All I can say is, she must have been one bloody special piece of ass.”
Tracy said, “When you dreamed, what did you do?”
“None of your business,” Edmonds said, flushing slightly.
Tracy snorted slight amusement. “I’ll bet one hell of a lot of the dreams are erotic experiences similar to the one I just went through.”
“Yes.”
Tracy said, “The ramifications of this are staggering, and I’ve just begun to work them out. Can’t the Medical Guild cure the addiction?”
Jo Edmonds was affirmative. He said, “Yes, through an advanced hypnosis technique, involving posthypnotic suggestion. It turns the patient against the programmed dream, though it doesn’t erase the memory of the ones he’s already had.”
“Then why don’t they? Why doesn’t this Medical Guild of yours take them off of the thing?”
Jo Edmonds said, “Because few programmed dream addicts volunteer for the hypnosis. They don’t
Tracy was on his feet. He said, “How many people take these programmed dreams?”
“At least hundreds of millions. The Dream Palaces are to be found in every Pleasure Center and there are tens of thousands of Pleasure Centers throughout the world. They are even beginning to spring up where there are no Pleasure Centers, nothing except the Dream Palace. Once onto a Dream Palace, who wants any of the other pleasures offered?”
“All right,” Tracy said. “Could we go? That’s quite a wrenching experience, even only two hours of it, and, as you said I would, I remember every bit of it in vivid detail. In short, I’m tired.”
Edmonds took what looked like a silver cigarette case from his pocket and flicked back the lid. “We should be getting back anyway,” he said, standing also.
As they returned to the car, Tracy said, “What’s that you looked at, some kind of watch?”
Jo Edmonds said, “My transceiver. We’ll have to get you one tomorrow. In a way it’s a watch, since I can get the time on it. But it’s a lot of other things, too. It’s a two-way TV phone screen in which I can get in touch with anyone in the world, immediately. I can also dial the Universal Data Banks for any information I want. It’s also a sort of identification device. Suppose I got lost up in the mountains, or wherever. I’d simply dial, and the computers would get a fix on me, and an automated car would be sent to rescue me.”
They got into the hover-craft and Edmonds activated it.
“That’s some device,” Tracy admitted. “Does everybody have one?”
“Yes. Everybody who wants one.”
“Why should anybody not want one?”
Edmonds shifted one shoulder. “How should I know? Perhaps he’s a recluse, a hermit or something and doesn’t want to be bothered with people calling him all of the time. I really don’t know. It’s not my field, but everyone I know has one.”
Tracy said, “Continually, when I ask you questions, you tell me that it’s not your field. What in the hell is your field, Jo? That is,” he added sourly, “besides being the Tracy Cogswell of this century.”
They were airborne now and presumably heading back for Tangier and the Stein home. Edmonds switched over from manual to auto control.
He said, “I’m a student of the social sciences; anthropology, ethnology, history, archeology, and specializing in socioeconomics.”
They were the subjects in which Tracy himself was particularly interested though he had had precious little formal education. He had read quite widely in them during his various terms in prisons and concentration camps.
He asked, more respect in his voice than he usually gave Edmonds, “What do you do with it, Jo?”
The other shrugged his slight shoulders and said with a touch of self-depreciation, “Not much besides working for the organization. After all, it is an outfit trying to overthrow the present socioeconomic system. I wanted to become a teacher, originally, but there was no place for me. There is need for precious few teachers anymore. The autoteachers, hooked to the Universal Data Banks, are far more efficient than any human instructor could be. The few jobs that there are are largely supervisory ones.”
“What would you say the present social system was?” Tracy said. “From what I’ve seen and heard so far it’s certainly not communism, socialism, or even technocracy.”
“It’s anarchism,” Edmonds said bluntly.
Tracy thought about that for a minute or two before speaking again. When he did, it was to change the subject.
He said, “These Pleasure Centers, what else do you do in them besides shooting dinosaurs, taking narcotics, having group sex and dreaming away your lives?”
Edmonds answered, “Well, for instance, see that building we’re passing over? It’s a gourmet restaurant, and kind of a club at the same time.”
“Restaurant? I thought your cooking was all automated and that you could have sent to your own home any dish ever devised by man.”
“Umm,” Edmonds responded. “Largely, but not quite. This is a gourmet restaurant with a difference, old chap. They specialize in exotic dishes of a type most persons wouldn’t be interested in and the ingredients of which are sometimes difficult to acquire.”
“Such as what?” Tracy was intrigued. He had always been a good trencherman himself… when he could afford it, which wasn’t too very often.
“Why, I ate there exactly once. Once was enough. Among other dishes they had a certain type of small dog, a very fat little dog originally raised by the Aztecs of Mexico for food. Then they had live shrimp.”
“Live shrimp?” Tracy couldn’t see where that was particularly exotic. “You mean fresh shrimp, alive before they cooked them?”
“No, I mean shrimp that were alive when they ate them. It’s evidently an old Japanese delicacy. You take very small live shrimp and put them in soy sauce and another ingredient or two and they are served under a bowl on top of a dish. The trick is to reach in and get one before he can hop out, bite off his head, and skin the meat out through the shell. It’s a bit tricky getting hold of them since they flip-flop all over the place.”
“Jesus. How do raw shrimp taste?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Edmonds admitted. “They also have various types of snakes, including rattlesnakes and cobras which the members can look at in their cages before ordering them to be cooked up. But the piece de resistance, the night I was there, was live monkey brains.”
“You have to be kidding.”
“No,” Edmonds said. “It’s an old Chinese delicacy. The diners sit at a circular table which has a hole cut in the center. The host comes out leading a monkey, or ape… it was chimpanzee on this occasion. He circles the table with it, so that the guests can see it. And it is then clamped under the table in such a manner that the top of its head projects through the hole there. The top of the skull is then sawed off and the diners take their spoons and dip into the brains and eat them.”
“I won’t repeat that you have to be kidding,” Tracy said, nauseated. “You sound too convincing. But I thought you people didn’t eat real meat any more, that it was all factory raised, in overgrown test tubes, or whatever.”
“These gourments like to eat living things,” Edmonds said grimly. “They like to see the things they are are going to eat, still alive. I think they get some sort of a thrill from that. I believe some of them like to do the killing, an atavistic thrill.”
“Okay. What other kind of entertainment do you have in these Pleasure Centers?”
“Oh, various, don’t you know. Just about any pleasure that has come down through history. During the daylight hours there are bullfights, cock fights, bull baiting, pit dog fights, bear baiting.”
“Bear baiting?” Tracy said. “I thought that went out in the Middle Ages.”
“It’s been brought back,” the other told him. “They turn a bear loose in a pit and send in fighting dogs,
