Выбрать главу

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.

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 towards 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 help-

lessly, knowing in advance what the answer would be.

"Darling," Clara soothed, "children don't live with their nat-

ural parents. It's neither practical nor civilized. I have had a

child conceived and born 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 be-

cause it was a special arrangement that you were my real

pareats." 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 re-

appoint 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 for-

ever 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 knowl-

edge 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 con-

tribution 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."