Captain Thiel glanced at her sharply. "What do you mean by that, child?" "Oh, nothing," Mary said hastily. "I just thought maybe he was." "Let me see your pharmacase," he said rather severely. Mary slipped the pharmacase off the belt at her waist and handed it to him. Captain Thiel extracted the prescription card from the back and threw it away. He slipped a new card in the taping machine on his desk and punched out a new prescription, which he reinserted in the pharmacase. In the space on the front, he wrote directions for Mary to take the drugs numbered from left to right. Mary watched his serious face and remembered that he had complimented her about being prettier than Susan. "Captain Thiel, is your hypoalter as handsome as you are?" The young medicop emptied the remains of the old prescription from the pharmacase and took it to the dispensary in the corner, where he slid it into the filling slot. He seemed unmoved by her question and simply muttered, "Much handsomer." The machine automatically filled the case from the punched card on its back and he returned it to Mary. "Are you taking your drugs exactly as prescribed? You know there are very strict laws about that, and as soon as you are fourteen, you will be held to them." Mary nodded solemnly. Great straitjackets, who didn't know there were laws about taking your drugs? There was a long pause and Mary knew she was supposed to leave. She wanted, though, to stay with Captain Thiel and talk with him. She wondered how it would be if he were appointed her father. Mary was not hurt that her shy compliment to him had gone unnoticed. She had only wanted something to talk about. Finally she said desperately, "Captain Thiel, how is it possible for a body to change as much from one Ego shift to another as it does between Susan and me?" "There isn't all the change you imagine," he said. "Have you had your first physiology?" "Yes. I was very good...." Mary saw from his smile that her inadvertent little conceit had trapped her. "Then, Miss Mary Walden, how do _you_ think it is possible?" Why did teachers and medicops have to be this way? When all you wanted was to have them talk to you, they turned everything around and made you think. She quoted unhappily from her schoolbook, "The main things in an ego shift are the two vegetative nervous systems that translate the conditions of either personality to the blood and other organs right from the brain. The vegetative nervous systems change the rate at which the liver burns or stores sugar and the rate at which the kidneys excrete...." Through the closed door to the other room, Mrs. Harris's voice raised at the visiophone said distinctly, "_But, Mr. Walden...._" "Reabsorb," corrected Captain Thiel. "What?" She didn't know what to listen to--the medicop or the distant voice of Mrs. Harris. "It's better to think of the kidneys as reabsorbing salts and nutrients from the filtrated blood." "Oh."