Return from the Stars

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.

THREE

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