H. L. Gold (ed), page 23
They walked to her home in silence and even in the darkened apartment they used only the primitive monosyllables of apprehensive need. Beyond these mere sounds of compassion, they had long ago said all that could be said.
Because Bill was the hyperalter, he had no fear that Conrad could force a shift on him. When later they lay in darkness, he allowed himself to drift into a brief slumber. Without the sleeping compound, distorted events came and went without reason. Dreaming, the ancients had called it. It was one of the most frightening things that had begun to happen when he first cut down on the drugs. Now, in the few seconds that he dozed, a thousand fragments of incidental knowledge, historical reading and emotional need melded and, in a strange contrast to their present tranquillity, he was dreaming a frightful moment in the 20th Century. These are the great paranoid wars, he thought. And it was so because he had thought it.
He searched frantically through the glove compartment of an ancient automobile. “Wait,” he pleaded. “I tell you we have sulfonamide-14. We’ve been taking it regularly as directed. We took a double dose back in Pater-son because there were soft-bombs all through that part of Jersey and we didn’t know what would be declared Plague Area next.”
Now Bill threw things out of his satchel onto the floor and seat of the car, fumbling deeper by the flashlight Clara held. His heart beat thickly with terror. Then he remembered his pharmacase. Oh, why hadn’t they remembered sooner about their pharmacases. Bill tore at the belt about his waist.
The Medicorps captain stepped back from the door of their car. He jerked his head at the dark form of the corporal standing in the roadway. “Shoot them. Run the car off the embankment before you burn it.”
Bill screamed metallically through the speaker of his radiation mask. “Wait. I’ve found it.” He thrust the pharmacase out the door of the car. “This is a pharmacase,” he explained. “We keep our drugs in one of these and it’s belted to our waist so we are never without them.”
The captain of the Medicorps came back. He inspected the pharmacase and the drugs and returned it. “From now on, keep your drugs handy. Take them without fail according to radio instructions. Do you understand?”
Clara’s head pressed heavily against Bill’s shoulder, and he could hear the tinny sound of her sobbing through the speaker of her mask.
The captain stepped into the road again. “We’ll have to burn your car. You passed through a Plague Area and it can’t be sterilized on this route. About a mile up this road you’ll come to a sterilization unit. Stop and have your person and belongings rayed. After that, keep walking, but stick to the road. You’ll be shot if you’re caught off it.”
The road was crowded with fleeing people. Their way was lighted by piles of cadavers writhing in gasoline flames. The Medicorps was everywhere. Those who stumbled, those who coughed, the delirious and their helping partners … these were taken to the side of the road, shot and burned. And there was bombing again to the south.
Bill stopped in the middle of the road and looked back. Clara clung to him.
“There is a plague here we haven’t any drug for,” he said, and realized he was crying. “We are all mad.”
Clara was crying too. “Darling, what have you done? Where are the drugs?”
The water of the Hudson hung as it had in the late afternoon, ice crystals in the stratosphere. The high, high sheet flashed and glowed in the new bombing to the south, where multicolored pillars of flame boiled into the sky. But the muffled crash of the distant bombing was suddenly the steady click of the urgent signal on a bedside visiophone, and Bill was abruptly awake.
Clara was throwing on her robe and moving toward the machine on terror-rigid limbs. With a scrambling motion, Bill got out of the possible view of the machine and crouched at the end of the room.
Distinctly, he could hear the machine say, “Clara Manz?”
“Yes,” Clara’s voice was a thin treble that could have been a shriek had it continued.
“This is Medicorps Headquarters. A routine check discloses you have delayed your shift two hours. To maintain the statistical record of deviations, please give us a full explanation.”
“I …” Clara had to swallow before she could talk. “I must have taken too much sleeping compound.”
“Mrs. Manz, our records indicate that you have been delaying your shift consistently for several periods now. We made a check of this as a routine follow up on any such deviation, but the discovery is quite serious.” There was a harsh silence, a silence that demanded a logical answer. But how could there be a logical answer ?
“My hyperalter hasn’t complained and I—well, I have just let a bad habit develop. I’ll see that it—doesn’t happen again.”
The machine voiced several platitudes about the responsibilities of one personality to another and the duty of all to society before Clara was able to shut it off.
Both of them sat as they were for a long, long time while the tide of terror subsided. When at last they looked at each other across the dim and silent room, both of them knew there could be at least one more time together before they were caught.
Five days later, on the last day of her shift, Mary Walden wrote the address of her appointed father’s hypoalter, Conrad Manz, with an indelible pencil on the skin just below her armpit.
During the morning, her father and mother had spoiled the family rest day by quarreling. It was about Helen’s hypoalter delaying so many shifts. Bill did not think it very important, but her mother was angry and threatened to complain to the Medicorps.
The lunch was eaten in silence, except that at one point Bill said, “It seems to me Conrad and Clara Manz are guilty of a peculiar marriage, not us. Yet they seem perfectly happy with it and you’re the one who is made unhappy. The woman has probably just developed a habit of taking too much sleeping compound for her rest-day naps. Why don’t you drop her a note?”
