He seemed to sense what was passing through my mind, for he stopped being impulsively over-communicative. It’s strange how a harassed man will bare the inmost secrets of his life at times to a total stranger — he nudged my arm and said, quite simply: “Follow me.”
I accompanied him in total silence along a narrow, dimly lighted corridor and down a short flight of stairs to another corridor with three branching offshoots. We turned right, then left, then right again.
The room was huge and blank-walled. It didn’t look like a laboratory where a scientific innovation tremendous in its implications had been successfully carried out, and until the lights came on my thoughts were in a turmoil. Would she be as beautiful as I had allowed myself to believe?
I could see vague objects towering in the shadows. One caught and held my attention. It looked in the gloom like an enormous stationary globe with shining crystal tubes branching off from it. And that did make the room seem a little more like a laboratory.
The lights came on with a startling abruptness, flooding every corner of the room with a dazzling radiance.
She was lying motionless beneath the globe in a transparent tank filled with weaving lights and shadows, her long, unbound hair descending to her shoulders in a tumbled, red-gold mass that caught and held the radiance.
Her eyes were closed, and her pale beautiful face was turned a little sideways.
She was as I had imagined she would be.
In youth’s awakening dreams she had smiled and beckoned to me. The magic of her features was a wondrously changing thing, like the flickering of tall candles on a shrine, or the sunglow on strange beaches in the morning of the world.
Had the poet Shelley dreamed of such a woman when he wrote by the blue Mediterranean: “Her steps paved with gold the downward ravine that sloped to the dawn’s bright gleam.”
I shut my eyes and we were walking together by the sea, her bronzed loveliness etched against the dawn glow, a miracle Time itself could not tarnish.
I opened my eyes, but for a moment the room seemed remote, unreal. Only the woman in the tank existed for me. She wore a simple white garment, belted at the waist. Her arms and shoulders were bare and her skin had the ruddy glow of perfect health — the natural bronze which only a warm tropical sun can impart to the skin of northern women who have long embraced its warmth.
Her cheeks were shadowed by long, dark lashes and her mouth was a curving rosebud and beneath the smooth-textured cloth of her belted tunic her young breasts rose firmly, twin bright mounds in a sea of billowy whiteness.
The sound was faint at first, a barely audible hum. I didn’t know it was an alarm for a moment. It sounded more like the drowsy murmur of bees in a noonday glade. But swiftly it grew in volume, turning into a steady and much louder drone, filling me with a sudden uneasiness.
The man turned abruptly and gripped my arm. “It’s a Security Police raid!” he whispered, alarm in his eyes. “We’ve got to get her out of here and upstairs fast!”
I stared at him in consternation. “But why should they raid this shop? Do they know about her?”
He shook his head, his lips white. “Of course not. If the big secret leaked out we wouldn’t have just the police raid to worry about. We’d be smashed in a large-scale operation. It’s not that at all. There happens to be a law against concealment in an emotional therapy shop — any kind of concealment. We’re not supposed to have underground rooms, unless we can prove they’re just used for storage purposes.”
I’d forgotten about that. Emotional illusion therapy can break down all barriers and lead to actual physical orgies. When men and women are undergoing therapy together the trance will sometimes become a twilight zone between sleeping and waking and they’ll behave as they would if they were freedom-ruin outcasts, but with no deep awareness of danger to keep them from going too far. A somnolent state can make even a strong-willed man abandon all restraint, and become the victim of his own inability to distinguish reality from illusion. Even the therapists had at times been overcome and brutally slain, and that danger was always present. It didn’t happen often, but the Security Police had to keep a careful check.
“We’ve got to get her up upstairs,” the man insisted, his fingers biting into my arm. “We’ve got to convince the police there’s nothing wrong. She’s simply your wife, understand? She came to this shop with you for therapy.”
I looked at him, aghast. It didn’t make too much sense to me, because married couples seldom needed emotional illusion therapy and if they did they seldom went to the same shop together.
It couldn’t be completely ruled out, however, and in that kind of emergency you seized on whatever comes to mind that can give you a fighting chance of getting at least a toehold on firm ground, where skillful lying can do you some good. He’d thought fast, and it dawned on me that he could have panicked and done just the opposite and I was grateful to him for not letting go. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t torn by doubts.
“She hasn’t said a word to me!” I protested. “She’s lying there in a deep sleep. She is asleep, isn’t she? Speak up, man! What do you want me to do?”
“I’ll wake her up,” he said. “I’m going to attach an electric stimulator to her right temple and wake her up right now. Then you’ve got to help me lift her out of the tank. We haven’t a moment to lose!”
He did exactly what he said he’d do. I watched him, a dull pounding at my temples, resenting the fact that she could not awake to me alone. For a few tormenting seconds I forget the danger we were in and the presence of an outsider seemed like a desecration. He’d become an outsider the instant I’d set eyes on her, and I regretted that she could not awaken to me in a moonlit garden in the first bright flush of dawn.
