Norton said, “They’re acting strangely. I don’t like this.”
Holliday reacted to the note of alarm in his voice. “Let’s get Vornan out of here,” he murmured to a guard standing just by my elbow. “There’s the look of a riot starting.”
Tickertape floated through the air. The churning brokers seized long streamers of it, danced around with it, sent it coiling upward toward the balcony. I heard a few shouts against the background of noise: they wanted Vornan to come down among them. Vornan continued to acknowledge their homage.
The ticker declared:
An exodus from the trading floor had begun. The brokers were coming upstairs to find Vornan! Our group dissolved in confusion. I was growing accustomed now to making quick exits; Aster Mikkelsen stood beside me, so I seized her by the hand and whispered hoarsely, “Come on, before the trouble starts! Vornan’s done it again!”
“But he hasn’t done anything!”
I tugged at her. A door appeared, and we slipped quickly through it. I looked back and saw Vornan following me, surrounded by his security guards. We passed down a long glittering corridor that coiled tubelike around the entire building. Behind us came shouts, muffled and inchoate. I saw a door marked NO ADMITTANCE and opened it. I was on another balcony, this one overlooking what could only have been the gut of the master computer. Snaky strands of data leaped convulsively from tank to tank. Girls in short smocks rushed back and forth, thrusting their hands into enigmatic openings. What looked like an intestine stretched across the ceiling. Aster laughed. I pulled her after me and we went out again, into the corridor. A robotruck came buzzing up toward us. We sidestepped it. What did the tape say now? FLOOR BROKERS RUN AMOK?
“Here,” Aster said. “Another door!”
We found ourselves at the lip of a dropshaft and stepped blithely into it. Down, down, down…
…and out. Into the warm arcade of Wall Street. Sirens wailed behind us. I paused, gasping, taking my bearings, and saw that Vornan was still behind me, with Holliday and the media crew right in back of him.
“Into the cars!” Holliday ordered.
We made our escape successfully. Later in the day we learned that the Dow-Jones averages had suffered a decline of 8.51 points during our visit to the Exchange, and that two elderly brokers had perished from derangement of their cardiac pacemakers during the excitement. As we sped out of New York City that night, Vornan said idly to Heyman, “You must explain capitalism to me again some time. It seems quite thrilling, in its fashion.”
TEN
We had a simpler time of things at the automated brothel in Chicago. Kralick was a little leery of letting Vornan visit the place, but Vornan requested it himself, and such a request could hardly be denied without risking explosive consequences. At any rate, since such places are legal and even fashionable, there was no reason for refusing, short of lingering puritanism.
Vornan was no puritan himself. That much was clear. He had lost little time commandeering the sexual services of Helen McIlwain, as Helen bragged to us on the third night of our stewardship. There was at least a fair chance that he had had Aster too, though of course neither he nor Aster was saying anything about it. Having demonstrated an insatiable curiosity for our sexual mores, Vornan could not be kept away from the computerized bordello; and, he slyly told Kralick, it would be part of his continuing education in the mysteries of the capitalistic system. Since Kralick had not been with us at the New York Stock Exchange, he failed to see the joke.
I was delegated to be Vornan’s guide. Kralick seemed embarrassed to ask it of me. But it was unthinkable to let him go anywhere without a watchdog, and Kralick had come to know me well enough to realize that I had no objections to accompanying him to the place. Neither, for that matter, had Kolff, but he was too boisterous himself for such a task, and Fields and Heyman were unfit for it on grounds of excessive morality. Vornan and I set out together through the erotic maze early on a dark afternoon, hours after we had podded into Chicago from New York.
The building was at once sumptuous and chaste: an ebony tower on the Near North Side, at least thirty stories, windowless, the faзade decorated with abstract inlays. There was no indication of the building’s purpose on its door. With great misgivings I ushered Vornan through the climate field, wondering what kind of chaos he would contrive to create inside.
I had never been to one of these places myself. Permit me the mild boast of saying that it had never been necessary for me to purchase sexual companionship; there had always been an ample supply available to me for no other quid pro quo than my own services. I wholeheartedly approved of the enabling law that had permitted their establishment, though. Why should sex not be a commodity as easily purchased as food and drink? Is it not as essential to human well-being, or nearly so? And is there not considerable revenue to be captured by licensing a public utility of eroticism, carefully regulated and heavily taxed? In the long run it was the national revenue need that had triumphed over our traditional puritanism; I wonder if the brothels would ever have come into being but for the temporary exhaustion of other tax avenues.
I did not try to explain the subtleties of all this to Vornan-19. He seemed baffled enough by the mere concept of money, let alone the idea of exchanging money for sex, or of taxing such transactions for the benefit of society as a whole. As we entered, he said pleasantly, “Why do your citizens require such places?”
“To satisfy their sexual needs.”
“And they give money for this satisfaction, Leo? Money which they have obtained by performing other services?”
“Yes.”
“Why not perform the services directly in return for sexual satisfaction?”
I explained briefly the role of money as a medium of exchange, and its advantages over barter. Vornan smiled. He said, “It is an interesting system. I will discuss it at great length when I get home. But why must money be paid in exchange for sexual pleasure? That seems unfair. The girls one hires here get money, and they get sexual pleasure too, so they are being paid twice.”
“They don’t get sexual pleasure,” I said. “Just money.”
“But they engage in the sexual act. And so they receive a benefit from the men who come here.”
“No, Vornan. They just let themselves be used. There’s no transaction of pleasure. They make themselves available to anyone, you see, and somehow that cancels out any physical pleasure in what they do.”
“But surely pleasure comes when one body is joined to another, regardless of motive!”
“That isn’t so. Not among us. You have to understand—”
I stopped. His expression was one of disbelief. Worse, of shock. At that moment Vornan seemed more authentically a man of another time than ever before. He was genuinely jarred by this revelation of our sexual ethos; his faзade of mild amusement dropped away, and I saw the real Vornan-19, stunned and repelled by our barbarity. Lost in confusion, I could not begin to extricate myself by tracing the evolution of our way of life. Instead I suggested blurredly that we begin our tour of the building.
Vornan agreed. We moved forward across a vast internal plaza of yielding purple tile. Before us stretched a shining blank wall broken only by reception cubicles. I had been briefed on what was expected of us. Vornan entered one cubicle; I took a seat in the cubicle to the left of his.
A small output screen lit up the moment I crossed the threshold. It said, Please reply to all questions in a clear, loud voice. A pause. If you have read and understood this instruction, indicate your understanding with the word yes.