And the third room.
It was almost bare by the standards of the other two. In the center of it stood a chair with great flat arms, and on each of the arms many rows of buttons.
He approached the chair cautiously, wondering what it was—what kind of trap it was. Although that was foolish, for there were no traps on Kimon. This was Kimon, the land of opportunity, where a man might make a fortune and live in luxury and rub shoulders with an intelligence and a culture that was the best yet found in the galaxy.
He bent down over the wide arms of the chair and found that each of the buttons was labeled. They were labeled “History,” “Poetry,” “Drama,” “Sculpture,” “Literature,” “Painting,” “Astronomy,” “Philosophy,” “Physics,” “Religions” and many other things. And there were several that were labeled with words he’d never seen and that had no meaning to him.
He stood in the room and looked around at its starkness and saw for the first time that it had no windows, but was just a sort of box—a theater, he decided, or a lecture room. You sat in the chair and pressed a certain button and—
But there was no time for that. An hour to dress for dinner, the cabinet had said, and some of that hour was already gone.
The luggage was in the bedroom and he opened the bag that held his dinner clothes. The jacket was badly wrinkled.
He stood with it in his hands, staring at it. Maybe the wrinkles would hang out. Maybe—
But he knew they wouldn’t.
The music stopped and the cabinet asked, “Is there something that you wish, sir?”
“Can you press a dinner jacket?”
“Surely, sir, I can.”
“How soon?”
“Five minutes,” said the cabinet. “Give me the trousers, too.”
The bell rang and he went to the door.
A man stood just outside.
“Good evening,” said the man. “My name is Montague, but they call me Monty.”
“Won’t you come in, Monty?”
Monty came in and surveyed the room.
“Nice place,” he said.
Bishop nodded. “I didn’t ask for anything at all. They just gave it to me.”
“Clever, these Kimonians,” said Monty. “Very clever, yes.”
“My name is Selden Bishop.”
“Just come in?” asked Monty.
“An hour or so ago.”
“All dewed up with what a great place Kimon is.”
“I know nothing about it,” Bishop told him. “I studied it, of course.”
“I know,” said Monty, looking at him slantwise. “Just being neighborly. New victim and all that, you know.”
Bishop smiled because he didn’t quite know what else to do.
“What’s your line?” asked Monty.
“Business,” said Bishop. “Administration’s what I’m aiming at.”
“Well, then,” Monty said, “I guess that lets you out. You wouldn’t be interested.”
“In what?”
“In football. Or baseball. Or cricket. Not the athletic type.”
“Never had the time.”
“Too bad,” Monty said. “You have the build for it.”
The cabinet asked: “Would the gentleman like a drink?”
“If you please,” said Monty.
“And another one for you, sir?”
“If you please,” said Bishop.
“Go on and get dressed,” said Monty. “I’ll sit down and wait.”
“Your jacket and trousers, sir,” said the cabinet.
A door swung open and there they were, cleaned and pressed.
“I didn’t know,” said Bishop, “that you went in for sports out here.”
“Oh, we don’t,” said Monty. “This is a business venture.”
“Business venture?”
“Certainly. Give the Kimonians something to bet on. They might go for it. For a while, at least. You see, they can’t bet—”
“I don’t see why not—”
“Well, consider for a moment. They have no sports at all, you know. Wouldn’t be possible. Telepathy. They’d know three moves ahead what their opponents were about to do. Telekinesis. They could move a piece or a ball or a what-have-you without touching a finger to it. They—”
“I think I see,” said Bishop.
“So we plan to get up some teams and put on exhibition matches. Drum up as much enthusiasm as we can. They’ll come out in droves to see it. Pay admission. Place bets. We, of course, will play the bookies and rake off our commissions. It will be a good thing while it lasts.”
“It won’t last, of course.”
Monty gave Bishop a long look.
“You catch on fast,” he said. “You’ll get along.”
“Drinks, gentlemen,” the cabinet said.
Bishop got the drinks, gave one of them to his visitor.
“You better let me put you down,” said Monty. “Might as well rake in what you can. You don’t need to know too much about it.”
“All right,” Bishop told him agreeably. “Go ahead and put me down.”
“You haven’t got much money,” Monty said.
“How did you know that?”
“You’re scared about this room,” said Monty.
“Telepathy?” asked Bishop.
“You pick it up,” said Monty. “Just the fringes of it. You’ll never be as good as they are. Never. But you pick things up from time to time—a sort of sense that seeps into you. After you’ve been here long enough.”
“I had hoped that no one noticed.”
“A lot of them will notice, Bishop. Can’t help but notice, the way you’re broadcasting. But don’t let it worry you. We are all friends. Banded against the common enemy, you might say. If you need a loan—”
“Not yet,” said Bishop. “I’ll let you know.”
“Me,” said Monty. “Me or anyone. We are all friends. We got to be.”
“Thanks.”
“Not at all. Now you go ahead and dress. I’ll sit and wait for you. I’ll bear you down with me. Everyone’s waiting to meet you.”
“That’s good to know,” said Bishop. “I felt quite a stranger.”
“Oh, my, no,” said Monty. “No need to. Not many come, you know. They’ll all want to know of Earth.”
He rolled the glass between his fingers.
“How about Earth?” he asked.
“How about—”
“Yes, it is still there, of course. How is it getting on? What’s the news?”
He had not seen the hotel before. He had caught a confused glimpse of it from the alcove off the lobby, with his luggage stacked up beside him, before the bell captain had showed up and whisked him to his rooms.
But now he saw that it was a strangely substantial fairyland, with fountains and hidden fountain music, with the spidery tracery of rainbows serving as groins and arches, with shimmery columns of glass that caught and reflected and duplicated many times the entire construction of the lobby so that one was at once caught up in the illusion that here was a place that went on and on forever, and at the same time you could cordon off a section of it in your mind as an intimate corner for a group of friends.
It was illusion and substantiality, beauty and a sense of home—it was, Bishop suspected, all things to all men and what you wished to make it. A place of utter magic that divorced one from the world and the crudities of the world, with a gaiety that was not brittle and a sentimentality that stopped short of being cheap, and that transmitted a sense of well-being and of self-importance from the very fact of being a part of such a place.
There was no such place on Earth, there could be no such place on Earth, for Bishop suspected that something more than human planning, more than human architectural skill, had gone into its building. You walked in an enchantment and you talked with magic and you felt the sparkle and the shine of the place live within your brain.