The park was like a quiet backwater in the eddying rush of
the evening city. Bill felt conspicuous and vulnerable in the
gloaming light. Above all, he felt a new loneliness, and he
knew that now Clara felt it, too. They needed each other as
each had been, before fear had bleached their feeling to
white bones of desperation.
They were not taking their drugs as prescribed, and for that
they would be horribly punished. That was the only unforgiv-
able
found out what life could be, in the same act that would sure-
ly take life from them. Their powerful emotions they had
found in abundance simply by refusing to take the drugs, and
by being together briefly each fifth day in a dangerous breach
of all convention. The closer their discovery and the greater
their terror, the more desperately they needed even their
terror, and the more impossible became the delight of their
first meetings.
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 Mor-
ris blackened against the sunset. The hollowed granite eyes
bore down on him out of an undecipherable dark... the
ancient, implacable face of the Medicorps. As if to pro-
nounce a sentence on his present crimes by a magical dis-
closure of the weight of centuries, a pool of sulphurous light
and leaf shadows danced on the painted plaque at the base
of the statue:
On this spot in' the Gregorian year 1996, Alfred Morris
announced to an assembly of war survivors the hypothal-
amic block. His stirring words were, 'The new drug se-
lectively halts at the thalamic brain the upward flow of
unconscious stimuli and the downward flow of unconscious
motivations. It acts as a screen between the cerebrum and
the psychosomatic discharge system. Using hypothalamic
block, we will not act emotively, we will initiate acts only
from the logical demands of situations.'
This announcement and the subsequent wholehearted ac-
tion of the war-weary people made the taking of hypothal-
amic block obligatory. This put an end to the powerful
play of unconscious mind in the public and private af-
fairs of the ancient world. It ended the great paranoid
wars and saved mankind.
In the strange evening light, the letters seemed alive, a cen-
turies-old condemnation of any who might try to go back to
the ancient pre-pharmacy days. Of course, it was not really
possible to go back. Without drugs, everybody and all society
