“Bored!” Ted was aghast. “You absolutely seem to forget that when those other guys are swanning round the house watching television and getting fat, I’m working hard to build up my health. That’s a marriage partner’s most important duty—to keep himself healthy.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Maggie whispered. “What have I done?”
Three days later, while Ted was surfing, she bought a luminous mink costing as much as the car and the bracelet put together. Ted examined the price tag then went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb in each hand and expended them in a foaming orgasm of fury. When calmness returned he went back to the lounge and greeted his wife with a numb smile.
“It has just occurred to me that I’ve been neglecting you a little, Maggie. Let’s go out tonight and see what we can do about hitting the town.”
Maggie’s eye flickered with enthusiasm as she hurried away to engage in lengthy cosmetic rituals, and that night she really did hit the town. When she was too full of assorted liquors to be aware of what was happening, Ted pushed her out through the window of their third floor bedroom.
The fall did not kill Maggie, but the damage to her lower spine was such that she was confined to a wheelchair for life. As the Trymbles’ house was tall and narrow—with a steep flight of steps at the door—Ted felt that his wife was as good as dead. She could not, at any rate, get to the expensive stores in which she would be tempted to further acts of infidelity.
With a mimimum of prompting from him she sold the car and the coat at a relatively small loss, but insisted on retaining the bracelet of green-veined Venusian gold.
“What’s the point of keeping it?” he pleaded. “I mean, you don’t even go out now.”
“It’s company for me. Something I can look at.”
“But there must be more interesting things to look at—how about a television set?”
To Ted’s surprise, his wife showed interest in the suggestion. “If I sell the bracelet will you get me a set?”
“Of course, sweetie.”
“Any kind of a television set?”
He sensed the trap immediately, but in his mind’s eye he could see the big nuclear-powered ships speeding towards Earth with cargoes of cheaper Venusian gold, and he decided to play along. “Any kind of set you want, Maggie. You know how bad I feel about you being tied to that chair all the time.”
“That’s nice of you, honey. I’d like a Telemart Three.”
Ted swallowed unhappily. He detested television as an opiate which sapped a man’s strength of body and mind, and he even had an aversion to reading about the bewildering technical developments in the field. But he knew about the Telemart Three.
The set was ordered that day and Ted’s unhappiness increased as he watched the technicians position the eight-foot proscenium and arch at one end of the lounge. Working with blunt efficiency they ripped out the floor below the proscenium and ran a mass of cables, conduits and wave guides down to the raw materials tank they were installing in the basement. Four hours later the job was completed, and a Telemart sales exec. formally presented Maggie with a white-and-gold brochure. He then placed the remote control set in her hand with the air of an English archbishop conferring the orb and sceptre of his sovereign.
“This is your on-off switch and channel selector,” he said, addressing himself intensely to Maggie and ignoring Ted. He moved the switch and a pretty girl in a silver dress appeared on the proscenium, singing in the low voice of a French diseuse. The only way in which she could be distinguished from real flesh-and-blood was a slight tendency to glow, which made her brighter than the other people in the room.
“Oops,” the sales exec. said. “If the image is too bright you do this.” He moved a knob and the girl dimmed to normality.
“It’s wonderful,” Maggie breathed. “When do we get the commercials?”
“You shouldn’t have long to wait,” the exec. said benignly, his eyes gleaming behind their old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. A few seconds later the silver girl finished her song and vanished, to be replaced by a handsome, tanned man in beachwear. He was reclining on a sun chair on a shockingly real area of honey-coloured sand, and in his hand was a dewy-cold bottle of Tingle-lime. Ted started involuntarily—he could actually smell sea air mingled with the keen tang of the soft drink. He examined the small orifices in the edge of the proscenium, looking for visible signs of gas being emitted, but saw nothing.
“… why don’t you join me?” the image was saying. “Join me now!”
“Shall I?” Maggie asked excitedly.
“Only if you can use some Tingle-lime,” the exec. replied. “We urge all our clients to buy only what they really need.”
“We drink lots of Tingle-lime.”
“No we don’t,” Ted put in, but he was too late. Maggie had pressed the ‘accept’ button on her handset and a crate of a dozen king-size Tingle-limes appeared, amid a faint ozonic crackling, on the vestigial catwalk attached to the front of the proscenium. The exec. lifted the crate, carried it to Maggie’s chair and with a flourish opened one of the plastic bottles.
Maggie took it and sipped the green liquid eagerly. “It’s perfect—even better than the stuff we get at the store.”
“It ought to be. Anything you buy in a store is bound to have been on the shelves for some time, possibly months, but goods you buy through Telemart Three are created specially for you on the instant of purchase.”
“How can that be?” Ted felt he had been silent too long. “As I understand it, there has to be a crate of Tingle-lime at the broadcasting station. It gets scanned with Röntgen rays and the details of its molecular structure are broadcast on a separate channel from the one which carries the programmes and commercials. Right?”
“That’s true, but …’
“If someone presses the ‘accept’ button, the molecular blueprint coming through at that time is used to build up a replica of the transmitted object from the raw materials bank in the basement. Right?”
“Right again, but …’
“So how do we know the original crate of pop hasn’t been lying on a shelf at the station, possibly for months?”
“You know because the Telemart Corporation stands over its word as given in this brochure,” the exec. said in a hurt voice. He turned to Maggie. “I’m pleased that a Tingle-lime commercial was on when you made your first purchase because it demonstrates the superiority of the Telemart Three over all other models. Believe it or not, a carbonated drink is not an easy object to transmit. With older systems there was an appreciable loss of carbon dioxide pressure before the container was completely formed.
“But the Telemart Three comes so close to instantaneous construction of the transmitted object that it is possible to …”
“Oh, look,” Maggie interrupted. “There’s a commercial for liqueur chocolates. It’s ages since I’ve had a liqueur chocolate.”
Ted hurried into the ground floor room in which his wife had slept since her injury and found the bracelet of Venusian gold. He had a feeling he would need to get the best possible price for it.
In spite of intensive bargaining, and even a certain amount of abject pleading, he dropped over $5,000 on the bracelet. He went to his favourite gymnasium and spent two hours trying to work the tension toxins out of his body, but all the while a gloomy certainty that he had made a major blunder was building up in him. Finally, half-way through a set of deep knee bends, he made a decision—Maggie would have to give him a sacred vow not to use the Telemart for anything beyond normal household shopping. If necessary he would even sit with her at nights until satisfied she was going to play the game.
He showered quickly and drove home in his ageing rotary-engined Pontiac. The tall narrow house was in darkness except for a dim, shifting light in the window of the lounge. Ted sprinted up the stone steps and went into the house, but he had trouble opening the lounge door. There seemed to be something heavy preventing it from moving. He got his head into the room and blinked incredulously at what he saw.