Wyman Guin

“ 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 Morris blackened against the sunset. The hollowed granite eyes bore down on him out of an undecipherable dark ... the ancient, implacable face of the Medicorps. ”

“ I'll take Clara out there; she'll like some of the men."
Major Grey nodded abstractedly. "Good idea." He shook hands with Conrad Manz, wished him fun on his rest shift, and left.
Taking a helicopter back to his city, Major Grey thought of his own hyperalter, Ralph Singer. He'd often wished that the silly fool could be erased. Now he wondered how it would be to have only one personality, and, wondering, realized that Conrad Manz had been right—it would be like amputation, the shameful distinction of living in a schizophrenic society with no alter. ”

“ They blended perfectly with the California landscape. Occasionally, when they raised their arms, the spars would open and spread those glorious planes.
Almost two hours went by before the male made it into the air. His playful curiosity about the world had been abandoned momentarily and he was chasing one of the girls. As usual, she was anxious to be caught and stopped abruptly at the bottom of a little knoll.
He probably meant to dive for her. But when he spread his arms, the spars snapped out and those golden planes sheared into the air. He sailed over her in a stunning sweep. ”

“ 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."
Conrad knew perfectly well that if he had made this assertion before asking Alberts for his wife, the man would have found some excuse to have her remain. All the faces present displayed the aficionado's disdain for one who has just demonstrated he doesn't belong. ”

“ I spun the jeep out of the yard and ripped off through the woods.
The chief was sitting at home as comfortable as you please. He was leaning back against the great oak that hid his tree house. He had a little fire going and one of the women was roasting a sparrow for him. He greeted me in volpla language.
"Do you realize," I blurted angrily, "that there are two volplas in my daughter's bedroom?"
"Why, yes," he answered calmly. "They go there every day. Is there anything wrong with that?"
"She's teaching them the words of men."
"You told us some men may be our enemies. ”

“ Finally Major Grey said, "I think you can see, Bill, that your desire to live without drugs is incompatable 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 inherent part of your personality can we do something medically or psycho-surgically about it." ”

“ I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer. "This place is going to hell," I complained. "The old man isn't allowed to pinch the maid and the kids can't go naked." I leaned toward her and smacked her cheek. "But the food and the old woman are still the best."
"Say, what goes with you? You've been grinning like a happy ape ever since you came out of the lab." ”

“ 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 segment 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 behavior. 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. ”

“ There will be more game."
He continued to stare directly at me. "There will be men. One has already shot one of us. We have forgiven him and are friends. But one of us is dead."
"You are friends with another man?" ”

“ 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 100 years, each of us only lives 50 years and our alter lives the other 50. 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." ”

“ The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my ranch and the fun would be on. ”

“ 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 smoothly running machine, where there was no unhappiness because there was no great happiness, where there was no crime except failure to take the drugs or cross the alter sex line. ”

“ Major Grey continued, "It is my duty to advise you, in the presence of the patient, of the profound difference between 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. ”

“ My family and I had found a colony of them on our ranch and taught them English. I was stuck with it because it was the truth.
The volpla waved his long thin arm over the front page. "Men are dangerous. They will shoot us with their guns if we leave here."
I hastened to reassure him. "It will not be like that. When men have learned about you, they will leave you alone." I stated this emphatically, but for the first time I was beginning to see this might not be a joke to the volplas. Nevertheless, I went on. "You must disperse the families at once. ”

“ 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 personalities 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 behavior designed to reactivate these conflicts, and to generate the destructive passions on which an undrugged mind feeds. Already illness and disrupted lives have resulted." ”

“ Bill Walden grasped sight and sound, and the sharp odor of makeup solvent stung his nostrils. He was conscious of only one clamoring, terrifying thought: They will catch us. It cannot go on much longer without Helen guessing about Clara. She is already angry about Clara delaying the shift, and if she learns from Mary that I am cheating on Conrad's shift.... Any time now, perhaps this time, when 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. ”

“ Both volplas nodded vigorously.
She turned back to me. "Daddy, did you know they can fly? They can fly right out of the window and way up in the sky."
"Is that a fact?" I said testily. I looked coldly at the two volplas. "I'm going to speak to your chief."
Back downstairs again, I raved at my wife. "Why didn't you tell me a thing like this was going on? How could you let such an unusual thing go on and not discuss it with me?"
My wife got a look on her face that I don't see very often. "Now you listen to me, mister. Your whole life is a secret from us. ”

