"You were talking in your sleep."
"I--was?"
She came forward so unsteadily that he helped her to a seat. She stared
at him. He asked jovially, "Who is this 'Bill' you were so desperately
involved with? Have you been having an affair I don't know about?
Aren't my friends good enough for you?"
The result of this banter was that she alarmingly began to cry,
clutching her robe about her and dropping her blonde head on her knees
and sobbing.
* * * * *
Children cried before they were acclimatized to the drugs, but Conrad
Manz had never in his life seen an adult cry. Though he had taken his
morning drugs and certain disrupting emotions were already impossible,
nevertheless this sight was completely unnerving.
In gasps between her sobs, Clara was saying, "Oh, I can't go back to
taking them? But I can't keep this up! I just can't!"
"Clara, darling, I don't know what to say or do. I think we ought to
call the Medicorps."
Intensely frightened, she rose and clung to him, begging, "Oh, no,
Conrad, that isn't necessary! It isn't necessary at all. I've only
neglected to take my sleeping compound and it won't happen again. All
I need is a sleeping compound. Please get my pharmacase for me and it
will be all right."
She was so desperate to convince him that Conrad got the pharmacase and
a glass of water for her only to appease the white face of fright.
Within a few minutes of taking the sleeping compound, she was calm. As
he put her back to bed, she laughed with a lazy indolence.
"Oh, Conrad, you take it so seriously. I only needed a sleeping
compound very badly and now I feel fine. I'll sleep all day. It's a
rest day, isn't it? Now go race a rocket and stop worrying and thinking
about calling the medicops."
But Conrad did not go rocket racing as he had planned. Clara had been
asleep only a few minutes when there was a call on the visiophone; they
wanted him at the office. The city of Santa Fe would be completely out
of balance within twelve shifts if revised plans were not put into
operation immediately. They were to start during the next five days
while he would be out of shift. In order to carry on the first day of
their next shift, he and the other three traffic managers he worked
with would have to come down today and familiarize themselves with the
new operations.
There was no getting out of it. His rest day was spoiled. Conrad
resented it all the more because Santa Fe was clear out on the edge of
their traffic district and could have been revised out of the Mexican
offices just as well. But those boys down there rested all five days of
their shift.
Conrad looked in on Clara before he left and found her asleep in the
total suspension of proper drug level. The unpleasant memory of her
behavior made him squirm, but now that the episode was over, it no
longer worried him. It was typical of him that, things having been set
straight in the proper manner, he did not think of her again until late
in the afternoon.
* * * * *
As early as 1950, the pioneer communications engineer Norbert
Wiener had pointed out that there might be a close parallel between
disassociation of personalities and the disruption of a communication
system. Wiener referred back specifically to the first clear
description, by Morton Prince, of multiple personalities existing,
together in the same human body. Prince had described only individual
cases and his observations were not altogether acceptable in Wiener's
time. Nevertheless, in the schizophrenic society of the 29th Century,
a major managerial problem was that of balancing the communicating and
non-communicating populations in a city.
As far as Conrad and the other traffic men present at the conference
were concerned, Santa Fe was a resort and retirement area of 100,000
human bodies, alive and consuming more than they produced every
day of the year. Whatever the representatives of the Medicorps and
Communications Board worked out, it would mean only slight changes in
the types of foodstuffs, entertainment and so forth moving into Santa
Fe, and Conrad could have grasped the entire traffic change in ten
minutes after the real problem had been settled. But, as usual, he and
the other traffic men had to sit through two hours while small wheels
from the Medicorps and Communications acted big about rebalancing a
city.
For them, Conrad had to admit, Santa Fe was a great deal more complex
than 100,000 consuming, moderately producing human bodies. It was
200,000 human personalities, two to each body. Conrad wondered
sometimes what they would have done if the three and four personality
cases so common back in the 20th and 21st Centuries had been allowed to
reproduce. The 200,000 personalities in Santa Fe were difficult enough.
Like all cities, Santa Fe operated in five shifts, A, B, C, D, and E.
