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."