“ Helen waited while all present got the idea that Major Grey had accused them of being illogical. "Bill's aberration has led to our daughter's illness. And think how quickly it contaminated Clara Manz! I cannot ask that society any longer expose itself, even to the extent of keeping Bill in the isolation of the hospital, for my purely sentimental reasons.
"As for Major Grey's closing remarks, I cannot see how it is fair to bring my husband to trial as a threat to society, if some future chance is expected, in which a man of his behavior would benefit society. ”

“ I raised my head and looked at him. "Son, let's go back to the jeep and we can talk about it on the way home."
"I'd rather walk." He sort of waved to the volpla he had been talking to and then to the chief. He jumped the creek and walked away into the oak woods.
The volpla holding the baby stared at me. From somewhere far up the valley, a crow was cawing. I didn't look at the chief. I turned and brushed past him and walked back to the jeep alone.
At home, I opened a bottle of beer and sat out on the terrace to wait for my son. ”

“ 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." ”

“ The group thus had the appearance of a super-family and the males indulged and cared for all the children without reference to actual parenthood.
By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy, sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through midday and midnight. ”

“ Major Grey felt very tired. It was, after all, difficult to understand why he always fought so hard against erasure of these aberrant cases. But he began with quiet determination. "The threat to society is effectively removed by either of the alternatives, hospitalization or total erasure. I think you can all see from Bill Walden's medical record that his is a well rounded personality with a remarkable mind. In the environment of the 20th Century, he would have been an outstanding citizen, and possibly, if there had been more like him, our present society would have been better for it. ”

“ Sometimes trotting, sometimes walking fast, I got way ahead of him. My hard breathing arose as much out of my anxiety about the manner of handling this stranger as it did out of the exertion.
I rounded a bend in the creek and there was my son sitting on the grass near a cooking fire playing with a baby volpla and talking in English to an adult volpla who stood beside him. ”

“ Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes. The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at once.
I used the metabolic accelerator to cut the volplas' gestation down to one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month. I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early infants were females, which sped things up considerably.
By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut down the accelerator. ”

“ The ancients of the 20th Century actually looked upon schizophrenia as a disease! Everyone felt it was very shameful to have a schizophrenic person in the family, and, since children lived right with the same parents who had borne them, it was very bad. If you were a schizophrenic child in the 20th Century, you would be locked up behind bars and people would call you—"
Mary blushed and stumbled over the daring word—"crazy." "The ancients locked up strong ego groups right along with weak ones. Today we would lock up those ancient people." ”

“ Something in the lab can't wait."
The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.
They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of growth in the metabolic accelerator. ”

“ The drugs worked so well that the ancients had to let millions of schizophrenic people out from behind the bars of 'crazy' houses. That was the Great Emancipation of the 1990s. From then on, schizophrenic people had trouble only when they criminally didn't take their drugs. Usually, there are two egos in a schizophrenic person—the hyperalter, or prime ego, and the hypoalter, the alternate ego. There often were more than two, but the Medicorps makes us take our drugs so that won't happen to us. ”

“ Now that the sickly personality has been dissipated, the healthy one can be brought back rapidly.
"As you are aware, the synapse operates on the binary 'yes-no' choice system of an electronic calculator. All synapses which were involved in the diseased personality have now been reduced to an atypical, uniform threshold. Thus they can be re-educated in new patterns by the healthy personality remaining.... There, you see the countenance of the healthy personality appearing."
It was Conrad Manz who looked up at them with a wry grin. ”

“ No, Bill Walden had been wrong, completely wrong, both about drugs and being split into two personalities. What one made up in pleasure through not taking drugs was more than lost in the suffering of conflict, frustration and hostility. And having an alter—any kind, even one as useless as Singer—meant, actually, not being alone.
Major Grey parked the helicopter and found a shifting station. He took off his makeup, addressed and mailed his clothes, and waited for the shift to come. ”