Just as it was supposed to be for Conrad in his city, today was rest
day for the 20,000 hypoalters on D-shift in Santa Fe. Tonight at around
6:00 P.M. they would all go to shifting rooms and be replaced by their
hyperalters, who had different tastes in food and pleasure and took
different drugs.
Tomorrow would be rest day for the hyperalters on E-shift and in the
evening they would turn things over to their hyperalters.
The next day it would be rest for the A-shift hyperalters and three
days after that the D-shift hyperalters, including Bill Walden, would
rest till evening, when Conrad and the D-shift hypoalters everywhere
would again have their five day use of their bodies.
Right now the trouble with Santa Fe's retired population, which worked
only for its own maintenance, was that too many elderly people on the
D-shift and E-shift had been dying off. This point was brought out by a
dapper young department head from Communications.
Conrad groaned when, as he knew would happen, a Medicorps officer
promptly set out on an exhaustive demonstration that Medicorps
predictions of deaths for Santa Fe had indicated clearly that
Communications should have been moving people from D-shift and E-shift
into the area.
Actually, it appeared that someone from Communications had blundered
and had overloaded the quota of people on A-shift and B-shift moving
to Santa Fe. Thus on one rest day there weren't enough people working
to keep things going, and later in the week there were so many
available workers that they were clogging the city.
None of this was heated exchange or in any way emotional. It was just
interminably, exhaustively logical and boring. Conrad fidgeted through
two hours of it, seeing his chance for a rocket race dissolving. When
at last the problem of balanced shift-populations for Santa Fe was
worked out, it took him and the other traffic men only a few minutes
to apply their tables and reschedule traffic to coordinate with the
population changes.
Disgusted, Conrad walked over to the Tennis Club and had lunch.
There were still two hours of his rest day left when Conrad Manz
realized that Bill Walden was again forcing an early shift. Conrad
was in the middle of a volley-tennis game and he didn't like having
the shift forced so soon. People generally shifted at their appointed
regular hour every five days, and a hyperalter was not supposed to use
his power to force shift. It was such an unthinkable thing nowadays
that there was occasional talk of abolishing the terms hyperalter and
hypoalter because they were somewhat disparaging to the hypoalter, and
really designated only the antisocial power of the hyperalter to force
the shift.
Bill Walden had been cheating two to four hours on Conrad every
shift for several periods back. Conrad could have reported it to the
Medicorps, but he himself was guilty of a constant misdemeanor about
which Bill had not yet complained. Unlike the sedentary Walden, Conrad
Manz enjoyed exercise. He overindulged in violent sports and put off
sleep, letting Bill Walden make up the fatigue on his shift. That was
undoubtedly why the poor old sucker had started cheating a few hours on
Conrad's rest day.
Conrad laughed to himself, remembering the time Bill Walden had
registered a long list of sports which he wished Conrad to be
restrained from--rocket racing, deepsea exploration, jet-skiing. It
had only given Conrad some ideas he hadn't had before. The Medicorps
had refused to enforce the list on the basis that danger and violent
exercise were a necessary outlet for Conrad's constitution. Then poor
old Bill had written Conrad a note threatening to sue him for any
injury resulting from such sports. As if he had a chance against the
Medicorps ruling!
Conrad knew it was no use trying to finish the volley-tennis game. He
lost interest and couldn't concentrate on what he was doing when Bill
started forcing the shift. Conrad shot the ball back at his opponent in
a blistering curve impossible to intercept.
"So long," he yelled at the man. "I've got some things to do before my
shift ends."
He lounged into the locker rooms and showered, put his clothes and
belongings, including his pharmacase, in a shipping carton, addressed
them to his own home and dropped them in the mail chute.
He stepped with languid nakedness across the hall, pressed his
identifying wristband to a lock-face and dialed his clothing sizes.
In this way he procured a neatly wrapped, clean shifting costume from
the slot. He put it on without bothering to return to his shower room.
He shouted a loud good-bye to no one in particular among the several
men and women in the baths and stepped out onto the street.
