bore down on him out of an undecipherable dark... the
ancient, implacable face of the Medicorps. As if to pro-
nounce a sentence on his present crimes by a magical dis-
closure of the weight of centuries, a pool of sulphurous 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 hypothal-
amic block. His stirring words were, "The new drug se-
lectively 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 ac-
tion of the war-weary people made the taking of hypothal-
amic block obligatory. This put an end to the powerful
play of unconscious mind in the public and private af-
fairs of the ancient world. It ended the great paranoid
wars and saved mankind.
In the strange evening light, the letters seemed alive, a cen-
turies-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, schizoph-
renia, that was jamming their hospitals. This 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 youthat the emotions experi-
enced 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 this 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 club-like 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 smouldering 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 sud-
denly 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 morn-
ing and made me take a sleeping compound. I've just awak-
ened."
ened apartment they used only the primitive monosyllables of
apprehensive need. Beyond these mere sounds of compas-
sion, they had long ago said all that could be said.
Because Bill was the hyperalter, he had no fear that Con-
rad could force a shift on him. When later they lay in dark-
ness, 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 bad begun to happen
when he first cut down on the drugs. Now, in the few sec-
onds that he dozed, a thousand fragments of incidental knowl-
edge, historical reading and emotional need melded and, in a
strange contrast to their present tranquillity, he was dream-
ing 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 car. "Wait," he pleaded. "I tell you we have sul-
phonamide-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 on to the floor
and seat of the car, fumbling deeper by the flashlight Clara
held. His heart beat thickly with terror. Then he remem-
bered 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 radia-
tion mask. "Wait. I've found it." He thrust the pharmacase
out the door of the car. "This is a pharmacase," he ex-
plained. "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. "Well have to
bum 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 sterlization 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 after-
noon, ice crystals in the stratosphere. The high, high sheet
flashed and glowed in the new bombing to the south, where
multicoloured pillars of flame boiled into the sky. But the muf-
fled 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 towards 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 sta-
tistical 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 de-
laying 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 Iwell, I have just
let a bad habit develop. I'll see that itdoesn't happen again."
The machine voiced several platitudes about the respon-
sibilities 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 lime 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 quarrelling. It was about Helen's hypo-
alter delaying so many shifts. Bill did not think it very
important, but her mother was angry and threatened to com-
plain 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 hap-
py 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 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 Citizens' 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 pre-
tended she did not know.
"Darling, I'm leaving now for the Citizens' 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
the 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 grey 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't care if Susan
Shorrs is an 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. He did tell 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 if he 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 afraid she would
kill him with the merest thing she said, with her very pres-
ence.
This was not painful to Mary, because, suddenly, something
came with ponderous enormity to stand before her: / would
just as soon the child did not realize her relationship to this
sordid situation.
Her relat
ionship. 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 make-up, 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.
... 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. Ap-
parently 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 rec-
ognized 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 recog-
nized only Carl Biair's hypoalter because of his freckles.