But the most flagrant abuser of such morbid little exchanges would have been horrified to learn that right here, in the middle of the daylight traffic, was a man who was using his antisocial shifting power to meet in secret the wife of his own hypoalter!
Bill did not have to wonder what the Medicorps would think. Relations between hyperalters world was literally not supposed to exist for him, for it was the world of his own hypoalter, Conrad Manz.
Undoubtedly, there were people in the traffic up ahead who knew both him and Conrad, people from the other shifts who never mentioned the one to the other except in those guarded, snickering little confidences they couldn't resist telling and you couldn't resist listening to. After all, the most important person in the world was your alter. If he got sick, injured or killed, so would you.
Thus, in moments of intimacy or joviality, an undercover exchange went on ... I'll tell you about your hyperalter if you'll tell me about my hypoalter. It was orthodox bad manners that and hypoalters of opposite sex were punishable—drastically punishable.
When he arrived at the apartment, Bill remembered to order a dinner for his daughter Mary. His order, dialed from the day's menu, was delivered to the apartment pneumatically and he set it out over electric warmers. He wanted to write a note to the child, but he started two and threw both in the basket. He couldn't think of anything to say to her.
Staring at the lonely table he was leaving for Mary, Bill felt his guilt overwhelming him. He could stop the behavior which led to the guilt by taking his drugs as prescribed. They would return him immediately to the sane and ordered conformity of the world. He would no longer have to carry the fear that the Medicorps would discover he was not taking his drugs. He would no longer neglect his appointed child. He would no longer endanger the very life of Conrad's wife Clara and, of course, his own.
When you took your drugs as prescribed, it was impossible to experience such ancient and primitive emotions as guilt. Even should you miscalculate and do something wrong, the drugs would not allow any such emotional reaction. To be free to experience his guilt over the lonely child who needed him was, for these reasons, a precious thing to Bill. In all the world, this night, he was undoubtedly the only man who could and did feel one of the ancient emotions. People felt shame, not guilt; conceit, not pride; pleasure, not desire. Now that he had stopped taking his drugs as prescribed, Bill realized that the drugs allowed only an impoverished segment of a vivid emotional spectrum.
But however exciting it was to live them, the ancient emotions did not seem to act as deterrents to bad behavior. Bill's sense of guilt did not keep him from continuing to neglect Mary. His fear of being caught did not restrain him from breaking every rule of inter-alter law and loving Clara, his own hypoalter's wife.