Conrad felt too good even to be sorry that his shift was over. After
all, nothing happened except you came to, five days later, on your
next shift. The important thing was the rest day. He had always said
the last day of the shift should be a work day; then you would be glad
it was over. He guessed the idea was to rest the body before another
personality took over. Well, poor old Bill Walden never got a rested
body. He probably slept off the first twelve hours.
Walking unhurriedly through the street crowds, Conrad entered a public
shifting station and found an empty room. As he started to open the
door, a girl came out of the adjoining booth and Conrad hastily averted
his glance. She was still rearranging her hair. There were so many rude
people nowadays who didn't seem to care at all about the etiquette of
shifting, women particularly. They were always redoing their hair or
makeup where a person couldn't help seeing them.
Conrad pressed his identifying wristband to the lock and entered the
booth he had picked. The act automatically sent the time and his shift
number to Medicorps Headquarters.
Once inside the shifting room, Conrad went to the lavatory and turned
on the faucet of makeup solvent. In spite of losing two hours of his
rest day, he decided to be decent to old Bill, though he was half
tempted to leave his makeup on. It was a pretty foul joke, of course,
especially on a humorless fellow like poor Walden.
Conrad creamed his face thoroughly and then washed in water and
used the automatic dryer. He looked at his strong-lined features in
the mirror. They displayed a less distinct expression of his own
personality with the makeup gone.
He turned away from the mirror and it was only then that he remembered
he hadn't spoken to his wife before shifting. Well, he couldn't
decently call up and let her see him without makeup.
He stepped across to the visiophone and set the machine to deliver
his spoken message in type: "Hello, Clara. Sorry I forgot to call you
before. Bill Walden is forcing me to shift early again. I hope you're
not still upset about that business this morning. Be a good girl and
smile at me on the next shift. I love you. Conrad."
* * * * *
For a moment, when the shift came, the body of Conrad Manz stood
moronically uninhabited. Then, rapidly, out of the gyri of its brain,
the personality of Bill Walden emerged, replacing the slackly powerful
attitude of Conrad by the slightly prim preciseness of Bill's bearing.
The face, just now relaxed with readiness for action, was abruptly
pulled into an intellectualized mask of tension by habitual patterns of
conflict in the muscles. There were also acute momentary signs of clash
between the vegetative nervous activity characteristic of Bill Walden
and the internal homeostasis Conrad Manz had left behind him. The face
paled as hypersensitive vascular beds closed down under new vegetative
volleys.
Bill Walden grasped sight and sound, and the sharp odor of makeup
solvent stung his nostrils. He was conscious of only one clamoring,
terrifying thought: _They will catch us. It cannot go on much longer
without Helen guessing about Clara. She is already angry about Clara
delaying the shift, and if she learns from Mary that I am cheating on
Conrad's shift.... Any time now, perhaps this time, when the shift is
over, I will be looking into the face of a medicop who is pulling a
needle from my arm, and then it'll all be over._
So far, at least, there was no medicop. Still feeling unreal but
anxious not to lose precious moments, Bill took an individualized kit
from the wall dispenser and made himself up. He was sparing and subtle
in his use of the makeup, unlike the horrible makeup jobs Conrad Manz
occasionally left on. Bill rearranged his hair. Conrad always wore it
too short for his taste, but you couldn't complain about everything.
Bill sat in a chair to await some of the slower aspects of the shift.
He knew that an hour after he left the booth, his basal metabolic rate
would be ten points higher. His blood sugar would go down steadily.
In the next five days he would lose six to eight pounds, which Conrad
later would promptly regain.
Just as Bill was about to leave the booth, he remembered to pick up
a news summary. He put his wristband to the switch on the telephoto
and a freshly printed summary of the last five days in the world fell
into the rack. His wristband, of course, called forth one edited for
hyperalters on the D-shift.
It did not mention by name any hypoalter on the D-shift. Should one
of them have done something that it was necessary for Bill or other
D-shift hyperalters to know about, it would appear in news summaries
called forth by their wristbands--but told in such fashion that the
personality involved seemed namelessly incidental, while names and
pictures of hyperalters and hypoalters on any of the other four
shifts naturally were freely used. The purpose was to keep Conrad
Manz and all other hypoalters on the D-shift, one-tenth of the total
population, non-existent as far as their hyperalters were concerned.
