Contents
I have two conflicting opinions. One is that any story should stand on its own feet—which means that, generally speaking, anything a writer has to say about his own story is better left unsaid. If it’s worth saying, why didn’t he say it in the story itself?
The other opinion, however, is equally firmly fixed in my mind, and at this moment it is in direct conflict with the first. That is, I think that more people should read science fiction than appear to be willing to do so; and I think the reason for this is that many people regard it as crazy, fantastic stuff with no basis in the real world and no relevance to their own lives.
I would like to hope that some people will read this book who normally don’t read science fiction. If you are one of them, and if you begin to feel like those many others mentioned above, please pause in your reading and go on to look at the author’s note included in the back of the book.
It seems to me that science fiction can have relevance to the real world and, yes, to your own life. And some of my reasons for thinking so are set forth here. . . .
Over everyone in the room, or perhaps it was a park, the lighting cast shapes and symbols of color. The girl in the filmy gown had at one moment glittering pink eyes and, at the next, an aura of silvery hair. The man next to Forrester had golden skin and a mask of shadow. Wisps of odor drifted past him, rosebuds following sage. There were snatches of a crystalline, far-off music.
“I’m rich!” he yelled. “And alive!”
No one seemed to mind. Forrester plucked one of the colorless grapes Hara had recommended to him, rose, patted the girl in the filmy dress, and walked unsteadily down to the pool where the revelers splashed and swam in a naked tangle. In spite of the long post-revival indoctrination that had given him so many new things and removed so much trash that was old, Forrester had not lost the habit of being a little dirty minded, and he was interested in nakedness.
“It’s Forrester the rich man!” one of them shouted. Forrester smiled and waved. A girl cried, “Sing him a song! A song!” And they all splashed at him and sang:
Oh, he died and he died and he died—
(SPLASH!)
And he cried and he cried and he cried—
(SPLASH!)
With his rages and his cholers he’s a puzzle to the scholars, And he’s got a quarter of a million dollars!
Forrester!
(SPLASH! SPLASH!)
Forrester ducked without thinking, then relaxed. He allowed them to drench him with the warm, scented water. “Enjoy, enjoy!” he cried, grinning at the bare bodies. Bronze and ivory, lean or soft, every body was beautiful. He knew that none of them would think the worse of him if he touched the two snaps at throat and waist and stepped out of his clothes to join them. But he also knew that his body would not compare well with those of the Adonises, would not impress the full-breasted Venuses, and so he stayed on the rim. “Drink and be merry, for yesterday we died,” he called and squirted them at random with his joymaker. He didn’t mind that he was not as beautiful as they. At least, not at this moment. He was happy. Nothing was troubling him. Not worry, not weariness, not fear. Not even his conscience; for, although he was wasting time, he had a right to waste time.
Hara had said so. “Relax,” advised Hara. “Get acclimated. Go slow. You’ve been dead a long time.”
Forrester was well content to follow his advice. In the morning he would take things seriously. In the morning he would go out into this new world and make a place for himself. With unassuming pride he thought that he would do this not because he really needed to, for he had that quarter of a million dollars, all right, but because it was proper that he should work and earn joy. He would be a good citizen.
Experimentally he shouted what he thought of as a friendly obscene suggestion to one of the girls (although Hara had said that the talk of this time contained no obscenities). In return she made a charming gesture which Forrester tried to think of as an obscene one, and her companion, stretched out at the edge of the pool, drowsily lifted his joymaker and drenched Forrester with a tingling spray that, startlingly, brought him to an instant thrill of sexual excitement and then left him replete and momentarily exhausted.
What a delightful way to live, Forrester thought. He turned and walked away, followed by more of the shouted song:
And he slept and he slept and he slept,
And he wept and he wept and he wept—
Is he damning? Is he dooming?
For that matter, is he human?
Forrester!
But he was too far away for them to splash him now and he had seen someone he wanted to talk to.
It was a girl. She had just come in and was still rather sober. She was alone. And she was not quite as tall as Forrester himself.
Hara would introduce him to her if asked, Forrester knew, since this was more or less Hara’s party. But he did not at that moment see Hara. Didn’t need Hara, either, he decided. He walked up to the girl and touched her on the arm.
“I am Charles D. Forrester,” he said. “I am five hundred and ninety-six years old. I have a quarter of a million dollars. This is my first day out of the sleep-freeze, and I would appreciate it if you would sit down and talk to me for a while, or kiss me.”
“Certainly,” she said, taking his hand. “Let’s lie down here on the violets. Careful of my joymaker; it’s loaded with something special.”
Half an hour later Hara came by and found them, lying on their backs, each with an arm under the other, heads inclined toward each other.
Forrester noticed him at once, but went on talking to the girl. They had been plucking and eating the glass-clear grapes from a vine over their heads. The intoxicating fruit, the occasion, and his general sense of well-being combined to erase social obligations from his mind. Anyway, Hara would understand and forgive any offense. “Don’t mind him, dear,” Forrester said to the girl. “You were telling me not to sign up as a donor.”
“Or as game. A lot of greenhorns fall for that, because the money’s good. But the way they get you is that you don’t figure what it will cost in the long run.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Forrester, then sighed, looked away from the girl, and nodded up at Hara. “You know, Hara,” he said, “you’re a drag.”
“And you’re a drunk,” said Hara. “Hello, Tip. You two seem to be getting on well enough.”
“He’s nice,” the girl said. “Of course, you’re nice too, Tip. Is it time for the champagne wine yet?”
“Well past. That’s why I came looking for you. I went to a lot of trouble to get this champagne wine for the party, and Forrester will damn well get up and drink some to show the rest of us how it’s done.”
“You tilt,” said Forrester, “and you pour.”
Hara looked at him more carefully, then shook his head and fingered his joymaker. “Don’t you remember anything I tell you?” he chided, spraying Forrester with what felt for a moment like an invigorating, and not at all shocking, ice-cold shower. “Not too drunk tonight. Get adjusted. Don’t forget you were dead. Do what I tell you, will you? And now let’s see about this champagne wine.”
Forrester got up like an obedient child and trailed after Hara toward the dispensing tables, one arm around the girl. She had pale hair, up in a fluffy crown, and the tricks of the lighting made it look as though fireflies nested in it.
In the event that he ever saw his once and potentially future wife Dorothy again, Forrester thought, he might have to give this sort of thing up. But for the time being it was very pleasant. And reassuring. It was hard for him to remember, when he had an arm around a pretty girl, that ninety days before his body had been a cryogenic crystal in an ambience of liquid helium, with his heart stopped and his brain still and his lungs a clot of destroyed scar tissue.
He popped the cork of the champagne like a good fellow, toasted, and drank. He had never seen the label before, but it was champagne, all right. At Hara’s request he roared the verses of “The Bastard King of England,” amid much applause, and would not let anyone sober him although he knew he was beginning again to reel and stammer. “You decadent sods,” he bellowed amiably, “you know so much! But you don’t know how to get drunk.”
They were dancing, a linked circle of all twenty-odd of them, with foot-stamping and sudden changes of direction, a little like a morris dance, a little like a Paul Jones, to music like pizzicato cello and the piping of flutes. The girl cried, “Oh, Charles! Charles Forrester! You almost make an Arcadian of me!” He nodded and grinned, clinging to her on his right and to a huge creature in orange tights on his left, a man who, someone said, had just returned from Mars and was stumbling and straining in Earth’s gravity. But he was laughing. Everyone was laughing. A lot of them seemed to be laughing at Forrester, perhaps at his clumsy attempts to follow the step, but no one laughed louder than he.
That was almost the last he remembered. There was some shouting about what to do with him, a proposal to sober him up, a veto, a long giggling debate while he nodded and nodded happily like a pottery head on a spring. He did not know when the party ended. He had a dreamlike memory of the girl leading him across an empty way between tall dark structures like monuments, while he shouted and sang to the echoes. He remembered kissing the girl, and that some vagrant aphrodisiac wisp from her joymaker had filled him with a confused emotion of mingled desire and fear. But he did not remember returning to his room or going to sleep.
And when he awoke in the morning he was buoyant, rested, vigorous, and alone.
The bed in which Forrester awoke was oval, springy, and gently warm. It woke him by purring faintly at him, soothingly and cheerfully. Then as he began to stir the purring sound stopped, and the surface beneath his body gently began to knead his muscles. Lights came on. There was a distant sound of lively music, like a Gypsy trio. Forrester stretched, yawned, explored his teeth with his tongue, and sat up.
“Good morning, Man Forrester,” said the bed. “It is eight-fifty hours, and you have an appointment at nine seventy-five. Would you like me to tell you your calls?”
“Not now,” said Forrester at once. Hara had told him about the talking bed. It did not startle him. It was a convenience, not a threat. It was one more comfortable part of this very amiable world.
Forrester, who had been thirty-seven years old when he was burned to death and still considered that to be his age, lit a cigarette, considered his situation carefully, and decided that it was a state unmatched by any other thirty-seven-year-old man in the history of the world. He had it made. Life. Health. Good company. And a quarter of a million dollars.
He was not, of course, as unique as he thought. But as he had not yet fully accepted the fact that he had himself been dead and was now returned to life, much less that there were millions upon millions like him, it felt unique. It felt very good.
“I have just received another message for you, Man Forrester,” said the bed.
“Save it,” said Forrester. “After I have a cup of coffee.”
“Do you wish me to send you a cup of coffee, Man Forrester?”
“You’re a nag, you know that? I’ll tell you what I want and when I want it.”
What Forrester really wanted, although he had not articulated it even to himself, was to go on enjoying for a moment the sensation of being uncommitted. It was like a liberation. It was like that first week of basic training, in the Army, when he realized that there was a hard way to get through his hitch and an easy one, and that the easy one, which entailed making no decisions of his own and taking no initiative, but merely doing what he was told, was like nothing so much as a rather prolonged holiday in a somewhat poorly equipped summer camp for adults.
Here the accommodations were in fact sumptuous. But the principle was the same. He did not have to concern himself with obligations. He had no obligations. He didn’t have to worry about making sure the kids got up for school, because he no longer had any children. He didn’t have to think about whether his wife had enough money to get through the day, because he didn’t now have a wife. If he wanted to, he could now lie back, pull the covers over his head, and go to sleep. No one would stop him, no one would be aggrieved. If he chose, he could get drunk, attempt the seduction of a girl, or write a poem. All of his debts were paid—or forgiven, centuries since. Every promise was redeemed—or had passed beyond the chance of redemption. The lie he had told Dorothy about that weekend in 1962 need trouble him no longer. If the truth now came out, no one would care; and it was all but impossible that the truth should ever come out.
He had, in short, a blank check on life.
More than that, he had a pretty substantially underwritten guarantee of continuing life itself. He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t even threatened; even the lump on his leg, which he had once or twice gazed on with some worry in the days before his death, could not be malignant or threatening; if it had been, the doctors at the dormer would have fixed it. He need not even worry about being run over by a car—if there were cars—since at worst that might mean only another few centuries in the bath of liquid helium, and then back to life—better than ever!
He had, in fact, everything he had ever wished for.
The only things he didn’t have were those he had not wished for because he already had them. . . . Family. Friends. Position in the community.
In this life of the year 2527 A.D., Charles Forrester was entirely free. But he was not so joyous as to be blinded to the fact that this coin of his treasure had two sides. Another way of looking at it was that he was entirely superfluous.
“Man Forrester,” said the bed, “I must insist. I have both an urgent-class message and a personal-visit notice.” And the mattress curled under him, humped itself, and deposited him on the floor of the room.
Staggering, Forrester growled, “What’s urgent?”
“A hunting license has been taken out on you, Man Forrester. The licensee is Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, male, dipara-Zen, Utopian, eighty-six elapsed, six feet four inches, import-export. He is extraterrestrial-human. No reason declared. Bonds and guaranties have been posted. Would you like your coffee now?”
While the bed was speaking it had been rolling itself into the wall. It disappeared into a sphincter that closed and left no trace. This was disconcerting, but Forrester remembered Hara’s instructions, searched for and found his joymaker, and said to it, “I would like my breakfast now. Ham and eggs. Toast and orange juice. Coffee. And a pack of cigarettes.”
“They will be delivered in five minutes, Man Forrester,” said the joymaker. “May I give you the rest of your messages?”
“Wait a minute. I thought it was the bed that was giving me messages.”
“We are all the same, Man Forrester. Your messages follow. Notice of personal visit: Taiko Hironibi will join you for breakfast. Dr. Hara has prescribed a euphoric in case of need, which will be delivered with your breakfast. Adne Bensen sends you a kiss. First Merchants Audit and Trust invites your patronage. Society of Ancients states you have been approved for membership and relocation benefits. Ziegler, Durant and Colfax, Attornies—”
“You can skip the commercials. What was that about a hunting license?”
“A hunting license has been taken out on you, Man Forrester. The licensee is Heinzlichen Jura de—”
“You said that. Wait a minute.” Forrester regarded his joymaker thoughtfully. The principle of it was clear enough. It was a remote input-output station for a shared-time computer program, with certain attachments that functioned as pocket flask, first-aid kit, cosmetic bag, and so on. It looked something like a mace or a jester’s scepter. Forrester told himself that it was really no less natural to talk to something like a mace than it was to talk into something like a telephone. But at the other end of a telephone had been a human being . . . or at least, he reminded himself, the taped voice of what at one time had been a human being. . . . Anyway, it didn’t feel natural. He said guardedly, “I don’t understand all this. I don’t know who these people are who are calling me up, either.”
“Man Forrester, the personal callers are as follows. Taiko Hironibi: male, dendritic Confucian, Arcadian, fifty-one elapsed, six feet one inch, organizer, business political. He will bring his own breakfast. Adne Bensen: female, Universalist, Arcadian-Trimmer, twenty-three declared, five feet seven inches, experiencer-homeswoman, no business stated. Her kiss follows.”
Forrester did not know what to expect but was pleasantly ready for anything.
What he got was indeed a kiss. It was disconcerting. No kissing lips were visible. There was a hint of perfumed breath, then a pressure on his lips—warm and soft, moist and sweet.
Startled, he touched his mouth. “How the devil did you do that?” he shouted.
“Sensory stimulation through the tactile net, Man Forrester. Will you receive Taiko Hironibi?”
“Well,” said Forrester, “frankly, I don’t know. Oh, hell. I guess so. Send him in. . . . Wait a minute. Shouldn’t I get dressed first?”
“Do you wish other clothing, Man Forrester?”
“Don’t confuse me. Just hold on a minute,” he said, rattled and angry. He thought for a minute. “I don’t know who this Hirowatsis is—”
“Taiko Hironibi, Man Forrester. Male, dendritic Confucian—”
“Cut that out!” Forrester was breathing hard. Abruptly the joymaker in his hand hissed and sprayed him with something that felt damp for a second, then dissipated.
Forrester felt himself relaxing. He appreciated the tranquilizing spray, without quite liking the idea of having a machine prescribe and dispense it.
“Oh, God,” he said, “what do I care who he is? Go ahead. Send him in. And get a move on with my breakfast, will you?”
“You’ll do!” cried Taiko Hironibi. “The greatest! What a cranial index! You look—cripes, I don’t know what to call it—you look like a brain. But a swinger.”
Charles Forrester, gravely and cheerfully, indicated a seat with his hand. “Sit down. I don’t know what you want but I’m willing to talk about it. You’re the damnedest looking Japanese I ever saw.”
“Really?” The man looked disconcerted. He also looked quite non-Japanese: crew-cut golden hair, blue eyes. “They change you around so,” he said apologetically. “Maybe I used to look different. Say! Did I get here first?”
“You got here before my breakfast, even.”
“Great! That’s really great. Now, here’s the thing. We’re all messed up here, you have to get that straight right away. The people are sheep. They know they’re being expropriated, but do they do anything about it? Sweat, no, they sit back and enjoy it. That’s what we’re for in the Ned Lud Society. I don’t know your politics, Charley—”
“I used to be a Democrat, mostly.”
“—Well, you can forget that. It doesn’t matter. I’m registered Arcadian myself, of course, but a lot of the guys are Trimmers, maybe—” he winked— “maybe even something a little worse, you know? We’re all in this together. Affects everybody. If you raise your kids with machines you’re bound to have machine-lovers growing up, right? Now—”
“Hey!” said Forrester, looking at his wall. At a point as near as he could remember to be just about where the bed had disappeared, a sphincter was opening again. It disgorged a table set for two, one side bearing his breakfast, the other a complete setting but no food.
“Ah, breakfast,” said Taiko Hironibi. He opened a pouch in the kiltlike affair he wore and took out a small capped bowl, a plastic box that turned out to contain something like crackers, and a globe, which, when squeezed, poured a hot, watery, greenish tea into the cup at his place. “Care for a pickled plum?” he asked politely, removing the cap from the bowl.