“ But, as usual, he and the other traffic men had to sit through two hours while small wheels from the Medicorps and Communications acted big about rebalancing a city.
For them, Conrad had to admit, Santa Fe was a great deal more complex than 100,000 consuming, moderately producing human bodies. It was 200,000 human personalities, two to each body. Conrad wondered sometimes what they would have done if the three and four personality cases so common back in the 20th and 21st Centuries had been allowed to reproduce. The 200,000 personalities in Santa Fe were difficult enough. ”

“ I think I should remind you that there are few advantages to having your alter extinguished in the mnemonic eraser. A man whose hyperalter has been extinguished must report on his regular shift days to a hospital and be placed for five days in suspended animation. This is not very healthy for the body, but necessary. Otherwise, everyone's natural distaste for his own alter and the understandable wish to spend twice as much time living would generate schemes to have one's alter sucked out by the eraser. ”

“ Conrad was in the middle of a volley-tennis game and he didn't like having the shift forced so soon. People generally shifted at their appointed regular hour every five days, and a hyperalter was not supposed to use his power to force shift. It was such an unthinkable thing nowadays that there was occasional talk of abolishing the terms hyperalter and hypoalter because they were somewhat disparaging to the hypoalter, and really designated only the antisocial power of the hyperalter to force the shift. ”

“ If we eliminate all personalities who do not fit, we may find ourselves without any minds capable of meeting future change. Our direct ancestors were largely the inmates of mental hospitals ... we are fortunate they were not erased. Conrad Manz," he asked abruptly, "what is your opinion on the case of Bill Walden?"
Helen Walden started, but Conrad Manz shrugged his muscular shoulders. "Oh, hospitalize the three-headed monster!"
Major Grey snapped his eyes directly past Colonel Hart and fastened them on the Medicorps captain. ”

“ Vaguely he remembered that the ancients did something called dreaming while they slept and the thought made him shiver.
Clara Manz was saying, "Oh, Bill, they'll catch us. We can't pretend any more unless we have drugs. Haven't we any drugs, Bill?"
Then she was silent and lay still. Her breathing was shallow and even in the dawn light her cheeks were deeply flushed against the blonde hair.
Having just awakened, Conrad was on a very low drug level and the incident was unpleasantly disturbing. He picked up his pharmacase from beside his bed and made his way to the bathroom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 boulevard, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ The other personality in the case before us has been drug-immobilized to keep this one from shifting. At the last moment, this personality before us will be drug-stimulated to bring it to the highest possible pitch of total activity. This produces utterly disorganized activity, every involved neuron and synapse being activated simultaneously by the drug. It is then a simple matter for the mnemonic eraser to locate all permanently echoing frequencies involved in this personality and suck them into its receiver."
Bill was suddenly aware that a needle had been thrust into his arm. ”

“ He laughed and grabbed her wrists. "Now, now. I'm neglecting you to fly a rocket, not just to talk about them. I won't let you die."
At that she could not suppress her husky musical laugh. "I found that out the last time you and I were together. Clara and I had a drink the other day at the Citizen's Club. I don't often use dirty language, but I told Clara she must be keeping you in a straitjacket at home."
Conrad frowned, wishing she hadn't brought up the subject. It worried him off and on that something was wrong with Clara, something even worse than that awful dreaming business ten days ago. ”

“ Without drugs, everybody and all society would fall apart.
The ancients had first learned to keep endocrine deviates such as the diabetic alive with drugs. Later they learned with other drugs to "cure" the far more prevalent disease, schizophrenia, that was jamming their hospitals. The big change came when the ancients used these same drugs on everyone to control the private and public irrationality of their time and stop the wars. ”

“ However, its fundamental datum is that the drugs and drugged minds must be protected before everything else." He watched Conrad's face while he added, "Because of this, it is possible for you to arrive logically at a conclusion that ... death is the required solution." He paused, looking at their white lips. Then he said, "Actually, other, more suitable solutions may be possible."
"But they were refusing their drugs," she said. "You talk as if you are defending them. Aren't you a Medicorps prosecutor?" ”

“ But when he found himself addressing the package of Conrad's clothes to his home, he chuckled bitterly.
It was when he went back to drop the package in the mail chute that he noticed the storage room door ajar. He disposed of the package and went over to the door. Then he stood still, listening. He had to stop his own breathing to hear clearly.
Bill tightened himself and opened the door. He flipped on the light and saw Mary. The child sat on the floor in the corner with her knees drawn up against her chest. ”