This convention made it necessary for photoprint summaries to be on
light-sensitive paper that blackened illegibly before six hours were
up, so that a man might never stumble on news about his hypoalter.
Bill did not even glance at the news summary. He had picked it up only
for appearances. The summaries were essential if you were going to
start where you left off on your last shift and have any knowledge of
the five intervening days. A man just didn't walk out of a shifting
room without one. It was failure to do little things like that that
would start them wondering about him.
Bill opened the door of the booth by applying his wristband to the lock
and stepped out into the street.
Late afternoon crowds pressed about him. Across the boulevard, a
helicopter landing swarmed with clouds of rising commuters. Bill had
some trouble figuring out the part of the city Conrad had left him
in and walked two blocks before he understood where he was. Then he
got into an idle two-place cab, started the motor with his wristband
and hurried the little three-wheeler recklessly through the traffic.
Clara was probably already waiting and he first had to go home and get
dressed.
The thought of Clara waiting for him in the park near her home was a
sharp reminder of his strange situation. He was in a left you with
shame, and a fear that the other fellow would tell people you seemed to
have a pathological interest in your alter and must need a change in
your prescription.
But the most flagrant abuser of such morbid little exchanges would have
been horrified to learn that right here, in the middle of the daylight
traffic, was a man who was using his antisocial shifting power to meet
in secret the wife of his own hypoalter!
Bill did not have to wonder what the Medicorps would think. Relations
between hyperalters world was literally not supposed to exist for
him, for it was the world of his own hypoalter, Conrad Manz.
Undoubtedly, there were people in the traffic up ahead who knew both
him and Conrad, people from the other shifts who never mentioned the
one to the other except in those guarded, snickering little confidences
they couldn't resist telling and you couldn't resist listening to.
After all, the most important person in the world was your alter. If he
got sick, injured or killed, so would you.
Thus, in moments of intimacy or joviality, an undercover exchange went
on ... _I'll tell you about your hyperalter if you'll tell me about
my hypoalter._ It was orthodox bad manners that and hypoalters of
opposite sex were punishable--drastically punishable.
* * * * *
When he arrived at the apartment, Bill remembered to order a dinner for
his daughter Mary. His order, dialed from the day's menu, was delivered
to the apartment pneumatically and he set it out over electric warmers.
He wanted to write a note to the child, but he started two and threw
both in the basket. He couldn't think of anything to say to her.
Staring at the lonely table he was leaving for Mary, Bill felt his
guilt overwhelming him. He could stop the behavior which led to
the guilt by taking his drugs as prescribed. They would return him
immediately to the sane and ordered conformity of the world. He would
no longer have to carry the fear that the Medicorps would discover he
was not taking his drugs. He would no longer neglect his appointed
child. He would no longer endanger the very life of Conrad's wife Clara
and, of course, his own.
When you took your drugs as prescribed, it was impossible to experience
such ancient and primitive emotions as guilt. Even should you
miscalculate and do something wrong, the drugs would not allow any
such emotional reaction. To be free to experience his guilt over the
lonely child who needed him was, for these reasons, a precious thing
to Bill. In all the world, this night, he was undoubtedly the only man
who could and did feel one of the ancient emotions. People felt shame,
not guilt; conceit, not pride; pleasure, not desire. Now that he had
stopped taking his drugs as prescribed, Bill realized that the drugs
allowed only an impoverished segment of a vivid emotional spectrum.
But however exciting it was to live them, the ancient emotions did not
seem to act as deterrents to bad behavior. Bill's sense of guilt did
not keep him from continuing to neglect Mary. His fear of being caught
did not restrain him from breaking every rule of inter-alter law and
loving Clara, his own hypoalter's wife.
