Fergesson said in a solemn, formal voice, “I admire your spirit.”

Laughing, Hoppy said with a stammer, “Th-thanks, Mr. Fergesson.”

One of the repairmen handed him a multiplex FM tuner. “It drifts. See what you can do for the alignment.”

“Okay,” Hoppy said, taking it in his metal extensors. “I sure will. I’ve done a lot of aligning, at home; I’m experienced with that.” He had found such work easiest of all: he barely had to concentrate on the set. It was as if the task were made to order for him and his abilities.

Reading the calendar on her kitchen wall, Bonny Keller saw that this was the day her friend Bruno Bluthgeld saw her psychiatrist Doctor Stockstill at his office in Berkeley. In fact, he had already seen Stockstill, had had his first hour of therapy and had left. Now he no doubt was driving back to Livermore and his own office at the Radiation Lab, the lab at which she had worked years ago before she had gotten pregnant: she had met Doctor Bluthgeld, there, back in 1975. Now she was thirty-one years old and living in West Marin; her husband George was now vice-principal of the local grammar school, and she was very happy.

“Well, not very happy. Just moderately—tolerably—happy. She still took analysis herself—once a week now instead of three times—and in many respects she understood herself, her unconscious drives and paratactic systematic distortions of the reality situation. Analysis, six years of it, had done a great deal for her, but she was not cured. There was really no such thing as being cured; the “illness” was life itself, and a constant growth (or rather a viable growing adaptation) had to continue, or psychic stagnation would result.