I absorbed two or three more cocktails during the course of the day, and they damped my nerves down so that I didn’t get a fit of shakes every time we stepped out of the limousine. It was reasonably late at night by the time the robot slaughter ended. I had every hope that my fair companion was willing to call it a day and take me back to the hotel room Transmat Inc. had rented for me. I said so.
She pouted prettily. “But the fun is just beginning, Ed!”
“Oh, no. We’ve been at it for seven hours, and you’re just beginning?”
“I promised some friends of mine I’d bring you over tonight. They’re having a party and they’re just dying to meet you!”
I groaned quietly. “Look, Carol, I’m dead tired, and all this excitement the first day…”
“This? Excitement? Don’t be an old fogie, Ed!”
“But I am pretty beat. Can’t we meet your friends some other night? I’m going to be here eight months, you know…”
“Oh, all right,” she said, but I could tell it wasn’t. “I guess we can skip it, if you’re so exhausted. But I told everyone you’d positively be there.”
I could tell from her voice that she’d hold it against me if I refused to go. So I shrugged and said I would. She melted at once, called me a dear, and snuggled up against me in the back of the car.
En route, I tried to make that transparent spot hold still. I got slapped; things hadn’t changed that much on Earth.
The party was being held at somebody’s apartment in Nyack, which was just about eighty miles from where we had watched the robots slice each other up. I settled back and tried to get some rest. The car traveled at better than 150 mph along an electronically controlled highway, and about half an hour later we were pulling up outside of a lofty apartment house.
It was eleven P.M. Ten hours ago, I had been on blissful Crawford IX. Now, with three or four slugs of rocket fuel under my belt, and a king-size headache already developing, I was enjoying “rest and diversion”—so they called it—on good old Earth. As we shot upward in what felt like a jet-propelled lift, I shut my throbbing eyes and tried to calm down. I couldn’t. Mournfully I told myself that after thirty-four weeks of this kind of life I would need a vacation—and a long one—on some planet far, far from civilization.
The party was being held in a four-room apartment, which Carol said was immense by current Terran standards. About fifty people were packed into the place, and they had all been there long enough to be well lit up.
The host, a lanky, civilized-looking fellow with a long purple beard and waxed red mustachios, threw his arm around Carol affectionately in a way that obscurely annoyed me, and gave me a big handshake. “So you’re the vacationing outworlder, eh! Well, we’ll help you have fun while you’re on Earth, friend! Drinks over there!”
An android bartender was mixing them. I asked for and got a rocket fuel, not daring to request any of the old and familiar drinks for fear I’d be considered old-fashioned. I put the drink down my throat in a hurry, too; all these people packed into so little space made me feel uneasily claustrophobic. Parties on Crawford IX have room to spread out.
I had another drink, and another. There was dance music playing; Carol dragged me out on the floor, gave me a sketchy idea of what the steps were, and led me through it. It seemed pretty much like an Aztec fertility rite to me, though that may have been just because the dance floor was so crowded. I began to get that warm, hazy feeling about the universe. If I didn’t drink, my nerves would be jangled by the raucous partying going all around, so I drank and gradually got accustomed to the racket. I began to feel mellow and relaxed. I also eyed some of the other women at the party with a good deal of interest. They were nifty, by any standard—but in my eyes Carol outpaced them all. I decided I had been quite lucky to draw her as my guide to Terran civilization.
I met some of the men. They seemed to be young execs-on-the-way-up, who made a lot of money but not enough to live within their means; they were uniformly good-looking, well-dressed, and (to my somewhat alcohol-soaked mind) witty. There was Monty Somebody and Alex Somebody and Dave Somebody—no one owned up to a last name—and around my eighth rocket fuel of the evening they began to wake up to the fact that I was a Transmat technician.
“Hey!” Monty said. “I got a great idea! Let’s you and me and Dave and our friend Ed here go down to the Transmat office next block and have some fun.”
“Great idea,” Alex said.
“Great,” Dave echoed.
“Swell,” someone else said.
Before I knew what was happening, I was being propelled through the crush and out of the apartment, flanked by Monty, Alex, Dave, and Somebody Else. I caught sight of Carol wig-wagging desperately at me from across the floor; then the door closed, and I was outside.
The fresh air did a little to sober me, but—alas!—not nearly enough. Like five wobbly-legged musketeers we went careening down the street, singing songs rich with the heritage of centuries, and turned the corner into a business district.
There was a Transmat office on the corner. Transmat offices are open round the clock, but there isn’t much of a staff in them late at night. There was just one clerk in this one, sitting behind the counter reading a book, when we came rollicking in.
I still had only the dimmest notion of why we had come here; and I don’t have a very clear recollection of the sequence of events. I recall Monty and Alex grabbing the unfortunate clerk, and dragging him into the back office where the Transmat machine itself was. I remember Dave saying, “You know how to work this thing, don’t you?” and I remember saying I did.
“Okay,” Monty said. “Just for a starter, let’s send this twerp off to Sirius.”
