“G —, honey, that’s awful. Let’s shut the d--- thing off and go down to the corner for a beer, huh?”
The first of the two words for which I use dashes was the name of the Deity and is a perfectly proper word when used reverently and in context. But it certainly didn’t sound as though he was using it reverently, and the second word was very definitely profanity.
I am deeply disturbed.
April 30—There is no real reason for me to make an entry tonight to add to the other notes I have made recently. I am more or less doodling and will no doubt throw this page away when I have finished with it. I am writing it simply because I have to be writing something and might as well do this as something even more meaningless.
You see, I am writing this “on screen,” as we call it. Tonight I am a newspaper reporter sitting in front of my typewriter in the city room of a newspaper.
I have, however, already played my active part in this adventure, and am now in the background, required only to look busy and keep typing. Since I am a touch typist and do not need to watch the keys, tonight I have ample opportunity to take occasional glances through the glass into the other world. I find myself again seeing a young couple alone together. Their “set” is in their bedroom and obviously they are married, since they are watching from their beds. Beds, plural, of course. I am pleased to see that they are following the Code, which permits married couples to be shown talking to each other from twin beds a reasonable distance apart, but more than understandably forbids their being shown together in a double bed; no matter how far apart they lie, this is definitely suggestive.
Just took another glance. Apparently they aren’t much interested in watching the screen from their side. Instead, they are talking. Of course, I cannot hear what they are saying to each other; even if there were absolute silence on our side, I am too far back from the glass. But he is asking her a question and she is nodding, smilingly.
Suddenly she sweeps back the covers and swings her feet out of bed, sits up on her side of it.
She is naked.
Dear God, how can you permit this? It is impossible. In our world, there is no such thing as a naked woman. It just cannot be.
She stands up and I cannot tear my eyes away from the impossibly beautiful, beautifully impossible, sight of her. Out of the corner of one eye I can see that he has thrown back the covers on his bed and he, too, is naked. He is beckoning to her and, for a brief moment, she stands there laughing, looking at him and letting him look at her.
Something strange, something I have never felt before, something I did not know was possible is happening in my loins. I try to tear my eyes away, but I cannot.
She crosses the two steps between the beds and lies down beside him. Suddenly he is kissing and caressing her. And now—
Can such things be?
It is true, then! There is no censorship for them; they can and do do the things that in our world may be only vaguely suggested as off-stage happenings. How can they be free when we are not? It is cruel. We are being denied equality and our birthright.
Let me out of here! Let me out!
Let me out!
Help, anyone, help!
Let me out of this box!
You could call it “canned soul.” Or maybe “electropsyche”? Sheerest fantasy when it assumes cognition (ego? sentience? essence?) springing full-blown from the picture tube—but very solid probability when you reverse the sequence, and feed the emotions into the box.
INTERVIEW
Frank A. Javor
Looking at the woman, Lester V. Morrison felt deep inside himself the stirring of sympathy, familiar, rising to the sustained, heady rapport that made him know, with the certainty of long experience, that this was going to be another of his great interviews.
He smiled and loosened the fist he’d made unconsciously to emphasize the word “great” when it passed through his mind.
He felt a light touch on his arm and turning, bowed his head so that his lead technician could slip over it the video-audio headband. Its close-fitting temple pieces curved to touch the bone behind his ears and the twin stereo view-finder cameras came down over his eyes.
Lester rather liked to make the subdued bowing movement, the symbolic humbling, it pleased him to think, of his six-and-almost-a-half-foot tallness to receive the crownlike headgear of his craft. A crown heavy, not with the scant two ounces of transmitting metal and optical plastic, but heavy with his responsibility to the billions upon billions of viewers who would see what Lester looked upon, would hear what he turned his ear to; the center of their universe for those moments the spot upon which Lester stood, the signal spreading outward from it like the ripple pattern of a dropped stone. -
His technician pressed Lester’s arm twice and stepped back. Lester stood erect, his hands and fingers hovering over the twin-arced rows of buttons and rods set in the flat surface of the control console he wore high on his chest like an ancient breastplate. There was no speaking between Lester and his four-man crew, nor any testing of equipment. Lester wore his responsibility with what he considered a Suitable humility, but with a firm confidence. Let lesser men fiddle with their equipment, talk, blur the virgin spontaneity of the look that would flash into the woman’s eyes with the first impact of Lester’s equipment upon her. His men, like Lester, were the absolute best in their field; razor-honed by long close union and good pay until they responded almost symbiotically to Lester and each other.
A clear warning warble from his left earphone, heard only by Lester through the bones of his skull, readied him to begin his task. He stood firmly tall, silent, waiting ...
A musical bleat. The suddenly glowing red face of the timer in the upper corner of his left viewfinder. He was on the air.
The general view first. Eight seconds to set the scene, to let his viewers see for themselves the sordid slum he was standing in. To see the aged, crumbling buildings, some of them as much as twelve and even fourteen years old, engineered to have been torn down and replaced long ago. Long before a tragedy of this kind could strike. To form their own opinion of a council that could allow such a blight to exist on their planet.
Smoothly Lester pivoted his body, one shoulder leading, a counterbalance for the slightly trailing head, editorializing subtly by what he chose to look at, by what he chose to ignore. Flowingly, easily, compensating automatically for even the rise and fall of his own controlled breathing. A beautifully functioning, rock-steady camera vehicle Lester was. It was the least of his interviewing skills.
A closer shot. His thumb brushed a rod on his breastplate. The view in his finders grew larger. Armor-suited men, resting now, but still strapped in the seats of their half-track diggers. Orange-painted against the greening dust and the bright red glow of the police-erected crowd-control barrier force-field like a sheltering dome over them. Through it, visible above and around in all directions, a swirling, shifting mass upon mass of human beings. Some in fliers, others on skimmers. Some strapped in one-man jumpers and even on foot. A boiling, roiling swarm of the morbidly, humanly curious pressing all around, straining toward the little knot of blue-coverall-clad men and their pitifully small, broken burden.