“Wait,” I called, “wait! What about me?”
They did not look back. The boats disappeared quickly in the roiling gloom over the icy, porpoiseful water. There was nothing for it but to climb my iceberg and see what I could see. As I clambered over the humps and pinnacles of ice, I thought of Peter Pan on his rock, saying, “To die will be a great adventure,” or that’s how I remembered what he said. I had always thought that that was very brave of Peter Pan, definitely a constructive way to look at dying, and perhaps even true. But I didn’t particularly want to find out whether it was true or not, just now. Just now, I wanted to get back to the Interplanary Hotel. But alas, when I reached the summit of the iceberg, no hotel was visible. I saw nothing but grey sea, porpoises, grey mists and clouds, and darkness slowly thickening.
Everything else, everywhere else, had changed quickly into somewhere else. Why didn’t this? Why didn’t the iceberg become a wheat field, or an oil refinery, or a pissoir? Why was I stuck on it? Wasn’t there something I could do? Click my heels and say, “I want to be in Kansas”? What was wrong with this plane, anyhow? A storybook world, indeed! My feet were very cold by now, and only the lingering warmth of the tomato soup kept my clothes from freezing in the bitter wind that whined over the surface of the ice. I had to move. I had to do something. I started trying to dig a hole in the ice with my hands and heels, breaking off projections, kicking till big flakes came loose and I could pry them up and toss them away. As they flew out over the sea they looked like gulls or white butterflies. A big help that was. I was by now very angry, so angry that the iceberg began to melt around me, steaming and fizzing faintly, and I sank into it like a hot poker, red-hot with fury, and yelled at the two pale people who were hastily stripping the long stocking-gloves off my legs and arms, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
They were terribly embarrassed and worried. They were afraid I had gone mad, afraid I was going to sue their Interplanary Inn, afraid I would say bad things about Uñi on other planes. They did not know what had gone wrong with the Virtual Reality Experience of Beautiful Uñi, although clearly something had. They had called for their programmer.
When he came—wearing nothing but blue swim trunks and horn-rimmed glasses—he barely examined the machine. He declared it was in perfect order. He asserted that my “confusion” had been due to an unfortunate semi-overlap of frequencies, a kind of mental moire effect, caused by something unusual in my brainwaves interacting with their program. An anomaly, he said. The effect of a resistance, he said. His tone was accusatory. I got angry all over again and told him and the clerks that if their damned machine malfunctioned, they shouldn’t blame me but either fix it or shut it down and let tourists experience beautiful Uñi in their own solid, anomalous, resistant flesh.
The manager now arrived, a heavyset, white-skinned, redheaded woman with no clothes on at all, only boots. The clerks wore minidresses and boots. The person vacuuming the lobby was a veritable mass of skirts, trousers, jackets, scarves, and veils. It appeared that the higher a Uñiat’s rank, the less they wore. But I had no interest now in their folkways. I glared at the manager. She smarmed halfheartedly and made the kind of threatening apology-bargain such people make, which means take what we offer if you know what’s good for you. There would be no charge for my stay at the inn or at any hotel on Uñi, I would have free rail passage to picturesque Jima, complimentary tickets to the museums, the circus, the sausage factory, all sorts of stuff, which she reeled off mechanically till I broke in. No thanks, I’d had quite enough of Uñi and was leaving right now. I had to catch my flight to Memfish.
“How?” she said, with an unpleasant smile.
At that simple question a flood of terror washed through me like meltwater from the iceberg, paralysing my body, stopping breath and thought.
I knew how I’d got here, how I’d gone to other planes—by waiting at the airport, of course.
But the airport was on my plane, not this plane. I did not know how to get back to the airport.
I stood frozen, as they say.
Fortunately the manager was only too eager to be rid of me. What the translatomat had translated as “How?” had been a conventional phrase on the order of “How regrettable,” which the manager’s fleshy but tight lips had truncated. My cowardice, leaping at the false signal, had stopped my brain, chopped off my memory, just as the mere fear of forgetting the name ensures that I will forget the name of anyone I have to introduce to anyone else.
“The waiting room is this way,” the manager said, and escorted me back across the lobby, her bare haunches moving with a heavy, malevolent waggle.
Of course all Interplanary inns and hotels have a waiting room exactly like an airport, with rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor, and a horrible diner with no seats which is closed but reeks of stale beef fat, and a flabby man with a nose cold overflowing from the chair next to you, and a display of expected flight arrivals and departures which flickers by so fast you never can be quite sure you’ve found your connecting plane among the thousands of listings, although when you do catch its number they seem to have changed the gate, which means that you need to be in a different concourse, so that your anxiety soon rises to an effective level—and there you are back in the Denver airport sitting on a plastic chair bolted to the floor next to a fat, phlegmy man reading a magazine called Successful Usury amid the smell of stale beef fat, the wails of a miserable two-year-old, and the hugely amplified voice of a woman whom I visualise as a heavyset, white-skinned, naked redhead in boots announcing that flight four-enty to Memfish has been canceled.
I was grateful to be back on my plane. I did not want to go east now. I wanted to go west. I found a flight to beautiful, peaceful, sane Los Engeles and went there. In the hotel there I had a long, very hot bath. I know people die of heart attacks in very hot baths, but I took the risk.