where the complaints would be so strong and no request for
leniency forthcoming. Conrad knew now, of course. Bill had
felt his hate.
It was nearing the end. Death would come to Bill with elec-
tronic fingers. A ghostly probing in his mind and suddenly. . .
Clara's great unhappiness and the way she turned her head
into his shoulder to cry forced him to calm the rising
panic in himself, and again to caress the fear from her.
Even later, when they lay where the moonlight thrust into
the room an impalpable shaft of alabaster, he loved her only
as a succour. Carefully, slowly, smoothing out her mind,
drawing it away from all the other things, drawing it down
into this one thing. Gathering all her mind into her senses and
holding it there. Then quickly taking it away from her in a
moaning spasm so that now she was murmuring, murmuring,
palely drifting. Sleeping like a loved child.
For a long, long time he watched the white moon cut
its arc across their window. He listened with a deep pleasure to
her evenly breathing sleep. But slowly he realized that her
breath had changed, that the body so close to his was tens-
ing. His heart gave a great bound and tiny moths of horror
fluttered along his back. He raised himself and saw that
the eyes were open in the silver light. Even through the make-
up he saw that they were Helen's eyes.
H did the only thing left for him. He shifted. But in
that terrible instant he understood something he had not antic-
ipated. In Helen's eyes there was not only intense shame
over shifting into her hypoalter's home; there was not only
the disgust with himself for breaking communication codes.
He saw that, as a woman of the 20th Century might have
felt, Helen hated Clara as a sexual rival. She hated Clara
doubly because he had turned not to some other woman,
but to the other part of herself whom she could never know.
As she shifted, Bill knew that the next light he saw would
be on the adamant face of the Medicorps.
Major Paul Grey, with two other Medicorps officers, en-
tered the Walden apartment about two hours after Bill left it
to meet Clara. Major Grey was angry with himself. Important
information on a case of communication breaks and drug
refusal could be learned by letting it run its course under ob-
servation. But he had not intended Conrad Manz's life to
be endangered, and certainly he would not have taken the
slightest chance on what they found in the Walden apart-
ment if he had expected it this early.
Major Grey blamed himself for what had happened to Mary
Walden. He should have had the machines watching Susan
and Mary at the same time that they were relaying wrist-
band data for Bill and Conrad and for Helen and Clara to
his office.
