Wall of silence descends. (Selene – n) has returned to the table of (now – n). Therefore I (now) will return to the table of Selene (now). I rush back to the Celestial Room. Selene, looking glum, sits alone, sipping drink. She brightens as I approach.
“See?” I cry. “Back just in time. Happy anniversary, darling. Happy, happy, happy, happy!”
When we woke Saturday morning we decided to share the same room thereafter. Selene showered while I went downstairs to arrange the transfer. I could have arranged everything by telephone without getting out of bed, but I chose to go in person to the desk, leaving Selene behind. You understand why.
In the lobby I received a transmission from (now + n), speaking out of Monday, October 12. “It’s definitely the amulet,” he said. “I can’t tell you how it works, but it’s some kind of mechanical psi-suppressant device. God knows why she wears it, but if I could only manage to have her lose it we’d be all right. It’s the amulet. Pass it on.”
I was reminded, by this, of the flash of contact I had received on Thursday outside the sniffer palace in High Holborn. I realized that I had another message to send, a rendezvous to keep with him who has become (now – n).
Late Saturday afternoon, I made contact with (now – n) once more, only momentarily. Again I resorted to a ruse in order to fulfill the necessary unfolding of destiny. Selene and I stood in the hallway, waiting for a dropshaft. There were other people. The dropshaft gate raised open and Selene went in, followed by others. With an excess of chivalry I let all the others enter before me, and “accidentally” missed the closing of the gate. The dropshaft descended with Selene. I remained alone in the hall. My timing was good; after a moment I felt the inner warmth that told me of proximity to the mind of (now – n). “The amulet’s what does it,” I said. “That’s the word I get from—” Aloneness intervened.
During the week beginning Monday, October 12, I received no advance information on the fluctuations of the stock market at all. Not in five years had I been so deprived of data. My linkings with (now – n) and (now + n) were fleeting and unsatisfactory. We exchanged a sentence here, a blurt of hasty words there, no more. Of course, there were moments every day when I was apart from the fair Selene long enough to get a message out. Though we were utterly consumed by our passion for one another, nevertheless I did get opportunities to elude the twenty-foot radius of her psi-suppressant field. The trouble was that my opportunities to send did not always coincide with the opportunities of (now – n) or (now + n) to receive. We remained linked in a 48-hour spacing, and to alter that spacing would require extensive discipline and infinitely careful coordination, which none of ourselves were able to provide in such a time. So any contact with myselves had to depend on a coincidence of apartnesses from Selene.
I regretted this keenly. Yet there was Selene to comfort me. We reveled all day and reveled all night. When fatigue overcame us we grabbed a two-hour deepsleep wire and caught up with ourselves, and then we started over. I plumbed the limits of ecstasy. I believe it was like that for her.
Though lacking my unique advantage, I also played the market that week. Partly it was compulsion: my plungings had become obsessive. Partly, too, it was at Selene’s urgings. “Don’t you neglect your work for me,” she purred. “I don’t want to stand in the way of making money.”
Money, I was discovering, fascinated her nearly as intensely as it did me. Another evidence of compatibility. She knew a good deal about the market herself and looked on, an excited spectator, as I each day shuffled my portfolio.
The market was closed Monday: Columbus Day. Tuesday, queasily operating in the dark, I sold Arizona Agrochemical, Consolidated Luna, Eastern Electric Energy, and Western Offshore, reinvesting the proceeds in large blocks of Meccano Leasing and Holoscan Dynamics. Wednesday’s Tribune, to my chagrin, brought me the news that Consolidated Luna had received the Copernicus franchise and had risen 9 points in the final hour of Tuesday’s trading. Meccano Leasing, though, had been rebuffed in the Robomation takeover bid and was off 4 since I had bought it. I got through to my broker in a hurry and sold Meccano, which was down even further that morning. My loss was $125 000—plus $250,000 more that I had dropped by selling Consolidated Luna too soon. After the market closed on Wednesday, the directors of Meccano Leasing unexpectedly declared a five-for-two split and a special dividend in the form of a one-for-ten distribution of cumulative participating high-depreciation warrants. Meccano regained its entire Tuesday-Wednesday loss and tacked on 5 points beyond.
I concealed the details of this from Selene. She saw only the glamor of my speculations: the telephone calls, the quick computations, the movements of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I hid the hideous botch from her, knowing it might damage my prestige.
On Thursday, feeling battered and looking for the safety of a utility, I picked up 10,000 Southwest Power and Fusion at 38, only hours before the explosion of SPF’s magnetohydrodynamic generating station in Las Cruces which destroyed half a county and neatly peeled $90,000 off the value of my investment when the stock finally traded after a delayed opening, on Friday. I sold. Later came news that SPF’s insurance would cover everything. SPF recovered, whereas Holoscan Dynamics plummeted 11, costing me $140,000 more. I had not known that Holoscan’s insurance subsidiary was the chief underwriter for SPF’s disaster coverage.
All told, that week I shed more than $500,000. My brokers were stunned. I had a reputation for infallibility among them. Most of them had become wealthy simply by duplicating my own transactions for their own accounts.
“Sweetheart, what happened?” they asked me.
My losses the following week came to $1,250,000. Still no news from (now + n). My brokers felt I needed a vacation. Even Selene knew I was losing heavily, by now. Curiously, my run of bad luck seemed to intensify her passion for me. Perhaps it made me look tragic and Byronic to be getting hit so hard.
We spent wild days and wilder nights. I lived in a throbbing haze of sensuality. Wherever we went we were the center of all attention. We had that burnished sheen that only great lovers have. We radiated a glow of delight all up and down the spectrum.
I was losing millions.
The more I lost, the more reckless my plunges became, and the deeper my losses became.
I was in real danger of being wiped out, if this went on.
I had to get away from her.
Monday, October 26. Selene has taken the deepsleep wire and in the next two hours will flush away the fatigue of three riotous days and nights without rest. I have only pretended to take the wire. When she goes under, I rise. I dress. I pack. I scrawl a note for her. “Business trip. Back soon. Love, love, love, love.” I catch noon rocket for Istanbul.
Minarets, mosques, Byzantine temples. Shunning the sleep wire, I spend next day and a half in bed in ordinary repose. I wake and it is forty-eight hours since parting from Selene. Desolation! Bitter solitude! But I feel (now + n) invading my mind.
“Take this down,” he says brusquely. “Buy 5,000 FSP, 800 CCG, 150 LC, 200 T, 1,000 TXN, 100 BVI. Go short 200 BA, 500 UCM, 200 LOC. Clear? Read back to me.”
I read back. Then I phone in my orders. I hardly care what the ticker symbols stand for. If (now + n) says to do, I do.