A Case of Conscience

It was; but Liu was frightened and Michelis in a murderously ugly mood by the time the next train came through and took them out; he was glad that he had not decided to argue with his predecessors in the barrel. Anybody who had tried the same thing with him might well have been killed. The fact that he was drenched with perfume as the serpentine passed through the next cell did not exactly improve his temper, but at least the cell did not require anyone's participation. It was a sizable and beautiful garden made of blown glass in every possible color, in which live Javanese models were posed in dioramas of discovered lust; the situations depicted were melodramatic in the extreme but, except for their almost imperceptible breathing, the models did not move a muscle; they were almost as motionless as the glass foliage. To Michelis' surprise — for outside the sciences he had almost no aesthetic sense — Liu regarded these lascivious, immobile scenes with a kind of withdrawn, grave approval.

"It's an art, to suggest a dance without moving," she murmured suddenly, as though she had sensed his uneasiness. "Difficult with the brush, far more difficult with the body. I think I know the man who designed this; there couldn't be but one."

He stared at her as though he had never seen her before, and by the pure current of jealousy that shot through him he knew for the first time that he loved her. "Who?" he said hoarsely.

"Oh, Tsien Hi, of course. The last classicist. I thought he was dead, but this isn't a copy — "

The serpentine slowed before the exit doors long enough for two models, looking obscenely alive in very modest movement, to hand them each a fan covered with brushed drawings in ink. A single glance was enough to make Michelis thrust his fan in his pocket, unwilling to acknowledge ownership of it by so definite a gesture as throwing it away; but Liu pointed mutely to an ideogram and folded hers with reverence. "Yes," she said. "It is he; these are the original sketches. I never thought I'd own one — "

The train lurched forward suddenly. The garden vanished, and they were plunged into a vague, colored chaos of meaningless emotions. There was nothing to see or hear or feel, yet Michelis was shaken to his soul, and then shaken again, and again. He cried out, and dimly heard others crying. He fought for control of himself, but it eluded him, and… no, he had it now, or almost had it… If he could only think for an instant -

For an instant, he managed it, and saw what was happening. The new cell was a long corridor, divided by invisible currents of moving air into fifteen sub-cells. Inside each sub-cell was a colored smoke, and in each smoke was some gas which went instantly home to the hypothalamus. Michelis recognized some of them: they were crude hallucinogenic compounds which had been developed during the heyday of tranquilizer research in the mid-twentieth century. Under the waves of fright, religious exaltation, berserker bravery, lust for power, and less namable emotions which each induced, he felt a mounting intellectual anger at such irresponsible wholesale tampering with the pharmacology of the mind for the sake of a momentary "experience"; but he knew that this kind of jolt — breathing was anything but uncommon in the Shelter state. The smokes had the reputation of being non-addicting, which for the most part they were — but they were certainly habit-forming, which is quite a different thing, and not necessarily less dangerous.

A hazy, formless curtain of pink at the far end of the corridor proved to be a pure free-serotonin antagonist in high concentration, a true ataraxic which washed his mind free of every emotion but contentment with everything in all the wide universe. What must be, must be… it is all for the best… there is peace in everything -

In this state of uncritical yea-saying, the passengers on the serpentine were run through an assembly line of elaborate and bestial practical jokes. It ended with a 3-V tape recreation of Belsen , in which the scenarist had cunningly made it appear that the people on the serpentine would be next into the ovens. As the furnace door closed behind them there was a blast of mind-cleansing oxygen; staggering with horror at what they had been about to accept with joy, the passengers were helped off the train to join a guffawing audience of previous victims. Michelis' only impulse was to escape — above all he did not want to stay to laugh at the next load of passengers in shock — but he was too exhausted to get beyond the nearest bench in the amphitheater, and Liu could hardly walk even that far. They were forced to sit there in the press until they had made a better recovery.