heard Clara laugh. Her warm, clear laughter, teasing him,
tumbled forth like a cloud of gay butterflies.
"Are you afraid to see me here at home because my hus-
band might walk in on us?"
Bill had been put completely at ease by this bantering indi-
cation that Clara knew who he was and welcomed him as an
intriguing diversion. Quite literally, the one person who could
not walk in on them, as the ancients thought of it, was his
own hypoalter, Conrad Manz.
Bill finished retouching his make-up and hurried to leave
the apartment. But this time, as he passed the table where
Mary's dinner was set out, he decided to write a few words
to the child, no matter how empty they sounded to himself.
The note he left explained that he had some early work to do
at the microfilm library where he worked.
Just as Bill was leaving the apartment, the visiophone
buzzed. In his hurry Bill flipped the switch before he thought.
Too late, his band froze and the implications of this call, an
hour before anyone would normally be home, shot a shaft
of terror through him.
But it was not the image of a medicop that formed on
the screen. The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Harris,
one of Mary's teachers.
It was strange that she should have thought he might be
home. The shift for children was half a day earlier than
for adults, so the parents could have half their rest day free.
This afternoon would be for Mary the first classes of her
shift, but the teacher must have guessed something was wrong
with the shifting schedules in Mary's family. Or had the child
told her?
Mrs. Harris explained rather dramatically that Mary was
being neglected. What could he say to her? That he was a
criminal breaking drug regulations in the most flagrant man-
ner? That nothing, not even the child appointed to him,
meant more to him than his wife's own hypoalter? Bill finally
ended the hopeless and possibly dangerous conversation by
turning off the receiver and leaving the apartment.
Bill realized that now, for both him and Clara, the greatest
joy had been those first few times together. The enormous
threat of a Medicorps retaliation took the pleasure from their
contact and they came together desperately because, having
tasted this fantastic nonconformity and the new undrugged
intimacy, there was no other way for them. Even now as. he
drove through the triffic towards where she would be waiting,
he was not so much concerned with meeting Clara in their
fear-poisoned present as with the vivid, aching remembrance
of what those meetings once had really been like.
He recalled an evening they had spent lying on the
summer lawn of the park, looking out at the haze-dimmed
stars. It had been shortly after Clara joined him in cutting
down on the drugs, and the clear memory of their quiet laugh-
ter so captured his mind now that Bill amost tangled his
car in the traffic.
In memory he kissed her again and, as it had been, the
newly cut grass mixed with the exciting fragrance of her
skin. After the kiss they continued a mock discussion of the
ancient word "sin". Bill pretended to be trying to explain
the meaning of the word to her, sometimes with definitions
that kept them laughing and sometimes with demonstrational
kisses that stopped their laughter.
He could remember Clara's face turned to him in the eve-
ning light with an outrageous parody of interest. He could
hear himself saying, "You see, the ancients would say we
are not sinning because they would disagree with the medi-
cops that you and Helen are two completely different peo-
ple, or that Conrad and I are not the same person."
Clara kissed him with an air of tentative experimentation.
"Mmm, no. I can't say I care for that interpretation."
"You'd rather be sinning?"
"Definitely."
"Well, if the ancients did agree with the medicops that we
are distinct from our alters, Helen and Conrad, then they
would say we are sinningbut not for the same reasons the
Medicorps would give."
"That," asserted Clara, "is where I get lost. If this sinning
business is going to be worth anything at all, it has to be
something you can identify."
Bill cut his car out of the main stream of traffic and to-
wards the park, without interrupting his memory.
"Well, darling, I don't want to confuse you, but the medi-
cops would say we are sinning only because you are my wife's
bypoalter, and I am your husband's hyperalterin other words
for the very reason the ancients would say we are not sinning.
Furthermore, if either of us were with anyone else, the medi-
cops would think it was perfectly all right, and so would
Conrad and Helen. Provided, of course, I took a hyperalter
and you took a hypoalter only."
"Of course," Clara said, and Bill hurried over the gloomy
fact.
"The ancients, on the other hand, would say we are sin-
ning because we are making love to someone we are not
married to."
"But what's the matter with that? Everybody does it."
"The ancient Moderns didn't. Or, that is, they often did,
but..."
Clara brought her full lips hungrily to his. "Darling, I think
the ancient Moderns had the right idea, though I don't see
how they ever arrived at it."
Bill grinned. "It was just an invention of theirs, along with
the wheel and atomic energy."
That evening was long gone by as Bill stopped the little
taxi beside the park and left it there for the next user. He
walked across the lawns towards the statue where he and
Clara always met. The very thought of entering one's own
hypoalter's house was so unnerving that Bill brought himself
to do it only by first meeting Clara near the statue. As he
walked between the trees, Bill could not again capture the
spirit of that evening he had been remembering. The Medi-
corps was too close. It was impossible to laugh that away now.
Bill arrived at the statue, but Clara was not there. He
waited impatiently while a livid sunset coagulated between
the branches of the great trees. Clara should have been there
first. It was easier for her, because she was leaving her shift,
and without doing it prematurely.
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 sin in their world. By committing it, he and Clara had
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