For them, Conrad had to admit, Santa Fe was a great deal more complex
than 100,000 consuming, moderately producing human bodies. It was
200,000 human personalities, two to each body. Conrad wondered
sometimes what they would have done if the three and four personality
cases so common back in the 20th and 21st Centuries had been allowed to
reproduce. The 200,000 personalities in Santa Fe were difficult enough.
Like all cities, Santa Fe operated in five shifts, A, B, C, D, and E.
Just as it was supposed to be for Conrad in his city, today was rest
day for the 20,000 hypoalters on D-shift in Santa Fe. Tonight at around
6:00 P.M. they would all go to shifting rooms and be replaced by their
hyperalters, who had different tastes in food and pleasure and took
different drugs.
Tomorrow would be rest day for the hyperalters on E-shift and in the
evening they would turn things over to their hyperalters.
The next day it would be rest for the A-shift hyperalters and three
days after that the D-shift hyperalters, including Bill Walden, would
rest till evening, when Conrad and the D-shift hypoalters everywhere
would again have their five day use of their bodies.
Right now the trouble with Santa Fe's retired population, which worked
only for its own maintenance, was that too many elderly people on the
D-shift and E-shift had been dying off. This point was brought out by a
dapper young department head from Communications.
Conrad groaned when, as he knew would happen, a Medicorps officer
promptly set out on an exhaustive demonstration that Medicorps
predictions of deaths for Santa Fe had indicated clearly that
Communications should have been moving people from D-shift and E-shift
into the area.
Actually, it appeared that someone from Communications had blundered
and had overloaded the quota of people on A-shift and B-shift moving
to Santa Fe. Thus on one rest day there weren't enough people working
to keep things going, and later in the week there were so many
available workers that they were clogging the city.
None of this was heated exchange or in any way emotional. It was just
interminably, exhaustively logical and boring. Conrad fidgeted through
two hours of it, seeing his chance for a rocket race dissolving. When
at last the problem of balanced shift-populations for Santa Fe was
worked out, it took him and the other traffic men only a few minutes
to apply their tables and reschedule traffic to coordinate with the
population changes.
Disgusted, Conrad walked over to the Tennis Club and had lunch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account