"Forty-three Rizal days ago, a man named Frederick Zubin got a voco call. It was from a woman—a beautiful woman he'd never seen before. She congratulated him on it being his sixty-first birthday, and said an anonymous well-wisher wanted to send him a little present.
"A messenger popped in almost before the woman hung up. He gave Zubin a package about the size of a pound box of candy. Unwrapped, it turned out to be a metal case with a nameplate stamped 'Apex Perceptual Intensifier'. Another plate, on the back, said it was 'Model DXG'! Those were the only marks on it anywhere, inside or out. There weren't any instructions as to what it was supposed to do or how to use it.
"Zubin was curious, in his dull, lethargic, conditioned way. He fiddled with the switches and dials.
"Eventually the thing came on, of course. It practically sent him through the roof. Colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings—all his senses were sharpened so far beyond anything he'd ever known before that he thought at first he was going crazy.
"If Zubin had had his way, then, we'd probably never have known about his little present. But his wife, in the next room, caught the fringe effect. It wasn't strong enough to hook her, the way it had Zubin himself, but it did scare her half to death. She decided anything that potent must be immoral, or illegal, or both, so she called your office in a hurry.
"Your psych boys ran poor Zubin through all the tests, from A to Izzard. They couldn't find anything wrong with him, or any harm done, except for one key point: His conditioning had been shattered. From a dreary, phlegmatic lump of protoplasmic tranquility, he'd been transformed into a human being—the kind of eager, intense, raw-nerved, inconsistent, emotional human being we used to have back two hundred years ago, before the laws that made conditioning compulsory.
"That scared everybody. As unit controller for Rizal Security, you ordered a full-scale check.
"In ten days, your men turned up 736 duplicates of Zubin's gadget. The story on all of them was the same: A good-looking girl had vocoed, congratulated whoever it was on having a birthday or anniversary or promotion, and then sent up a thrill-mill.
"Beyond that, you didn't get far. It turned out there wasn't any Apex syndicate or cartel or work coadunate listed anywhere. No one had ever heard of any such device as a perceptual intensifier. The messengers who delivered the packages worked from voco calls themselves; they even made their pick-ups at robot sorter stations. And when you tried to track down the girl who'd done the calling, you found her face apparently belonged to a youngster named Celeste Stelpa who's been certified as dead ever since the Kel blasted Bejak II four years ago.
"As for the technical end of things, nine of your lab men lost their conditioning before they could even get a thrill-mill apart. When they finally did tear one down successfully, they found it wasn't anything too remarkable, really—just a routine sort of gadget that regrouped standard circuits and miniquipment to produce interpulsational patterns of alpha and zeta waves. Effect-wise, that erases the synaptical threadings set up by Educational Psych's conditioning process, so that experiences come through sharp and clear, at maximum voltage, instead of dulled and blurred. It's a permanent change, too—though whether that's accidental or by design, we still don't know.