Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

cold, scientific zeal. It was more favored by women than men, but V67 found it occasionally beneficial. He had sufficient virility to dismiss as irrelevant the conventional sneers which were directed against the male astravasin users. He snuffed the drug into his nostrils and accelerated his pace. He was facing a trying ordeal. The patient awaiting him in the Gland Surgery was a victim of a hideous maladjustment of secretions. The wretch had actually reverted to the mores of the jungle, and killed his wife in a fit of jealous rage. To steady his perspective, V67 walked to the edge of the pavement and looked down into the abyss beneath him. Far below, the outer extremities of the lower level platforms abutted above the great central artery of Cosmopolis. Down, down he stared, past the projecting tiers and platforms, past the laboratory levels and the industrial levels and the agrarian levels till his gaze rested on the cyclopean turbines five miles below. A vertigo swept over him. He withdrew his gaze and walked on. Level TG | was a running tier of laboratories. At intervals of fifty feet, circular doors opened in the resovin facade that ran the length of the entire cityward wall of the level. They were surmounted by blue-litten classification plates bearing labels in radiumite script. He passed the Skin and Exoskeleton Correctional Laboratory, the Sympathetic System Clinic, the Muscle and Nerve Surgery, the Epithelial and Glandular Tissue Laboratory, and the Tumor Removal Center. There was a long line of patients waiting to enter the Removal Center. V67 shivered inwardly. He did not like to think about cancer. It was a major blight—the one appalling malady that had successfully defied the medical innovations of fifty centuries. A quarter of the population was afflicted with malignant tumors of one sort or another. The Health Super- visors affirmed that the malady was directly traceable to over-indulgence in electric baths and cosmic-ray rejuvenators, but V67 was skeptical of their glib and facile explanations. He met several co-workers as he progressed toward the surgery. Bio-chemist H43, grave and severe in his india-rubber frock, greeted him with upraised palm as he emerged from Bio-chemical Clinic R66, and T52 saluted him from the edge of the pavement. He passed quickly by K99,.L90 and W43. “How is your wife?” asked W43. V67 said: “Very well, thanks,” and experienced a momentary qualm. It was absurd, of course. In adoring Mechanical Companion GH8 he had adhered to a highly moral conduct pattern, His wife could not possibly resent his attentions to an artificial woman. The Dictator of Emotional Arts had proclaimed after extensive research and experimentation that no normal wife ‘could be jealous of a Mechanical Companion. Jealousy was a disease anyway— a pathological reversion to a primitive level of thought and feeling—but even when it did arise, its malignant shafts were directed against flesh-and-blood realities. The Dictator of Emotional Arts was a man of vast erudition, and V67 was content to abide by his decision. : V67 was now abreast of the Gland Surgery. Turning in at the bulb-sur- mounted entrance he passed quickly down a long, blue-tit corridor, and nodded to the attendant at the door of the operating-room. . 6