Forrester shook his head. Chairs had appeared beside the table, and he slid into the one placed before the ham and eggs.
Next to the steaming plate was a small crystal tray containing a capsule and a scrap of golden paper on which was written:
I don’t know much about that champagne wine. Take this if you have a hungover.
Hara
To the best of Forrester’s knowledge he didn’t have a hangover, but the capsule looked too good to waste. He swallowed it with some of the orange juice and at once felt even more relaxed. If that were possible. He felt positively affectionate toward the blond Japanese, now decorously nibbling at a dark, withered object.
It crossed Forrester’s mind that the capsule, plus what the joymaker had sprayed him with, might add up to something larger than he was ready for. He felt almost giddy. Better guard against that, he thought, and demanded as unpleasantly as he could, “Who sent you here?”
“Why—the contact was Adne Bensen.”
“Don’t know her,” snapped Forrester, trying not to grin.
“You don’t?” Taiko stopped eating, dismayed. “Sweat, man, she told me you’d be—”
“Doesn’t matter,” cried Forrester, and prepared for the killing question he had been saving. “Just tell me this. What’s the advantage of my joining your society?”
The blond man was clearly disgruntled. “Listen, I’m not begging you. We got something good here. You want in, come in. You want out, go—”
“No, don’t give me an argument. Just answer the question.” Forrester managed to light a cigarette, puffed smoke in Taiko’s face. “For instance,” he said, “would it be money that’s involved?”
“Well, sure. Everybody needs money, right? But that’s not the only thing—”
Forrester said, politely but severely, restraining the impulse to giggle, “You know, I had an idea it would be like that.” His two tranquilizers, plus what was still in his system from the previous night, were adding up to something very close to a roaring drunk, he noticed. With some pride. How manly of him, he thought, to keep his wits so clear when he was so smashed.
“You act like I’m trying to take advantage of you,” Taiko said angrily. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see that the machines are depriving us of our natural human birthright? to be miserable if we want to, to make mistakes, to forget things? Don’t you see that we Luddites want to smash the machines and give the world back to people? I mean, not counting the necessary machines, of course.”
“Sure I see,” agreed Forrester, standing up and swaying slightly. “Well, thanks. You better be going now, Hironibi. I’ll think over what you said, and maybe we can get together some time. But don’t you call me. Let me call you.” And he bowed Taiko to the door and watched it close behind him, keeping his face relaxed until the Japanese was gone.
Then Forrester bent over and howled with laughter. “Con man!” he shouted. “He thinks I’m an easy mark! Ah, the troubles of the rich—always somebody trying to swindle you out of it!”
“I do not understand, Man Forrester,” said the joymaker. “Are you addressing me?”
“Not in this life,” Forrester told the machine, still chuckling. He was filled with a growing pride. He might look like a country cousin, he thought, but there went one sharper who had got no farther than first base.
He wondered who this Adne Bensen was who had fingered him for the swindler and sent him an electronic kiss. If she kissed in person the way she kissed through sensory stimulation of the tactile net, she might be worth knowing. And no problem, either. If Taiko was the worst this century could turn up, Forrester thought with pleasure and joy, his quarter of a million dollars was safe!
Twenty minutes later he found his way to the street level of the building, not without arguments from his joymaker. “Man Forrester,” it said, sounding almost aggrieved, “it is better to take a taxi! Do not walk. The guaranties do not apply to provocation and contributory negligence.”
“Shut up for a minute, will you?” Forrester managed to get the door open and looked out.
The city of 2527 A.D. was very large, very fast-moving, and very noisy. Forrester was standing in a sort of driveway. A clump of ethereal, thirty-foot-high ferns in front of him partially masked a twelve-lane highway packed to its margins with high-speed traffic moving in both directions. Occasionally a vehicle would cut in to the entrance to his building, pause before him for a moment, and then move on. Taxis? Forrester wondered. If so, he was giving them no encouragement.
“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “I have summoned death-reversal equipment, but it will not arrive for several minutes. I must warn you, the costs may be challenged under the bonding regulations.”
“Oh, shut up.” It seemed to be a warm day, and Forrester was perhaps still slightly befuddled; the temptation to walk was irresistible. All questions could be deferred. Should be deferred, he told himself. Obviously his first task was to get himself oriented. And—he prided himself on this—he had been something of a cosmopolitan, back in those days before his death, equally at home in San Francisco or Rome as in New York or Chicago. And he had always made time to stroll around a city.
He would stroll through this one now. Joymakers be damned, thought Charles Forrester; he right-faced, hooked the joymaker to his belt, and set off along a narrow pedestrian walk.
There were very few walkers. It didn’t do to make snap judgments, Forrester thought, but these people seemed soft. Perhaps they could afford to be. No doubt someone like himself, he mused soberly, seemed like a hairy troglodyte, crude, savage, flint-axed.
“Man Forrester!” cried the joymaker from his belt. “I must inform you that Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major has waived protest of the bonding regulations. The death-reversal equipment is on its way.” He slapped it, and it was quiet, or else its continued bleating was drowned out by the sound of the clamoring traffic. Whatever drove these cars, it was not gasoline. There were no fumes. There was only a roar of air and singing tires, multiplied a hundredfold and unending. The trafficway lay between tall bright buildings, one a soft, flowing orange, one the crystalline, blue-gray color of fractured steel. In the court of a building across the trafficway he could see, dimly through the glass and the momentary gaps in the traffic, a riot of plant growth with enormous scarlet fruits. On a balcony above him scented fountains played.
The joymaker was addressing him again, but he could catch only part of it. “. . . On station now, Man Forrester.” A shadow passed over him, and he looked up.
Overhead a white aircraft of some sort—it had no wings—was sliding diagonally down toward him. It bore a glittering ruby insigne like the serpent staff of Aesculapius on its side. The nearer end of it was all glass and exposed, and inside a young woman in crisply tailored blue was drowsily watching something on a screen invisible to Forrester. She looked up, gazed at him, spoke into a microphone, then glanced at him again, and went back to watching her screen. The vehicle took position over his head and waited, following with him as he walked.
“That’s funny,” said Forrester aloud.
“It’s a funny world,” said somebody quite near him.
He turned around. Four men were standing there, looking at him with pleasant, open expressions. One of them was very tall and very heavy. In fact, he was gross. He leaned on a cane, studying Forrester, his expression alert and interested.
Forrester realized that he was the one who had spoken and, in the same moment, realized that he knew him. “Oh, sure,” he said, “The Martian in orange tights.”
“Very good,” said the Martian, nodding. He was not in orange tights now; he wore a loose white tunic and slate-gray shorts. He wasn’t really a Martian, Forrester remembered; at least, his ancestors had come from Earth.
One of the other men took Forrester’s hand and shook it. “You’re the one with the quarter of a million dollars,” he said. “Look me up when this is all over. I’d like to know what a fellow like you thinks of our world.”
He brought his knee up and kicked Forrester in the groin. Hard.
Forrester felt the world explode, starting inside him. He saw that the man was stepping back, looking at him with interest and pleasure; but it was hard to watch him because the city was moving. It tilted up at an angle, and the sidewalk struck him on the forehead. He rolled, clutching at his testicles, and found himself looking upward.
The man from Mars said conversationally, “Don’t hurry. Plenty of time for everybody.” He lifted his cane and limped forward. Moving was quite an effort for him in Earth’s gravity, after Mars, Forrester saw. The cane came down on his shoulder and upper arm, was lifted and came down again, regularly, slowly, and strongly. It must have been weighted. It felt like a baseball bat.
The pain in Forrester’s gut was like death. His arm was numb.
All in all, though, he realized quite clearly—unable to move, watching as they passed the cane from hand to hand and the white aircraft hovered overhead, the woman’s face peering patiently down—all in all, it was hurting rather less than he might have expected. Perhaps it was Hara’s hungover medicine. Perhaps it was just shock.
“You were warned, Man Forrester,” said the joymaker sadly from where it lay beside his head.
He tried to speak, but his lungs were not working.
He could not quite lose consciousness, either, though he wanted to very much. Perhaps that was another result of Hara’s euphoric pill. Then he felt that he was succeeding. The pain in his belly grew alarmingly and began to recede again, and then he felt nothing at all, or nothing physical.
But there was something painful in his mind, something that whimpered, Why? Why me?
Howls of laughter rolled over Forrester. A girl was screaming, “He’s spinning it! He’s spinning it! Gee, I think I saw the cartridge!”
Forrester opened his eyes. He was in something that lurched and hummed. A girl in a tailored blue suit, her back to him, was staring at what seemed to be a television screen showing a sort of arena, where the screaming girl, face flushed and happy, stamping with excitement, was standing over a blind-folded man who held a gun.
Forrester’s aches and bruises reminded him at once of what had happened. He was surprised that he was still alive. He croaked, “Hey!”
The girl in tailored blue looked over her shoulder at him. “You’re all right,” she said. “Just take it easy. We’ll be there in a minute.”
“Where?”
Impatiently she moved her hand. The arena with the man and girl disappeared—just as the man seemed to be raising the gun—and Forrester found himself looking at blue sky and clouds. “Lift up a little,” the girl in blue said. “You’ll see it. There.”
Forrester tried to raise himself on an elbow, caught a glimpse of trees and rambling pastel buildings, and fell back. “I can’t lift myself up! Damn it, I’ve been half killed.” He became aware that he was on a sort of a stretcher and that there was another one beside him. The other one was also occupied, by someone with a sheet over him. “Who’s that?” he cried.
“How would I know? I just bring them in, I don’t write their life stories. Now relax, or I’ll have to put you to sleep.”
“You silly bitch,” said Forrester precisely. “I’m not going to stand for this. I demand that you— Wait a minute! What are you doing?”
The girl had turned around, and she was holding something very like his own joymaker, pointed at him. “Are you going to shut up and lie still?”
“I warn you! Don’t you dare—”
She sighed, and something cool touched his face.
Forrester gathered all his strength to tell her what he thought of her, her probable sex life, and this world of hers, in which arbitrary and unpleasant things were done to well-to-do men like himself. He couldn’t. All that came out was, “Arr, a-r-r-r.” He was not unconscious, but he was very weak.
The girl said, “You sweat me, greenie. You are a greenhorn, aren’t you? I can always tell. You people wake up in the dormer and you think you’re God’s own sweat. Mother! Sure you’re alive. Sure you’ve had the biggest break you can imagine. But do you think we care?”
All this time the aircraft was slipping and turning, coming in for a landing. The girl, who one would have thought to be the pilot, paid no attention. She was very cross. She said, “Now, I know my job, and my job is to keep you alive—or keep you safely dead till they can take care of you. I don’t have to talk to you. I especially don’t have to listen to you.”
Forrester said, “A-r-r-r.”
“I don’t even like you,” she said with vexation, “and you’ve made me miss my favorite program. Oh, go to sleep.”
And, just as Forrester felt the aircraft touch ground, she raised the joymaker again, and he did.
At the temperature of liquid helium, chemistry stops.
On this fact, and on one reasonable hope, the largest industry of the late twentieth century had been built.
The reasonable hope was that the progress of medicine in past years would be matched by similar progress in the future—so that, no matter what a person might die of, at some future time a way would be found to cure it, to repair it, or at least to make it irrelevant to continuing life and activity (including a method of repairing the damage done by freezing a body to that temperature).
The fact was that freezing stopped time.
And the industry was Immortality, Inc.
In the city of Shoggo in which Forrester had awakened, a city that was nearly eight hundred years old and enormous, a thousand acres of park along a lake front had humped themselves into a hill. All around was flat. The hill itself was an artifact. It was, as a matter of fact, the freezing center for that part of the world.
A hundred and fifty million cubic yards of earth had been eaten out of the ground to make a cold-storage locker for people. After the locker was built, most of the dirt was heaped back on top of it for insulation.
The differential in temperature between ground level and the heart of the frozen hill was nearly five hundred degrees, Fahrenheit, or three hundred and more in the Kelvin scale on which the dormer operated.
When Forrester realized where the white aircraft had taken him, he was instantly submerged in a terror he could not express. Beginning to awaken, he was still terribly weak, as though one of those sprays from the girl’s joymaker had shorted out ninety percent of his volitional muscle control. (As in fact it had.) When he saw the bright featureless ceiling overhead and heard the moan and click of the thousand frightening instruments that brought people back to life, he fugued into a terrifying certainty that they were going to freeze him again. He lay there, groaning inarticulately, while things were done to him.
But they were not freezing him.
They were just patching him up. The blood was washed away. The bruises were scrubbed with something metallic, then touched with a transparent stiff jelly from a long silvery tube that looked something like a large lipstick. His left thigh was pressed for a moment between two glowing screens, which he knew to be a sort of X-ray device, and a fine wash of something that glistened wet and dark was painted over his heart.
This last treatment made him feel better, whatever it was. He found that he was able to speak.
“Thank you,” he said.
The young-looking, red-faced man who was working over him at that moment nodded casually and touched Forrester’s navel with the end of a silvery probe. He glanced at it and said, “All right, I guess we’re through with you. Get up, and let’s see if you can walk to Hara’s office.”
Forrester swung his legs out of the sort of low-walled crib he was lying in and found he could walk as well as ever. Even his bruises didn’t hurt, or not much, although he could detect what seemed to be the beginning return of pain.
The red-faced man said, “You’re fine. Stay out of here for a while, will you? And don’t forget to see Hara, because you’re in some kind of trouble.” He turned away as Forrester started to question him. “How would I know what kind? Just go see Hara.”
Although a slim green arrowhead of light skipped along the floor ahead of him, guiding him to Hara’s office, Forrester thought he could have found it without the arrowhead. Once he left the emergency rooms he was in the part of the dormer he remembered. Here he had awakened out of a frozen sleep lasting half a millennium. There, every day for a week, he had gone bathing in some sort of light, warm oil that had vibrated and tingled, making him feel drowsy but stronger each day. It was on the level below this that he had done his exercises and in the building across the bed of poinsettias (except that these poinsettias were bright gold) that he had slept.
He wondered what had become of the rest of what he thought of as his graduating class. The thawed Lazaruses were processed in batches—fifty at a clip in his group—and, although he had not spent much time with any of them, there was something about this shared experience that had made him know them quickly.
But when they were discharged, they all went in separate directions, apparently for policy reasons. Forrester regretted they had lost touch.
Then he laughed out loud. A blue-jacketed woman, walking toward him along the hall and talking into an instrument on her wrist, looked up at him with curiosity and faint contempt. “Sorry,” he said to her, still chuckling, as the green beacon of light turned a corner and he followed. He didn’t doubt he looked peculiar. He felt peculiar. He was amused that he was missing these fellow graduates of the freezatorium with the fond, distant detachment he had felt for his high school class. Yet it was less than forty-eight hours since he had been with them.
A busy forty-eight hours, he thought. A bit frightening, too. Even wealth was not as secure a buffer against this world as he had thought.
The flickering green light led him into Hara’s office and disappeared.
Hara was standing at the door, waiting for him. “Damned kamikaze,” he said amiably. “Can’t I trust you out of my sight for a minute?”
Forrester, who had never been a demonstrative man, seized his hand and shook it. “Jesus, I’m glad to see you! I’m mixed up. I don’t know what the hell is going on, and—”
“Just stay out of trouble, will you? Sit down.” Hara made a seat come out of the wall and a bottle out of his desk. He thumbed the cork expertly and poured a drink for Forrester, saying, “I expected you under your own power this morning, you know. Not in a DR cart. Didn’t the center warn you somebody was after you?”
“Positively not!” Forrester was both startled and indignant. “What do you mean, somebody was after me? I had no idea—”
Then, tardily, recognition dawned. “Unless,” he finished thoughtfully, “that’s what the joymaker was mumbling about. It was all about bonds and guaranties and somebody named Heinz something of Syrtis Major. That’s on Mars, isn’t it? Say!”
“Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major,” Hara supplied, toasting Forrester with his glass and taking a tiny sip of the drink. Forrester followed suit; it was champagne again. Hara sighed and said, “I don’t know, Charles, but I don’t think I’ll acquire a taste for this stuff after all.”
“Never mind that! The Martian! The fellow in orange tights! He’s the one who beat me up, he and his gang!”
Hara looked faintly puzzled. “Why, of course.”
Forrester tipped up his ruby crystal glass and drained the champagne. It was not very good champagne—heaven knew where Hara had found it, after Forrester had mentioned it as being one of the great goods of the past—and it was by no means appropriate to the occasion. It tickled his nose. But at least it contained alcohol, which Forrester felt he needed.
He said, humbly, “Please explain what happened.”
“Sweat, Charles, where do I start? What did you do to Heinzie?”
