supposed to do or how to use it.

"Zubin was curious, in his dull, lethargic, conditioned way. He fiddled with the switches and dials.

"Eventually the thing came on, of course. It practically sent him through the roof. Colors, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings—all his senses were sharpened so far beyond anything he'd ever known before that he thought at first he was going crazy.

"If Zubin had had his way, then, we'd probably never have known about his little present. But his wife, in the next room, caught the fringe effect. It wasn't strong enough to hook her, the way it had Zubin himself, but it did scare her half to death. She decided anything that potent must be immoral, or illegal, or both, so she called your office in a hurry.

"Your psych boys ran poor Zubin through all the tests, from A to Izzard. They couldn't find anything wrong with him, or any harm done, except for one key point: His conditioning had been shattered. From a dreary, phlegmatic lump of protoplasmic tranquility, he'd been transformed into a human being—the kind of eager, intense, raw-nerved, inconsistent, emotional human being we used to have back two hundred years ago, before the laws that made conditioning compulsory.

"That scared everybody. As unit controller for Rizal Security, you ordered a full-scale check.

"In ten days, your men turned up 736 duplicates of Zubin's gadget. The story on all of them was the same: A good-looking girl had vocoed, congratulated whoever it was on having a birthday or anniversary or promotion, and then sent up a thrill-mill.

"Beyond that, you didn't get far. It turned out there wasn't any Apex syndicate or cartel or work coadunate listed anywhere. No one had ever heard of any such device as a perceptual intensifier. The messengers who delivered the packages worked from voco calls themselves; they even made their pick-ups at robot sorter stations. And when you tried to track down the girl who'd done the calling, you found her face apparently belonged to a youngster named Celeste Stelpa who's been certified as dead ever since the Kel blasted Bejak II four years ago.

"As for the technical end of things, nine of your lab men lost their conditioning before they could even get a thrill-mill apart. When they finally did tear one down successfully, they found it wasn't anything too remarkable, really—just a routine sort of gadget that regrouped standard circuits and 

 Prev. P 6/55 next