by Wyman Guin
didly. It had already ceased to be funny to him, but he saw
Major Grey smile in spite of himself.
"They were quite upset when I found them. It must have
been some scramble before that." Major Grey came over
and sat in the chair vacated by the young man who had
just injected Bill. "You know, Bill, we will need a complete
analysis of you. We want to do everything we can to save
you, but it will require your co-operation."
Bill nodded, feeling his chest tighten. Here it came. Right
to the end they would be tearing him apart to find out
what made him work.
Major Grey must have sensed Bill's bitter will to resist.
His resonant voice was soft, his face kindly. "We must
have your sincere desire to help. We can't force you to do
anything."
"Except die," Bill said.
"Maybe helping us get the information that might save
your life at the trial isn't worth the trouble to you. But your
aberration has seriously disturbed the lives of several people.
Don't you think you owe it to them to help us to prevent
this sort of thing in the future?" Major Grey ran his hand
through his whitening hair. "I thought you would like to know
Mary will come through all right. We will begin shortly to
acclimatize her to her new appointed parents, who will be
visiting her each day. "That will accelerate her recovery a
great deal. Of course, right now she is still inaccessible."
The brutally clear picture of Mary alone in the storage-
room crashed back into Bill's mind. After a while, in such
slow stages that the beginning was hardly noticeable, he be-
gan to cry. The young medicop injected him with a sleeping
compound, but not before Bill knew he would do whatever
the Medicorps wanted.
The next day was crowded with battery after battery of
tests. The interviews were endless. He was subjected to a
hundred artificial situations and every reaction from his blood
sugar to the frequency ranges of his voice was measured.
They gave him only small amounts of drugs in order to test
his reaction to them.
Late in the evening. Major Grey came by and interrupted
an officer who was taking an electro-encephalogram for the
sixth time after injection of a drug.
"All right. Bill, you have really given us co-operation. But
after you've had your dinner, I hope you won't mind if I
come to your room and talk with you for a little while."
When Bill finished eating, he waited impatiently in his
room for the Medicorps officer. Major Grey came soon after.
He shook his head at the mute question Bill shot at him.
"No, Bill. We will not have the results of your tests evalu-
ated until late tomorrow morning. I can't tell you a thing
until the trial in any case."
"When will that be?"
"As soon as the evaluation of your tests is in." Major
Grey ran his hand over bis smooth chin and seemed to sigh.
'Tell me, Bill, how do you feel about your case? How did
you get into this situation and what do you think about it
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 brea
kfast 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-
ly barren. At the great oaken table around which they all
sat, there were three Medicorps officers m addition to Major
Grey.
Helen did not speak to Bill when they brought him in.
He was placed on the same side of the table with an offi-
cer between them. Two orderlies stood behind Bill's chair.
Other than these people, there was no one in the room.
The great windows were high above the floor and displayed
only the blissful sky. Now and then Bill saw a flock of pi-
geons waft aloft on silver-turning wings. Everyone at the ta-
ble except himself had a copy of his case report and they
discussed it with clipped sentences. Between the stone floor
and the vaulted ceiling, a subtle echolalia babbled about
Bill's problem behind their human talk.
The discussion of the report lulled when Major Grey
rapped on the table. He glanced unsmiling from face to face,
and his voice hurried the ritualized words: "This is a court
of medicine, co-joining the results of medical science and con-
sidered lay judgment to arrive at a decision in the case
of patient Bill Walden. The patient is hospitalized for a his-
tory of drug refusal and communication breaks. We have
before us the medical case record of patient Walden. Has ev-
eryone present studied this record?"
All at the table nodded.
"Do all present feel competent to pass judgment in this
case?"
Again there came the agreement.
Major Grey continued, "It is my duty to advise you, in
the presence of the patient, of the profound difference be-
tween a trial for simple drug refusal and one in which that
aberration is compounded with communication breaks.
"It is true that no other aberration is possible when the
drugs are taken as prescribed. After all, the drugs are the
basis for our schizophrenic society. Nevertheless, simple drug
refusal often is a mere matter of physiology, which is easy
enough to remedy.
"A far more profound threat to our society is the break
in communication. This generally is more deeply motivated
in the patient, and is often inaccessible to therapy. Such a pa-
tient is driven to emotive explorations which place the various
ancient passions, and the infamous art of historical gesture,
such as 'give me liberty or give me death', above the wel-
fare of society."
_ Bill watched the birds flash down the sky, a handful of
""Heavenly coin. Never had it seemed to him so good to look
at the sky. // they hospitalize me, he thought, I will be
content forever to sit and look from windows.
"Our schizophrenic society," Major Grey was saying, "holds
together and runs smoothly because, in each individual, the
" personality conflicts have been compartmentalized between
hyperalter and hypoalter. On the social level, conflicting per-
sonalities are kept on opposite shifts and never contact each
other. Or they are kept on shifts where contact is possible no
more than one or two days out of ten. Bill Walden's break
of shift is the type of behaviour designed to reactivate these
conflicts, and to generate the destructive passions on which
an undrugged mind feeds. Already illness and disrupted lives
have resulted."
Major Grey paused and looked di
rectly at Bill. "Exhaus-
tive tests have demonstrated that your entire personality is
involved. I might also say that the aberration to live without
the drugs and to break communication codes is your person-
ality. All these Medicorps oflicers are agreed on that diagno-
sis. It remains now for us of the Medicorps to sit with the
laymen intimately involved and decide on the action to be
taken. The only possible alternatives after that diagnosis are
permanent hospitalization or. . . total removal of the per-
sonality by mnemonic erasure."
Bill could not speak. He saw Major Grey nod to one of the
orderlies and felt the man pushing up his sleeve and inject-
ing his nerveless arm. They were forcing him to shift, he
knew, so that Conrad Manz could sit in on the trial and
participate.
Helplessly, he watched the great sky blacken and the room
dim and disappear.
Major Grey did not avert his face, as did the others, while
the shift was in progress. Helen Walden, he saw, was drama-
tizing her shame at being present during a shift, but the Medi-
corps officers simply stared at the table. Major Grey watched
the face of Conrad Manz take form while the man who was
going to be tried faded.
Bill Walden had been without make-up, and as soon as
he was sure Manz could hear him. Major Grey apologized.
"I hope you won't object to this brief interlude in public
without make-up. You are present at the trial of Bill Wal-
den."
Conrad Manz nodded and Major Grey waited another full
minute for the shift to complete itself before he continued.
"Mr. Manz, during the two days you waited in the hospital
for us to catch Walden in shift, I discussed this case quite
thoroughly with you, especially as it applied to the case of
Clara Manz, on which we were already working.
"You will recall that in the case of your wife, the Modi-
corps diagnosis was one of a clearly localized aberration.
It was quite simple to apply the mnemonic eraser to that
small section without disturbing in any way her basic per-
sonality. Medicorps agreement was for this procedure and
the case did not come to trial, but simply went to opera-
tion, because lay agreement was obtained. First yourself and
eventually" Major Grey paused and let the memory of
Helen's stubborn insistence that Clara die stir in Conrad's
mind"Mrs. Walden agreed with the Medicorps."
