Bill searched his face. "The way the ancient Moderns did, I guess. I
feel what happens to me the _way_ it 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 than
_drunk_." 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 in _crazy_ houses! 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."