Helen made only one remark. It was said through her teeth and very softly. “Bill, I would just as soon the child did not realize her relationship to this sordid situation.”
Mary cringed over the way Helen disregarded her hearing, the possibility that she might be capable of understanding, or her feelings about being shut out of their mutual world.
After the lunch Mary cleared the table, throwing the remains of the meal and the plastiplates into the flash trash disposer. Her father had retreated to the library room and Helen was getting ready to attend a Citizen’s Meeting. Mary heard her mother enter the room to say good-bye while she was wiping the dining table. She knew that Helen was standing, well-dressed and a little impatient, just behind her, but she pretended she did not know.
“Darling, I’m leaving now for the Citizen’s Meeting.”
“Oh … yes.”
“Be a good girl and don’t be late for your shift. You only have an hour now.” Helen’s patrician face smiled. “I won’t be late.”
“Don’t pay any attention to the things Bill and I discussed this morning, will you?” “No.”
And she was gone. She did not say good-bye to Bill.
Mary was very conscious of her father in the house. He continued to sit in the library. She walked by the door and she could see him sitting in a chair, staring at the floor. Mary stood in the sun room for a long while. If he had risen from his chair, if he had rustled a page, if he had sighed, she would have heard him.
It grew closer and closer to the time she would have to leave if Susan Shorrs was to catch the first school hours of her shift. Why did children have to shift half a day before adults?
Finally, Mary thought of something to say. She could let him know she was old enough to understand what the quarrel had been about if only it were explained to her.
Mary went into the library and hesitantly sat on the edge of a couch near him. He did not look at her and his face seemed gray in the midday light. Then she knew that he was lonely, too. But a great feeling of tenderness for him went through her.
“Sometimes I think you and Clara Manz must be the only people in the world,” she said abruptly, “who aren’t so silly about shifting right on the dot. Why, I don’t care if Susan Shorrs is an hour late for classes!”
Those first moments when he seized her in his arms, it seemed her heart would shake loose. It was as though she had uttered some magic formula, one that had abruptly opened the doors to his love. It was only after he had explained to her why he was always late on the first day of the family shift that she knew something was wrong. He did tell her, over and over, that he knew she was unhappy and that it was his fault. But he was at the same time soothing her, petting her, as if he was afraid of her.
He talked on and on. Gradually, Mary understood in his trembling body, in his perspiring palms, in his pleading eyes, that he was afraid of dying, that he was afraid she would kill him with the merest thing she said, with her very presence.
This was not painful to Mary, because, suddenly, something came with ponderous enormity to stand before her: span>would just as soon the child did not realize her relationship to this sordid situation.
Her relationship. It was some kind of relationship to Conrad and Clara Manz, because those were the people they had been talking about.
The moment her father left the apartment, she went to his desk and took out the file of family records. After she found the address of Conrad Manz, the idea occurred to her to write it on her body. Mary was certain that Susan Shorrs 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 makeup, 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. Apparently 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 recognized 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 recognized only Carl Blair’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 toward 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 helplessly, knowing in advance what the answer would be.
“Darling,” Clara soothed, “children don’t live with their natural parents. It’s neither practical nor civilized. I have had a child conceived and borne 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 because it was a special arrangement that you were my real parents.” 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 reappoint 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 forever 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 knowledge 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 contribution 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.”
“That’s just it,” another pilot put in. “There was a time when you could show that rocket races were necessary for better spaceship design. Design has gone way beyond that. From their point of view we just burn up units as fast as other people create them. And it’s no use trying to argue for the television shows. The Board can prove people would rather see a jet-skiing meet at a cost of about one-hundredth that of a rocket race.”
Conrad Manz grinned into his drink. He had been aware for several minutes that pert little Angela, Alberts’ soft-eyed, husky-voiced wife, was trying to catch his eye. But stranded as she was in the buzzing traffic of rockets, she was trying to hail the wrong rescuer. He had about fifteen minutes till the ramp boys would have a ship ready for him. Much as he liked Angela, he wasn’t going to miss that race.
Still, he let his grin broaden and, looking up at her, he lied maliciously by nodding. She interpreted this signal as he knew she would. Well, at least he would afford her a graceful exit from the boring conversation.
He got up and went over and took her hand. Her full lips parted a little and she kissed him on the mouth.
Conrad turned to Alberts and interrupted him. “Angela and I would like to spend a little time together. Do you mind ?”
Alberts was annoyed at having his train of thought broken and rather snapped out the usual courtesy. “Of course not. I’m glad for both of you.”
Conrad looked the group over with a bland stare. “Have you lads ever tried jet-skiing ? There’s more genuine excitement in ten minutes of it than an hour of rocket racing. Personally, I don’t care if the Board does ban the rockets soon. I’ll just hop out to the Rocky Mountains on rest days.”
