The Fourth Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®

CHAPTER II-1

CHAPTER III wouldn’t be lonely any more! She’d be slender and gay, with tumbled red-gold hair; and when she came forward to greet me for the first time, her smile would warm me as I’d never been warmed before.

I’d spoken to the man, and it was all arranged; I was on my way to pick her up. My beetle purred as it sped swiftly down the shop level driveway, red sunlight gleaming on its fused tungsten hood. The air was crisp, cool and invigorating, and the future looked bright.

All I had to do now was conquer a tendency towards fuzzy thinking, and face up to the facts. It was as if I could hear the computers humming, giving it to me straight. All right, the computers couldn’t talk. You fed them your identity data, and answers came out punched into a metal tape. But it was as if I could hear the Big Brain itself whispering to me.

“Not for you a quiet fireside, and a cloak around your shoulders when you’re too old to dream, boy! You’ll die on Venus Base.

“Take your happiness while you can. Make the best of it. You’ve got strength and you’ve got courage far beyond the average—so take it in your stride. This is the year 2486! There are gadgets, a million satisfying gadgets—glittering, and beautiful, and new. Gadgets to make up for everything nature, or society, or the perversity of fate denies us.

“There are compensations for every bitter frustration, every handicap of body and mind, every tragic lack of the raw materials of happiness. Wade in, and wise up. Take a substitute for what doesn’t come naturally. Drive down to the shop level arcades, and buy yourself a wig with synthetic nerve roots which will grow into your scalp. Buy yourself a bone ear, a musical or art appreciation grove-in, a money-sense illusion, anything you’d care to name.

“You don’t have to be reminded that there are some men who might say: ‘There is no substitute for the real thing. You’ll never get around it and you may as well stop lying to yourself.’

“But not you, boy! You’d never say that because you don’t give up as easily as that. Naturally they’ve been keeping it quiet. You have to dial the right shop. You’ve got to speak in a persuasive whisper to the right people. You’ve got to mention just how many trips you’ve made to Venus Base.

“Buy yourself a beautiful Android. Naturally it’s labeled: For Spacemen Only! If you’ve got something new and tremendous to sell you’d be crazy to offer it on the open market, wouldn’t you? Mass production takes years to build up. Until the mass production stage is reached, high profits can only be made without State Bureau interference.

“Why not sell your products directly to men whose need is so great and urgent—they’ll pay specialty prices? Pay eagerly and disappear into space?

“It’s the only policy that makes sense and you’ve no quarrel with it, have you, boy? You’ve spoken to the man, and you know exactly what you want, and you’ve the money to pay for it.”

* * * *

The big brain, of course, wouldn’t speak quite so frankly. The Big Brain wouldn’t conspire with an outlay firm to deceive the State Bureaus, much as it might want me to accept a substitute for the wife I couldn’t have.

I was really listening to a separate rebellious part of myself arguing with my more cautious self. My reckless self was now completely in the saddle. It pleased me to listen to that inner voice hammering home the facts, garnished up a bit by the Big Brain’s authority.

We’d better get it straight right at the start that artificial women are as old as the human race. There are Aurignacian Venuses from rock caverns in the Pyrenees you could date in your dreams with no effort at all. A bit on the plump side perhaps, but what of that?

What is a statue really? Hasn’t a statue a definite mechanical function to perform? Isn’t the statue of a beautiful woman a kind of android designed to delight the eye and the brain?

Remember, an object doesn’t have to move at all to be mechanically functional. If a certain arrangement of lines and curves and dimples can evoke a biogenetic response in a man you’ve got a mechanical prime mover, and if that object happens to be a statue you’ve got an android in a strict sense. You can do without the photoelectric brain cells and the Cybernetic memory banks.

The Pygmalion fantasy is the key. Every man carries about with him a subconscious image of the one perfect woman. There’s a biological norm, and that norm constitutes the ultimate in desirability. Every individual woman departs from the norm to a greater or a lesser degree. Nature is constantly attempting to create new species, and that tendency towards mutational variation keeps altering the norm, throwing it off center.

Features too large or too small will distort or completely shatter the norm. A woman with a too large mouth, for instance, may have other features so perfect she will still be beautiful. But her beauty won’t be perfect if a single one of her features departs from the norm. The closer women approach the norm in all respects, the more beautiful they are.

Unfortunately a woman who seems beautiful to a Hottentot may not seem beautiful to you. You’ve got to go back to your ancestry for the key; you’ve got to find out precisely the kind of norm woman your ancestors mated with for hundreds of thousands of years.

You could marry any one of ten thousand woman picked at random, and be reasonably happy. But to be perfectly content, you have to have a perfect biogenetic mate.

Now for the first time you could get your norm girl. Your biogenetic tape recordings supplied the key. You gave the man your biogenetic tape number, all the data available to the Big Brain, and the firm did the rest.

Waiting for me was an android female with a living colloidal brain. The human brain is a colloid with a billion teeming memory cells, made up of molecular aggregates just large enough to be visible in a powerful ultra-microscope.

