From his belt the voice of the joymaker spoke up. “Man Forrester. ‘Will you take your messages?”
“Yes,” said Forrester, disconcerted. “No. Wait a minute.”
He took the last cigarette out of the pack he had got that morning, lit it, then crumpled the pack and threw it away. He thought.
Owning a joymaker was a little like having a genie with three wishes. The thing’s promptness and precision disconcerted him; he felt that it demanded equal certitude from himself and he did not feel up to it.
He grinned to himself ruefully, admitting that he was being made self-conscious by what he really knew to be nothing but a radio connection with some distant lash-up of cold-state transistors and ferrite cores. Finally he said, “Look. You. I think what I ought to do is go back to my room and start over again from home base. What’s the best way to get there?”
“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “the best way to get to the room you occupied is by cab, which I can summon for you. However, the room is no longer yours. Will you accept your messages?”
“No. Wait a minute! What do you mean, no longer mine? I didn’t check out.”
“Not necessary, Man Forrester. It is automatic on departure.”
He paused and thought, and on consideration it didn’t seem to matter much. He had left nothing there. No bag, no baggage. No personal possessions, not even a shaving brush: he wouldn’t have to shave for a week or two anyway, Hara had told him.
All of himself that he had left in the room was the garments he had worn last night. And those, he remembered, were disposable . . . and so had no doubt been disposed of.
“What about the bill?” he asked.
“The charge was paid by the West Annex Discharge Center. It is entered on your financial statement, Man Forrester. Your messages include one urgent, two personal, one notice of legal, seven commercial—”
“I don’t want to hear right now. Wait a minute.”
Once again Forrester tried to frame the right question.
He abandoned the effort. Whatever his skills, he was not a computer programmer, and it was no good trying to talk like one. It seemed absurd to ask a machine for value judgments, but—
“Cripes,” he said, “tell me something. What would you do, right now, if you were me?”
The joymaker answered without hesitation, as though that sort of question were coming up every day. “If I were you, Man Forrester, which is to say, if I were human, just unfrozen, without accommodations, lacking major social contacts, unemployed, unskilled—”
“That’s the picture, all right,” Forrester agreed. “So answer the question.” Something was crawling underfoot. He stepped aside, out of its way, a glittering metal thing.
“I would go to a tea shop, Man Forrester. I would then read my orientation book while enjoying a light meal. I would then think things over. I would then—”
“That’s far enough.”
The metal thing, apparently espying Forrester’s discarded cigarette pack, scuttled over to it and gobbled it down. Forrester watched it for a second, then nodded.
“You’ve got some good ideas, machine,” he said. “Take me to a tea shop!”
Four
The joymaker procured a cab for Forrester, a wingless vehicle like the death-reversal conveyance that had brought him in for repair, but orange and black instead of white; it looked like Hallowe’en. And the cab took him to the joymaker’s recommended tea shop.
The shop was curious. It was located in an interior hall of a great spidery building in the heart of the city. The cab flew under a pierced-steel buttress, actually into a sort of vaulted opening that could have served only birds and angels, or men in aircraft, since it was at least fifty feet above ground. It halted and hovered before a balcony planted with climbing roses, and Forrester had to step over a knife edge of empty space. The cab did not quiver, not even when his weight left it.
A girl with hair like transparent cellophane greeted him. “I have your reservation, Man Forrester. Will you follow me, please?”
He did, walking behind her across a quartz-pebbled court and into the hall that was the tea room, admiring the swing of her hips and wondering just what it was that she did to her hair to make it stand out like a sculptured puffball and rob it of opacity.
She seated him beside a reflecting pool, with silvery fish swimming slowly about. Even with the peculiar hairdo, she was a pretty girl. She had dimples and dark, amused eyes.
He said, “I don’t know what I want, actually. Anyway, who do I order from?”
“We are all the same, Man Forrester,” she said. “May I choose for you? Some tea and cakes?”
Numbly, he nodded and, as she turned and left, watched the sway of her hips with an entirely different kind of interest.
He sighed. This was a confusing world!
He took the book out of the folder he had been given at the West Annex Discharge Center and placed it on the table. Its cover was simple and direct:
YOUR GUIDE TO THE 26TH CENTURY
[1970-1990 EDITION]
