The young man waved farewell to her, and she turned and left.
Julian looked back at Sean. “Anything more you want to know about blood and guts?”
“Not at the moment.” The other put away his notebook and stylo. “But I’d appreciate the opportunity to talk with you more when I’ve digested what you’ve told me and thought up some more questions.”
“Anytime. I’ll probably have a few to ask you, as well. I seem to have done most of the talking today.”
Sean hesitated for a moment. “You know, I have some friends who would love to meet you too. Do you think you could sneak away from Doctor Leete and his family some evening?”
“Sneak away?”
Sean laughed, in some embarrassment. He said, “Leete’s been given the job of adjusting you to your new environment, and it’s well known that he’s keeping you on a tight rein. It frustrates some of the rest of us who would love to have the chance to talk with a man who has actually been in combat—just a few months ago, in his mind—who has witnessed riots in the streets of the nineteen-sixties, who remembers clearly the days of street crime, juvenile delinquency, and all the rest of it.”
Julian smiled. “I didn’t think of the good doctor as my jailer, but I suppose in a way he is. How could we get together?”
“Why don’t we meet down on the ground level in the Cub Bar?”
“Cub Bar?”
“I suppose thus far the Leetes haven’t taken you out to any of the public places of entertainment. It’s a pleasant, intimate little bar, one of several dozen in this building. Could you meet me there, say, tonight at eight?”
“Certainly,” Julian said, standing as the other did. “I’d like to see the present-day equivalent of a bar. And I’m anxious to meet more of the present generation. Will they speak English too? My Interlingua isn’t all that good.”
“They’ll speak English.”
Julian saw him to the door. After Sean was gone, he thought of one question he could have asked. How did one go about getting a girl to sleep with him in this day and age?
Chapter Four
The Year 2, New Calendar
Despite the perils and problems of our times, we should be glad that we are living in this age. Every civilization is like a surf rider, carried forward on the crest of a wave. The wave bearing us has scarcely started its run; those who thought it was already slackening spoke centuries too soon. We are poised now, in the precarious but exhilarating balance that is the essence of real living, the antithesis of mere existence. Behind us lie the reefs we have already passed; beneath us the great wave, as yet barely flecked with foam, humps its back from the sea… And ahead…? We cannot tell; we are too far out to see the unknown land. It is enough to ride the wave.
When he was once again alone, Julian moved about the apartment, checking it out in more detail. So far as he could see, there was no reason in the world why he couldn’t be comfortable here. It was smaller than the apartment he had maintained in the United Nations Plaza building in New York, or even the Paris place on the Left Bank, but he wasn’t going to need servants here; Edith had explained that the apartments were entirely automated. He was going to have to check that one out. How the hell could you automate sweeping, dusting, washing windows; above all, how could you automate making a bed? Not that he couldn’t make his own bed, of course.
It was too early in the day, but he decided he could use a drink. He went back into the living room, to the small auto-bar which stood in one corner. He stared down at it. Although he had been in the Leete home for some time now, he had never used the auto-bar in their apartment; someone else had always gotten the drinks.
Well, it couldn’t be too complicated. There was a numbered dial and also a button, below a speaker. Experimentally, he pressed the button. He hadn’t the vaguest idea how to dial. Probably, somewhere around here, there was a pamphlet listing drinks, and all you had to do was dial what you wanted.
Instead, he cleared his throat and said, “I’d like a martini, with a twist of lemon peel rather than an olive.”
A slightly mechanical voice answered, “We are sorry, Mr. West, but that beverage is not on our list.”
He was genuinely surprised. “A martini not on your list?”
“No, Mr. West. However, if you will give us the formula it shall be placed in the building’s data banks.”
“All right. You take four, no make that five parts of gin and put it in a shaker with one part dry vermouth and lots of ice. You stir it briskly until it is very cold, but not too long so that too much of the ice melts. You pour it into a pre-chilled, thin-shelled cocktail glass and then twist a peel of lemon over it and drop the peel into the drink.”
“Thank you, Mr. West. The formula is now on file.”
He stood back half a step and scowled at the auto-bar. Now what?
It couldn’t have been two minutes before the top of the bar sank down to rise up again with a highly chilled, champagne-size glass. He was somewhat taken aback. He should have told them just what he meant by a part; that is, about a third of an ounce. There were at least five ounces of gin in this oversized, so-called cocktail glass. Well, he could straighten that out with them later. He took the drink and went over to the easy chair that was placed before the room’s TV screen.
He got out the screen’s directory and looked up the General News. Then he dialed it.
If he understood correctly, General News was the equivalent of the front page in the papers of his own day. Front page and possibly second and third.
The material began flashing before him, but it was Interlingua, and he was incapable of understanding more than one word out of three. He dialed for Information and asked it he could have the General News in English.
No problem, except that he couldn’t follow it even in English. It was too technical, except for a few items on entertainment and social matters. In disgust, he dialed again and, with a slight rasp in his voice, asked for the news in English for younger people—between the ages of eight and ten.
The voice said, “Of course, Mr. West.”
“What do you mean, of course?’” he snarled.
“Yes, sir,” the voice said unemotionally, as always.
How the hell did you argue with a computer? He settled back in the chair and took an irritated pull at his martini. Even the computers in this building knew that he had the educational level of a ten-year-old—maybe less.
For he found his work cut out for him trying to follow along even on that level.
The news was considerably different than it had been a third of a century ago. For one, there was no crime news. He was to find out later that this came under the heading of Medical News, and there was precious little of it. There was no financial news, either, which was one of the first items he used to look up in the Times and the Wall Street Journal.
There was a good deal of scientific and technological news, practically all of it entirely beyond him.
“Good God, this is for eight-year-olds?” he muttered, pulling at his overgrown martini again.
There was a great deal of sports; but there had been changes. There was no longer such a thing as boxing, although there was wrestling, and no karate or judo. There was seemingly no bullfighting, or auto racing, or any other sport that might involve someone getting hurt. There wasn’t even football. The remnants of the Roman arena had disappeared from the sports scene, and viewers of spectacle sports evidently no longer got their kicks from the fact that they might witness a serious injury, or even death. Nobody got hurt in the sports of this era.