“Nothing! I mean—well, nothing, really. I might have stepped on his feet when we were dancing.”
Hara said angrily, “A Marsman? You stepped on his feet?”
“What’s so bad about that? I mean, even if I did. I’m not sure I did. Would you blow your stack about something like that?”
“Mars isn’t Shoggo,” Hara said patiently, “and, anyway, maybe I would. Depends. Did you read your orientation book?”
“Huh?”
“The book of information about the year 2527. You got it when you were discharged here.”
Forrester searched his memory. “Oh, that. Maybe I left it at the party.”
“Well, that adds,” Hara said with some disgust. “Will you please try to bear in mind, first, that you’re sort of my responsibility; second, that you don’t know your way around? I’ll see you get another copy of the book. Read it! Come back and see me tomorrow; I’ve got work to do now. On your way out, stop at the discharge office and pick up your stuff.”
He escorted Forrester to the door, turned, then paused.
“Oh. Adne Bensen sends regards. Nice girl. She likes you,” he said, closed the door, and was gone.
Forrester completed his processing and was released by the medical section, receiving as he left a neat white folder with his name imprinted in gold.
It contained four sets of documents. One was a sheaf of medical records; the second was the book Hara had mentioned, slim and bronze-bound, with the title printed in luminous letters:
YOUR GUIDE TO THE 26TH CENTURY [1970-1990 EDITION]
The third document seemed to be a legal paper of some kind. At least, it was backed with a sheet of stiff blue material that gave it the look of a subpoena. Forrester remembered that the doctor who had patched him up had spoken of trouble. This looked like the trouble, though the words were either unfamiliar in context or totally meaningless to him:
You, Charles Daigleish Forrester, uncommitted, undeclared, elapsed thirty-seven years, unemployed-pending, take greeting and are directed. Requirement: To be present at Congruency Hearing, hours 1075, days 15, months 9 . . .
It had the authentic feel of legalese, he saw with dismay. Much of the face of the single sheet of paper that the blue material enclosed was covered with a sort of angular, almost readable lettering—something like the machine script they used to put on checks, Forrester thought, and then realized that that was no doubt what it was.
But the paper had a date on it, and since that date appeared to be a week or more away, as near as Forrester could figure, he tabled it with some relief and turned to the next and last item in the folder.
This was a financial statement. Attached to it was a crisp metallic slip with the same angular printing on it, which Forrester recognized as a check.
He fingered it lovingly and puzzled out the amount.
It was made out to him, and it was for $231,057.56.
Forrester attempted to fold it—it sprang back like spring steel—and then put it away flat in his pocket. It felt good there.
He was faintly puzzled by the fact that it was some twenty thousand dollars less than he had expected. But in terms of percentage the amount didn’t seem very significant, and he was cheerfully reconciled to the opinion that this society, like all societies, would no doubt have some sort of taxes. Twenty grand was, after all, an amount he could well afford as a sort of initiation fee.
Feeling much more secure, he emerged into the sunlight and looked about him.
It was late afternoon. The sun was to his right. Slate-blue water stretched to his left. He was looking southward over the great pinnacled mass of the city.
Aircraft moved above it. Things crawled in its valleys. The sun picked out reflections from glass and metal, and, although it was still daylight, the city already exuded a developing glow of neon and fluorescence.
There were at least ten million people in Shoggo, Forrester knew. There were theaters and card parties and homes, places where he might find a friend or a lover. Or even an enemy. Down there was the girl who had kissed him last night—Tip?—and the crazy Martian and his gang, who had tried to kill him.
But where?
Forrester did not know where to begin.
Alive, healthy, with almost a quarter of a million dollars in his pocket, he felt left out of things. Standing on a planet with a population of seventeen billion active human beings, and at least twice that number dreaming in the slow cold of the helium baths, he felt entirely alone.
From his belt the voice of the joymaker spoke up. “Man Forrester. ‘Will you take your messages?”
“Yes,” said Forrester, disconcerted. “No. Wait a minute.”
He took the last cigarette out of the pack he had got that morning, lit it, then crumpled the pack and threw it away. He thought.
Owning a joymaker was a little like having a genie with three wishes. The thing’s promptness and precision disconcerted him; he felt that it demanded equal certitude from himself and he did not feel up to it.
He grinned to himself ruefully, admitting that he was being made self-conscious by what he really knew to be nothing but a radio connection with some distant lash-up of cold-state transistors and ferrite cores. Finally he said, “Look. You. I think what I ought to do is go back to my room and start over again from home base. What’s the best way to get there?”
“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “the best way to get to the room you occupied is by cab, which I can summon for you. However, the room is no longer yours. Will you accept your messages?”
“No. Wait a minute! What do you mean, no longer mine? I didn’t check out.”
“Not necessary, Man Forrester. It is automatic on departure.”
He paused and thought, and on consideration it didn’t seem to matter much. He had left nothing there. No bag, no baggage. No personal possessions, not even a shaving brush: he wouldn’t have to shave for a week or two anyway, Hara had told him.
All of himself that he had left in the room was the garments he had worn last night. And those, he remembered, were disposable . . . and so had no doubt been disposed of.
“What about the bill?” he asked.
“The charge was paid by the West Annex Discharge Center. It is entered on your financial statement, Man Forrester. Your messages include one urgent, two personal, one notice of legal, seven commercial—”
“I don’t want to hear right now. Wait a minute.”
Once again Forrester tried to frame the right question.
He abandoned the effort. Whatever his skills, he was not a computer programmer, and it was no good trying to talk like one. It seemed absurd to ask a machine for value judgments, but—
“Cripes,” he said, “tell me something. What would you do, right now, if you were me?”
The joymaker answered without hesitation, as though that sort of question were coming up every day. “If I were you, Man Forrester, which is to say, if I were human, just unfrozen, without accommodations, lacking major social contacts, unemployed, unskilled—”
“That’s the picture, all right,” Forrester agreed. “So answer the question.” Something was crawling underfoot. He stepped aside, out of its way, a glittering metal thing.
“I would go to a tea shop, Man Forrester. I would then read my orientation book while enjoying a light meal. I would then think things over. I would then—”
“That’s far enough.”
The metal thing, apparently espying Forrester’s discarded cigarette pack, scuttled over to it and gobbled it down. Forrester watched it for a second, then nodded.
“You’ve got some good ideas, machine,” he said. “Take me to a tea shop!”
The joymaker procured a cab for Forrester, a wingless vehicle like the death-reversal conveyance that had brought him in for repair, but orange and black instead of white; it looked like Hallowe’en. And the cab took him to the joymaker’s recommended tea shop.
The shop was curious. It was located in an interior hall of a great spidery building in the heart of the city. The cab flew under a pierced-steel buttress, actually into a sort of vaulted opening that could have served only birds and angels, or men in aircraft, since it was at least fifty feet above ground. It halted and hovered before a balcony planted with climbing roses, and Forrester had to step over a knife edge of empty space. The cab did not quiver, not even when his weight left it.
A girl with hair like transparent cellophane greeted him. “I have your reservation, Man Forrester. Will you follow me, please?”
He did, walking behind her across a quartz-pebbled court and into the hall that was the tea room, admiring the swing of her hips and wondering just what it was that she did to her hair to make it stand out like a sculptured puffball and rob it of opacity.
She seated him beside a reflecting pool, with silvery fish swimming slowly about. Even with the peculiar hairdo, she was a pretty girl. She had dimples and dark, amused eyes.
He said, “I don’t know what I want, actually. Anyway, who do I order from?”
“We are all the same, Man Forrester,” she said. “May I choose for you? Some tea and cakes?”
Numbly, he nodded and, as she turned and left, watched the sway of her hips with an entirely different kind of interest.
He sighed. This was a confusing world!
He took the book out of the folder he had been given at the West Annex Discharge Center and placed it on the table. Its cover was simple and direct:
YOUR GUIDE TO THE 26TH CENTURY
[1970-1990 EDITION]
Where to Go
How to Live
Managing Your Money
Laws, Customs, Folkways
It was edge-indexed with helpful headings: MAKING FRIENDS, LIVING ON A BUDGET, HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR JOYMAKER, JOB OPPORTUNITIES, WHERE TO GET NEEDED TRAINING . . . it went on and on. Forrester, flipping through the pages, was astonished to find how many of them there were.
He had a good week’s reading here, he estimated. Obviously the first thing for him to do was to decide what was the first thing to do.
Making friends could wait a bit. He seemed already to have made more friends—and enemies!—than he could assimilate.
Living on a budget? He smiled to himself and patted the pocket that held his check.
How to get the most out of your joymaker, though. That was a good place to start, thought Forrester, then opened the book to the right page and began to read.
The remote-access computer transponder called the “joymaker” is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker.
Essentially it is a transponder connecting you with the central computing facilities of the city in which you reside on a shared-time, self-programming basis. “Shared-time” means that many other joymakers use the same central computer—in Shoggo, something like ten million of them. If you go to another city your joymaker will continue to serve you, but it must be reset to a new frequency and pulse-code. This will be done automatically when you travel by public transportation. However, if you use private means, or if for any reason you spend any time in the agricultural areas, you must notify the joymaker of your intentions. It will inform you of any steps you must take.
“Self-programming” means that the programmed software includes . . .
The self-programming, shared-time girl with the dark, grave eyes brought Forrester his tea and cakes. “Thank you,” he said, staring at her. He was still not quite sure of his deductions about her. He tried an experiment. “Can you give me my messages?” he asked.
“Certainly, Man Forrester, if you wish,” she said promptly. “Alfred Guysman wishes to see you on political business. Adne Bensen asks you to return her message of this morning. The Nineteenth Chromatic Trust informs you that arrangements have been made for you to establish banking facilities with them—”
“That’s enough,” he said, marveling at how nicely a shared-time transponder could be packaged. “I’ll take the rest later.”
There was no sugar for the tea, but it was physically hot and chemically cool at the same time—rather like a mentholated cigarette, except that there was no particular taste associated with it. Forrester returned to his book.
“Self-programming” means that the programmed software includes procedures for translating most normal variations of voice, idiom, accent, and other variable modalities into a computer-oriented simscript and thence into the mathematical expressions on which the computers operate. As long as your personal joymaker is within reception range of your voice, you may communicate via other shared-time transponders if you wish. Appropriate modulation will be established automatically. However, do not attempt to use another individual’s joymaker when yours is not within range. Proper coding cannot be assured. In the event that your joymaker is lost or damaged . . .
Forrester sighed and ate one of the cakes. It was rich with flavors like butter and cinnamon and with others he could not identify. Pleasant but strange.
Very much like this world that had been given him.
“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker at his belt, its tones muffled by his coat and the tablecloth, “it is necessary for you to accept some messages. I have a notice of personal visit and—”
Forrester said, “Look, I’m doing what you said, right? I’m reading my book. Let me figure it out a little before you throw messages at me. Unless,” he said as an afterthought, “there’s some matter of life or death.”
“There are no messages involving life or death, Man Forrester.”
“Then wait awhile.” He was aware he didn’t know how long it had been going on—that a distant wind instrument was hooting faintly. Pleasant but strange. Spiced cool breezes blew from the paneled walls, also pleasant but strange.
He said hesitantly, “Joymaker, answer me a question. Why did what’s-his-name, Heinzie, beat me up?”
“I cannot identify the individual, Man Forrester. You were beaten up by four persons in the one recorded incident of attack. Their names were Shlomo Cassavetes, Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, Edwardino-”
“That one. Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major. Or, for that matter, all of them—why did they rumble me?”
“I have a priority message regarding Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, Man Forrester. Perhaps it will be informative. May I give it to you?”
“Oh, hell. Why not?”
“Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major is protesting enforcement of guaranties and has enjoined disbursements under his bond. You are notified, Man Forrester.”
Forrester said hotly, ‘That’s what you call informative? Look, skip the damned messages and answer the question. What was that scene all about?”
“You have asked three questions, Man Forrester. May I offer a synoptic reply?”
“Please do, old friend.”
“Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, a guest in the rep-rooms utilized by Alin Hara, conceived a grievance against you, cause unstated. He called into association Shlomo Cassavetes, Edwardino Wry, and Edwardeto Wry; they formed an ad hoc club and filed appropriate conformance in regard to bonds and guaranties. The intention was stated as murder, first phase, ad lib. The motivation was stated as grievance as to De Syrtis Major, practical joke as to the others. Conformances were recorded, and the subject—that is, yourself, Man Forrester—was notified. Does that answer your three questions, Man Forrester?”
“What do you think?” Forrester snapped. “Well, maybe it does. Sort of. You mean those other three finks lumped me for a joke?”
“They so stated, yes, Man Forrester.”
“And they’re still running around loose?”
“Do you wish me to ascertain their present whereabouts, Man Forrester?”
“No—I mean, aren’t they in jail or something?”
“No, Man Forrester.”
Forrester said, “Joymaker, leave me alone for awhile. I better get back to my orientation book. I see I don’t know as much as I thought I did.”
Forrester drank the rest of his tea, ate the rest of his cakes, and plowed back into his book.
To use your joymaker as telephone: You must know the ortho-name and identification spectrum of the person you wish to reach. Once you have given this information to the joymaker it will be remembered, and you can then refer to the person in later calls by a reciprocal name or any other personal identification programmed into your joymaker. If you have been called by any person, the joymaker will have recorded the necessary ortho-name and identification spectrum. Simply ask the joymaker to call the person you wish to speak to. If you wish to establish a priority rating with any person, that person must so inform his joymaker. Otherwise your calls may be deferred or canceled as directed by the called person.
To use your joymaker as credit card: You must know the institutional designation and account spectrum . . .
A belated thought percolated to the surface of Forrester’s mind. Messages. Financial institutions. One of the messages had been from something that sounded like that.
He sighed and looked around the room. Most of the tables were empty. But it was a large room, and there were perhaps fifty other people in it, all of them seated at tables in twos and threes and larger groups. Through some effect of the sound-conditioning, he could not hear their voices, only the distant hooting flute and a faint splashing from the giant fish in the reflecting pools.
He wondered if any of these fifty people would mind if he got up and walked over to them.
Touching the faintly sore spots on his shoulders and neck, he decided against trying it. But it gave him an idea, and he turned to the section of the book called MAKING FRIENDS.
“I have an urgent notice of personal visit, Man Forrester,” grumbled the joymaker from his waist.
“Just save it,” said Forrester, preoccupied. He was startled at the length of the list of ways of making friends. Above all, there were clubs. Clubs in such profusion that he wondered that even seventeen billion people could fill their rolls. Social clubs, gymnastic clubs, professional clubs. Political groups, religious groups, therapeutic groups. There was a Society of First Families of Mars, and a Loyal Order of Descendants of Barsoom Fans. There were forty-eight bird-watching groups in Shoggo alone. There were stamp collectors and coin collectors and tax-token collectors and jet-car-transfer collectors.
There was something called the Society of Ancients that looked interesting, as it appeared to be an organization of persons like Forrester himself, revived from the dead heart of the freezers. Yet it was listed along with such curiosities as the B.P.O.E. and the Industrial Workers of the World (Memorial Association) in small type at the end of the section.
Puzzling. If it existed at all, should it not have a membership in the billions?
Evidently it did not, but . . .
“Man Forrester,” shrilled the joymaker. “I must inform you of a personal visitation by—”
“Wait a minute,” said Forrester, suddenly looking up, startled.
There was a hint of perfume in the air.
Forrester put down his book, frowning. The scent was familiar. What was it. Another tactile-tape message from Adne Bensen, whoever she might be?
He felt a touch on his shoulder, then warm arms around him, a hug.
These tactile tapes were certainly convincing, he thought momentarily, then realized this was not a tape. He was not merely feeling and smelling the presence of the embracing arms. He saw them, from the corner of his eye and, awkwardly, like a wrestler struggling to break a hold, he turned inside them.
He saw the face of the girl from the party, very near to his.
“Tip!” he cried. “My God, I’m glad to see you!”
When you came right down to it, Forrester hardly knew the girl, barring a little friendly kissing at a party, but at this moment she was very dear to him. It was like a chance meeting in Taiwan with somebody who had sat at the far end of the same commuter train for years. Not a friend, hardly even an acquaintance; but promoted by the accident of unexpected meeting to the status of near and dear. Half rising from his seat, he hugged her tight. She laughed breathlessly and shook free. “Dear Charles,” she gasped, “not so hard.”
“I’m sorry.” She sat down opposite him, and he sank back in his chair, admiring her dark hair and pale skin, her cheerful, pretty face, and her figure. The others in the tea room, some of whom had turned to look at them, were losing interest and returning to their own affairs. Forrester said, “It’s just that I’m so glad to see you, Tip.”
She looked startled, then faintly reproving. “My name is Adne Bensen, dear Charles. Call me Adne.”