We had no chance at all to be alone, for the instant she opened her eyes, he removed the electric stimulator from her brow and turned to me in urgent appeal.
“Come on, we’ve got to hurry,” he urged. “Help me lift her out. She isn’t heavy.”
I had an impulse to knock him down. If there was any lifting to be done I wanted to do it alone.
Then I remembered that you can’t walk into a shop and make a purchase of any kind without assistance.
In another twenty minutes, if the police could be outwitted, the man would be an ugly, receding memory — nothing more.
Another thought struck me, incredible at such a time. I hadn’t even asked her name. “I don’t know her name,” I heard myself saying, my voice suddenly out of control. “Tell me her name — then I’ll help you.”
He seemed startled and taken aback by my sudden vehemence. “You can give her any name that suits your fancy.”
He lost his temper then, for the first time. “Do you want me to give you a catalogue of women’s names? Gloria, Ann, Helen — the face that launched a thousand ships — Barbara, Janice — pick one quickly and let’s get on with this.”
His features hardened. “The Security Police won’t be interested in your romantic ideas. They’ll put you through a grilling. You’ll have to know something about her, not just her name alone.”
The shock of the sudden raid must have thrown me off my rocker. But I didn’t feel like apologizing to him. I still felt that she should have a name.
I knew that if I named her under pressure I might regret it later. But I had no choice. Claire I thought. Claire will do for now.
I stepped quickly to the man’s side and together we lifted Claire out of the tank, and set her on her feet.
In the tank with her eyes closed her beauty had seemed breathtaking. But the instant she was on her feet, facing me, the instant she opened her eyes and looked straight at me I couldn’t speak at all.
“Say something to her!” the man urged. “You’ve got to get acquainted fast. Speak up — she’ll answer you!”
“I cleared my throat. “I’m John, Claire,” I said. “Look at me, Claire. Don’t be afraid.”
She had never seen me before, of course. But I knew that a
n artificial memory picture of my general aspect had been skillfully stippled into her mind. A colloidial memory-chain implant that would be activated when she saw me standing before her.
Her voice was low and musical and it matched in all respects the wondrous beauty of her features. “John,” Claire said. “John, John.”
I knew that a bond of sympathy and understanding could only be established between us if I talked to her at first about simple things — a few simple things a man and a woman meeting for the first time and sharing certain basic memory patterns, would have in common.
“Yes, I’m John, Claire,” I reiterated. “Do you like me?”
She stared at me as if puzzled. “I like you,” she said.
My heart skipped a beat. I leaned forward and put my arm about her shoulder. “I am taking you away with me, Claire,” I told her. “You have never seen the city with your own eyes. There are memories of the city in your mind, but they are not living memories. You will like the city, Claire.”
“I will like the city.”
I took her hand. It was warm and soft and the fingers closed quickly on mine.
A torturing doubt had crept into my mind. So far her words had done little more than parrot my own. I had dangled a promise before her, had opened a gate on shining adventure that would have delighted a child. Would not a child have asked, “Will it be fun?” or “Have you a beetle? Will we go riding?”
The man was becoming impatient. “We’ve got to hurry,” he warned. “If the police find this room I can’t answer for the consequences. They’re probably checking everything over upstairs and that takes a little time. With no one in the shop, they’ll be doubly suspicious if they have the slightest reason to suspect there’s someone down here. Our luck has held so far. But don’t press it.”
He looked steadily at me. “You’ve put her at ease. She’s not as startled as I was afraid she might be. Be satisfied with that, can’t you? Do you have to make love to her?”
His eyes flashed angrily when I didn’t say a word. “We made her especially for you and you’re not satisfied,” he complained. “You have to start playing all the stops immediately. You wouldn’t do that with a new musical instrument. You’d have more sense.”
He had a point there, all right. But how wise had been my decision not to study him too closely? I knew that the memory of that moment would always hold emotional overtones of ugliness for me. It would always make the illusion a little less than perfect, a sordid reminder that he could compare her to a musical instrument, and that I hadn’t met her in a moonlit garden at the home of an old and trusted friend.
He had nothing further to say and neither did I. I followed his advice and together we walked Claire out of the room, and along a corridor thronged with flickering shadows and up a narrow flight of stairs to the shop.
CHAPTER 4
There were two police officers waiting for us in the shop, close to the big metal helmets which gave the customers the kind of illusions that could shut out the Law completely.
For us the policemen were real and they were earnest.
The instant they saw us they did a slow double-take. One was burly with muscular shoulders and a florid, granite-firm jaw. The other was a skinny bantamweight.
The burly one did all the talking. The instant he saw us he asked, “You two together?”
The man answered for me. “Mr. Tabor is one of my regular customers,” he said, quickly. “This is his wife.”
The officer planted his hands on his hips and looked Claire up and down. “Married folk, eh? Did you put on the helmets together?”
I knew that I had to think fast. The question was a deliberately insulting one, obviously designed to trap us.
“I just dropped in to make an appointment for next week,” I said. “Mrs. Talbot doesn’t take emotional illusion therapy.”
