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