"Mrs. Manz," he finally said, "I would like to meet you in the park across from your home." To this awkward opening he owed the first time he had 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 husband might _walk in on us_?" Bill had been put completely at ease by this bantering indication 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 makeup 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 hand 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 that 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 manner? 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 non-conformity and the new undrugged intimacy, there was no other way for them. Even now as he drove through the traffic toward 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.