Return From the Stars Read online

  TWO

  My eyes still closed, I touched my chest; I had my sweater on; if I’d fallen asleep without undressing, then I was on watch duty. “Olaf!” I wanted to say, and sat up suddenly.

  This was a hotel, not the Prometheus. I remembered it all: the labyrinths of the station, the girl, my initiation, her fear, the bluish cliff of the Terminal above the black lake, the singer, the lions…

  Looking for the bathroom, I accidentally found the bed; it was in a wall and fell in a bulging pearly square when something was pressed. In the bathroom there was no tub or sink, nothing, only shining plates in the ceiling and a small depression for the feet, padded with a spongy plastic. It did not look like a shower, either. I felt like a Neanderthal. I quickly undressed, then stood with my clothes in my hands, since there were no hangers; there was instead a small compartment in the wall, and I tossed everything into it. Nearby, three buttons, blue, red, and white. I pushed the white. The light went off. The red. There was a rushing sound, but it was not water, only a powerful wind, blowing ozone and something else; it enveloped me; thick, glittering droplets settled on my skin; they effervesced and evaporated, I did not even feel moisture, it was like a swarm of soft electrodes massaging my muscles. I tried the blue button and the wind changed; now it seemed to go right through me, a very peculiar feeling. I thought that once a person became used to this, he would come to enjoy it. At Adapt on Luna they didn’t have this — they had only ordinary bathrooms. I wondered why. My blood was circulating more strongly, I felt good; the only problem was that I did not know how to brush my teeth or with what. I gave up on that in the end. In the wall was still another door, with the sign “Bathrobes” on it. I looked inside. No robes, just three metal bottles, a little like siphons. But by that time I was completely dry and did not need to rub myself down.

  I opened the compartment into which I had put my clothes and received a shock: it was empty. A good thing I had put my shorts on the top of the compartment. Wearing my shorts, I went back into the room and looked for a telephone, to find out what had happened to my clothes. A predicament. I discovered the telephone, finally, by the window — in my mind I still called the television screen the window — it leapt from the wall when I began to curse out loud, reacting, I guess, to the sound of my voice. An idiotic mania for hiding things in walls. The receptionist answered. I asked about my clothes.

  “You placed them in the laundry,” said a soft baritone. “They will be ready in five minutes.”

  Fair enough, I thought. I sat near the desk, the top of which obligingly moved under my elbow the moment I leaned forward. How did that work? No need to concern myself; the majority of people benefit from the technology of their civilization without understanding it.

  I sat naked, except for my shorts, and considered the possibilities. I could go to Adapt. If it were only an introduction to the technology and the customs, I would not have hesitated, but I had noticed on Luna that they tried at the same time to instill particular approaches, even judgments of phenomena; in other words, they started off with a prepared scale of values, and if one did not adopt them, they attributed this — and, in general, everything — to conservatism, subconscious resistance, ingrained habits, and so on. I had no intention of giving up such habits and resistance until I was convinced that what they were offering me was better, and my lessons of the previous night had done nothing to change my mind. I didn’t want nursery school or rehabilitation, certainly not with such politeness and not right away. Curious, that they had not given me that betrization. I would have to find out why.

  I could look for one of us; for Olaf. That would be in clear contravention of the recommendations of Adapt. Ah, because they never ordered; they repeated continually that they were acting in my best interest, that I could do what I liked, even jump straight from the Moon to Earth (jocular Dr. Abs) if I was in such a hurry. I was choosing to ignore Adapt, but that might not suit Olaf. In any case I would write him. I had his address.

  Work. Try to get a job? As what, a pilot? And make Mars-Earth-Mars runs? I was an expert at that sort of thing, but…

  Suddenly I remembered that I had some money. It wasn’t exactly money, for it was called something else, but I failed to see the difference, inasmuch as everything could be obtained with it. I asked the receptionist for a city connection. In the receiver, a distant singing. The telephone had no numbers, no dial; would I need to give the name of the bank? I had it written on a card; the card was with my clothes. I looked into the bathroom, and there they lay in the compartment, freshly laundered; in the pockets were my odds and ends, including the card.

  The bank was not a bank — it was called Omnilox. I said the name, and, quickly, as if my call had been expected, a rough voice responded:

  “Omnilox here.”

  “My name is Bregg,” I said, “Hal Bregg, and I understand that I have an account with you… I would like to know how much is in it.”

  Something crackled, and another, higher, voice said:

  “Hal Bregg?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who opened the account?”

  “Cosnav — Cosmic Navigation — by order of the Planetological Institute and the Cosmic Affairs Commission of the United Nations, but that was a hundred and twenty-seven years ago.”

  “Do you have any identification?”

  “No, only a card from Adapt on Luna, from Director Oswamm…”

  “That’s in order. The state of the account: twenty-six thousand, four hundred and seven ets.”

  “Ets?”

  “Yes. Do you require anything further?”

  “I would like to withdraw a little mon — some ets, that is.”

  “In what form? Perhaps you would like a calster?”

  “What is that? A checkbook?”

  “No. You will be able to pay cash right away.”

  “Yes. Good.”

