-disciplined child.

George was aware that the television romances were designed to shape
his attitudes and his emotional reactions. The stories endlessly
repeated his mother's philosophy. All men were pictured as beasts
crudely dominated by lust. Women, on the other hand, were always
sensitive, delicate, modest, and intelligent; their martyrdom to the
men in their lives was called love. To pay for their animal lusts, men
were expected to slave away their lives earning things--kitchen
gadgets, household appliances, fancy cars, luxuries and
stockholdings--for their patient, long-suffering wives.

_And it's all a fake!_ George thought. He had seen his Mother drive
two men to their graves and trade off two others because they hadn't
produced luxuries as fast as she demanded. His mother and his
pinch-faced sisters were pampered, selfish, rock-hard Amazons; by no
conceivable twist of imagination could they be called martyrs to
anything.

That seemed self-evident, but George had no way of knowing if any
other man had ever reasoned out the same conclusion. Maybe he was
unique because of his immunity to the compound. He was sure that very
few men--possibly none--had reached marriage age with their immunity
still undiscovered.

* * * * *

George was lucky, in a way: he knew the truth about himself when he
was seven, and he had time to adjust to it--to plan the role he had
been acting for the past twelve years. His early childhood had been a
livid nightmare, primarily because of the precocious cruelty of his
two sisters. Shortly before his seventh birthday they forced him to
take part in a game they called cocktail party. The game involved only
one activity: the two little girls filled a glass with an unidentified
liquid, and ordered George to drink. Afterward, dancing up and down in
girlish glee, they said they had given him the compound.

George had seen the love stories on television; he knew how he was
expected to act. He gave a good performance--better than his sisters
realized, for inside his mind George was in turmoil. They had given
him the compound (true, years before he should have taken it), and
nothing had happened. He had felt absolutely nothing; he was immune!
If anyone had ever found out, George would have been given a life
sentence to the national hero's corps; or, more probably, the Morals
Squad would have disposed of him altogether.

From that day on, George lived with gui