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
