Return from the Stars (11 page)

It was only when I began to eat that I noticed that the tables around me were vacant. I had automatically sought seclusion. I had not even realized it. I did not know what I was eating. I was no longer certain that what I had decided on was good. A vacation, as if I wanted to reward myself, seeing as no one else had thought of it. The waiter approached noiselessly.

"Mr. Bregg?"

"Yes."

"You have a visitor—in your room."

"A visitor?"

I thought at once of Nais. I drank the rest of the dark, bubbling liquid and got up, feeling stares at my back as I left. It would have been nice to saw off about ten centimeters. In my room sat a young woman I had never seen before. A fluffy gray dress, a red whimsy around her arms.

"I am from Adapt," she said. "I spoke with you today."

"Ah, so that was you?"

I stiffened a little. What did they want of me now?

She sat down. And I sat down slowly.

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine. I went to a doctor today, and he examined me. Everything is in working order. I have rented myself a villa. I want to do a little reading."

"Very wise. Clavestra is ideal for that. You will have mountains, quiet…"

She knew that it was Clavestra. Were they spying on me, or what? I sat motionless, waiting.

"I brought you … something from us."

She pointed to a small package on the table.

"It is our latest thing." She spoke with an animation that seemed artificial. "Before going to sleep you set this machine, and in the course of a dozen nights or so you learn, in the easiest possible way, without any effort, a great many useful things."

"Really? That's good," I said. She smiled at me. And I smiled, the well-behaved pupil.

"You are a psychologist?"

"Yes. You guessed."

She hesitated. I saw that she wanted to say something.

"Go ahead."

"You won't be angry with me?"

"Why should I be angry?"

"Because … you see … the way you are dressed is a bit…"

"I know. But I like these trousers. Maybe in time…"

"Ah, no, not the trousers. The sweater."

"The sweater?" I was surprised. "They made it for me today. It's the latest word in fashion, isn't it?"

"Yes. Except that you shouldn't have inflated it. May I?"

"Please," I said quite softly. She leaned forward in her chair, poked me lightly in the chest with straightened fingers, and let out a faint cry.

"What do you have there?"

"Other than myself, nothing," I answered with a crooked smile.

She clutched the fingers of her right hand with her left and stood up. Suddenly my calm, invested with a malicious satisfaction, became like ice.

"Why don't you sit down?"

"But… I'm terribly sorry, I…"

"Forget it. Have you been with Adapt long?"

"It's my second year."

"Aha—and your first patient?" I pointed a finger at myself. She blushed a little.

"May I ask you something?"

Her eyelids fluttered. Did she think that I would ask her out?

"Certainly."

"How do they work it so that the sky is visible at every level of the city?"

She perked up.

"Very simple. Television—that is what they called it, long ago. On the ceilings are screens. They transmit what is above the Earth—the sky, the clouds…"

"But surely the levels are not that high," I said. "Forty-story buildings stand there…"

"It is an illusion," she said, smiling. "The buildings are only partly real; their continuation is an image. Do you understand?"

"I understand how it's done, but not the reason."

"So that the people living on each level do not feel deprived. Not in any way."

"Aha," I said. "Yes, that's clever. One more thing. I'll be shopping for books. Could you suggest a few works in your field? An overview…?"

"You want to study psychology?" She was surprised.

"No, but I'd like to know what has been accomplished in all this time."

"I'd recommend Mayssen," she said.

"What is that?"

"A school textbook."

"I would prefer something larger. Abstracts, monographs—it's always better to go to the source."

"That might be too … difficult."

I smiled politely.

"Perhaps not. What would the difficulty be?"

"Psychology has become very mathematical…"

"So have I. At least, up to the point where I left off, a hundred or so years ago. Do I need to know more?"

"But you are not a mathematician."

"Not by profession, but I studied the subject. On the
Prometheus
. There was a lot of spare time, you know."

Surprised, disconcerted, she said no more. She gave me a piece of paper with a list of titles. When she had gone, I returned to the desk and sat down heavily. Even she, an employee of Adapt… Mathematics? How was it possible? A wild man. I hate them, I thought. I hate them. I hate them. Whom did I hate? I did not know. Everyone. Yes, everyone. I had been tricked. They sent me out, not knowing themselves what they were doing. I should not have returned, like Venturi, Arder, Thomas, but I did return, to frighten them, to walk about like a guilty conscience that no one wants. I am useless, I thought. If only I could cry. Arder knew how. He said you should not be ashamed of tears. Maybe I had lied to the doctor. I had never told anyone about that, but I was not sure whether I would have done it for anyone else. Perhaps I would have. For Olaf, later. But I was not completely sure of that. Arder! They destroyed us and we believed in them, feeling the entire time that Earth was by us, present, had faith in us, was mindful of us. No one spoke of it. Why speak of what is obvious?

I got up. I couldn't sit still. I walked from corner to corner.

Enough. I opened the bathroom door, but there was no water, of course, to splash on my face. Stupid. Hysterics.

