Beyond Bedlam Page 3

  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