  “How high should the calster be?”

  “I really don’t know — five thousand…”

  “Five thousand. Good. Should it be sent to your hotel?”

  “Yes. Wait — I’ve forgotten the name of this hotel.”

  “Is it not the one from which you are calling?”

  “It is.”

  “That is the Alcaron. We will send you the calster right away. But there is one more thing: your right hand has not changed, has it?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Nothing. If it had, we would need to change the calster. You will receive it very soon.”

  “Thank you,” I said, putting down the receiver. Twenty-six thousand, how much was that? I did not have the faintest idea. Something began to hum. A radio? It was the phone. I picked up the receiver.

  “Bregg?”

  “Yes,” I said. My heart beat stronger, but only for a moment. I recognized her voice. “How did you know where I was?” I asked, for she did not speak immediately.

  “From an infer. Bregg… Hal… listen, I wanted to explain to you…”

  “There is nothing to explain, Nais.”

  “You’re angry. But try to understand…”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Hal, really. Come over to my place today. You’ll come?”

  “No, Nais; tell me, please — how much is twenty-six thousand ets?”

  “What do you mean, how much? Hal, you have to come.”

  “Well… how long can one live on that much?”

  “As long as you like. Living costs nothing, after all. But let’s forget about that. Hal, if you wanted to…”

  “Wait. How many ets do you spend in a month?”

  “It varies. Sometimes twenty, sometimes five, or nothing.”

  “Aha. Thank you.”

  “Hal! Listen!”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Let’s not end it this way…”

  “We’re not ending a thing,” I said, “because nothing ever began. Thanks for everything, Nais.”

  I put down the receiver. Living costs nothing? That interested
me most at the moment. Did that mean that there were some things, some services, free of charge?

  The telephone again.

  “Bregg here.”

  “This is reception. Mr. Bregg, Omnilox has sent you a calster. I am sending it up.”

  “Thank you — hello!”

  “Yes?”

  “Does one pay for a room?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “And is there a restaurant in the hotel?”

  “Yes, there are four. Do you wish to have breakfast in your room?”

  “All right, and… does one pay for meals?”

  “No, sir. You now have the calster. Breakfast will be served in a moment.”

  The robot hung up, and I did not have time to ask where I was supposed to look for the calster. I had no idea what it looked like. Getting up from the desk, which, abandoned, immediately shrank and shriveled up, I saw a kind of stand growing out of the wall next to the door; on it lay a flat object wrapped in transparent plastic and resembling a small cigarette case. On one side it had a row of little windows, in them showed the number 1100 1000. At the bottom were two tiny buttons labeled “1” and “0.” I looked at it, puzzled, until I realized that the sum of five thousand had been entered in the binary system. I pressed the “1” and a small plastic triangle with the number 1 stamped on it fell into my hand. This, then, was a kind of stamping machine or press for money, up to the amount indicated in the windows — the number at the top decreased by a unit.

  I was dressed and ready to leave when I remembered about Adapt. I phoned and told them that I had been unable to find their man at the Terminal.

  “We were getting worried about you,” said a woman’s voice, “but we learned this morning that you were staying at the Alcaron…”

  They knew where I was. Why, then, had they not found me at the station? Planned that way, no doubt. I was supposed to get lost, so as to realize how rash my “rebellion” on Luna had been.

  “Your information is correct,” I replied politely. “At present I am going out to see the city. I’ll report to you later.”

  I left the room; corridors flowed, silver and in motion, and the wall along with them — something new to me. I took an escalator down and on successive floors passed bars; one of them was green, as if submerged in water; each level had its own dominant color, silver, gold, already this had begun to annoy me. And after a single day! Odd that they liked it. Strange tastes. But then I recalled the view of the Terminal at night,

  I needed to get myself some clothes. With that decision I stepped out into the street. The sky was overcast, but the clouds were bright, high up, and the sun shone through them occasionally. Only now did I see — from the boulevard, down the center of which ran a double line of huge palms with leaves as pink as tongues — a panorama of the city. The buildings stood like islands, set apart, and here and there a spire soared to the heavens, a frozen jet of some liquid material, its height incredible. They were no doubt measured in whole kilometers. I knew — someone had told me back on Luna — that no one built them any more and that the rush to construct tall buildings had died a natural death soon after these had been put up. They were monuments to a particular architectural epoch, since, apart from their immensity, offset only by their slimness of form, there was nothing in them to appeal to the eye. They looked like pipes, brown and gold, black and white, transversely striped, or silver, serving to support or trap the clouds, and the landing pads that jutted out from them against the sky, hanging in the air on tubular supports, were reminiscent of bookshelves.

  Much more attractive were the new buildings, without windows, so that all their walls could be decorated. The entire city took on the appearance of a gigantic art exhibit, a showcase for masters of color and form. I cannot say that I liked everything that adorned those twenty- and thirty-floor heights, but for a hundred-and-fifty-year-old character I was not, I dare say, overly stuffy. To my mind the most attractive were the buildings divided in half by gardens. Maybe they were not houses — the fact that the structures were cut in the middle and seemed to rest on cushions of air (the walls of those high-level gardens being of glass) gave an impression of lightness; at the same time pleasantly irregular belts of ruffled green cut across the edifices.