* * * * *
Bill got dressed as rapidly as possible. He tossed the discarded
shifting costume into the return chute. He retouched his makeup, trying
to eliminate some of the heavy, inexpressive planes of muscularity
which were more typical of Conrad than of himself.
The act reminded him of the shame which his wife Helen had felt when
she learned, a few years ago, that her own hypoalter, Clara, and his
hypoalter, Conrad, had obtained from the Medicorps a special release
to marry. Such rare marriages in which the same bodies lived together
on both halves of a shift were something to snicker about. They verged
on the antisocial, but could be arranged if the batteries of Medicorps
tests could be satisfied.
Perhaps it had been the very intensity of Helen's shame on learning
of this marriage, the nauseous display of conformity so typical of
his wife, that had first given Bill the idea of seeking out Clara,
who had dared convention to make such a peculiar marriage. Over the
years, Helen had continued blaming all their troubles on the fact that
both egos of himself were living with, and intimate with, both egos of
herself.
So Bill had started cutting down on his drugs, the curiosity having
become an obsession. What was this other part of Helen like, this
Clara who was unconventional enough to want to marry only Bill's own
hypoalter, in spite of almost certain public shame?
He had first seen Clara's face when it formed on a visiophone, the
first time he had forced Conrad to shift prematurely. It was softer
than Helen's. The delicate contours were less purposefully, set, gayer.
"Clara Manz?" Bill had sat there staring at the visiophone for several
seconds, unable to continue. His great fear that she would immediately
report him must have been naked on his face.
He had watched an impish suspicion grow in the tender curve of her lips
and her oblique glance from the visiophone. She did not speak.
"Mrs. Manz," he finally said, "I would like to meet you in the park
across from your home."
To this awkward opening he owed the first time he had heard Clara
laugh. Her warm, clear laughter, teasing him, tumbled forth like a
cloud of gay butterflies.
"Are you afraid to see me here at home because my husband might _walk
in on us_?"
Bill had been put completely at ease by this bantering indication that
Clara knew who he was and welcomed him as an intriguing diversion.
Quite literally, the one person who could not _walk in on them_, as the
ancients thought of it, was his own hypoalter, Conrad Manz.
* * * * *
Bill finished retouching his makeup and hurried to leave the apartment.
But this time, as he passed the table where Mary's dinner was set out,
he decided to write a few words to the child, no matter how empty they
sounded to himself. The note he left explained that he had some early
work to do at the microfilm library where he worked.
Just as Bill was leaving the apartment, the visiophone buzzed. In his
hurry Bill flipped the switch before he thought. Too late, his hand
froze and the implications of this call, an hour before anyone would
normally be home, shot a shaft of terror through him.
But it was not the image of a medicop that formed on the screen. The
woman introduced herself as Mrs. Harris, one of Mary's teachers.
It was strange that she should have thought he might be home. The
shift for children was half a day earlier than that for adults, so
the parents could have half their rest day free. This afternoon would
be for Mary the first classes of her shift, but the teacher must have
guessed something was wrong with the shifting schedules in Mary's
family. Or had the child told her?
Mrs. Harris explained rather dramatically that Mary was being
neglected. What could he say; to her? That he was a criminal breaking
drug regulations in the most flagrant manner? That nothing, not even
the child appointed to him, meant more to him than his wife's own
hypoalter? Bill finally ended the hopeless and possibly dangerous
conversation by turning off the receiver and leaving the apartment.
Bill realized that now, for both him and Clara, the greatest joy had
been those first few times together. The enormous threat of a Medicorps
retaliation took the pleasure from their contact and they came together
desperately because, having tasted this fantastic non-conformity and
the new undrugged intimacy, there was no other way for them. Even now
as he drove through the traffic toward where she would be waiting, he
was not so much concerned with meeting Clara in their fear-poisoned
present as with the vivid, aching remembrance of what those meetings
once had really been like.
He recalled an evening they had spent lying on the summer lawn of the
park, looking out at the haze-dimmed stars. It had been shortly after
Clara joined him in cutting down on the drugs, and the clear memory of
their quiet laughter so captured his mind now that Bill almost tangled
his car in the traffic.