The officer grinned. “No repressions, eh?”
If Claire had really been my wife the question would have infuriated me. I became angry anyway. The officer saw the flushed look come into my face and it aroused his suspicions.
He moved closer to Claire and studied her face. “Been married long?”
Claire shook her head. Such reticence wasn’t natural in a woman confronted with that kind of smirking impertinence and I could see that the officer felt that he was making progress.
“I shouldn’t think your husband would need emotional illusion therapy if you’ve just been married,” he said. “I’m curious to know exactly how long you’ve been married. Seven months? A year?”
Claire didn’t say a word. If she’d looked deeply bewildered or too angry to speak it might have helped. But there was just a look of awakening interest in her eyes, as if she couldn’t quite decide what the officer was talking about, but was doing her best to fit him into a new-impression category in her mind.
A very young child has to make such an effort constantly, for his experience is too limited to enable him to grasp the implications of the many startling things that keep taking place around him. He just isn’t aware of how ugly and threatening life can be at times. Not until he burns his fingers and learns the painful way. And by then it’s frequently too late.
“It’s none of my business, I suppose,” the officer said. “But it does make a difference. If you were married recently your husband shouldn’t need emotional illusion therapy at all. It goes without saying that the woman a man marries may turn out to be the really cold kind. He can’t always be sure in advance. You could be that way, but — well, if you were my wife just your looks alone would keep me out of an illusion therapy shop for at least five years.”
It was envy, mixed with admiration, that was making him talk that way. He was the blunt, coarse type and that kind of man has to have some aggressive outlet for his frustration when authority goes to his head. I knew all that and perhaps I should have accepted it as inevitable, and kept my anger bottled up until he went too far and forced me to resort to violence. But you can’t think realistically when rage makes you want to grab him by the shoulders and bang him around until he flattens out on the floor.
I might even have killed him, because something very primitive in me was ripping my self-control to shreds. An affront to yourself alone is one thing. You can sometimes exercise control when you know that the whole weight of Society can be hurled against you if you don’t, no matter how unjustly. No man can hope to buck that kind of power. But when the affront is directed against a woman who has the innocence of a child and no way of parrying it, a woman who has suddenly become far more precious to you than your own life —
He went on as if he wasn’t even aware of the danger he was in. “It’s an important thing to get straight. In fact, there are laws against illusion therapy for the newly married, unless the head shrinkers decide there’s some very drastic need for it. There’s a waiting list for cases like that, a lot of papers to sign. Otherwise thousands of honeymooners would crowd in when there’s no real need for them to compensate for anything and everyone has to try it at least once.”
A cynical smirk twisted his lips. “Sex is like everything else — you feel you can never get too much of it, even when you know it makes no sense. Give a man a big, expensive dinner with all the trimmings, and tell him that there’s another one waiting to be served to him, with a different main dish, and he’ll forget that he won’t be that hungry when he’s through gorging himself. Especially if you tell him that everyone’s doing it. Two big dinners every night — a popular fad. You have to prove you’re as good as the next man at it, or you think you do. And Society suffers in the end.”
Out of the mouths of babes a little wisdom sometimes comes and its just as true with the blunt, crudely outspoken types. Purely by accident a man like that can hit the nail so squarely on the head that you have to admire him a little, if only because there is more than a trace of forthright bluntness in all of us that is wholly on the coarse side. It’s one way of giving that part of yourself a pat on the back.
But right at the moment I wasn’t even thinking of that. If I’d given him a pat it would have hurled him back against the wall and turned him into a stretcher case.
He narrowed his eyes and looked at Claire even more steadily. “Now suppose you answer my question. Just how long have you two been married?”
Claire said, “John is my husband. I like John. John likes me.”
That did it. The officer swung on me, the veins on his temples pulsing like seaworms on a mud flat when the tide is running out.
“Can’t she answer simple questions?” he demanded. “What is she — a moron?”
“Now wait a minute —” I choked.
He didn’t give me a chance to lunge at him. He beckoned to Skin-and-Bones and the little bantamweight grabbed my arm from behind. I was caught so completely off-guard that I thought for an instant that a muscular spasm had jerked the bones of my wrist right out of their sockets. Skin-and-Bones’s fingers seemed to have the tensile strength of steel.
“We’ll have to take you both in for questioning,” the burly officer said. “She must have something to conceal, or she’d speak up.”
There was a shark-toothed rasp to his voice that made me think of the sea again, probably because there’s a cold, cruel rapacity about the sea that even its great surface beauty can’t hide.
There was nothing beautiful about the burly officer, on the surface or otherwise.
“She must have something to conceal,” he reiterated, “or she wouldn’t try to make me think she has no brains at all.”
I went completely berserk then. I straightened my shoulders, wrenched my wrists free despite the bantamweight’s eight-ply grip and gave him a violent shove. Skin-and-Bones gave a startled gasp, as if it had never happened to him before. Without turning, I grabbed Claire by the wrist, and we started for the door.
IT WAS THE DAY OF THE ROBOT Page 3