Mack Reynolds - After Utopia

Through this the Chinese and Finnish girls were playing their instruments, and now the song swelled higher and faster. Outside, the dancers swirled faster and faster. Her buttocks were everything he had expected them to be, a wonderful cushion.

Behind him and a little to one side was stationed the Arab. She slyly inserted one small hand inside his trousers. She was an expert and he all but screamed in pleasure. Between the two of them, he came quickly to climax. Much too quickly, but he knew that there would be more. Instinctively, he knew that there was to be no limit to his virility.

He reached over and picked up his glass of wine.

The Negress came scurrying up with a tray of food. He could recognize none of the dishes, but the smell of them all was simply tremendous. He took up a drum-stick of some sort of bird: certainly it wasn’t chicken, duck, or turkey. Possibly peacock he thought. It was heavy with a sauce which he also failed to recognize, though once again he detected the delicate flavor of pine nuts.

The Hindu girl had weakly begun to get back into her silken trousers.

“Just leave those off,” he ordered. “I might want to get into that again.”

“Yes, Master,” she said.

When he awakened, it was to find Jo Edmonds seated in an easy chair about six feet from where Tracy was stretched out on the bed. The other eyed him speculatively, but for the nonce said nothing.

Tracy took a deep breath. “How much of that was real?” he demanded.

“None of it.”

Tracy shook his head negatively. “It had to be,” he said. “I had that experience as truly as any I’ve ever had. What do they do, mock up some fabulous sets in some present-day Hollywood and… ?” But even as he was saying it, he knew it was impossible.

“No,” Edmonds said, crossing his legs. “I mentioned the fact that if you wished to general the battle of Issus between Alexander the Great and Darius, you could. Do you think any tri-di or movie set could involve sixty thousand Macedonians and possibly as many as a million Persians? No, none of it happened, or, at least, it happened only in your mind.”

“Could I go back?”

The other shrugged. “Yes, again and again, if you wished, and either repeat the same experience or go on from where you left off.”

“And the same girls would be there, all eight of them?”

Edmonds laughed softly, “Or a new batch, if you’d prefer, old chap. There’s only one proviso. You can’t stay in a programmed dream for more than eight hours out of the twenty-four.”

“Why not?” Tracy swung his feet around and to the floor preparatory to getting out of the bed.

“For reasons of health,” the other told him. “Some addicts are so hooked on programmed dreams that they would remain in them until their bodies starved to death, stretched out on the dreamer’s bed. So the Medical Guild has rather insisted that eight hours at a stretch is all that you can take. Of course, if you wish, when you take your next eight hours you can return to the exact split second that your last eight hours ended in. Some do. I knew of one chap who went back to the days of Republican Rome, to Egypt. He went off his trolley with Cleopatra, or at the least with the dream world version of her and spent the rest of his dream life returning over and over again to her. All I can say is, she must have been one bloody special piece of ass.”

Tracy said, “When you dreamed, what did you do?”

“None of your business,” Edmonds said, flushing slightly.

Tracy snorted slight amusement. “I’ll bet one hell of a lot of the dreams are erotic experiences similar to the one I just went through.”

“Yes.”

Tracy said, “The ramifications of this are staggering, and I’ve just begun to work them out. Can’t the Medical Guild cure the addiction?”

Jo Edmonds was affirmative. He said, “Yes, through an advanced hypnosis technique, involving posthypnotic suggestion. It turns the patient against the programmed dream, though it doesn’t erase the memory of the ones he’s already had.”

“Then why don’t they? Why doesn’t this Medical Guild of yours take them off of the thing?”

Jo Edmonds said, “Because few programmed dream addicts volunteer for the hypnosis. They don’t want to be cured. And, you see, they are harming nobody. Nobody at all, except themselves, since the dreams aren’t real. You can choose to be Billy the Kid and go back and kill twenty-one men, or however many men he is supposed to have killed. But actually, you would hurt no one. The Medical Guild has no jurisdiction. It’s your own silly self that you’re hurting and not anybody else.”

Tracy was on his feet. He said, “How many people take these programmed dreams?”

“At least hundreds of millions. The Dream Palaces are to be found in every Pleasure Center and there are tens of thousands of Pleasure Centers throughout the world. They are even beginning to spring up where there are no Pleasure Centers, nothing except the Dream Palace. Once onto a Dream Palace, who wants any of the other pleasures offered?”

“All right,” Tracy said. “Could we go? That’s quite a wrenching experience, even only two hours of it, and, as you said I would, I remember every bit of it in vivid detail. In short, I’m tired.”

Edmonds took what looked like a silver cigarette case from his pocket and flicked back the lid. “We should be getting back anyway,” he said, standing also.

As they returned to the car, Tracy said, “What’s that you looked at, some kind of watch?”

Jo Edmonds said, “My transceiver. We’ll have to get you one tomorrow. In a way it’s a watch, since I can get the time on it. But it’s a lot of other things, too. It’s a two-way TV phone screen in which I can get in touch with anyone in the world, immediately. I can also dial the Universal Data Banks for any information I want. It’s also a sort of identification device. Suppose I got lost up in the mountains, or wherever. I’d simply dial, and the computers would get a fix on me, and an automated car would be sent to rescue me.”

They got into the hover-craft and Edmonds activated it.

“That’s some device,” Tracy admitted. “Does everybody have one?”

“Yes. Everybody who wants one.”

“Why should anybody not want one?”

Edmonds shifted one shoulder. “How should I know? Perhaps he’s a recluse, a hermit or something and doesn’t want to be bothered with people calling him all of the time. I really don’t know. It’s not my field, but everyone I know has one.”

Tracy said, “Continually, when I ask you questions, you tell me that it’s not your field. What in the hell is your field, Jo? That is,” he added sourly, “besides being the Tracy Cogswell of this century.”

They were airborne now and presumably heading back for Tangier and the Stein home. Edmonds switched over from manual to auto control.

He said, “I’m a student of the social sciences; anthropology, ethnology, history, archeology, and specializing in socioeconomics.”

They were the subjects in which Tracy himself was particularly interested though he had had precious little formal education. He had read quite widely in them during his various terms in prisons and concentration camps.

He asked, more respect in his voice than he usually gave Edmonds, “What do you do with it, Jo?”

The other shrugged his slight shoulders and said with a touch of self-depreciation, “Not much besides working for the organization. After all, it is an outfit trying to overthrow the present socioeconomic system. I wanted to become a teacher, originally, but there was no place for me. There is need for precious few teachers anymore. The autoteachers, hooked to the Universal Data Banks, are far more efficient than any human instructor could be. The few jobs that there are are largely supervisory ones.”