The Midas Plague

Heat your house and insulate it.
Next your food: Refrigerate it.
Frost will damp your Freon coils,
So flux in nichrome till it boils.
See the picture? Heat in cold
In heat in cold, the story’s told!
Giant-writ the sacred scrawl:
Oh, the twoness of it all!
Yang
And Yin!

It had, at any rate, seemed to mean something at the time.

If alcohol opened Morey’s eyes to the fact that there was a twoness, perhaps alcohol was what he needed. For there was.

Call it a dichotomy, if the word seems more couth. A kind of two-pronged struggle, the struggle of two unwearying runners in an immortal race. There is the refrigerator inside the house. The cold air, the bubble of heated air that is the house, the bubble of cooled air that is the refrigerator, the momentary bubble of heated air that defrosts it. Call the heat Yang, if you will. Call the cold Yin. Yang overtakes Yin. Then Yin passes Yang. Then Yang passes Yin. Then-Give them other names. Call Yin a mouth; call Yang a hand.

If the hand rests, the mouth will starve. If the mouth stops, the hand will die. The hand, Yang, moves faster.

Yin may not lag behind.

Then call Yang a robot.

And remember that a pipeline has two ends.

Like any once-in-a-lifetime lush, Morey braced himself for the consequences—and found startledly that there were none.

Cherry was a surprise to him. “You were so funny,” she giggled. “And, honestly, so romantic.”

He shakily swallowed his breakfast coffee.

The office staff roared and slapped him on the back. “Howland tells us you’re living high, boy!” they bellowed more or less in the same words. “Hey, listen to what Morey did—went on the town for the night of a lifetime and didn’t even bring his ration book along to cash in!”

They thought it was a wonderful joke.

But, then, everything was going well. Cherry, it seemed, had reformed out of recognition. True, she still hated to go out in the evening and Morey never saw her forcing herself to gorge on unwanted food or play undesired games. But, moping into the pantry one afternoon, he found to his incredulous delight that they were well ahead of their ration quotas. In some items, in fact, they were out—a. month’s supply and more was gone ahead of schedule!

Nor was it the counterfeit stamps, for he had found them tucked behind a bain-marie and quietly burned them. He cast about for ways of complimenting her, but caution prevailed. She was sensitive on the subject; leave it be.

And virtue had its reward.

Wainwright called him in, all smiles. “Morey, great news! We’ve all appreciated your work here and we’ve been able to show it in some more tangible way than compliments. I didn’t want to say anything till it was definite, but—your status has been reviewed by Classification and the Ration Board. You’re out of Class Four Minor, Morey!”

Morey said tremulously, hardly daring to hope, “I’m a full Class Four?”

“Class Five, Morey. Class Five! When we do something, we do it right. We asked for a special waiver and got it—you’ve skipped a whole class.” He added honestly, “Not that it was just our backing that did it, of course. Your own recent splendid record of consumption helped a lot. I told you you could do it!”

Morey had to sit down. He missed the rest of what Wainwright had to say, but it couldn’t have mattered. He escaped from the office, side-stepped the knot of fellow-employees waiting to congratulate him, and got to a phone.

Cherry was as ecstatic and inarticulate as he. “Oh, darling!” was all she could say.

“And I couldn’t have done it without you,” he babbled. “Wainwright as much as said so himself. Said if it wasn’t for the way we— well, you have been keeping up with the rations, it never would have got by the Board. I’ve been meaning to say something to you about that, dear, but I just haven’t known how. But I do appreciate it. I— Hello?” There was a curious silence at the other end of the phone. “Hello?” he repeated worriedly.

Cherry’s voice was intense and low. “Morey Fry, I think you’re mean. I wish you hadn’t spoiled the good news.” And she hung up.

Morey stared slack-jawed at the phone.

Howland appeared behind him, chuckling. “Women,” he said. “Never try to figure them. Anyway, congratulations, Morey.”

“Thanks,” Morey mumbled.

Howland coughed and said, “Uh—by the way, Morey, now that you’re one of the big shots, so to speak, you won’t—uh—feel obliged to—well, say anything to Wainwright, for instance, about anything I may have said while we—”

“Excuse me,” Morey said, unhearing, and pushed past him. He thought wildly of calling Cherry back, of racing home to see just what he’d said that was wrong. Not that there was much doubt, of course. He’d touched her on her sore point.

Anyhow, his wristwatch was chiming a reminder of the fact that his psychiatric appointment for the week was coming up.

Morey sighed. The day gives and the day takes away. Blessed is the day that gives only good things.

If any.

The session went badly. Many of the sessions had been going badly, Morey decided; there had been more and more whispering in knots of doctors from which he was excluded, poking and probing in the dark instead of the precise psychic surgery he was used to. Something was wrong, he thought.

Something was. Semmelweiss confirmed it when he adjourned the group session. After the other doctor had left, he sat Morey down for a private talk. On his own time, too—he didn’t ask for his usual ration fee. That told Morey how important the problem was.

“Morey,” said Semmelweiss, “you’re holding back.”

“I don’t mean to, Doctor,” Morey said earnestly.

“Who knows what you ‘mean’ to do? Part of you ‘means’ to. We’ve dug pretty deep and we’ve found some important things. Now there’s something I can’t put my finger on. Exploring the mind, Morey, is like sending scouts through cannibal territory. You can’t see the cannibals—until it’s too late. But if you send a scout through the jungle and he doesn’t show up on the other side, it’s a fair assumption that something obstructed his way. In that case, we would label the obstruction ‘cannibals.’ In the case of the human mind, we label the obstruction a ‘trauma.’ What the trauma is, or what its effects on behavior will be, we have to find out, once we know that it’s there.”

Morey nodded. All of this was familiar; he couldn’t see what Semmelweiss was driving at.

Semmelweiss sighed. “The trouble with healing traumas and penetrating psychic blocks and releasing inhibitions—the trouble with everything we psychiatrists do, in fact, is that we can’t afford to do it too well. An inhibited man is under a strain. We try to relieve the strain. But if we succeed completely, leaving him with no inhibitions at all, we have an outlaw, Morey. Inhibitions are often socially necessary. Suppose, for instance, that an average man were not inhibited against blatant waste. It could happen, you know. Suppose that instead of consuming his ration quota in an orderly and responsible way, he did such things as set fire to his house and everything in it or dumped his food allotment in the river.

“When only a few individuals are doing it, we treat the individuals. But if it were done on a mass scale,