  On the boulevards, along those lines of fleshlike palms, which I definitely did not like, flowed two rivers of black automobiles. I knew now that they were called gleeders. Above the buildings flew other machines, though not helicopters or planes; they looked like pencils sharpened at both ends.

  On the walkways were a few people, but not as many as there had been in the city a hundred years earlier. There had been a marked easing of traffic, pedestrian especially, perhaps because of the multiplication of levels, for beneath the city that I had seen spread successive, lower, subterranean tiers, with streets, squares, stores — a corner infor told me, for example, that it was best to shop at the Serean level. It was a first-rate infor, or maybe by now I was expressing myself better, because it gave me a little plastic book with four fold-outs, maps of the city’s transit system. When I wanted to go somewhere, I touched the silver-printed name — street, level, square — and instantly on the map a circuit of all the necessary connections lit up. I could also travel by gleeder. Or by rast. Or — finally — on foot; therefore, four maps. But I realized now that traveling on foot (even with the moving walkways and escalators) often took many hours.

  Serean, unless I was mistaken, was the third level. And again the city astounded me: coming out of the tunnel, I found myself not underground but on a street beneath the open sky, in the full light of the sun; in the center of a square grew great pines, farther off the striped spires took on a blue tint, and, in the other direction, behind a small pool in which children were splashing, riding the water with colorful little bikes, there stood a white skyscraper, cut by palm-green bands and with a most peculiar caplike structure, shining like glass, on its summit. I regretted that there was no one I could ask about this curiosity; then suddenly I remembered — or, rather, my stomach reminded me — that I had not eaten breakfast, for I had completely forgotten that it was to be sent to my room at the hotel, and I had left without waiting for it. Perhaps the robot at reception had made a mistake.

  Back, then, to the infor; I no longer did anything without first checking out exactly what and how, and in any event the infor could also reserve a gleeder for me, although I was not about to ask for one yet, since I did not know how to get inside the thing, let alone what to do after that; but I had time.

  In the restaurant, one look at the menu and I saw that it was complete Greek to me. I firmly asked for breakfast, a normal breakfast.

  “Ozote, kress, or herma?”

  Had the waiter been human, I would have asked him to bring what he himself preferred, but it was a robot. It could not matter to a robot.

  “Is there coffee?” I asked uneasily.

  “There is. Kress, ozote, or herma?”

  “Coffee, and… well, whatever goes best with coffee, that, uh…”

  “Ozote” it said and went away.

  Success.

  It must have had everything prepared, for it returned immediately, and with such a heavily loaded tray that I supected some trick or joke. But the sight of the tray made me realize, apart from the bons I had eaten the day before, and a cup of the notorious brit, I had eaten nothing since my return.

  The only familiar thing was the coffee, which was like boiled tar. The cream was in tiny blue specks and definitely came from no cow. I wished I could have observed someone, to see how to eat all this, but apparently the time for breakfast was over, because I was alone. Small plates, crescent-shaped, contained steaming masses from which protruded things like matchsticks, and in the middle was a baked apple; not an apple, of course, and not matchsticks, and what I took for oatmeal began to rise at the touch of a spoon. I ate everything; I was, it turned out, ravenous, so that the nostalgia fo
r bread (of which there was not a trace) came to me only later, as an afterthought, when the robot appeared and waited at a distance.

  “What do I pay?” I asked it.

  “Nothing, thank you,” it said. It was more a piece of furniture than a mannequin. It had one round eye of crystal. Something moved about inside, but I could not bring myself to peer into its stomach. There was not even anyone for me to tip. I doubted that it would understand me if I asked it for a paper; perhaps there were none now. So I went out shopping. But first I found the travel agency — a revelation. I went in.

  The large hall, silver with emerald consoles (I was getting tired of these colors), was practically empty. Frosted-glass windows, enormous color photographs of the Grand Canyon, the Crater of Archimedes, the cliffs of Deimos, Palm Beach, Florida — done in such a way that, looking at them, one had the impression of depth, and even the waves of the ocean moved, as if these were not photographs but windows opening onto actual scenes. I went to the counter with the sign EARTH.

  Sitting there, of course, was a robot. This time a gold one. Rather, gold-sprinkled.

  “What can we do for you?” it asked, It had a deep voice. If I closed my eyes, I could have sworn that the speaker was a muscular, dark-haired man.

  “I want something primitive,” I said. “I’ve just returned from a long journey, a very long one. I don’t want too much comfort. I want peace and quiet, water, trees, there could be mountains, too. Only it should be primitive and old-fashioned. Like a hundred years ago. Do you have anything like that?”

  “If you desire it, we must have it. The Rocky Mountains. Fort Plumm. Majorca. The Antilles.”

  “Something closer,” I said. “Yes… within a radius of a thousand kilometers. Is there anything?”

  “Clavestra.”

  “Where is that?”

  I had noticed that I had no difficulty conversing with robots, because absolutely nothing surprised them. They were incapable of surprise. A very sensible quality.