Read He Who Shapes for Free Online Page A

abolished hunger, though the back-
    woods orphan would still rather receive a package of food
    concentrates from a human being who cares for him than to
    obtain a warm meal from an automat unit in the middle of the
    jungle.
    "Physical welfare is now every man's right, in excess. The
    reaction to this has occurred in the area of mental health.
    Thanks to technology, the reasons for many of the old social
    problems have passed, and along with them went many of the
    reasons for psychic distress. But between the black of yesterday
    and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with
    nostalgia, and fear of the future, which cannot be expressed on a
    purely material plane, is now being represented by a willful
    seeking after historical anxiety-modes . . ."
    The phone-box buzzed briefly. Render did not hear it over
    the Eighth.
    "We are afraid of what we do not know," he continued, "and
    tomorrow is a very great unknown. My own specialized area of
    psychiatry did not even exist thirty years ago. Science is
    capable of, advancing itself so rapidly now that there is a
    genuine public uneasiness1 might even say 'distress'as to the
    logical outcome: the total mechanization of everything in the
    world..."
    He passed near the desk as the phone buzzed again. He
    switched off his microphone and softened the Eighth.
    "Hello?"
    "Saint Moritz," she said.
    "Davos," he replied firmly.
    "Charlie, you are most exasperating!"
    "Jill, dearso are you."
    "Shall we discuss it tonight?"
    "There is nothing to discuss!"
    "You'll pick me up at five, though?"
    He hesitated, then:
    "Yes, at five. How come the screen is blank?"
    "I've had my hair fixed. I'm going to surprise you again."
    He suppressed an idiot chuckle, said, "Pleasantly, I hope.
    Okay, see you then," waited for her "goodbye," and broke the
    connection.
    He transpared the windows, turned off the light on his desk,
    and looked outside.
    Gray again overhead, and many slow flakes of snowwan-
    dering, not being blown about muchmoving downwards and
    then losing themselves in the tumult . . .
    He also saw, when he opened the window and leaned out,
    the place off to the left where Irizarry had left his next-to-last
    mark on the world.
    He closed the window and listened to the rest of the
    symphony. It had been a week since he had gone blindspinning
    with Eileen. Her appointment was for one o'clock.
    He remembered her fingertips brushing over his face, like
    leaves, or the bodies of insects, learning his appearance in the
    ancient manner of the blind. The memory was not altogether
    pleasant. He wondered why.
    Far below, a patch of hosed pavement was blank once again;
    under a thin, fresh shroud of white, it was slippery as glass. A
    building custodian hurried outside and spread salt on it, before
    someone slipped and hurt himself.
    Sigmund was the myth of Fenris come alive. After Render
    had instructed Mrs. Hedges, "Show them in," the door had
    begun to open, was suddenly pushed wider, and a pair of
    smoky-yellow eyes stared in at him. The eyes were set in a
    strangely inisshapen dog-skull.
    Sigmund's was not a low canine brow, slanting up slightly
    from the muzzle; it was a high, shaggy cranium, making the
    eyes appear even more deep-set than they actually were.
    Render shivered slightly at the size and aspect of that head.
    The muties he had seen had all been puppies. Sigmund was full
    grown, and his gray-black fur had a tendency to bristle, which
    made him appear somewhat larger than a normal specimen of
    the breed.
    He stared in at Render in a very un-doglike way and made a
    growling noise which sounded too much like; "Hello, doctor,"
    to have been an accident.
    Render nodded and stood.
    "Hello, Sigmund," he said. "Come in."
    The dog turned his head, sniffing the air of the roomas
    though deciding whether or not to trust his ward within its
    confines. Then he returned his stare to Render, dipped his head
    in an affirmative, and shouldered the door open. Perhaps the
    entire encounter