“But last night Hara called you—oh!” he said, remembering. “Then you’re the girl who has been sending me the messages.”
She nodded.
“Very nice messages they were,” he said. “Would you like some tea?”
She said, “Oh, I think not. I mean, not here, anyway. I came to see if you’d like to come to my place for dinner.”
“Yes!”
She laughed. “You are such an impetuous man, Charles. Is that why they call you the kamikaze people? I mean, your century and all.”
“As to that, Adne, I don’t know,” he said. “Because, when you come right down to it, I don’t know who calls me what. I am, you might say, confused. One of the many reasons why I am pleased to see you is that I need somebody to talk to.”
She leaned back in her chair, smiling, and said she would take some tea, after all. It came without being asked for; apparently the joymaker had monitored their conversation and drawn the inferences any good waiter would draw. She threw back her filmy, puffy wrap—it had floated around her shoulders like a cloud, but now it lay back against the chair quite inconspicuously, Forrester noticed—to reveal a deep-cut, tight-fitting, flesh-colored vest or jerkin of some sort, which was startling at first glance.
At the second, it was still startling.
She said, “Dear Charles. Don’t you ask your joymaker things?”
“I would, except I don’t know what to ask.”
“Oh, anything! What do you want? Have you filed an interests profile?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, do! Then it will tell you what programs are on, what parties you will be welcomed at, who you would wish to know. It’s terrible to go on impulse, Charles,” she said earnestly. “Let the joymaker help you.’’
He discovered that his own teacup had been replenished and he took a sip. “I don’t understand,” he said. “You mean I should let the joymaker decide what I’m going to do for fun?”
“Of course. There’s so much. How could you know what you would like?”
He shook his head. . . .
But that was all of that conversation, all for then. His joymaker said suddenly, its voice curiously tinny, “Priority urgent! This is a drill! Take cover! Take cover! Take cover!”
“Oh, dear,” said Adne, pouting. “Well, let’s go.”
“Take cover!” blared the joymaker again, and Forrester discovered the reason for its metallic sound. Not only his but the girl’s, those of patrons at other tables, all the joymakers at once were repeating the same message. “Take cover! Countdown starts now! One hundred seconds. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.”
“Where are you going?” Forrester asked, rising with her.
“To the shelter, of course! Hurry it up, Charles, will you? I hate it when I’m out in a public place in one of these things.”
“. . . Ninety-one. Ninety. Eighty-nine. . . .”
He asked, swallowing hard. “Air raid? A war?”
“Then what?”
“Aliens. Monsters. That’s all. Now, hurry, or we’ll never get a seat.”
A walk, an elevator ride, a short stretch through a light-walled corridor, and they came out into a great shadowy auditorium. There was just enough light to find their way to seats. It was filling rapidly, and behind them Forrester heard heavy doors slamming.
When about three quarters of the seats were filled, a man in black climbed onto the stage and said, “Thank you all for your cooperation. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that this building has achieved four-nines compliance in exactly one hundred and forty-one seconds.”
There was a stir of interest from the audience. Forrester craned his neck to find the source of the PA system—it seemed to murmur from all over the hall—and located it at last as the man spoke again. It was his joymaker, and all the joymakers, repeating what the man said.
“This is one of the best showings we’ve ever had,” he said warmly, “and I appreciate it. You may leave.”
“You mean that’s all there is to it?” Forrester asked the girl.
“That’s all. Are you coming up to my place?”
“But,” he went on, “if there’s going to be a raid, or any chance of one, shouldn’t we wait and see—”
“See what, Charles dear? There’s no need to grovel in the ground like moles. It’s just a test.”
“Yes, but—” He hesitated, and then followed her out of the auditorium thoughtfully.
It was confusing. No one had mentioned war to him.
But when he said as much to Adne, she laughed. “War? Oh, Charles! You’re so funny, you kamikazes! Now, we’ve wasted enough time—are you coming to my place for dinner or not?”
He sighed.
“Oh, sure,” he said. As brightly as he could.
In the life that had begun with his birth in 1932 and ended with the inhalation of a lungful of flame thirty-seven years later, Forrester had been a successful, self-sufficient, and substantial man.
He had had a wife—her name was Dorothy—small, blonde, a little younger than himself. He had had three sons, and a job as copy chief of a technical writing service, and a reputation among his friends as a fine poker player and useful companion.
Although he had missed combat participation in a war, he had been a Boy Scout during World War Two, participating in scrap-metal drives and Slap the Jap waste-fat collections. As a young adult he had lived through the H-bomb hysteria of the early fifties, when every city street blossomed out with signs directing the nearest way to a bomb shelter. He had seen enough movies and television shows to know what air raid drills meant.
He was not very satisfied with the one he had just seen. He tried to phrase his dissatisfaction to Adne as she changed clothes behind a screen, but she was not very interested. Drills were an annoyance to her, it was clear, but not a very serious one.
She came out from behind the screen, wearing something filmy and pale and not at all practical for cooking dinner. On the other hand, Forrester thought, who knew how these people cooked their dinners? She rustled over to him, lifted his hand, kissed his fingers, and sat down beside him, pulling her joymaker from the place by the arm of the chair where she had left it. “Excuse me, Charles dear,” she said; and, to the joymaker, “Receiving messages.”
Forrester could not hear what the joymaker said to her, because she was holding it close to her ear and had evidently somehow turned the volume down—which he resolved to learn how to do. But he heard what she said to it, although the words were mostly incomprehensible. “Cancel. Hold Three. Commissary four, two as programmed, two A-varied.” And, “That takes care of that,” she said to him. “Would you like a drink?”
“All right.” She lifted glasses out of the well of the— Forrester would have called it a cocktail table, and perhaps it was. He noticed her eyes were on a stack of parcels on a low table across the room. “Excuse me,” she said, pouring a glass of minty liquid for him and one for herself. “I just have to look at these things.” She took a small sip of her drink, rose, walked over to the table.
Forrester decided he liked his drink, which was not sweet and made his nose tingle. He stood up and crossed over to her. “Been shopping?” he asked. Adne was taking out clothes, small packets that might have been cosmetics, some things like appliances.
“Oh, no, Charles dear. It’s my job.” She was preoccupied with a soft, billowy green thing, stroking it against her cheek thoughtfully. With a twist of her arms she threw it around her shoulders and it became a sort of Elizabethan ruff. “Like it, dear?”
“Sure. I mean, I guess I do.”
“It’s soft. Feel.” She drew it over his face. It felt like fur, although its points thrust out again the moment they left his skin, looking starched and thorny. “Or this,” she said, taking it off and replacing it with something that had looked like oiled silk in the box it came in, but which, on her shoulders, disappeared entirely, except that it gave luster and color to her skin. “Or—”
“They’re all beautiful,” he said. “What do you mean, it’s your job?”
“I’m a reacter,” she said proudly. “Weighted at nearly fifty million, with two-nines reliability.”
“Which means?”
“Oh, you know. If I like a thing, chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred that the others will, too.”
“Fifty million others?”
She nodded, flushed and pleased.
“And this is how you make your living?”
“It’s how I get rich,” she corrected him. “Say!” She looked at him thoughtfully. “I wonder. Do you have any idea how many others like you have come out of the dormers? Maybe you could get a job doing the same thing. I could ask—”
He patted her hand indulgently, amused. “No, thanks,” he said, careful not to mention the fact that he was rich—although, he remembered dimly, he had been far less reticent about it at the party the night before. Well, he had made a lot of mistakes at that party—as witness his troubles with the Martian.
“I never asked,” said Adne, putting the things away. “How did you die, Charles?”
“Why,” he said, sitting down again and waiting for her to join him, “I died in a fire. As a matter of fact, I understand I was a hero.”
“Really!” She was impressed.
“I was a volunteer fireman, you know, and there was an apartment fire one night—it was January, very cold, if you stood in the puddles of water you’d freeze to the ground in two minutes—and there was a child in the upper part of the building. And I was the nearest one to the ladder.”
He sipped his drink, admiring its milky golden color. “I forgot my Air-Pak,” he admitted. “The smoke got me. Or the combination did—smoke and heat. And maybe booze, because I’d just come from a party. Hara said I must have inhaled pure flame, because my lungs were burned. My face must have been, too, of course. I mean, you wouldn’t know, but I don’t think I look quite the same as I used to. A little leaner now, and maybe a little younger. And I don’t think my eyes were quite as bright blue.”
She giggled. “Hara can’t help editing. Most people don’t mind a few improvements.”
Dinner arrived as his breakfast had that morning, through a serving door in the wall. Adne excused herself for a moment while the table was setting itself up.
She was gone more than a moment and came back looking amused. “That’s that,” she said without explaining. “Let’s eat.”
Forrester was able to identify few if any of the foods served him. The textures were sort of Oriental, with crisp things like water chestnuts and gummy things like sukiyaki lending variety to the crunch of lettuce and the plasticity of starches. The flavors were queer but palatable. While they ate he told her about himself—his life as a tech writer, his children, the manner of his death.
“You must have been one of the first to be frozen,” she commented. “1969? That’s only a few years after it began.”
“First on the block,” he agreed. “It was because of the fire company, I guess. We’d just got the new death-reversal truck—gift of our local millionaire, who wanted it around. I didn’t think I’d be the one to christen it.”
He ate a forkful of something like creamed onions in pastry crust and said, “It must have been confusing for Dorothy.”
“Your wife?”
He nodded. “I wonder if there’s any way I can find out about her. What she did. How the children made out. She was young when I was killed. . . . Let’s see. Thirty-three, about. I don’t know if having a husband dead but frozen . . . if she would marry again. . . . Hope she did. I mean—” He broke off, wondering what he did mean.
“Anyway,” he said, “Hara had some records. She lived nearly fifty more years, died in her eighties of the third massive stroke. She’d been partly paralyzed for some time.” He shook his head, trying to visualize small, blonde Dorothy as an ancient, bedridden beldame.
“Had enough?” asked Adne.
He came back to present time, faintly startled. “Dinner? Why, I guess so. It was delicious.” She did something that caused the table to retract itself and stood up. “Come over here and have your coffee. I ordered it specially for you. Would you like some music?”
He started to say, “Not particularly,” but she had already turned on some remote recording equipment. He paused to listen, braced for almost anything, with visions of Bartók and musique concrète. But it turned out to be something very like violins, playing something very like detached, introspective Tchaikovsky.
She sank back against him and she was very warm and fragrant. “We’ll have to find you a place to live,” she said.
He put his arm around her.
“This is a condominium building,” she said thoughtfully, “but I think there might be something. Do you have any preferences?”
“I don’t know enough to have preferences.” He caressed her soft hair.
She said drowsily, “That’s nice.” And in the same tone, a moment later, “But I think I should warn you I’m natural-flow. And this is about M day minus four, so all I want is to be cuddled.” She yawned and touched her mouth with her hand. “Oh! Excuse me.”
Then she caught a glimpse of his face. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, sitting up. “I mean, I could take a pill—Charles, why are you that color?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
She said apologetically, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know much about kamikaze ways. If there’s a ritual taboo . . . I’m sorry.”
“No taboo. Just a misunderstanding.” He picked up his glass and held it out to her. “Any more of this stuff around?”
“Charles dear,” she said, stretching, “there’s all you want. And I have an idea.”
“Shoot.”
“I’m going to find you a place to live!” she cried. “You just stay here. Order what you want.” She touched something that he could not see and added, “If you don’t know how, the children will show you while they’re keeping you company.”
What had seemed to be a floor-length mural opened itself and became a doorway. Forrester found himself looking into a bright, gay room where two small children were racing each other around a sort of climbable maze.
“We ate our dinner, Mim,” cried one of them, then saw Forrester and nudged the other. The two looked at him with calm appraisal.
“You don’t mind this, either, do you, Charles dear?” Adne asked. “That’s another thing about being a natural-flow.”
There were two of them, a boy and a girl, about seven and five, Forrester guessed. They accepted him without question. . . .
Or not exactly that, thought Forrester ruefully. There were questions.
“Charles! Did people really smell bad in the old days?”
“Oh, Charles! You rode in automobiles?”
“When the little children had to work in the coal mines, Charles, didn’t they get anything to eat?”
“But what did they play with, Charles? Dolls that didn’t talk?”
He tried his best to answer. “Well, the child-labor time was over when I lived, or almost. And dolls did talk, sort of. Not very intelligently—”
“When did you live, Charles?”
“I was burned to death in 1969—”
The little girl shrieked, “For witchcraft?”
“Oh, no. No, that was hundreds of years earlier, too.” Charles tried not to laugh. “You see, houses used to catch on fire in those days—”
“The Shoggo fire!” shouted the boy. “Mrs. Leary’s cow and the earthquake!”
“Well—something like that. Anyway, there were men whose job it was to put the fires out, and I was one of them. Only then I got caught and died there.”
“Mim drowned once,” the little girl bragged. “We haven’t died at all.”
“You were sick once, though,” said the boy seriously. “You could have died. I heard Mim talking to the medoc.”
Forrester said, “Are you children in school?”
They looked at him, then at each other.
“I mean, are you old enough to start lessons?”
The boy said, “Well, sure, Charles. Tunt ought to be doing hers right now, as a matter of fact.”
“So should you! Mim said—”
“We have to be polite to the guest, Tunt!” The boy said to Charles, “Is there anything we can get you? Something to eat? Drink? Watch a program? Sex-stim? Although I guess you ought to know,” he said apologetically, “that Mim’s natural-flow and—”
“Yes, yes, I know about that,” Forrester said hastily, and thought, Sweet God!
But when in Rome, he thought, it was what the Romans did that counted, and he resolved to do his best. He resolved it earnestly.
It was like being at a party. You got there at ten o’clock, with your collar too tight, and a little grouchy at being rushed and your starched shirt front still damp where the kids had splashed it as you supervised their bedtime tooth-brushing. And your host was old Sam, who’d been such a drag; and his wife Myra was in one of her nouveau-riche moods, showing off the new dishwasher; and the conversation started out about politics, which was Sam’s most offensive side. . . .
But then you had the second drink. And then the third. Faces grew brighter. You began to feel more at ease. The whole bunch laughed at one of your jokes. The music on the stack of records changed to something you could dance to. You began to catch the rhythm of the party. . . .
Oh, I’ll try, vowed Forrester, joining the children in a sort of board game played against their own joymakers. I’ll catch the mood of this age if it kills me. Again.
Up betimes, and set out to conquer a world. The home that Adne found for him was fascinating—walls that made closets as he needed them, windows that were not windows but something like television screens—but Forrester resolutely spent no time exploring its marvels. After a disturbed night’s sleep he was up and out, testing his new world and learning to cope with it. The children were marvelous. He begged the loan of them from Adne, and they were his guides. They took him to the offices of the Nineteenth Chromatic Trust, where a portly old Ebenezer Scrooge gravely examined Forrester’s check, painstakingly showed him how to draw against it, severely supervised his signing the necessary documents to open an account, and only at the end revealed himself by saying, “Man Forrester, good day.” They took him to a Titanian restaurant for lunch, a lark for them, but for him a shattering test of nerve, since the Titanians ate only live food, and he was barely able to cope with an aspic that writhed and rustled in his spoon. They showed him their playschool, where for three hours a week they competed and plotted with their peers (their lessons were learned at home, via their child-modified joymakers), and Forrester found himself playing London Bridge Is Falling Down with fourteen children and one other adult, symbolically acting out the ritual murder and entombment in the bridge’s foundations that the nursery rhyme celebrated. They took him to where the poor people lived, with half-fearful giggles and injunctions against speaking to anyone, and Forrester found himself out of pocket change, having given it all away to pale, mumbling creatures with hard-luck stories about Sol-burn on Mercury and freezer insurance firms that had gone bankrupt. They took him to a park—indoors, underground—where the landscaping was topologically grotesque and a purling stream flowed through a hill’s base and up the other side, and where ducks and frogs and a feathery sort of Venusian fish ate morsels of food the children tossed them. They took him to a museum where animated, enlarged cells underwent mitosis with a plop like a cow lifting her foot from a bog, and a re-created Tyrannosaurus rex coughed and barked and thumped its feet clangorously, its orange eyes glaring straight at Forrester. They showed him all their treasures and pleasures. But they did not show him a factory, or an office building, or a store of any size. For it did not seem that any of these existed any more. They showed him all around Shoggo until their joymakers chided them, and Forrester’s own said severely, “Man Forrester! The children must be returned for their naps. And you really must receive your messages.”
The children looked at him with woe. “Ah, well,” said Forrester, “we’ll do it again another day. How do we get home from here?”
“A cab,” said the girl doubtfully, but the boy shouted, “Walk! We can walk! I know where we are—ten minutes will do it. Ask your joymaker if you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you,” said Forrester.
