now?" The officer sat in the room's only chair and motioned
Bill to the cot.
Bill was astonished at his sudden desire to talk about
his problem. He had to laugh to cover it up. "I guess I
feel as if I am being condemned for trying to stay sober."
Bill used the ancient word with a mock tone of rigliteousness
that he knew the major would understand.
Major Grey smiled. "How do you feel when you're sober?"
Bill searched his face. "The way the ancient Moderns did,
--. I guess. I feel what happens to me the way it happens to
roe, 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 a hundred years, each
of us only lives fifty years and our alter lives the other
fifty. 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 smooth-
ly running machine, where there was no unhappiness because
there was no great happiness, where there was no crime ex-
cept 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 ar-
tificial morals and their endless prescriptions! They belong in
crazy houses! What use is there m 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 incompatible 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 inher-
ent part of your personality can we do something medical-
ly 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 bet-
ter. It was as though a man who had thought himself per-
manently 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 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 make-up 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 lift 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 was necessary."
--i t was a long time before he could speak. "Clara, I need
you."
She spun on him. "Have you no shame? You are married
to my hyperalterdon't you understand that?" Her face was
suddenly wet with tears and the intensity of her shame flamed
at him from her cheeks. "How can Conrad ever forgive me
for being with his hyperalter and talking about him? Oh,
how can I have been so mad?"
"They have done something to you," he said, shaking with
tension.
Her chin raised at this. She was defiant, he saw, though
not towards himselfhe no longer existed for herbut to-
wards that part of herself which once had needed him and
now no longer existed. "They have cured me," she declared.
"They have cured me of everything but my shame, and
they will help me get rid of that as soon as you leave this
room."
Bill stared at her before leaving. Out in the corridor, the
young medicop did not look him in the face. They went
back to Bill's room and the ofBcer left without a word. Bill
lay down on his cot.
Presently Major Grey entered the room. He came over to
the cot. "I'm sorry it had to be this way. Bill."
Bill's words came tonelessly from his dry throat. "Was it
necessary to be cruel?"
"It was necessary to test the result of her psycho-surgery.
Also, it will help her over her shame. She might other-
wise have retained a seed of fear that she still loved you."
Bill did not feel anything any more. Staring at the ceiling,
he knew there was no place left for him in this world and
no one in it who needed him. The only person who had really
needed him had been Mary, and he could not bear to think
of how he had treated her. Now the Medicorps was efficiently
curing the child of the hurt he had done her. They had
already erased from Clara any need for him she had ever
felt.
This seemed funny and he began to laugh. "Everyone is
being cured of me."
"Yes, Bill. That is necessary." When Bill went on laughing
Maor Grey's voice turned quite sharp. "Come with me. It's
time for your trial."
The enormous room in which they held the trial was utter-