would fall apart.
The ancients had first learned to keep endocrine deviates
such as the diabetic alive with drugs. Later they learned with
other drugs to 'cure' the far more prevalent disease, schizoph-
renia, that was jamming their hospitals. This big change
came when the ancients used these same drugs on everyone to
control the private and public irrationality of their time and
stop the wars.
In this new, drugged world, the schizophrene thrived better
than any, and the world became patterned on him. But, just
as the diabetic was still diabetic, the schizophrene was still
himself, plus the drugs. Meanwhile, everyone had forgotten
what it was the drugs did to youthat the emotions experi-
enced were blurred emotions, that insight was at an isolated
level of rationality because the drugs kept true feelings
from ever emerging.
How inconceivable it would be to Helen and the other
people of this world to live on as little drug as possible . . . to
experience the conflicting emotions, the interplay of passion
and logic that almost tore you apart! Sober, the ancients
called it, and they lived that way most of the time, with
only the occasional crude and club-like effects of alcohol or
narcotics to relieve their chronic anxiety.
By taking as little hypothalamic block as possible, he and
Clara were able to desire their fantastic attachment, to delight
in an absolutely illogical situation unheard of in their society. .
But the society would judge their refusal to take hypothalamic
block in only one sense. The weight of this judgment stood
before him in the smouldering words,
When Clara did appear, she was searching myopically in
the wrong vicinity of the statue. He did not call to her at
once, letting the sight of her smooth out the tensions in him,
convert all the conflicts into this one intense longing to be
with her.
Her halting search for him was deeply touching, like that of
a tragic little puppet in a darkening dumbshow. He saw sud-
denly how like puppets the two of them were. They were
moved by the strengthening wires of a new life of feeling to
batter clumsily at an implacable stage setting that would
finally leave them as bits of wood and paper.
Then suddenly in his arms Clara was at the same time
hungrily moving and tense with fear of discovery. Little
sounds of love and fear choked each other in her throat. Her
blonde head pressed tightly into his shoulder and she clung
to him with desperation.
She said, 'Conrad was disturbed by my tension this morn-
ing and made me take a sleeping compound. I've just awak-
ened.'