“Then this way, Charles. Come on, Tunt.” And the boy led off between two towering buildings on the margin of a grassy strip, where huge hovercraft swished by at enormous speeds.
The joymaker complained, “Man Forrester, I have dichotomous instructions. Please resolve them.”
“Oh, God,” said Forrester, tired and irritable. “What’s your trouble now?”
“You have instructed me to hold messages, but I have several that are high priority and urgent. Please reaffirm holding order, stipulating a time limit if possible, or receive them now.”
The boy giggled. “You know why, Charles?” he demanded. “It tickles them when they’re holding messages. It’s like if you have to go to the bathroom.”
The joymaker said, “The analogue is inexact, Man Forrester. However, please allow me to discharge my message load.”
Forrester sighed and prepared to contemplate reality again. But something distracted him.
Besides the steady whush, whush of the passing hovercraft, besides the distant chant of a choir—they were passing some sort of church—there was another sound. Forrester looked up.
A faint tweeting sound of communications equipment was coming from a white aircraft, glass-fronted, hanging overhead. It bore the shining ruby caduceus, and behind the glass a dark-skinned man in blue was regarding Forrester gravely.
Forrester swallowed.
“Joymaker,” he demanded. “is that a death-reversal vehicle overhead?”
“Yes, Man Forrester.”
“Does that mean—” He cleared his throat. “Does that mean that crazy Martian is after me again?”
“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker primly, “among your urgent priority messages is a legal notice. The twenty-four-hour hold period having expired, and appropriate notices and action having been filed and taken, the man Heinzlichen Jura de—”
“Cut it out! Is he after me?”
“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “yes. As of seventeen minutes ago, the hold period having expired then, he is.”
At least the crazy Martian wasn’t in sight, thought Forrester, scanning the few visible pedestrians. But the presence of the death-reversal aircraft was a poor omen.
“Kids,” he said, “we got troubles. I’m being chased.”
“Oh, Charles!” breathed the boy, fascinated. “Will you get killed?”
“Not if I can help it. Look. Do you know any short cuts from here? Any secret ways—through cellars, over rooftops—you know.”
The boy looked at the girl. The girl’s eyes got very big.
“Tunt,” she whispered, “Charles wants to hide.”
“That’s it,” said Forrester. “What about it, son? You must know some special way. Any kid would.”
The boy said, “Charles. I know a way, all right. But are you sure—”
“I’m sure, I’m sure!” snapped Charles Forrester. “Come on! Where?”
The boy surrendered. “Follow me. You too, Tunt.” They turned and dived into one of the buildings. Forrester took a last look around for Heinzlichen whatever-his-name-was. He was not in sight. Only the hovercraft thrumming past, and the few uncaring pedestrians . . . and overhead the man in blue in the death-reversal vehicle, staring down at him, his expression both surprised and angry.
When he was safely back in the condominium building, the children returned to their own home to await the arrival of their mother, Forrester hurried to his apartment, closed the door, and locked it.
“Joymaker,” he said, “you were right. I admit it. So now let’s have all those messages. And take it slow, so I can understand what they’re about.”
The joymaker said serenely, “Man Forrester, your messages follow. Vincenzo d’Angostura states that he is still available for legal representation, but will not call again under Bar Association rules. Taiko Hironibi feels there was some misunderstanding and would like to discuss it with you. Adne Bensen sends you an embrace. A document package is in your receiving chute. Will you receive the embrace?”
“Hold it a minute. Gives me something to look forward to. Is any of the other stuff important?”
“As to that, Man Forrester, I have no parameters.”
“You’re a big help,” said Forrester bitterly. “Get me a drink while I’m thinking. Uh, gin and tonic.” He waited for it to appear and took a long pull.
His nerves began to feel less like tangled barbed wire. “All right,” he said. “Now, what was that about a package?”
“You have a document package in your receiving chute, Man Forrester. Envelope. Approximately nine centimeters by twenty-five centimeters, less than one half centimeter in thickness, weighing approximately eleven grams. Inscription: ‘Mr. Charles Dalgleish Forrester, Social Security Number 145-10-3088, last address while living 252 Dulcimer Drive, Evanston, Illinois. Died of burns received 16 October 1969. To be delivered upon revival.’ Contents unknown.”
“Hum. Is that all its says?”
“No, Man Forrester. There are machine-script handling instructions on the document. I will phonemize them as closely as possible: ‘Sigma triphase ooty-poot trip toe, baker tare sugar aleph, paraphase—’ ”
“Yeah, well, that’s enough of that. I mean, is there anything in English? Anything I could understand?”
“No, Man Forrester. Faint carbonization marks are visible where the envelope has been creased. There are several minor discolorations, which may represent latent human skinprints. At some time a mild corrosive liquid was spilled—”
“Say, joymaker,” said Forrester, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t I open it up? Where’d you say it was?”
Retrieved from his receiving chute, the envelope turned out to be a letter from his wife.
He stared at it and felt something tingling in the corners of his eyes. The handwriting was very strange to him. The signature was “Still with affection, Dorothy” . . . but the hand that had formed those letters scrawled and shook. She had even abandoned her little finishing-school affectations of penmanship, the open-circle dots over the i ’s, the flowing crosses on the t ’s. He could read it only with difficulty.
Dear Charles,
This is, I think, the tenth or eleventh time I have written this letter to you. I seem to do it every time there is a death or bad news, as though the only gossip I have that is worth the effort to pass on for what may be another century—or more!—is that which has to do with troubles. Not your troubles, of course. Not any more. Usually the troubles are mine.
Although I must say that really my life has not been a burden to me. I remember that you made me happy, Charles. I must tell you that I missed you terribly. But I must also tell you that I got over it.
To begin with: You will want to know what you died of, I know, and perhaps the people who bring you back to life will not be able to tell you. (I am assuming that you will be brought back to life. I didn’t believe it at the time—but since then I’ve seen it happen.)
You were burned to death in a house fire on Christie Street on October 16th, 1969. Dr. Ten Eyck, who was with the first aid squad, pronounced you dead and, with some difficulty, persuaded them to use their death-reversal equipment to freeze you. There was some trouble about lacking glycerol for perfusion, but the whole fire company, you will be glad to know, dug into their liquor closets and came up with several bottles of bourbon . . .and it was that which was used as a buffer. (If you woke up with a hangover, you now know why!)
There was some question as to whether too much time had elapsed, too. They thought you might have spoiled during the discussion, you see. But as it was cold weather for October they decided to take a chance, and you were ultimately consigned to a freeze-dormer at liquid helium temperatures. Where, as I write this, you now lie. . .and where, or in one like it, I expect to be myself before long.
I should tell you that I didn’t pay for any of this. Your fire company insurance, it turned out, was adequate to cover all the costs and was in fact earmarked for that purpose. If it had been up to me I don’t think I would have gone to the expense, Charles, because after all there were the children to bring up.
What can I tell you about them? They missed you very much.
Vance, in particular, played truant from school for the best part of a month, forging notes to his teacher, persuading some adult— I suspected our cleaning woman at the time—to phone the principal to explain his absence, before I found out about it. But then he joined a Boy Scout troop and, as they say, developed other interests.
David didn’t say much. But I don’t think he ever got over it. At least not during his lifetime. He joined the Peace Corps four years later and was executed by insurgents during the Huk uprising in VTGD. Since his body was mutilated before being found he could not be frozen. So he, at least, we will never see again.
Vance is now married, and is in fact a grandfather. It was his second marriage; the first was annulled. His present wife was a schoolteacher before their marriage. . .and they have been happy. And I really can think of nothing else to tell you about your son Vance that does not involve attempting to explain what broke up his first marriage and why his second wife could not stay in the United States. I suppose you may meet him some day. You can ask him yourself.
Billy, you will be astonished to learn, is now a Great Man.
Let me see. He was two when you died. Now he’s our senator from Hawaii, and they say he will be President one day. But you will find out more about him in the history books than I can tell you, I think. Let me only say, what I know will interest you, that his first campaign was on a platform of free freezing for everyone, paid for out of Social Security funds, and you were mentioned in every speech. He won easily.
And I . . . am seventy-nine years old.
Since you died forty years ago I cannot now remember you well enough, my Charles, to know if you will mind what I have to say next. Three years after your death I remarried. My husband—my other husband—was a doctor. Still is, though he is out of practice now. We have been very happy, too. We had two other children. Both girls. You never met him, but he is a good man, barring the fact that at one time he drank too much. He gave it up. He looks a little like you. . . .
If I remember correctly, he does.
And I am now in brittle health and I think this is the last time I will write you this letter. Perhaps we will meet again. I wonder what it will be like.
Still with affection,
Dorothy
Forrester put down the letter and cried, “Joymaker! Was there ever a President named Forrester?”
“President of what, Man Forrester?”
“President of the United States!”
“Which United States is that, Man Forrester?”
“Oh, for God’s sakes! The United States of America. Wait a minute. First off, do you know the Presidents of the United States of America?”
“Yes, Man Forrester. Washington, George. Adams, John. Jefferson, Thomas—”
“Later on! starting with the middle of the twentieth century.”
“Yes, Man Forrester. Truman, Harry S. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Kennedy—”
“Move it up! Start with around 1990.”
“Yes, Man Forrester. Williams, Harrison E. Knapp, Leonard Stanchion, Karen P. Forrester, Wilton N. Tschirky, Leon—”
“Well, my God,” said Forrester softly, and sat marveling while the joymaker droned on to the end of the twenty-first century and stopped.
Little two-year-old Willy. Baby Bill. A senator . . . and President. It was an unsettling idea.
The joymaker said, “Man Forrester! Notice of physical visit. Adne Bensen is to see you, purpose unstated, time of arrival less than one minute.”
“Oh,” said Forrester, “good. Let her right in.” And he rehearsed what he would tell her, but not to any effect. Genealogy was not what was on her mind. She was angry.
“You,” she cried, “what the sweat do you think you’re doing to my kids?”
“Why, nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Dog sweat!” The door crashed closed behind her. “Twitching kamikaze!” She flung her cape against the wall; it dropped to a chair and arranged itself in neat square folds. “Pervert creep, you get a kick out of this, don’t you? Want to make my kids like you! Want to change them into chatter-toothed, hand-working, dog-sweaty, cowardly—”
Forrester guided her to a chair. “Honey,” he said, attempting to get her a drink, “shut up a minute.”
“Oh, sweat! Give me that—” She quickly produced drinks for them, without a pause in her talking. “My kids! You want to ruin them? You hid from a challenge!”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I didn’t mean to get them in a dangerous—”
“Dangerous! Go crawl! I’m not talking about danger.”
“I didn’t let them get hurt—”
“Sweat!”
“Well, it isn’t my fault if some crazy Martian—”
“Dogsweat!” She was wearing a skintight coverall that seemed to be made of parallel strands of fabric running top to bottom, held together God knew how; with every movement as she turned, as her breast rose and fell, tiny slivers of skin showed disturbingly. “You’re not even a man! What do you know about—”
“I said I was sorry. Listen, I don’t know what I did wrong, but I’ll make it up to them.”
She sneered.
“No, I will! . . . I know. There must be something they want. I’ve got plenty of money, so—”
“Charles, you’re pathetic! You haven’t got money enough to feed a sick pup—or character enough to make him a dog. Go rot!”
“Now, wait a minute! We’re not married. You can’t talk to me like that!” He got up and stood over her, the glass unheeded in his hand. Now he was getting angry, too. He opened his mouth to speak, gesticulating.
Six ounces of icy, sticky fluid slopped into her face.
She stared up at him and began to laugh.
“Oh, Charles!” She put down her own glass and tried to wipe her face. “You know you’re an idiot, don’t you?” But the way she said it was almost affectionate.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Times, let’s see, times three, anyway. For spilling the drink on you, for getting the kids in trouble, for yelling back at you—”
She stood up and kissed him swiftly. As she lifted her arms, the strands of fabric parted provocatively. She turned and disappeared into the protean cubicle of the lavatory.
Forrester picked up the rest of his drink, drank it, drank hers, and carefully ordered two more from the dispenser. His brow was furrowed with thought.
When she came back he said, “Honey, one thing. What did you mean when you said I didn’t have a lot of money?”
She fluffed her hair, looking abstracted.
He said persistently, “No, I mean it. I mean, I thought you knew Hara pretty well. He must have told you about me.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
“Well, then. I had this insurance thing when I died, you see. They banked the money or something, and it’s had six hundred years to grow. Like John Jones’s Dollar, if you know what that was. I didn’t have much to begin with, but by the time they took me out of the cooler it was over a quarter of a million dollars.”
She picked up her new drink, hesitated, then took a sip of it. She said, “As a matter of fact, Charles dear, it was a lot more than that. Two million seven hundred thousand, Hara said. Didn’t you ever look at your statement?”
Forrester stared. “Two million see— Two mill—”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “Look it up. You had the papers with you in the tea room yesterday.”
“But—but, Adne! Somebody must’ve—I mean, your kids were with me when I deposited the check! It was only two hundred and some thousand.”
“Dear Charles. Will you please look it up in your statement?” She stood up, looking somewhat annoyed and, he thought, somewhat embarrassed. “Oh, where the devil did you put it? It was a silly joke anyway, and I’m tired of it.”
Numbly he stood up with her, numbly found the folder from the West Annex Discharge Center, and placed it in her hands. What joke? If there was a joke, he didn’t know what it was. But already he didn’t like it.
She fished out the sheaf of glossy sheets in the financial report, glanced at them, began handing them to him. The first was entitled CRYOTHERAPY, MAINTENANCE, SCHEDULE 1. It bore a list of charge under headings like Annual Rental, Biotesting, Cell Retrieval and Detoxification, as well as a dozen or more recurring items with names that meant nothing to him—Schlick-Tolhaus Procedures, Homiletics, and so on. On the second sheet was a list of charges for what appeared to be financial services, presumably investing and supervising his capital. The third sheet covered diagnostic procedures; there were several for what seemed to be separate surgeries, sheets for nursing care and for pharmaceuticals used. . . . There were in all nearly thirty sheets, and the totals at the bottom of each of them were impressive, but the last sheet of all took Forrester’s breath away.
It was a simple arithmetical statement:
AGGREGATE OF CONVERTED ASSETS - $2 706 884.72
AGGREGATE OF SCHEDULES 1-27 - 2 443 182.09
NET DUE PATIENT ON DISCHARGE - $ 263 702.63
Forrester gasped and coughed and cried, half strangled, “Two and a half million dollars for medical—Sweet Jesus God!” He swallowed and looked up unbelievingly. “Holy AMA! Who can afford that kind of money?”
Adne said, “Why, you can, for one. Otherwise you’d still be frozen.”
“Christ! And—” A thought struck him— “Look at this! Even so they’re cheating me! It says two hundred and sixty thousand, and they only gave me two thirty!”
Adne was beginning to look faintly angry again. “Well, after all, Charles. You did go back there for extra treatment. You might get some of that back from Heinzie, I don’t know. . . . Of course, he’s protesting it because you messed things up.”
He looked at her blankly, then back at the statement. He groaned.
“Reach me my drink,” he said and took a long pull of it. He announced, “The whole thing’s crazy. Millions of dollars for doctors! People just can’t have that much money.”
“You did,” she pointed out. “Given time, people can. At compound interest, they can.”
“But it’s—it’s—medical profiteering! I don’t know what they did to me, but surely there should be some attempt to control fees!”
Adne took his arm and drew him down again on the couch beside her. She said with patience, but not very much patience, “Dear Charles, I wish you would learn a little something about the world before you tell us all what’s wrong with it. Do you know what they had to do to you?”
“Well— Not exactly, no. But I know something about what medical treatment costs.” He frowned. “Or used to cost, anyway. I suppose there’s inflation.”
“I don’t think so. I—I think that’s the wrong word,” she said. “I mean, that means things cost more because the money is worth less, right? But that isn’t what happened. Those operations would have cost you just as much in the nineteenth century, but—”
“Twentieth!”
“Oh, what’s the difference! Twentieth, then. That is, they would have cost just as much if anybody had been able to do them. Of course, nobody was.”
Forrester nodded unwillingly. “All right, I admit I’m alive and I shouldn’t kick. But still—”
Impatiently the girl selected another document from the sheaf, glanced at it, and handed it to him. Forrester looked, and he was very nearly sick. Full color, nearly life size, he thought at first that it was Lon Chaney made up as the Phantom of the Opera.
But there was no makeup. It was a face. Or what was left of one.
He gagged. “What— What—”
“Do you see, Charles? You were in bad shape.”
“Me?”
