make mistakes.... Certainly not mistakes of identity.... It would not have occurred to Carl to disregard the appointment even though failure to appear entailed no penalty.... Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion....
Carl walked through the Town Hall Square.... Nickel nudes sixty feet high with brass genitals soaped themselves under gleaming showers.... The Town Hall cupola, of glass brick and copper crashed into the sky.
Carl stared back at a homosexual American tourist who dropped his eyes and fumbled with the light filters of his Leica....
Carl entered the steel enamel labyrinth of the Ministry, strode to the information desk... and presented his card.
'Fifth floor... Room twenty-six...'
In room twenty-six a nurse looked at him with cold undersea eyes.
'Doctor Benway is expecting you,' she said smiling. 'Go right in.'
'As if he had nothing to do but wait for me,' thought Carl... The office was completely silent, and filled with milky light. The doctor shook Carl's hand, keeping his eyes on the young man's chest....
'I've seen this man before,' Carl thought.... 'But where?' He sat down and crossed his legs. He glanced at an ashtray on the desk and lit a cigarette.... He turned to the doctor a steady inquiring gaze in which there was more than a touch of insolence. The doctor seemed embarrassed.... He fidgeted and coughed... and fumbled with papers....
'Hurumph,' he said finally.... 'Your name is Carl Peterson I believe....' His glasses slid down into his nose in parody of the academic manner.... Carl nodded silently.... The doctor did not look at him but seemed none the less to register the acknowledgment. ... He pushed his glasses back into place with one finger and opened a file on the white enameled desk.
'Mmmmmmmm. Carl Peterson,' he repeated the name caressingly, pursed his lips and nodded several times. He spoke again abruptly: 'You know of course that we are trying. We are all trying. Sometimes of course we don't succeed.' His voice trailed off thin and tenuous. He put a hand to his forehead. 'To adjust the state --simply a tool --to the needs of each individual citizen.' His voice boomed out so unexpectedly deep and loud that Carl started. 'That is the only function of the state as we see it. Our knowledge... incomplete, of course,' he made a slight gesture of depreciation....
'For example...
'We regard it as a misfortune... a sickness... certainly nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned any more than say... tuberculosis.... Yes,' he repeated firmly as if Carl had raised an objection....
'Tuberculosis. On the other hand you can readily see that any illness imposes certain, should we say obligations, certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of inconvenience and hardship to the unfortunate individual who has, through no fault of his own, become uh infected.... 93
That is to say, of course, the minimum hardship compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected.... We do not find obligatory vaccination for smallpox an unreasonable measure.... Nor isolation for certain contagious diseases.... I am sure you will agree that individuals infected with hurumph what the French call 'Les Maladies galantes' heh heh heh should be compelled to undergo treatment if they do not report voluntarily.' The doctor went on chuckling and rocking in his chair like a mechanical toy.... Carl realized that he was expected to say something.
'That seems reasonable,' he said.
The doctor stopped chuckling. He was suddenly motionless. 'Now to get back to this uh matter of sexual deviation. Frankly we don't pretend to understand --at least not completely --why some men and women prefer the uh sexual company of their own sex. We do know that the uh phenomena is common enough, and, under certain circumstances a matter of uh concern to this department.'
For the first time the doctor's eyes flickered across Carl's face. Eyes without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion that Carl had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal. Carl suddenly felt trapped in this silent underwater cave of a room, cut off from all sources of warmth and certainty. His picture of himself sitting there calm, alert with a trace of well mannered contempt went dim, as if vitality were draining out of him to mix with the milky grey medium of the room.
'Treatment of these disorders is, at the present time, hurmph symptomatic.' The doctor suddenly threw himself back in his chair and burst into peals of metallic laughter. Carl watched him appalled....
'The man is insane,' he thought. The doctor's face went blank as a gambler's. Carl felt an odd sensation in his stomach like the sudden stopping of an elevator. The doctor was studying the file in front of him. He spoke in a tone of slightly condescending amusement:
'Don't look so frightened, young man. Just a professional joke. To say treatment is symptomatic means there is
