lt and fear. As the years
passed, he several times stole capsules of the compound from his
mother's love-cabinet and gulped them down. Sometimes he felt a little
giddy, and once he was sick. But he experienced no reaction which
could possibly be defined as love. Not that he had any idea what that
reaction should have been, but he knew he was supposed to feel very
wicked and he never did.

Each failure increased the agony of guilt; George drove himself to be
far better behaved than he was required to be. He dreaded making one
mistake. If his mother or a Director examined it too closely, they
might find out his real secret.

George's basic education began when he was assigned to his confinement
room above the garage after his tenth birthday. Thereafter his time
was thoroughly regulated by law. Three hours a day he watched
television; three hours he spent in his gym, building a
magnificent--and salable--body; for four hours he listened to the
educational tapes. Arithmetic, economics, salesmanship, business
techniques, accounting, mechanics, practical science: the things he
had to know in order to earn a satisfactory living for the woman who
bought him in marriage.

He learned nothing else and as he grew older he became very conscious
of the gaps in his education. For instance, what of the past? Had the
world always been this sham he lived in? That question he had the good
sense not to ask.

But George had learned enough from his lessons in practical science to
guess what the compound really was, what it had to be: a mixture of
aphrodisiacs and a habit-forming drug. The compound was calculated to
stir up a man's desire to the point where he would give up anything in
order to satisfy it. Boys were given increased doses during their
adolescence; by the time they married, they were addicts, unable to
leave the compound alone.

George couldn't prove his conclusion. He had no idea how many other
men had followed the same line of reasoning and come up with the same
answer. But why was George immune? There was only one way he could
figure it: it must have happened because his sisters gave him the
first draft when he was seven. But logically that didn't make much
sense.

Bachelors were another sort of enemy: men who shirked their duty and
deserted their wives. It seemed unreasonable to believe a man could
desert his wife, when first he had to break himself of addiction to
the compound. George had always supposed that bache