mastiffs, bulldogs and so forth, to pull it down. Evidently, quite a few people enjoy seeing pain and death inflicted.”
“But bullfighting,” Tracy protested. “I’ve seen a bullfight or two, in Spain and Mexico, in my time. And I can understand a matador of my era going through with it in view of the large pay, if he hit the jackpot. But who would be silly enough to be a matador today, when he doesn’t have to be?”
Edmonds shrugged again. “People who get a thrill out of it. Or people who get a thrill appearing before a cheering audience. Largely exhibitionists, I should think. The same as with the gladiators.”
“What gladiators?” Tracy said, looking over at the other in complete surprise.
Edmonds said, “Most Pleasure Centers have arenas patterned after the old Roman ones. In them they duplicate the games of the Romans at the time of the republic and empire. By the way, that’s a fallacy that has come down through history. When the Christians took over in Rome, the games didn’t end for quite a time. The only difference was that instead of the pagans throwing the Christians to the lions, the Christians threw the pagans. It wasn’t until 399 a.d. that the last gladiator schools were closed, although the first Christian emperor, Constantine, had come to power almost a hundred years earlier. In 404 a monk named Telemachus jumped into an arena in Rome and berated the spectators, who were so infuriated that they stoned him to death. The emperor Honorius in turn became so furious over the lynching that he closed the arenas.”
Tracy said, “But gladiators in this day and age. That’s ridiculous. Who’d be silly enough—”
“Oh, they seldom, if ever, fight to the death. They’re probably, as with matadors, sadists, maso-chists, and exhibitionists. They’re consenting adults. If one of them gets hurt, he was asking for it. I’m sure it’s not as all-out as it was in the Roman times. Except, of course, the animals they kill with everything from spears to bows and arrows.”
“All right. What else?”
“Oh, the less far-out entertainments. Bars, nightclubs, dancing places, that sort of thing. And sports, certainly. Just about all fun and games are represented in a Pleasure Center.”
They were coming up on Gibraltar now. The lights on the rock flickered ahead of them.
Tracy said, “What’s Gib nowadays? In my time it was a British naval base.”
“It’s another Pleasure Center. We went on up to Torremolinos because it’s a larger one. Gibraltar is too limited in space. There’s another one in Rabat, one in Cadiz, one in Seville.”
“In short, they’re all over the place, eh?”
“Yes,” Edmonds nodded. “They’re all over the place and more are being built all the time. More and larger ones. Especially the Dream Palaces.”
Tracy said, “That brings something to mind. Back there you said that nothing in my programmed dream was reality. It was all in my head. But that can’t be right. For instance, I know nothing at all of the architecture of Persia in Omar Khayyam’s time, but I saw it there. I also know nothing about the musical instruments and the music of the time, but I saw and heard them. You also said I could go back and be Alexander at Issus, but I know nothing about the battle of Issus. I don’t even know Greek, so I couldn’t have ordered the troops around.”
Edmonds replied, “I gave you a wrong impression. When you’re having a programmed dream, you’re tied in with the data banks, which, of course, have all the information known to man in them, including the architecture, music and everything else of old Persia. They also have all information known about the Battle of Issus, including the types of weapons used on both sides, and including the types of chariots utilized and even including the breeds of horses current at the time. So far as speaking Greek is concerned, the data bank computer translators can translate any known language into any other immediately. Or, for that matter, they could change history around a bit and have both the Greeks and Persians speaking Interlingua or English.
“So what happens is, you speak into the mike telling all you know about what you want, as you did about Hasan Ben Sabbah and his gardens, and when you drop off into your dream, the computers take over.”
Tracy shook his head in wonderment, as he had been doing so often these past few days.
They had passed over the Straits of Hercules and now the pilot took over manual controls again.
Tracy indicated the hover craft. “How do these things work? Sooner or later, I’ll have to know.”
“Oh, they’re quite simple and quite safe, Tracy,” Edmonds said. “You could hardly have an accident if you wanted to. In case of danger, the computers take over immediately, even if you’re on manual control.” He pointed out the method of starting up, the lift lever, the accelerator, what amounted to a brake.
Tracy said, “How about this automatic stuff?”
“That’s simplest. “You first dial the coordinates of your destination and the computers, once again, take over.”
“Yeah,” Tracy said. “But suppose you don’t know the coordinates of your destination?”
“Then you simply dial Information and ask for them. I usually like to land and take off manually, but there’s no real need of it, I shouldn’t think. The hover craft would have landed at exactly the point before the garage where we took off from the Stein house. There’s a landing pad there. If there is no automated landing pad where you wish to go, you must switch over to manual and land yourself.”
They were approaching the Stein home and now whisked in to a landing. They went on into the living room and found Betty Stein, wrapped up in a night robe with a drink handy to her on a cocktail table, watching the life- size tri-di screen which took up the greater part of one wall. She flicked the set off when they entered.
She looked at Tracy, bit of mockery in her eyes. “Well,” she said. “And did you have fun?”
“Yes,” he told her.
Chapter Eleven
And what impressed you most about out decadent modern society?” she said.
“The Dream Palaces.”
Jo Edmonds yawned and said, “I’m off to sleep. Has the academician already gone?”
“Yes. He took off early.” She looked back to Tracy. “He suggested that you pop into bed as soon as you returned, as well. He’s still afraid that you’ll overestimate your strength. And, if my guess is correct, you probably now feel something like a wet washcloth.”
Edmonds, still yawning, drifted off, but Tracy went over to the bar and dialed himself a nightcap.
He came back with it to sit across from her and said, “I do. But I can’t understand why. If it didn’t really happen, why should I feel tired?”
Her voice still mocking, she said, “How many orgasms did you have?”
He looked at her sourly. “At least six, over a period of two hours time.”
“What a man,” she said. “Well, the truth is that though your body wasn’t really in action, psychologistically the experience happened to you and you feel as tired as you should.”
He sipped his drink, then said, “This fascinates me. Look, why do people bother with such things as narcotics, group sex, small-time sadism, and gladiator fights, not to speak of gourmet restaurants? Group sex? I had more group sex in that two hours than ordinarily I could have gone through in a week. And with the most beautiful broads possible. I was even equipped with a super-sized tool, a bigger one than I have in the ordinary world. Sadism? Why bother with a bit of whipping each other? Why not go back to the original, the works of the Marquis de Sade? From what Jo told me, the dream you have doesn’t have to have any resemblance to reality, it can be strictly fiction. Gourmet food? Why not go back to the days of Nero and sit in on some of his banquets, instead of eating live shrimp?”
She nodded at the validity of his question and said, “The Dream Palaces have only been going for about five years. They are taking over tremendously. The Pleasure Centers are having a time building them fast enough, even with modern means of construction. They’re always packed. But some people haven’t got onto the hang of them as yet, to the point of being able to milk the possibilities completely.”
He took another pull at his drink and said, “I can’t see why these programmed dreams should be all bad. They’d be a wonderful method of education. Why, an anthropologist could go back to Neolithic times and study the Stone Age. A historian could take in at first hand the siege of Troy.”
She said, “All the information that would be available to such scholars is in the data banks. You can’t get more in a dream than is in those banks.”