“Oh yes, dear. You really must read your report. See here . . . evidently you fell forward into the flames. Besides your being killed, the whole anterior section of the head was destroyed. At least, the soft parts. Mm . . . lucky your brains weren’t cooked, at that.” He saw with incredulity that this tender, charming girl was studying the photograph with as little passion as though the charred meat it represented were a lamb chop. She went on, “Didn’t you say you noticed your eyes were different? New eyes.”
Forrester croaked, “Put that thing away.”
He took a swallow of his drink and immediately regretted it, then fished one of the remaining cigarettes out of his second pack and lit it. “I see what you mean,” he said at last.
“Do you, dear? Good. You know, I bet four or five hundred people worked on you. All sorts of specialists. All their helpers. Using all their equipment. They get a case like yours, it’s like one of those great big enormous jigsaw puzzles. They have to put it all back together, piece by piece—only they don’t have all the pieces, so they have to get or make new ones . . . and of course the stuff spoils so. They have to—”
“Quit it!”
“You’re awfully jumpy, Charles.”
“All right! I’m jumpy.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette and asked the question that had been developing in his mind for ten minutes now. “Look. At a normal rate of expenditure—oh, you know; the way you see me living—roughly how long is my quarter of a million dollars going to last?”
She looked into space and tapped her fingernails against her teeth. “There are those custom items of yours,” she said thoughtfully. “They come high—those things you smoke, and fowl eggs, and—what was that other thing? The oransh juice—”
“Leaving out that kind of stuff! How long?”
She pursed her lips. “Well, it depends—”
“Roughly! How long?”
She said, “Well, maybe the rest of this week.”
He goggled at her. He repressed a laugh that sounded almost like a sob.
The end of the week?
He had been building himself up to hear an answer he wouldn’t like, but this exceeded his expectations. He said wretchedly, “Adne—what am I supposed to do?”
“Well,” she said, “you could always get a job.”
“Sure,” he said bitterly. “Got one up your sleeve? One that pays a million dollars a week?”
To his surprise, she seemed to take him seriously. “Oh, Charles! Not that much. I mean, you’re not skilled. Twenty, twenty-five thousand a day—I don’t think you can really expect more.”
He said, “You can find me a job like that?”
“Well, what do you think Taiko would have paid?”
“Wait a minute! You mean Taiko would have given me a job? But I thought— I mean, he said it was his club. What did he call it, the Ned Lud Society?”
“Yes, that’s right.” She nodded. “What do you think a club’s for, Charles?”
“Why—so that people with like interests can, well, get together and work on their interests.”
“And what did you used to so quaintly call a business company?”
“Why . . . Yeah, but look, a company produces something of value. Something you can sell.”
She sniffed. “We’ve got beyond that sort of consideration. Anything that any reasonably competent people agree is worth doing is worth a salary in exchange for doing it.”
“Gosh,” said Charles Forrester.
“But Taiko was quite astonished at the way you acted, Charles. I don’t know whether he’s angry or not. But I wouldn’t count on the offer still being open.”
“Figures,” said Forrester gloomily, musing over lost possibilities.
“Man Forrester!”
The sound of the joymaker was almost like an alarm wakening him from sleep. It took him a few moments to realize what it was, as he emerged from his bemused state. Then he said, “In a minute, machine. Adne, let me get this straight—”
But she was looking urgent and abashed. “Charles dear, you’d better take this message.”
“Man Forrester! I have a priority notice of personal visit!”
“Yeah, but Adne—”
“Charles,” she said, “please take it. Or—never mind. I’ll tell you myself.” She looked down at her hands, avoiding his eyes. “I guess I should have told you before. I think that’s Heinzie coming now.”
“Heinzie? The Martian? The one—”
She said apologetically, “I told him to come, Charles dear. You’d really better let him in.”
As Forrester faced the man named Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major, he felt he was in the state described as “ready for anything.” What this actually meant was that he was totally unready. He did not know what to expect. He could feel his heart pounding; he sensed that his hands were beginning to shake. Even Adne seemed stimulated; she was watching them, her small face intensely interested, and she was fumbling something out of her joymaker. A tranquilizer? No, more likely something to pep her up, thought Forrester. Whatever it was, she popped it in her mouth and swallowed before she said, “Hello, Heinzie. Come on in. I think you and Charles have met.”
Forrester gave her a look, then returned to Heinzlichen. He started to put out his hand, then stopped, balancing on the balls of his feet, half ready to shake hands, half in a stance resembling the attack position of karate. “We’ve met, all right. Too damned often, if you ask me.”
Heinzlichen came in, allowed the door to close behind him, and stood still, studying Forrester as if he were a specimen in a museum. Adne had been playing with the lights again, and mottled reds and yellows flecked his face. They suited his personal color scheme. He was a tall, fat man. His hair was red, and he wore a close-cut red beard that covered all of his face except for nose, lips, and eyes, like the mask of a chimpanzee. He rubbed his beard thoughtfully while he examined Forrester’s face with attention, glanced appraisingly at his arms and body, stared down at the position of his feet, and finally nodded. He returned his gaze to a point on Forrester’s chest and stabbed at it with a finger. He said, “Dat is where I will kill you. Dere. In de heart.”
Forrester exhaled sharply through his nose. It tingled. He felt the flush of adrenalin through his bloodstream. He opened his mouth; but Adne cut in swiftly before he could speak.
“Heinze dear! You promised.”
“Promised? What promised? I promised to talk, dat’s all. So let’s talk.”
“But Charles doesn’t understand how things are, Heinzie. Sit down. Have a drink.”
“Oh, sure I’ll have a drink. You pick me out something nice. But make it fast, because I have only a couple of minutes.” He returned to Forrester. “Well? You want to talk?”
Forrester said belligerently, “You’re damned right I want to talk. And, no, Adne, I don’t want a drink. Now, look here, you—” He hesitated, finding it hard to think of the right thing to say. “Well, what I want to know is, why the devil do you want to kill me?”
The Martian looked baffled. He glanced at Adne helplessly, then back to Forrester. “Sweat, I don’t know,” he said. “Up dere at de party you stomped my foot. . . . But I guess I just didn’t like you anyway. What do you want to ask a question like dat for?”
“Why? It’s my life!”
The Martian growled, “I knew dis was a bad idea. Honey, I’m going. De more I see of dis guy, de less I like him.”
But Adne had her hand on his arm. “Please, Heinzie. Here.” She handed him a fizzy orange drink in a thing like a brandy inhaler with a hollow stem. “You know Charles is just out of the sleep-freeze. He’s kind of a slow learner, I’m afraid.”
“Dat’s his business. Killing him, dat’s my business.” But the Martian grumpily accepted the drink. The girl pressed her advantage.
“Yes, but Heinzie—dear—what’s the fun of it if he doesn’t know what it’s all about?”
“Trimmer!” Heinzlichen growled. “Maybe it’s more fun dat way. I can’t help dinking we lose some of de important values when killing’s all so cut and dried.”
“All right, Heinzie, maybe you’re right, but there’s such a thing as fair play, too. Why, I don’t even think Charles really knows what his rights are.”
The Martian shook his head. “Dat’s not my business eider. Dere’s his joymaker; let him call up and find out.”
Adne winked reassuringly at Forrester, who was not in the least reassured. But she seemed more confident and relaxed now. She leaned back, sipping her drink, and said silkily, “Wouldn’t it be nicer for you to talk to him about it? Tell Charles what you want to do, exactly?”
“Oh, dat part’s all right.” The Martian put down his drink, scratched his beard thoughtfully, and said, “Well, it’s like dis. I want to beat him up good, and den I will stomp on his chest cage until it breaks and ruptures de heart. De reason I like to do it dat way is it hurts a lot, and you don’t get near de brain. Of course,” he mused, “I got to pay a little more, but de best pleasures are de ones you pay for. Cheap’s cheap.” Then his expression lightened—or seemed to: the beard hid most of his transient looks. “Anyway,” he added, “maybe I can get off paying de bill. I talked to de lawyer, and he said Forrester hasn’t touched all de bases, law-wise, so maybe we can fight de costs. But dat doesn’t matter in de long run. What de hell, if it costs it costs.”
Forrester nodded thoughtfully and sat down. “I believe I’ll have that drink now, Adne,” he said. He realized, with a certain amount of pride, that he was perfectly calm.
The reason was that Forrester had come to a decision while Heinzlichen was talking: he had decided to go along with the gag. True, it wasn’t really a gag. True, when this man said he intended to cause Forrester a lot of pain and bring about his ultimate death, he meant every word of it. But you could not spend your life in weighing consequences. You had to pretend that the chips were only plastic and did not represent real currency of any sort, otherwise you would lose the game out of nerves and panic.
The very fact that the stakes were so important to Forrester was a good reason for pretending they were only make-believe.
He accepted a glass from Adne and said reasonably, “Now, let’s get this straight. Did I understand you right? You talked to a lawyer before you tried to kill me?”
“Nah! Wake up, will you? All I did den was file de papers.”
“But you just said—”
“Listen, why don’t you? De papers was so I could kill you—all de usual stuff, bonds to cover de DR business, guaranties against damaging de brain, and like dat. Den de lawyer was just yesterday, when I got de idea maybe I could kill you and save, all de bond and guaranty money.”
“Excuse me. I didn’t understand that part.” Forrester nodded pleasantly, thinking hard. It began to make a certain amount of sense. The thing you had to remember was that death, to these people, was not a terminal event but only an intermission.
He said, “As I understand it—I mean, if I understand it—the legal part of this business means you have to guarantee to pay my freezer costs if you kill me.”
“Nah! Not ‘if.’ Odder wise you got it.”
“So I don’t have anything to say about it. The law lets you kill me, and I’m stuck with it.”
“Dat’s right.”
Forrester said thoughtfully, “But it doesn’t sound fair to me, everything considered.”
“Fair? Of course it’s fair! Dat’s de whole idea of de guaranties.”
“Yes, of course—if the circumstances are normal. But in this case, with death-reversal out of the question . . .”
The Martian snorted angrily. “Are you crazy?”
“No, really,” Forrester persisted. “You said you were going to try to get out of paying my expenses. You know more about it than I do. Suppose you succeed?”
“Oh, boy! Den you have to pay dem yourself.”
Forrester said politely. “But you see, I can’t. I don’t have any money to pay them with. Ask Adne.”
The Martian turned to Adne with a look of unbelieving anger, but she said, “As a matter of fact, Heinzie, Charles is telling you the truth. I didn’t think of it, but it’s so. I mean, I haven’t checked his balance . . . but it can’t be much.”
“De hell with his balance! What de sweat do I care about his balance? I just want to kill him!”
“You see, Jura, if you kill me—”
“Shut up, you!”
“But the way things are—”
“Dog sweat!” The Martian’s face was working angrily under the mask of beard. He was confused, and that made him mad: “What’s de matter with you, Forrester? Why didn’t you get a job?”
“Well, I will. As soon as I can.”
“Sweat! You want to chicken out, dat’s all!”
“I simply didn’t understand my money situation. I didn’t plan it this way. I’m sorry, Jura, I really am, but—”
“Shut up!” barked the Martian. “Look, I got no more time for dis talk. I have to go to de rehearsal hall; we’re doing de Schumannlieder, and I’m de soloist. Answer de question. Do you want to chicken out?”
“Well,” said Forrester, fiddling with his glass and casting a sidelong glance at Adne, “yes.”
“Fink! Dog-sweat fink!”
“I know how you feel. I guess I’d feel the same way.”
“De hell with how you’d feel. All right, look. I’m not promising anything, but I’ll talk to de lawyer again and see where de hell we stand. Meanwhile, you get a job, hear?”
Forrester showed the Martian out. For some reason that he could not quite analyze, he was feeling elated.
He stood thoughtfully at the door, testing the feeling. For a man who had just discovered he was a pauper, who had reinforced the dislike of an enemy who proposed to kill him, Forrester was feeling pretty good. Probably it was all an illusion, he thought fatalistically.
Adne was curled up on the couch, studying him. She had been doing something with the lights again; now they were misty blue, and her skin gleamed through the lacy strands of her coverall. Perhaps she had been doing something with that, too; it seemed to be showing more of Adne than it had earlier. Forrester excused himself and went into the little lavatory room to splash cold water on his face. And then he realized the cause of his elation.
He had managed to win a point.
He was not a bit sure it was a worthwhile point; he wasn’t even quite sure of what he had won. But, for better or for worse, he had gained a small victory over Heinzlichen Jura de Syrtis Major. For days Forrester had been a cork bobbing to the thrust of every passerby; now he was thrusting back. He came smiling back into the room and cried, “I want a drink!”
Adne was still on the couch, murmuring into her joymaker. “—And be sure you’re locked up,” she was saying. “Don’t forget your prophylaxis and say good night, Mim.” She put it down and looked up at him. Her expression was sulky but entertained.
“The kids?” She nodded. “My God, is it that late?” He had forgotten the passage of time. “I’m sorry. I mean, what about their dinners and all?”
She looked slightly less sulky, slightly more entertained. “Oh, Charles! You weren’t thinking I had to boil oatmeal or peel potatoes? They’ve had their dinners, of course.”
“Oh. Well. I guess we should be thinking about ours. . . .”
“Not yet.”
Forrester said, reorienting his thinking very quickly, “All right. Then what about that drink?”
“I’m not thirsty, you fool. Sit down.” She lifted her joymaker, looked him over with narrowed eyes, kissed the soft spot at the base of his throat, and touched it with the joymaker.
Forrester felt a sudden surge inside him. It was like a mild electric shock, like a whiff of mingled oxygen and musk.
Adne studied him critically, then leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.
A moment later he said, “Do that again.”
She did. Then she lay back against him with her head on his shoulder.
“Dear Charles,” she said, “you’re such a nut.”
He stroked her and kissed her hair. The parallel-strand fabric did not feel coarse or wiry; he could hardly tell it was there.
“I don’t know if you did the right thing with Heinzie,” she said meditatively. “It’s kind of—you know. Almost chicken . . .” Then she turned inside his arm and kissed his ear. “I know it embarrasses you when I talk biology, but—well, the reason I’m natural-flow, you see, is that I’m a natural type of girl. Do you understand?”
“Sure,” he lied, only vaguely hearing her.
“I mean, if you want to you can take the pills and use the chemosimulants, and it’s just about the same. But I don’t do that, because, if you’re going to do that, you might just as well go all the way and use the joy machine.”
“I can see that, all right,” he said, but she fended him off and added, “Still, one doesn’t have to be rigid. Sometimes you’re at a low point, and something special happens, and you’d like to be at a high point. Then you can take a pill if you want to, do you see?”
“Oh, yes! Say!” said Forrester, pleasantly excited, “I wonder! How would you feel about taking a pill now?”
She sat up, stretched, and put her arms around him. “Don’t have to,” she said, resting her cheek against his. “I took one when you let Heinzie in.”
With two victories in one day, thought Forrester in a mood of pleasant triumph and lassitude, this world had come pretty close to his first hopes for it, after all. After the girl had gone, he slept for ten good hours and woke with the conviction that everything would turn out right. The father of a President and the lover of Adne Bensen was, at least in his own eyes, a figure of much mana. There were problems. But he would cope with them.
He ordered breakfast and added, “Machine! How do I go about getting a job?”
“If you will state parameters, Man Forrester, I will inform you as to openings that may be suitable.”
“You mean, what kind of job? I don’t know what kind. Just so it pays—” he coughed before he could get the figure out—“around ten million bucks a year.”
But the joymaker took it in stride. “Yes, Man Forrester. Please inform me further as to working conditions: home or external; mode of payment—straight cash or fringed; if fringe, nature permitted—profit-sharing, stock issue, allocated earnings bonus, or other; categories not to be considered; religious, moral or political objections, not stated in your record profile, which may debar classes of employ—”
“Slow down a minute, machine. Let me think.”
“Certainly, Man Forrester. Will you receive your messages now?”
“No. I mean,” he added cautiously, “not unless there are some life-or-death ones, like that Martian being out to kill me again.” But there weren’t. That, too, thought Forrester with pleasure, set this day off from other days.
He ate thoughtfully and economically, bathed, put on clean clothes, and allowed himself an extremely expensive cigarette before he tackled the joymaker again. Then he said, “Tell you what you do, machine. Just give me an idea of what jobs are open.”
“I cannot sort them unless you give me parameters, Man Forrester.”
“That’s right. Don’t sort them. Just give me an idea of what’s going.”
“Very well, Man Forrester. I will give you direct crude readout of new listings as received in real time. Marking. Mark! Item, curvilinear phase-analysis major, seventy-five hundred. Item, chef, full manual, Cordon Bleu experience, eighteen thousand. Item, poll subjects, detergents and stress-control appliances, no experience required, six thousand. Item, childcare domestics—but, Man Forrester,” the joymaker broke in on itself, “that clearly specifies female employment. Shall I eliminate the obviously inappropriate listings?”
