could point to thousands of men like Granville Esmond, who spent the greater part of their lives keeping order in remote provinces, far from their own kind.
The walls of Esmond’s poor little living room were covered with framed stereos, the cheap, motionless kind: views of the desolate land, the subterranean villages, groups of local Earthmen in sports kit, a close up of Mrs. Esmond in a sixties hat, looking strangely like her husband. And there were other mementos, a smogwood carving, a chunk of venustone, a native weave rug on the floor.
‘I spent twenty-nine years on our sister planet,’ Esmond said proudly, seeing Laurie’s glance.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘Oh, don’t apologise, it’s nice to have someone to see my – ah, trophies: I’m very much alone.’ The words seemed wrenched out of him; he immediately covered the confession by adding, ‘My illusion room’s through here, if you’d come, please.’
He gestured to a door and then said hurriedly, ‘I’m afraid it’s rather worn … The upkeep’s very expensive, you know. But I couldn’t bear to be without it: it helps remind me of happier times.’
He stood there as if barring the door, smiling in a weak, apologetic way.
‘I’ll put it right if I can,’ Laurie said, and pushed gently past him into the room.
The sky was a tawny overcast, moving slowly like curdled milk. A line of smogtress, part of an afforestation scheme, stretched from the horizon until the boughs of the nearest ones waved overhead. A large cabin dwelling with ‘District Commissioner’ over the door stood close beside a series of monolithic slabs. Laurie recognised the slabs as entrances to the warrenlike villages of the Venusians.
On the verandah of the cabin a middle-aged man sat smoking his pipe. He was lean and alert, his face tanned green by the perpetual breezes. It was Commissioner Esmond.
Through him, through the trees, through the sky, through the bleak land, the shadowy walls of the illusion room were visible. The recording was indeed worn.
‘As I explained to you on the pscreen,’ the present Esmond said, coming up from behind a tree, ‘the illusions keep changing without my switching them over. I’ve only got three illusions, but they keep changing …’
‘It happens sometimes on old circuits,’ Laurie said, hefting his repair kit. ‘I’ll soon fix it. The activator keys probably need rebuilding.’
‘They’ve been flickering a lot lately. It’s very disconcerting. But it probably won’t happen now you’re here.’
But even as Esmond spoke, there was a rush of ghostly figures into the Venusian clearing. The monoliths and trees faded and the two men were standing in a crowded club room. There were trophies on the wall, and flags, and bright flowers in vases, and somewhere a piano was being autoplayed.
People moved to and fro, talking, men and women in gay clothes. To one end of the room there was dancing. The hostess, glorious in yards of white extanza, was followed by a retinue of young men; one of the eager faces was twenty-year-old Granville Esmond.
‘The year is 1629 A-C,’ said old Esmond in a tremulous voice. ‘What a summer that was! Everything still before me … Do you see I was just growing my very first moustache? To be so very young … You’ll see my wife-to-be in a moment; she comes in that green door at the end, and I don’t notice her for some time. Shall we go and stand there and wait for her?’
He stepped forward to let a phantom pass and caught the look in Laurie’s eyes. He dropped his own.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Your time’s money, son. You’d better go and switch the illusions off and see what’s gone wrong with them. I don’t mind.’
Feeling callow and hard-hearted, Laurie made his way to the master switch. As he bent down to it, a girl with the palest countenance hurried towards him from a shadowy green doorway; her eyes, dark and dedicated, looked nervously through him, and for a second their lips seemed to touch: then the switch went over. The ghosts died.
‘That was my wife! That was Muriel!’ Esmond said. He stood in the middle of a bare chamber, his gesticulating hands drawing mirages; then he stuffed them in the pockets of his sneaking-jacket.
Pulling out a magnetic key, Laurie knelt and opened the illusion hood. This was an old model, probably acquired secondhand, and the interior looked vastly complicated to a layman, although it presented no special difficulties to Laurie. The illusion unit was bigger than a small refrigerator: current ones were the size of a small suitcase.
Laurie checked swiftly over the emanation circuits with his teller. There was considerable leakage, although not enough to be critical.
‘I shall have to re-earth to be safe,’ he said over his shoulder to the old man.
‘I’m afraid these technical terms don’t convey anything to me at all,’ Esmond apologised. ‘You see, I had a classical education. It would be – oh, right back in nineteen – no, eighteen, the year the Centauri team won the Ashes, when I started at French Foundation …’
And as Laurie worked, the old man began to tell his life story. Laurie did not bother to listen at first. He could see the equipment was worn out, and was wondering what was the least he could charge for an adequate job. The amplification transistors in colour, feeler and solidity circuits would all have to be renewed, and they’d cost a cool two hundred each.
This model had racks for only three illusion spools; more expensive ones had racks running into thousands. Most people preferred to record their own memories for the illusion, as Esmond had done; ultimately, they were most satisfying. But there were professional memorisers, some of whose memory types sold by the million. Laurie unclipped Esmond’s three memories from the prong that held them, and bent further into the entrails of the machine.
Gradually, he found himself absorbed in the other’s account of his life. On Esmond’s own showing, it had been dull, filled with a timid integrity and ended with a tiny pension. It contrasted strangely with Laurie’s existence, in which mad sessions of work alternated with women and the gay dives of the higher strata.
‘I hope you don’t mind listening to all this!’ Esmond exclaimed suddenly, interrupting himself. ‘You see, it’s eighteen months since a real live person was in my flat. All my food and supplies are automatically delivered through the muon-chute. And I hardly ever go out into the country these days – it costs so much to get out of London now, you know.’
It certainly did. All movement could only be by muon in the built-up area, and present rates for that were five and a half per cubic foot per yard.
‘You ought to get around more,’ Laurie said, tugging at the cover of the twitch plate. ‘You must be lonely here.’
‘Lonely!’ There was such a high note in the old man’s voice that Laurie involuntarily turned to look at him. As he did so, his temples made contact with the twin prongs of the record rack.
Sparks flew, sparks so cool they hardly singed his skin. Current flowed, current so slight it hardly made his scalp crawl. Air crackled with a noise so slight you would never think to call it sinister or world-shattering, or any of the things it really was.
After a long pause, Laurie completed the gesture he had begun and turned to look at Esmond. The old fellow stood in the