Just large enough to be visible. Visibility was the key, for a visible structure could be studied and duplicated. Not exactly perhaps; we’d get that in another century or so. But enough of the structure could be duplicated to yield results.

I had been warned that there would be no emotional overtones in the woman who was waiting for me. A seven-year-old level of intelligence perhaps, no more. Curiously enough the limitation did not depress me too much. When beauty becomes overwhelming, you can think of nothing else.

The shop-level arcades were a purple and gold glimmer for ten thousand feet. At night, the lights are so dazzling that you can’t see the individual beetle; but in broad daylight every window stands out, and the level becomes a tunnel of weaving lights and shadows.

It’s like plunging into a revolving kaleidoscope to pluck out a rare and glittering prize. Come early, take your pick.

I knew that the shop where I’d left my order would be using some kind of false front; but I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of the display which filled the window: a terraced garden with a fountain gushing silver spray, a breathtaking Watteau-gambol of fauns and satyrs in a twilight nymph pursuit.

In the window a little square sign read:

Enjoy Yourself Without

Breaking the Law

Which Shall It Be?

Ten Minutes of Emotional Illusion Therapy

Or Ten Months of Freud?

For an instant, I was tempted to go inside, and forget to mention my name. I knew the routine of the illusion therapy shops backward. If the human brain is paralyzed in certain centers, and stimulated abnormally in others, you get an illusion which can only be compared to sheet lightning.

When I closed my eyes, I was inside the shop, relaxing in the scented darkness. I could feel the incredible lightness of the big impulse-transmitting helmet resting on my head. I could hear the therapist saying in a cool, soothing voice: “The women whom you are about to see are incredibly beautiful. Not one woman, but twenty. Now if you’ll just relax—”

It’s a swift, effective way to cure frustration. But when you wake up, the savor of living is dulled for you, just as heavy smoking often dulls the pleasures of the palate. I told myself I’d be crazy to pay that kind of penalty when I could have the real thing.

The man was expecting me. He was tall, quiet and soft-spoken; but I never really got a good look at his face.

You know how it is when you whisper over a wire. Someone has to be at the other end to take down your message. He may be young or old, an executive of the firm, or just a front man, a go-between. Instinctively, you know you’re not going to like him. When you actually meet him, you see no reason for studying him closely. If he has authority, you simply accept him as a vital link in the arrangement. He becomes a person with no real identity—a figurehead, a mummer. He becomes—the man.

He looked me over carefully. It takes skilled training to judge a man’s occupation at a glance. Often as not it’s a hit-or-miss task—but if you’re really good at it there is always a high-salaried undercover job waiting for you.

He was good at it. You spend two years at Venus Base and it shows in your eyes, the way you carry your shoulders when you walk, the very rhythms of your speech. Spend a lifetime hoeing a field in blazing sunlight, or pacing the deck of a ship at sea and you’ll get deep creases in the back of your neck, crow’s feet about your eyes and a leathery texture of skin such as you can’t possibly get if you’re a sedentary worker under glass. Two years at Venus Base can’t quite do that to you, but a really good occupation-guesser can tag you every time.

The man said: “I think you’ll be satisfied, sir. But you’ve got to remember that a woman can be made for just one man alone, and not quite satisfy him at first glance.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the way he smiled when he said that—as if he knew a great deal about women himself, and was treating the matter as an amusing episode in the course of his philanderings. As if he’d discovered a girl that suited him fine, and was trying to palm off an old flame on the first gullible guy to walk into the trap. Some girl he’d decided not to like for no particular reason.

“I guess you know that caution is our stock-in-trade,” he said. “We have to be careful right from the start. You’ve got to forgive me if I seem a little ill at ease. I’ll be frank with you. I would have preferred to be a creative artist, a painter, or a musician, or something of the sort. But I guess we all get sidetracked. You’re sidetracked in a bad way.”

His eyes grew suddenly sympathetic and for a moment I found myself actually liking the guy.

“I’ve been married ten years myself,” he said. “It’s a headache at times, but I wouldn’t want to be alone on Venus Base without a woman. No, sir; that’s one thing I don’t envy you lads.”

He’d have gone right on talking if I hadn’t reminded him that I was very eager to complete my purchase and be on my way. There was a hammering at my temples, and my heart was pounding like a bass drum.

He seemed to sense what was passing through my mind. He nudged my arm and said, quite simply: “Follow me.”

I accompanied him along a narrow, dimly-lighted corridor and down a short flight of stairs to another corridor with three branching offshoots. We turned right, then left, then right again.

The room was huge and blank-walled. It didn’t look like a laboratory and until the lights came on my thoughts were in a turmoil. Would, she be as beautiful as I had allowed myself to believe?

I could see vague objects towering in the shadows. One caught and held my attention. It looked in the gloom like an enormous stationary globe with shining crystal tubes branching off from it.

The lights came on with a startling abruptness, flooding every corner of the room with a dazzling radiance.