by Wyman Guin
the shift is over, I will be looking into the face of a medicop
who is pulling a needle from my arm, and then it'll all be
over.
So far, at least, there was no medicop. Still feeling un-
real but anxious not to lose precious moments, Bill took an
individualized kit from the wall dispenser and made himself
up. He was sparing and subtle in his use of the make-up, un-
like the horrible make-up jobs Conrad Manz occasionally left
on. Bill rearranged his hair. Conrad always wore it too short
for his taste, but you couldn't complain about everything.
Bill sat in a chair to await some of the slower aspects of the
shift. He knew that an hour after he left the booth, his basal
metabolic rate would be ten points higher. His blood sugar
would go down steadily. In the next five days he would lose
six to eight pounds, which Conrad would promptly regain.
Just as Bill was about to leave the booth, he remembered
to pick up a news summary. He put his wristband to the
switch on the telephoto and a freshly printed summary of the
last five days in the world fell into the rack. His wristband,
of course, called forth one edited for hyperalters on the D-
shift.
It did not mention by name any hypoalter on the D-shift.
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 r
elease 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
heard Clara laugh. Her warm, clear laughter, teasing him,
tumbled forth like a cloud of gay butterflies.
"Are you afraid to see me here at home because my hus-
band might walk in on us?"
Bill had been put completely at ease by this bantering indi-
cation that Clara knew who he was and welcomed him as an
intriguing diversion. Quite literally, the one person who could
not walk in on them, as the ancients thought of it, was his
own hypoalter, Conrad Manz.
Bill finished retouching his make-up and hurried to leave
the apartment. But this time, as he passed the table where
Mary's dinner was set out, he decided to write a few words
to the child, no matter how empty they sounded to himself.
The note he left explained that he had some early work to do
at the microfilm library where he worked.
Just as Bill was leaving the apartment, the visiophone
buzzed. In his hurry Bill flipped the switch before he thought.
Too late, his band froze and the implications of this call, an
hour before anyone would normally be home, shot a shaft
of terror through him.
But it was not the image of a medicop that formed on
the screen. The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Harris,
one of Mary's teachers.
It was strange that she should have thought he might be
home. The shift for children was half a day earlier than
for adults, so the parents could have half their rest day free.
This afternoon would be for Mary the first classes of her
shift, but the teacher must have guessed something was wrong
with the shifting schedules in Mary's family. Or had the child
told her?
Mrs. Harris explained rather dramatically that Mary was
being neglected. What could he say to her? That he was a
criminal breaking drug regulations in the most flagrant man-
ner? That nothing, not even the child appointed to him,
meant more to him than his wife's own hypoalter? Bill finally
ended the hopeless and possibly dangerous conversation by
turning off the receiver and leaving the apartment.
Bill realized that now, for both him and Clara, the greatest
joy had been those first few times together. The enormous
threat of a Medicorps retaliation took the pleasure from their
contact and they came together desperately because, having
tasted this fantastic nonconformity and the new undrugged
intimacy, there was no other way for them. Even now as. he
drove through the triffic towards where she would be waiting,
he was not so much concerned with meeting Clara in their
fear-poisoned present as with the vivid, aching remembrance
of what those meetings once had really been like.
He recalled an evening they had spent lying on the
summer lawn of the park, looking out at the haze-dimmed
stars. It had been shortly after Clara joined him in cutting
down on the drugs, and the clear memory of their quiet laugh-
ter so captured his mind now that Bill amost tangled his
car in the traffic.
In memory he kissed her again and, as it had been, the
newly cut grass mixed with the exciting fragrance of her
skin. After the kiss they continued a mock discussion of the
ancient word "sin". Bill pretended to be trying to explain
the meaning of the word to her, sometimes with definitions
that kept them laughing and sometimes with demonstrational
kisses that stopped their laughter.
He could remember Clara's face turned to him in the eve-
ning light with an outrageous parody of interest. He could
hear himself saying, "You see, the ancients would say we
are not sinning because they would disagree with the medi-
cops that you and Helen are two completely different peo-
ple, or that Conrad and I are not the same person."
Clara kissed him with an air of tentative experimentation.
"Mmm, no. I can't say I care for that interpretation."
"You'd rather be sinning?"
"Definitely."
"Well, if the ancients did agree with the medicops that we
are distinct from our alters, Helen and Conrad, then they
would say we are sinningbut not for the same reasons the
Medicorps would give."
"That," asserted Clara, "is where I get lost. If this sinning
business is going to be worth anything at all, it has to be
something you can identify."
Bill cut his car out of the main stream of traffic and to-
wards the park, without interrupting his memory.
"Well, darling, I don't want to confuse you, but the medi-
cops would say we are sinning only because you are my wife's
bypoalter, and I am your husband's hyperalterin other words
for the very reason the ancients would say we are not sinning.
Furthermore, if either of us were with anyone else, the medi-
cops would think it was perfectly all right, and so would
Conrad and Helen. Provided, of course, I took a hyperalter
and you took a hypoalter only."
"Of course," Clara said, and Bill hurried over the gloomy
fact.
"The ancients, on the other hand, would say we are sin-
ning because we are making love to someone we are not
married to."
"But what's the matter with that? Everybody does it."
"The ancient Moderns didn't. Or, that is, they often did,
but..."
Clara brought her full li
ps hungrily to his. "Darling, I think
the ancient Moderns had the right idea, though I don't see
how they ever arrived at it."
Bill grinned. "It was just an invention of theirs, along with
the wheel and atomic energy."
That evening was long gone by as Bill stopped the little
taxi beside the park and left it there for the next user. He
walked across the lawns towards the statue where he and
Clara always met. The very thought of entering one's own
hypoalter's house was so unnerving that Bill brought himself
to do it only by first meeting Clara near the statue. As he
walked between the trees, Bill could not again capture the
spirit of that evening he had been remembering. The Medi-
corps was too close. It was impossible to laugh that away now.
Bill arrived at the statue, but Clara was not there. He
waited impatiently while a livid sunset coagulated between
the branches of the great trees. Clara should have been there
first. It was easier for her, because she was leaving her shift,
and without doing it prematurely.
The park was like a quiet backwater in the eddying rush of
the evening city. Bill felt conspicuous and vulnerable in the
gloaming light. Above all, he felt a new loneliness, and he
knew that now Clara felt it, too. They needed each other as
each had been, before fear had bleached their feeling to
white bones of desperation.
They were not taking their drugs as prescribed, and for that
they would be horribly punished. That was the only unforgiv-
able sin in their world. By committing it, he and Clara had
found out what life could be, in the same act that would sure-
ly take life from them. Their powerful emotions they had
found in abundance simply by refusing to take the drugs, and
by being together briefly each fifth day in a dangerous breach
of all convention. The closer their discovery and the greater
their terror, the more desperately they needed even their
terror, and the more impossible became the delight of their
first meetings.
Telegraphing bright beads of sound, a night bird skimmed
the sunset lawns to the looming statue and skewed around
its monolithic base. The bird's piping doubled and then choked
off as it veered frantically from Bill. After a while, far off
through the park, it released a fading protest of song.
Above Bill, the towering statue of the great Alfred Mor-
ris blackened against the sunset. The hollowed granite eyes
