicop or the distant
voice of Mrs. Harris.
"It's better to think of the kidneys as reabsorbing salts and nutrients
from the filtrated blood."
"Oh."
"_But, Mr. Walden, we can overdo a good thing. The proper amount of
neglect is definitely required for full development of some personality
types and Mary certainly is one of those...._"
"What about the pituitary gland that's attached to the brain and
controls all the other glands during the shift of egos?" pressed
Captain Thiel distractingly.
"_But, Mr. Walden, too much neglect at this critical point may cause
another personality to split off and we can't have that. Adequate
personalities are congenital. A new one now would only rob the present
personalities. You are the appointed parent of this child and the Board
of Education will enforce your compliance with our diagnosis...._"
Mary's mind leaped to a page in one of her childhood storybooks. It
was an illustration of a little girl resting beneath a great tree that
overhung a brook. There were friendly little wild animals about. Mary
could see the page clearly and she thought about it very hard instead
of crying.
"Aren't you interested any more, Mary?" Captain Thiel was looking at
her strangely.
The agitation in her voice was a surprise. "I have to get home. I have
a lot of things to do."
Outside, when Mrs. Harris seemed suddenly to realize that something was
wrong, and delicately probed to find out whether her angry voice had
been overheard, Mary said calmly and as if it didn't matter, "Was my
father home when you called him before?"
"Why--yes, Mary. But you mustn't pay any attention to conversations
like that, darling."
_You can't force him to like me_, she thought to herself, and she was
angry with Mrs. Harris because now her father would only dislike her
more.
Neither her father nor her mother was home when Mary walked into the
evening-darkened apartment. It was the first day of the family shift,
and on that day, for many periods now, they had not been home until
late.
Mary walked through the empty rooms, turning on lights. She passed
up the electrically heated dinner her father had set out for her.
Presently she found herself at the storage room door. She opened it
slowly.
After hesitating a while she went in and began an exhausting search for
the old storybook with the picture in it.
Finally she knew she could not find it. She stood in the middle of the
junk-filled room and began to cry.
* * * * *
The day which ended for Mary Walden in lonely weeping should have been,
for Conrad Manz, a pleasant rest day with an hour of rocket racing in
the middle of it. Instead, he awakened with a shock to hear his wife
actually _talking_ while she was _asleep_.
He stood over her bed and made certain that she was asleep. It was as
though her mind thought it was somewhere else, doing something else.
Vaguely he remembered that the ancients did something called _dreaming_
while they slept and the thought made him shiver.
Clara Manz was saying, "Oh, Bill, they'll catch us. We can't pretend
any more unless we have drugs. Haven't we any drugs, Bill?"
Then she was silent and lay still. Her breathing was shallow and even
in the dawn light her cheeks were deeply flushed against the blonde
hair.
Having just awakened, Conrad was on a very low drug level and the
incident was unpleasantly disturbing. He picked up his pharmacase
from beside his bed and made his way to the bathroom. He took his
hypothalamic block and the integration enzymes and returned to the
bedroom. Clara was still sleeping.
She had been behaving oddly for some time, but there had never been
anything as disturbing as this. He felt that he should call a medicop,
but, of course, he didn't want to do anything that extreme. It was
probably something with a simple explanation. Clara was a little
scatterbrained at times. Maybe she had forgotten to take her sleeping
compound and that was what caused _dreaming_. The very word made his
powerful body chill. But if she was neglecting to take any of her drugs
and he called in a medicop, it would be serious.
Conrad went into the library and found the _Family Pharmacy_. He
switched on a light in the dawn-shrunken room and let his heavy
frame into a chair. _A Guide to Better Understanding of your Family
Prescriptions. Official Edition, 2831._ The book was mostly Medicorps
propaganda and almost never gave a practical suggestion. If something
went wrong, you called a medicop.
Conrad hunted through the book for the section on sleeping compound. It
was funny, too, about that name Bill. Conrad went over all the men of
their acquaintance with whom Clara had occasional affairs or with whom
she was friendly and he couldn't remember a single Bill. In fact, the
only man with that name whom he could think of was his own hyperalter,
Bill Walden. But that was naturally impossible.
Maybe dreaming was always about imaginary people.
SLEEPING COMPOUND: An official mixture of soporific and
hypnotic alkaloids and synthetics. A critical drug; an essential
feature in every prescription. Slight deviations in following
prescription are unallowable because of the subtle manner in which
behavior may be altered over months or years. The first sleeping
compound was announced by Thomas Marshall in 1986. The formula has
been modified only twice since then.
There followed a tightly packed description of the chemistry and
pharmacology of the various ingredients. Conrad skipped through this.
The importance of Sleeping Compound in the life of every individual
and to society is best appreciated when we recall Marshall's words
announcing its initial development:
"It is during so-called _normal_ sleep that the vicious unconscious
mind responsible for wars and other symptoms of unhappiness
develops its resources and its hold on our conscious lives.
"In this _normal_ sleep the critical faculties of the cortex are
paralyzed. Meanwhile, the infantile unconscious mind expands
misinterpreted experience into the toxic patterns of neurosis and
psychosis. The conscious mind takes over at morning, unaware that
these infantile motivations have been cleverly woven into its very
structure.
"Sleeping Compound will stop this. There is no unconscious activity
after taking this harmless drug. We believe the Medicorps should at
once initiate measures to acclimatize every child to its use. In
these children, as the years go by, infantile patterns unable to
work during sleep will fight a losing battle during waking hours
with conscious patterns accumulating in the direction of
adulthood."
That was all there was--mostly the Medicorps patting its own back for
saving humanity. But if you were in trouble and called a medicop, you'd
risk getting into real trouble.
Conrad became aware of Clara standing in the doorway. The flush of
her disturbed emotions and the pallor of her fatigue mixed in ragged
banners on her cheeks.
Conrad waved the _Family Pharmacy_ with a foolish gesture of
embarrassment.
"Young lady, have you been neglecting to take your sleeping compound?"