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“I meant to ask you last night—why are you consulting a psychiatrist? And my lord, you carry it around everywhere with you; not once did you set it down—and you had it turned on right up until—” She raised an eyebrow and glanced at him searchingly. “At least I did turn it off then,” Barney pointed out.
But I guess you’re like a lot of really topnotch precogs: you see the future so well that you have only a hazy recollection of the past.
In addition the humidity, as the oceans evaporated, had increased by 16 Selkirks. So things were hotter and wetter; the great procession of nature clanked on, and toward what?
Robot workmen had quickly shown up and repaired it.
long brown hair
“Can I see your ceramics? I’m in neckties, myself. The Werner simulated-handwrought living tie in a variety of Titanian colors—I have one on, see? The colors are actually a primitive life form that we import and then grow in cultures here on Terra.
Mayerson was a rather heavy-set man, in his late thirties, with unusually—and not particularly fashionable—loose and wavy hair.
“You precogs.” Remarkable. Maybe there were alternate futures.
he had the experience, but talent could not be stored up: it had to be there as God-given.
She was a redhead and he liked redheads; they were either outrageously ugly or almost supernaturally attractive.
that’s why he’s hired that talking suitcase. I don’t understand the modern world at all, obviously. I’m living back in the twentieth century when psychoanalysts made people less prone to stress.
He would, of course, chew it with her; in concert the users’ minds fused, became a new unity—or at least that was the experience.
few sessions of Can-D chewing in togetherness and he would know all there was to know about Pia Jurgens; there was something about her—beyond the obvious physical, anatomical enormity—that fascinated him; he yearned to be closer to her.
“I read,” Miss Jurgens said, “that he was practically a nut.” “Sure. Ten years out of his life, all that agony, and for what?”
“You can be sure he got a good return for the ten years,” Miss Jurgens said. “He’s crazy but smart; he looks out for himself, like everyone else does. He’s not that nuts.”
Very young, Leo realized. A child who would speak up and contradict her superior when she thought he was wrong.
He himself was a believer; he affirmed the miracle of translation—the near-sacred moment in which the miniature artifacts of the layout no longer merely represented Earth but became Earth.
“It should be a purifying experience. We lose our fleshly bodies, our corporeality, as they say. And put on imperishable bodies instead, for a time anyhow. Or forever, if you believe as some do that it’s outside of time and space, that it’s eternal. Don’t you agree, Sam?” She sighed. “I know you don’t.”
Connie Companion Doll.”
Come to me, artificially accelerated cortical-development idea, he said in prayer.
Hence the end of a career to which he had already sacrificed everything else in his life, his marriage and the woman he—even now!—loved.
I think you have that Greek sin—what did they call it? Hubris?
Barney cut the connection. The screen became a formless gray. Gray, he thought, like the world inside me and around me, like reality.
The girl was afraid of no one and nothing on Earth or in the whole Sol system, he realized.
You’ll have many new and exciting concepts occur to you, especially of a religious nature. Oh, if only Luther and Erasmus were alive today; their controversies could be solved so easily now, by means of E Therapy.
it will smart; that is a pun, you know? It smarts and you become, ah, smart.”
had he ever really looked at Emily’s pots as anything more than merchandise for which a market existed? No. What I ought to have seen in them, he realized, is the artistic intention, the spirit she’s revealing intrinsically.
“Are you in that thing there, Eldritch? Or are you somewhere else, speaking through it?”
“Take me to your leader,” Leo said. “An old joke; you wouldn’t understand it. Went out a century ago.”
Eldritch had given him an intravenous injection of a translating drug, no doubt Chew-Z. This place was a nonexistent world, analogous to the irreal “Earth” to which the translated colonists went when they chewed his own product, Can-D.
“What about me?” Dr. Smile called anxiously. No one came back for him.
Does every new universe constructed have to be nice?
“This guy isn’t real; we should have suspected it. He’s a—what did they used to call them? From chewing that diabolical drug that Eldritch picked up in the Prox system. A chooser; that’s what. He’s a phantasm.” He glared at Leo.
“Why so-called?” Barney glanced up quickly, and ceased his packing. “Because I’m even more convinced he’s not human.
“I’ll see you,” he said, and touched the button; the doors shut, cutting off his view of Roni. I’ll see you in what the Neo-Christians call hell, he thought to himself. Probably not before. Not unless this already is, and it may be, hell right now.
“Someday you’d be in difficulty and need my help and I’d do to you exactly what I did to Leo; I’d let you sink without moving my right arm.” “But your own life was at—” “It always is,” he pointed out. “When you do anything. That’s the name of the comedy we’re stuck in.”
Not even that jackass of a husband of hers that she prefers over me . . . for reasons I’ll never know, except perhaps that marriage to him has the aspect of destiny. She’s fated to live with Richard Hnatt, fated never to be my wife again; you can’t reverse the flow of time.
“I’ve got doubts,” Barney said. “Grave ones. I tell you; don’t call me, I’ll call you. If I don’t go into the service.” He handed the mike back to the cab. “Here. Thanks.” “It’s patriotic to go into the service,” the cab said. “Mind your own business,” Barney said.
And then, he said to himself, we make one last one. About our whole life, summing it all up. Whether to take a job with Eldritch or go into the service. And whichever we choose we can know this: It was the wrong alternative.
Anyhow, he thought as he rode back to his conapt, this beats stepping out into the midday sun, becoming, as they say, a mad dog or an Englishman.
“They’re very religious in the colonies. So I hear, anyhow. What denomination are you, Mr. Mayerson?” “Um,” he said, stuck.
“You have faith in that. And yet you know that the Earth it takes you to isn’t the real one.”
“I don’t want to argue it,” he said. “It’s experienced as real; that’s all I know.” “So are dreams.” “But this is stronger,” he pointed out. “Clearer. And it’s done in—” He had started to say communion. “In company with others who really go along.
“I can’t,” he said. I believe in Can-D, he said to himself, and, if necessary, Chew-Z. You can put your faith in something twenty-one centuries old; I’ll stick with something new. And that is that.
what’s worse leads to lethal, escape-dreams, not of Terra but of—” She gestured with the pistol. “Grotesque, baroque fantasies of an infantile, totally deranged nature.
Norm Schein reflected that this was a sentimental occasion because they would never be doing this again . . . unless, of course, they did it—made use of the layout—with Chew-Z. How would that work out? he wondered. Interesting
“That’s true, Mayerson; honest. We have to live too close together to import any kind of ideological fanaticism from Terra. It’s happened at other hovels; we know what we’re talking about. It has to be live and let live, with no absolutist creeds and dogma; a hovel is just too small.”
One of the laws of thermal dynamics, he thought. The exchange of heat; molecules passing between us, hers and mine mingling in—entropy? Not yet, he thought.
Who’s the girl?” “I don’t know,” Barney said sardonically. “It was dark; I couldn’t see.”
“I know some of the circumstances, Mayerson. What you’re doing is atoning. Correct?” Surprised, Barney said, “You, too?” Religious inclinations seemed to permeate the entire milieu, here. “You may object to the word,” Faine said, “but it’s the proper one.