Obligingly I set up the coordinates while the clerk jabbered in terror.
“Heave-ho,” they cried in unison, and tossed him into the Transmat cubicle. I pulled the lever; the clerk vanished in green flame. “What now?” I asked.
“Us next,” Alex chorded. “We wanna go on vacations for nothing!”
“Sure, sure,” I said. “Leave it all to me!”
With the calmness of utter intoxication, I set up Transmat coordinates from memory. Alex clambered into the cubicle and I sent him off to Feinberg XII, a jaunt of nine thousand light-years. At standard company rates, a trip like that would set a person back five thousand dollars or more, but tonight everything was on the house.
“Me next,” Monty cried—and off he went to Betelgeuse XXIX.
I was setting up coordinates that would ensure Dave’s safe arrival on Hardecanute IV when the front door of the office burst open and a swarm of people entered. I recognized Carol, the host, and half a dozen other parties. There were also three men in the traditional garb of policemen, and I suppose I thought they were fugitives from a masquerade ball.
“Ed!” Carol shrieked. “What have you been doing? Where are Monty and Alex?”
“On vacation,” I said with a snigger. “And now it’s Dave’s turn. This is fun!”
“Good Lord!” someone yelled. I turned my back on the crowd and finished setting up the coordinates. As I nudged the last dial into place, I felt a hand grasp my shoulder tightly.
I glanced around. It was one of the policemen. “That’s about enough of this stuff, bud,” he snapped.
I wriggled loose from his grasp. Dave gave him a push. He grunted and tumbled into the Transmat cubicle.
I yanked the lever; Carol shrieked; and the cop departed for Hardecanute IV, thirteen thousand five-hundred light-years from Earth.
I collapsed.
If there is a Supreme Being who orders the events of this universe, I devoutly pray that He will not afflict me with more such mornings-after as I experienced the next day.
I was in jail, for one thing.
A speaker grid set in the ceiling said, “A visitor for Prisoner Reese.”
Radiant bars of force that had been hovering in the air a few feet from my nose blinked out long enough to permit Carol Dwyer to step
into my cell; then the force-field returned.
Carol was wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse that was off-the-bosom as well, at least so far as her left breast was concerned. She wore mildly-translucent trousers that might have been sprayed on; but the effect was totally lost on me. I surveyed her out of bloodshot eyes, and said finally, “Okay. When do they execute me?”
“You really went wild last night, didn’t you?”
“Did you come here to rub it in?”
She sat down facing me. I put my head in my hands.
“I didn’t realize how secluded from civilization you’d been,” she said. “If I had known how small the colony is on Crawford IX, we would have gone a lot slower in introducing you to Terran culture again.”
I merely groaned. “How much was the damage? And have they got everyone back yet?”
“The policeman, the company clerk, and Monty are back. There isn’t any word from Alex yet, but I suppose when he sobers up he’ll explain to the authorities, and they’ll send him back.”
“What’s it all going to cost?”
“Upward of seventy-five-thousand dollars, by economy-class rates.”
“Ten years’ pay!”
“Poor Ed,” she said soothingly. “Why don’t you try to get some more sleep? Everything’s going to work out okay.”
“Glad you think so,” I said sourly.
She left, and I tucked my aching head under my arms and slept some more. A few hours later she was back, with the news that Alex, very overhung, had checked in from Feinberg XII shortly before.
She also had some good news.
“I had a talk with some of the company brass,” she said, “and they’re going to let you off with a light reprimand. They’ll absorb the cost of the rumpus last night.”
“What?”
She nodded. I felt my headache ebb away. “I argued that it wasn’t fair to hold you responsible for the impact of Terran civilization on you, after all the years you’d spent in the back woods. After all, it was partly their fault for letting you go so many years without a vacation. So they decided to forgive you—and to let you spend the rest of your vacation wherever you like.”
As you see, it all worked out pretty well, if you don’t count the four-day hangover I had after that party. A Transmat lawyer took care of the disturbance-of-the-peace charge; the costs of shipping four human beings to distant parts of the galaxy were written off by the company; and I was shipped back to Crawford IX post-haste, to finish the rest of my thirty-four week layoff roaming the woods in peace.
Oh, yes, Carol came with me. It was time for her vacation, you see, and she decided to try a relatively peaceful place, for once. So she tried Crawford IX, and she liked it fine, just fine. Liked it enough to apply for permanent residency, as Mrs. Ed Reese.
So now it’s business as usual for me: I run the Transmat office on Crawford IX, with Carol helping out a bit, and when the time comes, I’m going to take my vacation—right here on Crawford IX. Carol is a little homesick for Earth, but not homesick enough to really want to go back to all that noisy foofaraw. Earth may set the fashions for the rest of the galaxy, and Earth may make more money than any other world. It’s an exciting place, in its way, only it’s not for me—or for Carol, any more. We like it just fine here. As they say, there’s no place like space!
Robert Silverberg, Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era
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