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Should one of them have done something that it was necessary

for Bill or other D-shift hyperalters to know about, it would

appear in news summaries called forth by their wristbands

but told in such fashion that the personality involved seemed

namelessly incidental, while names and pictures of hyperalters

and hypoalters on any of the other four shifts naturally were

freely used. The purpose was to keep Conrad Manz and all

the other hypoalters on the D-shift, one tenth of the total

population, non-existent as far as their hyperalters were con-

cerned. This convention made it necessary for photoprint

summaries to be on light-sensitive paper that blackened illegi-

bly before six hours were up, so that a man might never

stumble on news about his hypoalter.

Bill did not even glance at the news summary. He had

picked it up only for appearances. The summaries were es-

sential if you were going to start where you left off on your

last shift and have any knowledge of the five intervening

days. A man just didn't walk out of a shifting room without

one. It was failure to do little things like that that would start

them wondering about him.

Bill opened the door of the booth by applying his wristband

to the lock and stepped out into the street.

Late afternoon crowds pressed about him. Across the boul-

evard, a helicopter landing swarmed with clouds of rising

commuters. Bill had some trouble figuring out the part of the

city Conrad had left him in and walked two blocks before he

understood where he was. Then he got into an idle two-place

cab, started the motor with his wristband and hurried the

little three-wheeler recklessly through the traffic. Clara was

probably already waiting and he first had to go home and

get dressed.

The thought of Clara waiting for him in the park near her

home was a sharp reminder of his strange situation. He was

in a world that was literally not supposed to exist for him,

for it was the world of his own hypoalter, Conrad Manz.

Undoubtedly, there were people in the traffic up ahead

who knew both him and Conrad, people from the other shifts

who never mentioned the one to the other except in those

guarded, snickering little confidences they couldn't resist telling

and you couldn't resist listening to. After all, the most im-

portant person in the world was your alter. If he got sick,

injured or killed, so would you.

Thus, in moments of intimacy or joviality, an undercover

exchange went on. . . . I'll tell you about your hyperalter if

you'll tell me about my hypoalter. It was orthodox bad man-

ners that left you with shame, and a fear that the other fel-

low would tell people you seemed to have a pathological

interest in your alter and must need a change in your prescrip-

tion.

But the most flagrant abuser of such morbid little exchanges

would have been horrified to learn that right here, in the mid-

dle of the daylight traffic, was a man who was using his anti-

social shifting power to meet in secret the wife of his own

hypoalteri

Bill did not have to wonder what the Medicorps would

think. Relations between hyperalters and hypoalters of oppo-

site sex were punishabledrastically punishable.

When he arrived at the apartment. Bill remembered to or-

der a dinner for his daughter Mary. His order, dialled from

the day's menu, was delivered to the apartment pneumat-

ically and he set it out over electric warmers. He wanted to

write a note to the child, but he started two and threw both

in the basket. He couldn't think of anything to say to her.

Staring at the lonely table he was leaving for Mary, Bill

felt his guilt overwhelming him. He could stop the behaviour

which led to the guilt by taking his drugs as prescribed. They

would return him immediately to the sane and ordered con-

formity of the world. He would no longer have to carry the

fear that the Medicorps would discover he was not taking

his drugs. He would no longer neglect his appointed child.

He would no longer endanger the very life of Conrad's wife

Clara and, of course, his own.

When you took your drugs as prescribed, it was impossible

to experience such ancient and primitive emotions as guilt.

Even should you miscalculate and do something wrong, the

drugs would not allow any such emotional reaction. To be

free to experience his guilt over the lonely child who needed

him was, for these reasons, a precious thing to Bill. In all

the world, this night, he was undoubtedly the only man who

could and did feel one of the ancient emotions. People felt

shame, not guilt; conceit, not pride; pleasure, not desire. Now

that he had stopped taking his drugs as prescribed, Bill

realized that the drugs allowed only an impoverished seg-

ment of a vivid emotional spectrum.

But however exciting it was to live them, the ancient

emotions did not seem to act as deterrents to bad behaviour.

Bill's sense of guilt did not keep him from continuing to

neglect Mary. His fear of being caught did not restrain him

from breaking every rule of inter-alter law and loving Clara,

his own hypoalter's wife.

Bill got dressed as rapidly as possible. He tossed the dis-

carded shifting costume into the return chute. He retouched

his make-up, trying to eliminate some of the heavy, inexpres-

sive planes of muscularity which were more typical of Conrad

than of himself.

The act reminded him of the shame which his wife Helen

had felt when she learned, a few years ago, that her own

hypoalter, Clara, and his hypoalter, Conrad, had obtained

from the Medicorps a special release to marry. Such rare

marriages in which the same bodies lived together on both

halves of a shift were something to snicker about. They

verged on the antisocial, but could be arranged if the bat-

teries of Medicorps tests could be satisfied.

Perhaps it had been the very intensity of Helen's shame

on learning of this marriage, the nauseous display of con-

formity so typical of his wife, that had first given Bill the

idea of seeking out Clara, who had dared convention to make

such a peculiar marriage. Over the years, Helen had continued

blaming all their troubles on the fact that both egos of him-

self were living with, and intimate with, both egos of her-

self.

So Bill had started cutting down on his drugs, the curiosity

having become an obsession. What was this other part of

Helen like, this Clara who was unconventional enough to

want to marry only Bill's own hypoalter, in spite of almost

certain public shame?

He had first seen Clara's face when it formed on a visio-

phone, the first time he had forced Conrad to shift prema-

turely. It was softer than Helen's. The delicate contours were

less purposefully set, gayer.

"Clara Manz?" Bill had sat there staring at the visiophone

for several seconds, unable to continue. His great fear that

she would immediately report him must have been naked on

his face.

He had watched an impish suspicion grow in the tender

curve of her lips and her oblique glance from the visiophone.

She did not speak.

"Mrs. Manz," he finally said. "I would like to meet you in

the park across from your home."

To this awkward opening he owed the first time he had