his identifying wristband to a lock-free and dialled his cloth-
ing sizes.
In this way he procured a neatly wrapped, clean shifting
costume from the slot. He put it on without bothering to re-
turn to his shower room.
He shouted a loud good-bye to no one in particular among
the several men and women in the baths and stepped out
on to the street.
Conrad felt too good even to be sorry that his shift was
over. After all, nothing happened except you came to, five
days later, on your next shift. The important thing was the
rest day. He had always said the last days of the shift should
be a work day; then you would be glad it was over. He
guessed the idea was to rest the body before another person-
ality took over. Well, poor old Bill Walden never got a rested
body. He probably slept off the first twelve hours.
Walking unhurriedly through the street crowds, Conrad en-
tered a public shifting station and found an empty room. As
he started to open the door, a girl came out of the adjoining
booth and Conrad hastily averted his glance. She was still
rearranging her hair. There were so many rude people nowa-
days who didn't seem to care at all about the etiquette of
shifting, womOn particularly. They were always redoing their
hair or make-up where a person couldn't help seeing them.
Conrad pressed his identifying wristband to the lock and
entered the booth he had picked. The act automatically sent
the time and his shift number to Medicorps Headquarters.
Once inside the shifting room, Conrad went to the lava-
tory and turned on the tap of make-up solvent. In spite of
losing two hours of his rest day, he decided to be decent to
old Bill, though he was half tempted to leave his make-up
on. It was a pretty foul joke, of course, especially on a hu-
mourless fellow like poor Walden.
Conrad creamed his face thoroughly and then washed in
water and used the automatic dryer. He looked at his strong
lined face features in the mirror. They displayed a less dis-
tinct expression of his own personality with the make-up
gone.
He turned away from the mirror and it was only then that
he remembered he hadn't spoken to his wife before shifting.
Well, he couldn't decently call up and let her see him with-
out make-up.
He stepped across to the visiophone and set the machine to
deliver his spoken message in type: 'Hello, Clara. Sorry I
forgot to call you before. Bill Walden is forcing me to shift
early again. I hope you're not still upset about that business
this morning. Be a good girl and smile at me on the next
shift. I love you. Conrad.'
For a moment, when the shift came, the body of Conrad
Manz stood moronically uninhabited. Then, rapidly, out of