“No. I mean, yes. Eliminate the whole thing for now. I get the idea.” But it was confusing, thought Forrester uncomfortably; the salaries mentioned were hardly higher than twentieth-century scale. They would not support a Pekingese pup in this era of joyful extravagance. “I think I’ll go see Adne,” he said suddenly, and aloud.
The joymaker chose to reply. “Very well, Man Forrester, but I must inform you as to a Class Gamma alert. Transit outside your own dwelling will be interrupted for drill purposes.”
“Oh, God. You mean like an air raid.”
“A drill, Man Forrester.”
“Sure. Well, how long is that going to go on?”
“Perhaps five minutes, Man Forrester.”
“Oh, well, that’s not so bad. I tell you what, why don’t you give me my messages while I’m waiting.”
“Yes, Man Forrester. There are one personal and nine commercial. The personal message is from Adne Bensen and follows.” Forrester felt the light touch of Adne’s hand, then the soft sound of Adne’s voice. “Dear Charles,” her voice whispered, “see me again soon, you dragon! And you know we have to think about something, don’t you? We have to decide on a name.”
When he reached Adne’s apartment, the children let him in. “Hello, Tunt,” he said. “Hello, Mim.”
They stared at him curiously, then at each other. Blew it again, he thought in resignation; it must be the girl that’s Tunt, the boy that’s Mim. But he had long since decided that if he tried to track down all his little errors he would have time for nothing else, and he was determined not to be derailed. “Where’s your mother?” he asked.
“Out.”
“Do you know where?”
“Uh-huh.”
Forrester said patiently, “Would you like to tell me where?”
The boy and girl looked at each other thoughtfully. Then the boy said, “Well, not particularly, Charles. We’re kind of busy.”
Forrester had always thought of himself as a man who liked children, but, although he smiled at these two, the smile was becoming forced. “I guess I can call her up on the joymaker,” he said.
The boy looked scandalized. “Now? While she’s crawling?”
Forrester sighed. “Look, fellows, I want to talk to your mother about something. How do you recommend I go about it?”
“You could wait here, I guess,” the boy said reluctantly.
“If you have to,” added the girl.
“I get the impression you don’t want me around. What are you kids doing?”
“Well—” The boy overruled his sister with a look and said sheepishly, “We’re having a meeting.”
“But please don’t tell Taiko!” cried the girl.
“He doesn’t like our club,” the boy finished.
“Just the two of you?”
“Sweet sweat, no!” laughed the boy. “Let’s see. There are eleven of us.”
“Twelve!” the girl crowed. “I bet you forgot the robot again.”
“Maybe I did. You and me, Tunt. Four boys. Three girls. A grown-up. A Martian . . . and the robot. Yeah, twelve.”
“You mean a Martian like Heinzlichen what’s-his-name?”
“Oh, no, Charles! Heinzie’s a dope, but he’s people. This is one of the big green ones with four arms.”
Forrester did a double take, then said, “You mean like in Edgar Rice Burroughs? But—but I didn’t think those were real.”
The boy looked politely interested. “Yes? What about it?”
“What do you mean by ‘real,’ Charles?” asked the girl.
In the old days, before Forrester died, he had been a science-lover. It had always seemed to him wonderful and exciting that he should be living in an age when electricity came from wall sockets and living pictures from a box on a bench. He had thought sometimes, with irony and pity, of how laughably incompetent some great mind of the past, a Newton or an Archimedes, would have been to follow his own six-year-old’s instructions about tuning a television set or operating his electric trains. So here I am, he thought wryly, the bushman in Times Square. It’s not much fun.
But by careful and single-minded questioning he got some glimpse of what the children were talking about. Their playmates were not “real,” but they were a lot realer than, say, a Betsy-Wetsy doll. They were analogues, simulacra; the children, when pressed, called them “simulogs.” The little girl said proudly that they were very good at developing interpersonal relationships. “Got that much,” said Charles, “or, anyway, I think I do. So what does Taiko have to do with it?”
“Oh, him!”
“He doesn’t like anything that’s fun.”
“He says we’re losing the will to cope with—with what you said, Charles. Reality.”
“And all that sweat,” added the girl. “Say! Would you like to hear him?”
She glanced toward the view-wall, now showing a placid background scene of woody glades and small furry animals. “You mean on the television?” Forrester asked.
“The what, Charles?”
“On that.”
“That’s right, Charles.”
“Well,” said Forrester. . . .
And thought that, after all, he might as well. If worst came to worst, he could take up Taiko’s offer of a job, assuming it was still open; and before he came to that worst he would be better off knowing something about it. “Display away,” he said. “What have I got to lose?”
The viewing wall, obedient to the little girl’s orders, washed out the forest glade and replaced it with a stage. On it a man in a fright wig was bounding about and howling.
With difficulty Forrester recognized the blond, crew-cut visitor he had so unceremoniously got rid of—when? Was it only a couple of days ago? Taiko was doing a sort of ceremonial step dance: a couple of paces in one direction and a stomp, a couple of paces away and another stomp. And what he was shouting seemed like gibberish to Forrester.
“Lud, lords, led nobly!”(Stomp!) “Let Lud lead, lords,”(stomp!) “lest lone, lorn lads lapse loosely”(stomp!) “into limbo!”(Stomp!) He faced forward and threw his arms wide. The camera zoomed in on his impassioned, tortured face. “Jeez, kids! You want to get your goddamn brains scrambled? You want to be a juiceless jellyfish? If you don’t, then—let Lud lead!”’(Stomps!) “Let Lud lead!”(Stomp!) “Let Lud lead—”
The boy cried over the noise from the view-walls, “Now he’s going to ask for comments from the viewers. This is where we usually send in things to make him mad, like ‘Go back in the freezer, you old icy cube’ and ‘Taiko’s a dirty old Utopian!’ Of course, we don’t give our names.”
“Today I was going to send in, ‘If it was up to people like you we’d still be swinging from our tails like apes,’ ” said the girl thoughtfully, “but it probably wouldn’t make him very mad.”
Forrester coughed. “Actually, I’d just as soon not make him mad. I may have to go to work for him.”
The children stared at him, dismayed. The boy extinguished Taiko’s image on the view-wall and cried, “Please, Charles, don’t do that! Mim said you turned him down.”
“I did, but I may have to reconsider; I have to get some kind of a job. Matter of fact, that’s why I’m here.”
“Oh, good,” said the girl. “Mim’ll get you a job. Won’t she, Tunt?”
“If she can,” the boy said uncertainly. “Say, what can you do, Charles?”
“That’s one of my problems. But there has to be something; I’m running out of money.”
They did not respond to that, merely looked at him wide-eyed. They not only looked astonished, they looked embarrassed.
At length the little girl sighed and said, “Charles, you’re so sweaty ignorant I could freeze. I never heard of anybody being out of money, ‘cept the Forgotten Men. Don’t you know how to get a job?”
“Not very well.”
“You use the joymaker,” the boy said patiently.
“Sure. I tried that.”
The boy looked excited. “You mean— Look, Charles, you want me to help you? Cause I will. I mean, we had that last year in Phase Five. All you have to do is—”
His expression suddenly became crafty. “Oh, sweat, Charles,” he said carelessly, “let me do it for you. Just, uh, tell it to listen to me.”
Forrester didn’t need the girl’s look of thrilled shock to warn him. “Nope,” he said firmly. “I’ll wait for your mother to come home.”
The boy grinned and surrendered. “All right, Charles. I just wanted to ask it something about Mim’s other— Well, here’s what you do. Tell it you want to be tested for an employability profile and then you want recommendations.”
“I don’t exactly know what that involves,” Forrester said cautiously.
The boy sighed. “You don’t have to understand it, Charles. Just do it. What the sweat do you think the joymaker’s for?”
And, actually, it turned out to be pretty easy, although the employability profile testing involved some rather weird questions. . . .
What is “God”?
Are your stools black and tarry?
If you happened to be a girl, would you wish you were a boy?
Assume there are Plutonians. Assume there are elves. If elves attacked Pluto without warning, whose side would you be on?
Why are you better than anyone else?
Most of the questions were like that. Some were worse—either totally incomprehensible to Forrester or touching on matters that made him blush and glance uneasily at the children. But the children seemed to take it as a matter of course, and indeed grew bored before long and wandered back to their own view-wall, where they watched what seemed to be a news broadcast. Forrester growled out the answers as best he could, having come to the conclusion that the machine knew what it was doing even if he didn’t. The answers, of course, made no more sense than the questions; tardily he realized that the joymaker was undoubtedly monitoring his nervous system and learning more from the impulses that raced through his brain than from his words, anyway. Which was confirmed when, at the end of the questions, the joymaker said, “Man Forrester, we will now observe you until you return to rest state. I will then inform you as to employability.”
Forrester stood up, stretched, and looked around the room. He could not help feeling that he had been through an ordeal. Being reborn was nearly as much trouble as being born in the first place.
The children were discussing the scene on the view-wall, which seemed to show a crashed airliner surrounded by emergency equipment, on what appeared to be a mountain top somewhere. Men and machines were dousing it with chemical sprays and carrying out injured and dead—if they made that distinction!—on litters, to what Forrester recognized by the ruby caduceus as death-reversal vehicles. The mountainside was dotted with what looked like pleasure craft—tiny, bright-colored aircraft that had no visible business there, and that seemed to be occupied by sightseers. No doubt they were, thought Forrester—remembering the crowds that had stood by the night he was burned to death heedless of icy spray, icy winds and irritated police trying to push them back.
“Old Hap’s never going to make it,” said the boy to the girl, then looked up as he saw Forrester. “Oh, you’re done?”
Forrester nodded. A drone from the view-wall was saying, “. . . Made it again, with a total to this minute of thirty-one and fifty-five out of a possible ninety-eight. Not bad for the Old Master! Yet Hap still trails the rookie Maori from Port Moresby—”
“What are you watching?” he asked.
“Just the semifinals,” said the boy. “How’d you make out on your tests?”
“I don’t have the results yet.” The screen flickered and showed a new picture, a sort of stylized star map with arrows and dots of green and gold. Forrester said, “Is ten million a year too much to ask for?”
“Sweat, Charles! How would we know?” The boy was clearly more interested in the view-wall than in Forrester, but he was polite enough to add, “Tunt’s projected life average is about twelve million a year. Mine’s fifteen. But of course we’ve got, uh, more advantages,” he said delicately.
Forrester sat down and resigned himself to waiting for the results. The arrows and circles were moving about the star map, and a voice was saying, “Probe reports from 61 Cygni, Proxima Centauri, Epsilon Indi, and Cordoba 31353 show no sign of artifactual activity and no change in net systemic energy levels.”
“Dopes!” shrilled the little girl. “They couldn’t find a Martian in a mattress.”
“At Groombridge One, eight, three, oh, however, the unidentified object monitored six days ago shows no sign of emission and has been tentatively identified as a large comet, although its anecliptic orbit marks this large and massive intruder as a potential trouble spot. Needless to say, it is being carefully watched, and SEPF headquarters in Federal City announce that they are phasing two additional monitors out of their passive orbits. . . .”
“What are they talking about?” Forrester asked the boy.
“The war, of course. Shut up, won’t you?”
“. . . Well, there’s a good news tonight from 22H Camelopardis! A late bulletin just received from sortie-control headquarters states that the difficult task of replacing the damaged probe has been completed! The first of the replacements rushed out from BO 7899 has achieved stellar orbit in a near-perfect, almost circular orbit, and all systems are go. Seven backup replacements—”
“Sweat,” said the girl. “What a tedious war! Charles, you used to do things better, didn’t you?”
“In what way?”
The girl looked puzzled. “More killing, of course.”
“If you call that better, maybe we did. World War Two killed twenty million people, I think.”
“Weep. Twenty million,” breathed the girl. “And so far we’ve killed, what is it, Tunt? Twenty-two?”
“Twenty-two million?” asked Forrester.
The boy shook his head disgustedly. “Twenty-two individual Sirians. Isn’t that rotten?”
But before Forrester could answer, his joymaker spoke up.
“Man Forrester! Your tests have been integrated and assayed. May I display the transcript on Bensen children equipment?”
“Go ahead,” the boy said sullenly. “Can’t be any worse than that.”
The star map disappeared from the wall and was replaced by shimmering sine waves, punctuated with numbers that were quite meaningless to Forrester. “You may apply for reevaluation on any element of the profile, if you wish. Do you wish to do this, Man Forrester?”
“Hell, no.” The numbers and graphs were not only meaningless but disturbing. Forrester had a flash of memory, which he identified as dating from the last time a government agency had concerned itself with finding him a job—after his discharge from his post-Korean peacetime army service, when he joined the long lines of unemployables telling their lies to a bored State Employment Service clerk. He could almost see the squares of linoleum on the floor, the queues of those who, like himself, wanted only to collect unemployment insurance for a while, in the hope that during that time the world would clarify itself for them.
But the joymaker was talking.
“Your profile, Man Forrester, indicates relatively high employability in personal-service and advocative categories. I have selected ninety-three possible openings. Shall I give you the list?”
“My God, no. Just give me the one you like best.”
“Your optimum choice, Man Forrester, is as follows: Salary, seventeen thousand five hundred. This is rather less than your stated requirements, but an expense—”
“Hold on a minute! I’ll say it’s less! I was asking for ten million!”
“Yes, Man Forrester. You stated ten million per year. This is seventeen thousand five hundred per day. At four-day-week norm, allowing for projected overtime as against health losses, three million eight hundred thousand dollars per year. Expenses are also included, however, optimized at five million plus in addition to salary.”
“Wait a minute.” The numbers were so large as to be dizzying. He turned to the children. “That’s almost nine million a year. Can I live on that?”
“Sweat, Charles, sure, if you want to.”
Forrester took a deep breath.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
The joymaker did not seem particularly concerned. “Very well, Man Forrester. Your duties are as follows: Conversation. Briefing. Discussion. The orientation is timeless, so your status as a recent disfreezee will not be a handicap. You will be expected to answer questions and be available for discussions, usually remote due to habitat considerations. Some travel is indicated.”
“Sweat.” The Bensen children were showing signs of interest; the boy sat up, and his sister stared wide-eyed at Forrester.
“Supplementary information, Man Forrester: This employer has rejected automated services for heuristic reasons. His desideratum is subjectivity rather than accuracy of data. The employer is relatively unfamiliar with human history, culture, and customs—”
“It is!” cried the girl.
“—And will supplement your services with TIC data as needed.”
Forrester cut in, “Never mind that. Where do I go for my interview?”
“Man Forrester, you have had it.”
“You mean I’ve got the job? but—but what do I do next?”
“Man Forrester, I was outlining the procedure. Please note the following signal.” There was a mellow, booming chime. “This will indicate a message from your employer. Under the terms of your employment contract, you may not decline to accept these messages during the hours of ten hundred to fourteen hundred on working days. You are further required to receive such messages with no more than twelve hours’ delay even on nonworking days. Thank you, Man Forrester.”
And that, thought Forrester, was that.
Except for trying to find out what was bugging the kids. He said, “All right. What’s eating you?”
They were whispering together, their eyes on him. The boy stopped long enough to ask, “Eating us, Charles?”
“Why are you acting like that?” Forrester amended.
“Oh, nothing.”
“Nothing important,” corrected the girl.
“Come on!”
The little girl said, “It’s just that we never knew anybody who’d work for them before.”
“Work for who?”
“The joymaker told you, Charles! Don’t you listen?” said the boy, and the girl chimed in, “Sweat, Charles! Don’t you know who you’re working for?”
Forrester took a deep breath and glared at them. He told himself that they were only children and that in fact he was rather fond of them; but they seemed on this particular morning to be determined to drive him mad. He sat down and picked up his joymaker. Carefully he scanned the cluster of buttons until he found the crystal-clear, rounded one he was looking for, turned the joymaker until its spray nozzle was pointing at the exposed flesh of his arm, and pressed the button.
Happily it was the right button. What the fine mist that danced into his wrist might be he did not know, but it achieved the expected effect. It was like a supertranquilizer; it cleared his mind, quieted his pulse, and enabled him to say, quite calmly, “Machine! Just who the hell have you got me working for?”
“Do you wish me to display a picture of your employer, Man Forrester?”
“You damn bet I wish!”
“Please observe the view-wall, Man Forrester.”
And observe it Forrester did; and he swallowed hard, stunned.
In all justice to the joymaker, Forrester was forced to admit that he had placed no restrictions on its choice of an employer for him. He had been willing to accept almost anything, but all the same he was surprised.
He hadn’t expected his employer to have bright green fur, or a diadem of tiny eyes peering out of a ruff around a pointed head, or tentacles. He had not, in fact, expected it to be one of the enemy, the race whose presence in space had scared mankind into a vast series of raid drills, weapons programs, and space probes . . . in short, a Sirian.