In memory he kissed her again and, as it had then, the newly cut grass
mixed with the exciting fragrance of her skin. After the kiss they
continued a mock discussion of the ancient word "sin." Bill pretended
to be trying to explain the meaning of the word to her, sometimes with
definitions that kept them laughing and sometimes with demonstrational
kisses that stopped their laughter.
He could remember Clara's face turned to him in the evening light
with an outrageous parody of interest. He could hear himself saying,
"You see, the ancients would say we are not _sinning_ because they
would disagree with the medicops that you and Helen are two completely
different people, or that Conrad and I are not the same person."
Clara kissed him with an air of tentative experimentation. "Mmm, no. I
can't say I care for that interpretation."
"You'd rather be sinning?"
"Definitely."
"Well, if the ancients did agree with the medicops that we are
distinct from our alters, Helen and Conrad, then they would say we are
sinning--but not for the same reasons the Medicorps would give."
"That," asserted Clara, "is where I get lost. If this sinning business
is going to be worth anything at all, it has to be something you can
identify."
Bill cut his car out of the main stream of traffic and toward the park,
without interrupting his memory.
"Well, darling, I don't want to confuse you, but the medicops would
say we are sinning only because you are my wife's hypoalter, and I am
your husband's hyperalter--in other words, for the very reason the
ancients would say we are _not_ sinning. Furthermore, if either of us
were with anyone else, the medicops would think it was perfectly all
right, and so would Conrad and Helen. Provided, of course, I took a
hyperalter and you took a hypoalter only."
"Of course," Clara said, and Bill hurried over the gloomy fact.
"The ancients, on the other hand, would say we are sinning because we
are making love to someone we are not married to."
"But what's the matter with that? Everybody does it."
"The ancient Moderns didn't. Or, that is, they often did, but...."
Clara brought her full lips hungrily to his. "Darling, I think the
ancient Moderns had the right idea, though I don't see how they ever
arrived at it."
Bill grinned. "It was just an invention of theirs, along with the wheel
and atomic energy."
That evening was long gone by as Bill stopped the little taxi beside
the park and left it there for the next user. He walked across the
lawns toward the statue where he and Clara always met. The very thought
of entering one's own hypoalter's house was so unnerving that Bill
brought himself to do it only by first meeting Clara near the statue.
As he walked between the trees, Bill could not again capture the spirit
of that evening he had been remembering. The Medicorps was too close.
It was impossible to laugh that way now.
Bill arrived at the statue, but Clara was not there. He waited
impatiently while a livid sunset coagulated between the branches of the
great trees. Clara should have been there first. It was easier for her,
because she was leaving her shift, and without doing it prematurely.
The park was like a quiet backwater in the eddying rush of the evening
city. Bill felt conspicuous and vulnerable in the gloaming light. Above
all, he felt a new loneliness, and he knew that now Clara felt it, too.
They needed each other as each had been, before fear had bleached their
feeling to white bones of desperation.
They were not taking their drugs as prescribed, and for that they would
be horribly punished. That was the only unforgivable _sin_ in their
world. By committing it, he and Clara had found out what life could be,
in the same act that would surely take life from them. Their powerful
emotions they had found in abundance simply by refusing to take the
drugs, and by being together briefly each fifth day in a dangerous
breach of all convention. The closer their discovery and the greater
their terror, the more desperately they needed even their terror, and
the more impossible became the delight of their first meetings.
Telegraphing bright beads of sound, a night bird skimmed the sunset
lawns to the looming statue and skewed around its monolithic base. The
bird's piping doubled and then choked off as it veered frantically from
Bill. After a while, far off through the park, it released a fading
protest of song.
Above Bill, the towering statue of the great Alfred Morris blackened
against the sunset. The hollowed granite eyes bore down on him out
of an undecipherable dark ... the ancient, implacable face of the
Medicorps. As if to pronounce a sentence on his present crimes by a
magical disclosure of the weight of centuries, a pool of sulfurous
light and leaf shadows danced on the painted plaque at the base of the
statue.
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.