But none of them saw the other cube.
It’s a scenic view and it’s the same as the third face of “The Lovers.” If you walk around it it’s a 360-degree view from a low hillock. In one direction you can see the shore curving around a bay of red-violet water and beyond, dimly seen, are what might be spires or rocks or possibly towers. In the other direction the blue-green waves in the gentle breezes towards the distant mountains. The cycle is long, several times longer than any present sensatron, some thirty hours. But nothing happens. The sun rises and sets and there are two moons, one large and one small. The wind blows, the grass undulates, the tides come and go. A hot G-type sun. Moonlight on the water. Peaceful vibrations. Quiet. Alone in that studio I touched the smooth glassite surface and it was unyielding, yet an alien world seemed within reach. Or was it? Had Mike’s particle research opened some new door for him? I was afraid to have the cube moved for perhaps, in some way, it was aligned. You see, there are footsteps on the ground.
Two sets, and they start at the cube and go away, toward the distant spires.
I had my best team look it over. They went away with the diagrams and the notes they found on interdimensional space. They even had a stat of some figures scribbled on a tabletop.
Sometimes I plug into the monitor and look at the Cube sitting in the empty, locked studio, and I wonder.
Where are they?
Where are they?
5
For almost two years after Madelon and Mike disappeared I was a sort of robot, going through the motions of being Brian Thorne, being the Brian Thorne, almost by reflex. But I was a changed man, less comfortable in my ways, going from moody hermit holed up in a house or an island, to a party-giving playboy. Madelon’s leaving triggered a flood of lush-bodied young ladies who had been waiting impatiently in the wings, each promising her intimate version of Valhalla, Paradise, or Hell. There were times when I lost myself in beds across the world, burrowing into masses of prime young flesh, rutting mindlessly, shamelessly letting my businesses run themselves with minimum attention from me. Often I would substitute quantity for the quality I really wanted in women and then be disillusioned, and go into meditation about the universe in my belly button.
But the flesh would tug at me and I would break the shell and emerge, racing to the fleshpots, popping sensoids, pushing my body to the limit, overdosing on sex and high speeds and variety, variety in everything. Once I selected a girl named Millicent Abigail Fletcher as my consort simply because her chocolate skin contrasted so well with a golden body jewelry design I had seen. I changed her name to Juno and never let her wear anything but the totally revealing costume, even when we made love. My guilt over making her a nonperson sent me back into another retreat, this time into the Himalayas.
I came back from the snows, impatient with the weather-domed Shangri-La, and dropped into the real world again with a large splash. I acquired a pair of identical twins, blonde and tanned and almost grotesquely voluptuous, and made them my constant companions, calling them Left and Right, and dressing them in a mirror image of each other. I stood on a balcony at the New Metropolitan, waiting for Stephanie and Harold, flanked by my shimmering voluptuaries, and I commented that the nude was an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century.
“Before that it was religious sex,” I said.
“Oh, I am devoutly sexual,” Left said.
“Me, too,” Right said huskily, the nipple ornament of her left breast denting my jacket, going on automatic with any mention of sex. The next day I had them signed with a good agent and I was in Berlin. I was moody and unhappy and sorry for myself. An idle comment to Von Arrow that a certain artist was lousy because he traced his nudes almost destroyed the man’s career.
It was while I was in these moods that I studied hardest at mazeru, becoming violent enough to be given a thumping by Shigeta, then a lecture about control and balance and centering. I awoke one morning, looking as if I had just gotten up from inside an egg, and realized there was a nude girl on each side of me, naked beneath the satin, and I couldn’t remember their names, nor was I certain how they had gotten there. I lay quietly, listening to the untroubled dreams of the stereo nudes, immune and indifferent to the bared firm bosoms and ripe curving hips, all within reach. I stared at the big dead panel of the abstraction channel overhead, now silvered and reflecting the wanton trio below. I saw the rippled, distorted images, the black skin, the white, the golden, and I thought my dark thoughts.
I rose to walk barefoot along a curving Tahitian beach in the early dawn and by the time the nameless, forgettable girls had awakened to a breakfast of fruit, I was at a conference table a thousand kilometers away, discussing interest rates and tax credits.
I do not think I have been callous in my treatment of the young beauties who, in effect, sell themselves to me, or at least rent. They are pleasant companions, and the wisest of them know the time spent with me is an investment. I make outright gifts of stock or jobs, and I open investment opportunities for brothers and fathers, and sometimes husbands. Our relations are businesslike, a bartering process in laughter and sex and companionship.
By no means were all of my female friends in this classification, although I have become friends with many women I met in this manner. Many of my friends are the wives and mistresses or companions of friends, wise and wonderful women whose friendship I value as much as that of any man.
But there is always the matter of sex. Sex has a beginning, a middle, and an end, both in individual acts and in affairs. When the time came that a woman no longer interested me, or I no longer interested her, I might make a suggestion to a film producer, if she was the right type, and wanted it. She might go from my bed to having her name across every teleset on four continents. I might bring some rich-bodied, hot-mouthed wench together with a sensatron artist like Coe, give the necessary commission, and the aid of my Publitex firm to “glorify” it, and another star would be born as payment for a week in Madagascar or several delightful days of rutting in the Atlantis undersea world. It was incidental that my publicity company made money, that an artist was helped, that the sensatron could be donated, and that my Voyage Productions had a new star. I might do the same sort of thing for someone who had merely pleased me, or someone I admired, without any sex or ego-caresses. It was something I seemed to do by reflex, separating the wheat from the chaff, plucking the good from the poor and making it better.
All this was because of my money, and my money was, in part, because of all this. Money, beyond a certain point, is only wealth. Wealth, after a certain point, is pointless. It’s there, you know it’s there, but you don’t really know how much it is. You really only care when it isn’t there. Money is a burden, a responsibility, and just occasionally, a joy.