“What are you sniffing?”
“Butyl mercaptan,” he said at random.
“Come off it. You know we don’t—”
“Pyruvic acid, then. With a jolt of lactate dehydrogenase 5 as a spike.”
Pomrath drew laughter, but it was mechanical, the laughter of an entrepreneur humoring a valued if slightly embittered customer. “Here, Norm. Stop contaminating my brain and take this. And sweet dreams. You got couch nine, and you owe me a piece and a half.”
Taking the mask, Pomrath dropped a few coins into the fleshy palm and retreated to a vacant couch. He kicked his shoes off. He stretched out. He clasped the mask to his face and inhaled. A harmless pastime, a mild hallucinatory gas, a quick illusion to enliven the day. As he went under, Pomrath felt electrodes sliding into place against his skull. To serve as wardens for his alpha rhythms, was the official explanation; if his illusion got too violent, he could be awakened by the management before he did some harm to himself.
Pomrath had heard that the electrodes served another, more sinister purpose: to record the hallucinations, to tape them for the benefit of Class Two millionaires who liked the vicarious kick of sitting inside a prolet’s mind for a while. Pomrath had asked Jerry about that, but Jerry denied it. As well he might do. It hardly mattered, Pomrath thought, if the sniffer palace chose to peddle second-hand hallucinations. They were free to loot his alphas, if they cared to. So long as he got some decent entertainment for his piece and a half, his proprietary interests ended there.
He went under.
Abruptly he was Class Two, the occupant of a villa on an artificial island in the Mediterranean. Wearing nothing but a strip of green cloth about his waist, he lay restfully on a fat pneumochair at the edge of the sea. A girl paddled back and forth in the crystal water, her tanned skin gleaming when she broke the surface. She smiled at him. Pomrath acknowledged her with a negligent wave of his hand. She looked quite lovely in the water, he told himself.
He was viceroy for interpersonal relations in Moslem East, a nice soft Class Two sinecure that involved nothing more than an occasional visit to Mecca and a few conferences each winter in Cairo. He had a pleasant home near Fargo, North Dakota, and a decent apartment in the New York zone of Appalachia, and of course this island in the Mediterranean. He firmly expected to reach Class One in the next personnel kickover of the High Government. Danton consulted with him frequently. Kloofman had invited him to dinner several times down on Level One Hundred. They had discussed wines. Kloofman was something of a connoisseur; he and Pomrath had spent a splendid evening analyzing the virtues of a Chambertin that the synthesizers had produced back in ’74. That was a good year, ’74. Especially for the bigger Burgundies.
Helaine crawled up out of the water and stood incandescently bare before him, her tanned, full-blown body shimmering in the warm sunlight.
“Darling, why didn’t you come swimming?” she asked.
“I was thinking. Very delicate plans.”
“You know that that gives you a headache! Isn’t there a government to do the thinking for you?”
“Underlings like your brother Joe? Don’t be foolish, love. There’s the government, and there’s the High Government, and the two are quite distinct. I have my responsibilities. I have to sit here and think.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Helping Kloofman assassinate Danton.”
“Really, love? But I thought you were in the Danton faction!”
Pomrath smiled. “I was. Kloofman, though, is a connoisseur of fine wines. He tempted me. Do you know what he’s devised for Danton? It’s magnificent. An autonomic laser programmed to put a beam through him at the exact moment when he—”
“Don’t tell me,” Helaine said. “I might give away the secret!” She turned, presenting her back to him. Pomrath let his eyes rove up and down the succulent voluptuousness of her. She had never looked more delightful, he thought. He wondered if he should participate in Kloofman’s assassination scheme. Danton might reward him well for information. It was worth further thought.
The butler came rolling out of the villa and planted itself on four stubby telescoping legs beside Pomrath’s lounge chair. Pomrath regarded the gray metal box with affection. What could be better than a homeostatic butler, programmed to its master’s cycle of alcohol consumption?
“A filtered rum,” Pomrath said.
He accepted the drink, which was extended toward him by a spidery arm of crosshatched titanium fibers. He sipped it. A hundred yards off shore, the sea abruptly began to bubble and boil, as though something monstrous were churning upward from the depths. A vast corkscrew-shaped nose broke the surface. A metal kraken, paying a visit.
Pomrath gestured in the defense-motion, and instantly the guardian cells of the island threw up a picket fense of evenly spaced copper wire, each strand eight feet high and a sixteenth of an inch thick. The defense screen glowed between the strands.
The kraken lumbered toward the shore. It did not challenge the defensive screen. Rearing twenty feet out of the water, the bulky grayish-green object cast a long shadow across Pomrath and Helaine. It had large yellow eyes. A lid opened in the tubular skull, and a panel slid forward, out of which a human figure descended. So the kraken was merely a means of transportation, Pomrath observed. He recognized the figure who was coming ashore, and ordered the screen to drop.
It was Danton.
Cold eyes, sharply beaked nose, thin lips, swarthy skin betokening a more than usually mixed ancestry: Danton. As he stepped ashore, the Class One potentate nodded courteously to the nude Helaine and held both palms out to the apprehensive Pomrath. Pomrath tapped the butler’s control panel; the metal box scuttled off to fetch a pneumochair for the newcomer. Danton settled into it. Pomrath procured a drink for him. Danton thanked him kindly. Helaine sprawled out on her belly to sunbathe.
Danton said quietly, “About Kloofman, now. The time has come—”
Pomrath woke, the taste of old rags in his mouth.
It was always like that, he thought sadly. Just as the hallucination got really exciting, the effect wore off. Now and then, experimentally, he had paid for a double-strength jolt so he could enjoy the fantasy longer. Even then, though, the mid-hallucination interruption was the rule. TO BE CONTINUED, the mask always said, ringing down the curtain. But what did he expect? A neatly rounded episode, beginning, middle, climax, resolution? Since when did the universe work that way? He elbowed up from the couch and headed back to the front desk to drop off the mask.
“You have a good one, Norm?” Jerry asked.
“Terrific,” Pomrath said. “I was demoted to Class Twenty and put in maximum confinement. Then they found work for me as assistant to a sanitation robot. I was the one who worked the squeegee. After that I started to get cancer of the inner ear, and—”
“Hey, don’t fool me. You got a dream like that here?”
“Sure,” said Pomrath. “Not bad for a piece and a half, was it? Some fun!”
“You got a hell of a sense of humor, Norm. I don’t know, a guy like you, where you think up the jokes.”
Pomrath smiled thinly. “It’s a gift from heaven. I don’t question a thing like that. It comes to you out of the blue, like cancer of the inner ear. See you, Jerry.”
He walked out and took the shaft to the top of the tank. It was late, close to dinnertime. He was in the mood for walking, but he knew Helaine would bend the walls if he dawdled like that on the way home, so he made for the nearest quickboat ramp. As he approached it, Pomrath saw a seedy figure coming toward him at a rapid clip. Pomrath tensed. I’m ready for anything, he thought. Just let him try some funny stuff.
“Read this,” the man said, and jammed a crumpled minislip into Pomrath’s hand.