Forrester could have carried on his new duties anywhere. But he didn’t want to, he wanted to return to the nest; and there in his room he wrestled with the joymaker and the view-wall and emerged with some sort of picture of what the Sirians were and what they were doing on Earth.
There were eleven of them, as it turned out. They were neither tourists nor diplomats. They were prisoners.
Some thirty years earlier, the first human vessels had made contact with the outposts of the Sirian civilization—a civilization much like the human in the quality of its technology, quite inhuman in terms of the appearance of its members and in their social organization. The human exploring party, investigating an extrasolarian planet, had encountered a Sirian ship nosing about a ringlike structure orbiting that planet.
Forrester, having learned that much, had already discovered some enormous gaps in his knowledge. Why hadn’t somebody said something to him about men exploring extrasolar space? Where was this system? And what was the orbital ring? It puzzled and confused Forrester; evidently it was not a Sirian structure and it certainly was not man’s. But he avoided the proliferation of questions in his mind and stuck to the straight line of the first encounter with the Sirians.
The Earth ship was loaded for bear. Having found bear, it pushed all the buttons. The commander may or may not have been given discretion about the chances of alien contact and what to do when and if it happened. But he wasted no time in contemplating choices. Everything the Earth ship owned lashed out at the squat, uneven Sirian vessel—lasers and shells, rockets and energy-emitting decoys to confuse and disrupt its instruments. The Sirians didn’t have a chance. Except for a few who were found still alive in space tanks—their equivalent of suits—they all died with their ship.
The Earthmen brought them warily aboard, then turned tail and fled for home. (Years later, remote-operated probes cautiously returned to look at the scene. They discovered that even the wreckage of the Sirian ship was gone, apparently retrieved by . . . someone. Whereupon the probes fled, too.)
Fourteen Sirians had survived the attack. Eleven of them were still alive and on Earth.
Forrester, watching the picture-story of the Sirians spread across his view-wall while the joymaker stolidly recited the facts of their exile, could not help feeling a twinge of sympathy. Thirty years of imprisonment! They must be getting old now. Did they hope? Did they despair? Were their wives and kiddies waiting back in the nest, or hatching pond, or burrow?
The joymaker did not say; it said only that the Sirians had been thoroughly studied, endlessly debated—and released. Released to house arrest.
The Parliament of Ridings had passed laws about the Sirians. First, it was, from that moment, cardinal policy to avoid contact with their home planet. It was possible that the Sirians would not attack even if they discovered Earth—but it was certain that they wouldn’t if they didn’t. Second, the Sirians now in captivity could never go home. Third—mankind prepared for the attack it hoped would not come.
So the Sirians were spread across the face of the earth, one to a city. They were provided with large subsidies, good living quarters, everything they could want except the freedom to leave and the company of their kind. Every one of them was monitored—not with a mere joymaker. Transponders linked to the central computing nets were surgically built into their very nervous systems. The whereabouts of each was on record at every moment. They were informed as to the areas forbidden to them—rocket landing grounds, nuclear power stations, a dozen other classes of installations. If they ignored the warning, they were reminded. If they failed to heed the reminder, they got a searing jolt of pain in the central nervous system to emphasize it. If that did not stop them, or if for any reason their transponders lost contact with the central computer, they would be destroyed at once. Three of them already had been.
At that moment the mellow chime sounded, the view-wall flickered and changed its picture, and Forrester was face to face with his employer.
It was just like the picture he had seen before.
Maybe it was the same Sirian. But it was looking at him now, or seemed to be, although it was hard to tell from the dozens of tiny eyes that rimmed its upper parts, and it spoke to him.
“Your name,” it said in hollow, unaccented English, “is Charles Dalgleish Forrester, and you work for me and you call me S Four.”
It sounded like a robot talking. More like a robot than the joymaker itself.
“Right, S Four,” said Forrester.
“You tell me about yourself.”
It sounded like a reasonable request. “All right, S Four. Where do you want me to begin?”
“You tell me about yourself.” The tentacles were rippling slowly, the circlet of tiny eyes winking at random like the lights on a computer. He had been wrong about its sound, Forrester decided. It was more like a dubbed-in voice in a foreign film on the Late Show—back when there were foreign films and Late Shows.
“Well,” said Forrester ruminatively, “I guess I can start with when I was born. It was the nineteenth of March, nineteen thirty-two. My father was an architect, but at that time he was unemployed. Later he worked as a project supervisor for the WPA. My mother—”
“You will tell me about WPA,” interrupted the Sirian.
“It was a government agency designed to relieve unemployment during the Depression. You see, at that time there were periodic cyclic imbalances in the economy—”
“You will not lecture me,” interrupted the Sirian, “and will explain terms for which letters WPA are function of entity.”
Dashed, Forrester tried to put in concrete terms the business of the New Deal’s work relief program. Only concrete terms would do. The Sirian was distinctly not interested in Forrester’s digressions into economic theory. Probably he liked his own theories better. But he seemed interested in, or at least did not interrupt, a couple of jokes about leaf-raking and about a WPA worker falling down when someone kicked the broom he was leaning on. The Sirian listened impassively, the girdle of eyes twinkling, for half an hour by the clock; then it said, cutting through Forrester’s description of his high school graduation, “You will tell me more at another time,” and was gone.
And Forrester was well enough pleased. He had never talked to a Sirian before.
Although the children were romantically thrilled, Adne did not approve when she heard about it. Not in the least. “Dear Charles,” she said patiently, “they’re the enemy. People will say you are doing an evil thing.”
“If they’re so dangerous, why aren’t they in concentration camps?”
“Charles! You’re acting kamikaze again!”
“Or why isn’t there a law against working for them?”
She sighed and nibbled what looked like a candied orchid, regarding him with fond concern. “Oh, Charles. Human society is not merely a matter of law. You have to remember principle. There are certain standards of what is good and what is bad, and civilized people comply with them.”
Forrester grumbled, “Yes, I understand that. It’s good when anybody jumps on me. It’s bad when I try to do anything about it.”
“Kamikaze, Charles! I’m simply trying to point out to you that Taiko—for instance—would pay you at least as much as this filthy Sirian for a socially useful job—”
“Sweat Taiko!” shouted Forrester, making her laugh with his malaprop anger. “I’m going to do this by myself!”
So Adne left him there on friendly terms, but she left him nonetheless; an engagement in connection with her employment, she said, and Forrester did not know enough about her job to question it. He hadn’t found an opportunity to ask what her “crawling” date had been, nor did he see a chance to bring up her suggestion about picking a name. She volunteered nothing, and he was just as well pleased.
Besides, he wanted to talk more with the children.
With their help he was learning more about the Sirian than the Sirian would be able to learn about him. The kids frothed with information. It wasn’t difficult to master all the facts they had on tap, for there were not many real facts about Sirians to learn. All the hostages on Earth were of the same sex, for example, but there was a good deal of argument about what that sex was. Nor was their family structure at all clear. Whatever their relationships may have been on the planet from which they came, none of them had ever given any signs of being particularly depressed over being separated from their near and dear. Forrester took in the information grudgingly; he could not help thinking there should have been more of it. He said, “Do you mean to tell me that the only time we’ve ever seen them is this one time when we wiped out their exploring party?”
“Oh, no, Charles!” The boy was indulgent with him. “We long-range spied their home planet once, too. But that’s dangerous. Anyway, that’s what they say; so they stopped it. If it was up to me I would have kept it up.”
“And like in the chromosphere of Mira Ceti,” added the girl brightly.
“The what?”
The boy chortled. “Oh, yeah. That was a fun one! We had it on our class evaluation trip.”
“Sweat!” cried the girl excitedly. “Say! Maybe Forrester would like to go with us if we do it again. I’d like to!”
Forrester felt a sensation of committing himself to more than he liked. He said uncertainly, “Well, sure. But I don’t have much time right now. I mean, these are my working hours—”
“Oh, sweat, Charles,” said the boy impatiently, “it doesn’t take time. I mean, you don’t go anywhere in space. It’s a construct.”
“Only it was kind of real, too,” added the girl.
“But it’s all just tapes now,” explained the boy helpfully.
“Show him!” crowed the girl excitedly. “Mira Ceti! Please, Tunt, you promised!”
The boy shrugged, cocked an eye thoughtfully at Forrester, then leaned forward. He spoke into his junior joymaker and touched a button on his teaching desk.
At once the cluttered children’s room disappeared, and they were surrounded by a wall of hot swirling gray and incandescent orange. It cleared. . . .
And at once Forrester and the two children were seated in the bridge of a spaceship. The toys were gone, the furnishings replaced by bright metal instruments and flickering, whistling gauges. And outside crystal panels surged the devastating chromosphere of a sun.
Forrester shrank back instinctively from the heat before he realized that there was none. It was illusion. But it was perfect.
“By God!” he cried admiringly. “How does that work?”
“Sweat, I don’t know,” scoffed the boy. “That’s ninth-phase stuff. Ask your joymaker.”
“Well, machine? How about it?”
The calm voice of the joymaker replied at once. “The phenomenon you are currently inspecting, Man Forrester, is a photic projection on a vibratory curtain. An interference effect produces a virtual image on the surface of an optical sphere with the nexus of yourself and your companions as its geometric center. This particular construct is an edited and simplified reproduction of scansion of a Sirian exploration vessel in a stellar atmosphere, to wit—”
“That’s enough,” interrupted Forrester. “I liked the kid’s answer better.”
But the boy said tautly, “Knock it off, Charles. We’re starting! See, there’s this Sirian high-thermal scout vessel, and we’re about to run into it.”
A harsh male voice rasped, “Tractor ship Gimmel! Your wingmate has an engine dysfunction! Prepare to lock, grapple, and evacuate crew!”
“Are!” cried the boy. “Start search procedures, Tunt! Keep a watch, Charles!” His hands flashed over the keyboard—it had not been there a moment before, but it was operative; when he energized a circuit, their make-believe ship responded. He put it through a turn; the “virtual” sunship heeled sharply and sped through fountains of flaming gas.
Forrester could not repress his admiration at the perfection of the illusion. Everything was there, everything but the heat and the feeling of motion—and, gazing at the images around him, Forrester could almost feel the surge and shudder of their ship as it responded to the boy’s touch at the controls. Clearly, they were part of a squadron on some adventurous, unspecified mission. Forrester saw nothing that resembled a Sirian; he saw nothing at all, in fact, but the serpents and coils of gas through which they hurtled. But he was conscious of illusory vessels around them. A spatter of command signals came through the speaker as other “ships” talked back and forth. A panel showed their position in plan and elevation as they swam through the stripped-atom gases of Mira Ceti’s ocean of fire. Forrester ventured to say, “Uh, Tunt. What am I supposed to be doing again?”
“Just use your eyes!” the boy hissed, his attention riveted to the controls. “Don’t mix me up, man!” But his sister was shrieking, “I see it! I see it, Tunt! Look over there!”
“Oh, sweat,” he groaned in despair. “Will you ever learn to make a report?”
She gulped. “I mean, wingmate sighted, vector oh, seven, oh, I guess. Depression—um—not much.”
“Prepare to grapple!” roared the boy.
Through the incandescent swirl a fat slug of a ship appeared, vanished, and appeared again. It was black against the blinding brilliance of its surroundings. Black on its metal skin, black in its ports, black even at the tail where a rocket exhaust discharged dark gases into the brightness around them. The rocket cut off as a labored voice gasped through the speaker, “Hurry it up, Gimmel! We can’t hold out much longer!”
They jockeyed close to the stranded “ship,” buffeted this way and that by the force of the flaming gas. Forrester stared open-mouthed. There was the ship, derelict and helpless. And beyond it, swimming faintly toward them through the chromosphere, something that was bright even in this explosion of radiation, something that loomed enormous and fearsome. . . .
“Holy God,” he cried, “it’s a Sirian!”
And the whole picture shivered and winked away.
They were back in the children’s room. For a moment Forrester was almost blind; then his strained optic centers began to register again. He saw the view-walls, the furnishings, the children’s familiar faces. The expedition was over.
“Fun?” demanded the girl, jumping up and down. “Wasn’t it, Charles? Wasn’t it fun?”
But her brother was staring disgustedly at a readout on his desk. “Tunt,” he grumbled, “you should know better. Don’t you see the tally? We were late locking up. There was a crew of three there, and two of them are scored dead . . . and we never even got to see the Sirian at all. Just him.”
“I’m sorry, Tunt. I’ll look better next time,” the little girl said repentantly.
“Oh, it’s not you.” He glared past her at Forrester and said bitterly, “They set the norms for a three-person mission. As if he was any help.”
Thoughtfully Forrester picked up the mace of his joymaker, selected a button, pointed it at the base of his skull just behind the ear, and squirted. He was not sure he had picked the right joy-juice for the occasion; what he wanted was something that would make him tranquil, happy, and smart. What he got was more like a euphoric, but it would serve.
He said humbly, “I’m sorry I messed it up for you.”
“Not your fault. Should have known better than to take you, anyway.”
“But I wish we’d seen the Sirian,” said the little girl wistfully.
“I think I did. A big bright ship? Coming toward us?”
The boy revived. “Really? Well, maybe that’s not so bad, then. You hear that, monitor?” He listened to what was, to Forrester, an inaudible voice from his teaching machine, then grinned. “We got a tentative conditional,” he said happily. “Take it again next week, Tunt. For record.”
“Oh, wonderful!”
Forrester cleared his throat. “Would you mind telling me exactly what it was we just did?” he asked.
The boy put on his patient expression. “It was a simulated mission against the Sirian exploring party in the chromosphere of Mira Ceti. I thought you knew that. Basically a real observation, but with the contact between our ships and theirs variably emended.”
“Oh. Uh-huh.”
The boy looked quizzically at him. He said, “The thing is, Charles, we get graded on these simulations. But it’s all right; it didn’t hurt us.”
“Sure.” Forrester could feel the beginnings of an idea asserting themselves. No doubt it was the spray from the joymaker, but . . . “Could you do the same trick with some other things about the Sirians? So I could get a better look at them? Maybe the original encounter, for instance?”
“Neg.” The boy glared at his sister. “It’s Tunt’s fault, of course. She cried when the Sirians got killed. We have to wait to take the prebriefing over when we’re older.”
The little girl hung her head. “I was sad,” she said defensively. “But there’s other things we can do, Charles. Would you like to see the coconut on the Moon?”
“The what?”
“Oh, sweat. We’ll just show you.” The boy scratched his ear thoughtfully, then spoke to his junior joymaker. The view-walls clouded again.
“It’s supposed to be another artifact like the one the Sirians were searching for in Mira Ceti’s atmosphere,” he said over his shoulder, manipulating his teaching machine as he spoke. “Don’t know much about it, really. It’s not Sirian. It’s also not ours. Nobody knows whose they are, really, but there are lots of them around—and the Sirians don’t seem to know any more about them than we do. They’re old. And this is the nearest one.”
The view-walls cleared to show the lunar Farside. They were near the terminator line, with crystalline white peaks and craters before them, the jet black of a lunar night to one side. They were looking down into the shallow cup of a crater, where figures were moving.
“This is just tape,” the boy said. “No participation. Just look as long’s you want to.”
There was a clump of pressure huts in the crater. Perhaps they were laboratories, perhaps housing for the scientists or for those who were studying the “artifact” in the center of the screen—or who had been studying it once, perhaps, and had given it up.
It did indeed look like a coconut. As much as it looked like anything.
It was shaggy and rather egg-shaped. Its tendrils of—whatever they were—were not organic, Forrester thought. They were almost glassy in their brightness, reflecting and refracting the sunlight in a spray of color. By the scale of the huts, the thing appeared to be about the size of a locomotive.
“It’s empty, Charles,” volunteered the girl. “They all are.”
“But what are they?”
The girl giggled. “If you find out, tell us. They’ll make us twelfth-phase for sure!”
But the boy said kindly, “Now you know as much as anybody does.”
“But the Sirians must—”
“Oh, no, Charles. The Sirians are late arrivals. Like us. And that thing’s been there, just the way it is now, for no less than a couple gigayears.” He switched off the scene. “Well,” he said brightly. “Anything else you want to know?”
There was indeed. But Forrester had grasped the fact that the more he got to know, the more he was going to realize how little that knowledge was.
Astonishingly enough, it has not really occurred to him before this that a lot of things had been happening to the human race while he was lying deep in the liquid-helium baths of the West Annex Facility. It was like a story in a magazine. You turn a page. Ten years have passed; but you know perfectly well that they weren’t important; if they were, the author would have told you about them.
But far more than ten years had passed. And they were important, all right. And there was no Author to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.