Please get my pharmacase for me and it will be all right.'
She was so desperate to convince him that Conrad got the
pharmacase and a glass of water for her only to appease the
white face of fright.
Within a few minutes of taking the sleeping compound, she
was calm. As he put her back to bed, she laughed with a
lazy indolence.
'Oh, Conrad, you take it so seriously. I only needed a
sleeping compound very badly and now I feel fine. I'll sleep
all day. It's a rest day, isn't it? Now go race a rocket and
stop worrying and thinking about calling the medicops.'
But Conrad did not go rocket racing as he had planned.
Clara had been asleep only a few minutes when there was
a call on the visiophone; they wanted him at the office. The
city of Santa Fe would be completely out of balance within
twelve shifts if revised plans were not put into operation im-
mediately. They were to start during the next five days while
he would be out of shift. In order to carry on the first day
of their next shift, he and the other three traffic managers
he worked with would have to come down today and famil-
iarize themselves with the new operations.
There was no getting out of it. His rest day was spoiled.
Conrad resented it all the more because Santa Fe was clear
out on the edge of their traffic district and could have been
revised out of the Mexican offices just as well. But those
boys down there rested all five days of their shift.
Conrad looked in on Clara before he left and found her
asleep in the total suspension of proper drug level. The
unpleasant memory of her behaviour made him squirm, but
now that the episode was over, it no longer worried him.
It was typical of him that, things having been set straight
in the proper manner, he did not think of her again until
late in the afternoon.
As early as 1950, the pioneer communications engineer
Norbert Wiener had pointed out that there might be a close
parallel between disassociation of personalities and the dis-
ruption of a communication system. Wiener referred back
specifically to the first clear description, by Morton Prince,
of multiple personalities existing together in the same human
body. Prince had described only individual cases and his ob-
servations were not altogether acceptable in Wiener's time.
Nevertheless, in the schizophrenic society of the 29th Cen-
tury, a major managerial problem was that of balancing the
communicating and non-communicating populations in a
city.
As far as Conrad and the other traffic men present at the
conference were concerned, Santa Fe was a resort and retire-
ment area of 100,000 human bodies, alive and consuming
more than they produced every day of the year. Whatever