I went back to the room and started to pack.

spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I had looked forward to them, after the microfilms that made up the library of the
Prometheus
! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in the hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons—lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. A handful of crystal corn—my books. I selected a number of works on history and sociology, a few on statistics and demography, and what the girl from Adapt had recommended on psychology. A couple of the larger mathematical textbooks—larger, of course, in the sense of their content, not of their physical size. The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that—as it told me—it was linked directly, through electronic catalogues, to templates of every book on Earth. As a rule, a bookstore had only single "copies" of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the content of the work was recorded in a crystal.

The originals—crystomatrices—were not to be seen; they were kept behind pale blue enameled steel plates. So a book was printed, as it were, every time someone needed it. The question of printings, of their quantity, of their running out, had ceased to exist. Actually, a great achievement, and yet I regretted the passing of books. On learning that there were secondhand bookshops that had paper books, I went and found one. I was disappointed; there were practically no scientific works. Light reading, a few children's books, some sets of old periodicals.

I bought (one had to pay only for the old books) a few fairy tales from forty years earlier, to find out what were considered fairy tales now, and I went to a sporting-goods store. Here my disappointment had no limit. Athletics existed in a stunted form. Running, throwing, jumping, swimming, but hardly any combat sports. There was no boxing now, and what they called wrestling was downright ridiculous, an exchange of shoves instead of a respectable fight. I watched one world-championship match in the projection room of the store and thought I would burst with anger. At times I began laughing like a lunatic. I asked about American free-style, judo, ju-jitsu, but no one knew what I was talking about. Understandable, given that soccer had died without heirs, as an activity in which sharp encounters and bodily injuries came about. There was hockey, but it wasn't hockey! They played in outfits so inflated that they looked like enormous balls. It was entertaining to see the two teams bounce off each other, but it was a farce, not a match. Diving, yes, but from a height of only four meters. I thought immediately of my own (my own!) pool and bought a folding springboard, to add on to the one that would be at Clavestra. This disintegration was the work of betrization. That bullfights, cockfights, and other bloody spectacles had disappeared did not bother me, nor had I ever been an enthusiast of professional boxing. But the tepid pap that remained did not appeal to me in the least. The invasion of technology in sports I had tolerated only in the tourist business. It had grown, especially, in underwater sports.

I had a look at various equipment for diving: small electric torpedoes one could use to travel along the bottom of a lake; speedboats, hydrofoils that moved on a cushion of compressed air; water microgleeders, everything fitted with special safety devices to guard against accidents.

The racing, which enjoyed a considerable popularity, I could not consider a sport; no horses, of course, and no cars—remote-control machines raced one another, and bets could be placed on them. Competition had lost its importance. It was explained to me that the limits of man's physical capability had been reached and the existing records could be broken only by an abnormal person, some freak of strength or speed. Rationally, I had to agree with this, and the universal popularity of those athletic disciplines that had survived the decimation, deserved praise; nevertheless, after three hours of inspecting, I left depressed.

I asked that the gymnastic equipment I had selected be sent on to Clavestra. After some thought, I decided against a speedboat; I wanted to buy myself a yacht, but there were no decent ones, that is, with real sails, with centerboards, only some miserable boats that guaranteed such stability that I could not understand how sailing them could gratify anyone.

It was evening when I headed back to the hotel. From the west marched fluffy reddish clouds, the sun had set already, the moon was rising in its first quarter, and at the zenith shone another—some huge satellite. High above the buildings swarmed flying machines. There were fewer pedestrians but more gleeders, and there appeared, streaking the roadways, those lights in apertures, whose purpose I still did not know. I took a different route back and came upon a large garden. At first I thought it was the Terminal park, but that glass mountain of a station loomed in the distance, in the northern, higher part of the city.

The view was unusual, for although the darkness, cut by street lights, had enveloped the whole area, the upper levels of the Terminal still gleamed like snow-covered Alpine peaks.

It was crowded in the park. Many new species of trees, especially palms, blossoming cacti without spines; in a corner far from the main promenades I was able to find a chestnut tree that must have been two hundred years old. Three men of my size could not have encircled its trunk. I sat on a small bench and looked at the sky for some time. How harmless, how friendly the stars seemed, twinkling, shimmering in the invisible currents of the atmosphere that shielded Earth from them. I thought of them as "little stars" for the first time in years. Up there, no one would have spoken in such a way—we would have thought him crazy. Little stars, yes, hungry little stars. Above the trees, which were now completely dark, fireworks exploded in the distance, and suddenly, with astounding reality, I saw Arcturus, the mountains of fire over which I had flown, teeth chattering from the cold, while the frost of the cooling equipment, melting, ran red with rust down my suit. I was collecting samples with a corona siphon, one ear cocked for the whistle of the compressors, in case of any loss of rotation, because a breakdown of a single second, their jamming, would have turned my armor, my equipment, and myself into an invisible puff of steam. A drop of water falling on a red-hot plate does not vanish so quickly as a man evaporates then.

The chestnut tree was nearly out of bloom. I had never cared for the smell of its flowers, but now it reminded me of long ago. Above the hedges the glare of fireworks came and went in waves, a noise swelled, orchestras mingling, and every few seconds, carried by the wind, returned the choral cry of participants in some show, perhaps of passengers in a cable car. My little corner, however, remained undisturbed.