Either we go somewhere without that whatever-it-is, or you can marry someone else. I don’t mind having it around after we’re married, but not before, Sol. Do you understand?”
I was already reaching for the video yellow pages.
*
I turned on the television-wall in the apartment before we left and instructed the diver to stay around and watch it. They are very curious creatures, inquisitive, always chasing new ideas, and I thought that should hold the diver happily for several days. Meanwhile, I had booked adjoining rooms at the Asteroid-Central.
The Asteroid-Central advertised in the video yellow pages that it practiced the Most Rigid Discrimination—meaning no telepaths, clairvoyants, clairaudients or psychometrists. Life was hard on a psi outside Government circles. But life was much harder on the rest of the world seeking secluded privacy and discretion. The Asteroid-Central was so discreet, you could hardly see where you were going. Dim lights, elegant figures passing in the gloom, singing perfumes of the gentlest kind, and “Guaranteed Psi-Free” on every bedroom door.
I was humming idly in my room, with one eye on the communicating door through which, were she but true to her own mind, Florence would shortly come, and I turned on the television-wall only to see how less fortunate people were spending their leisure. An idle and most regrettable gesture.
There was a quiz-game on International Channel 462, dull and just finishing. All the contestants seemed to know all the answers. In fact, the man who won the trip around the Rings of Saturn, did so by answering the question before the Martian quiz-master had really finished reading it out. When the winner turned sharply on the other contestants and knocked them down, yelling, “So that’s what you think of my mother, is it?” the wall was blacked out and we were taken straight to the Solar Party Convention.
The nominee this decade was human. He seemed to be speaking on his aims, his pure record and altruistic intentions. The stereo cameras looked over the heads of the delegates. Starting in the row by the main aisle, each delegate shot to his feet and started booing and jeering. It rippled down the rows like a falling pack of cards, each delegate in turn after the man in front of him, and each row picking up where the back of the previous row left off. It was as if someone were passing a galvanizing brush along the heads of the delegates, row by row.
Or as if a diver were refreshing the delegates with a clear picture of their nominee’s mind.
I groaned and called Florence.
“Look,” I said when she came. “That damned pet has followed the program back to the cameras from your apartment, and there he is lousing up the Convention.”
“I vote Earth,” she told me indifferently.
“That isn’t the point, honey. I’ll have to bring the diver here, and quickly.”
“You do that, Sol. I’ll be at home when you get rid of it.”
By the time the diver picked up my thoughts and came flickering into the room through the walls, Florence had left.
I felt the diver off the back of my head, made my thoughts as kindly as possible, and went downstairs to the largest, longest bar.
*
The evening passed profitably because I was invited to join a threesome of crooks at cards. With the aid of the little diver, I was able to shorten the odds to a pleasant margin in my favor. But this was doing nothing about Florence. A not altogether funny remark about teleporting the cards did, however, suggest the answer.
After the transaction was over, I sent the diver off to a friend on the faculty of Luke University, where they had a long history of psi investigation and where the diver could be guaranteed to be kept busy rolling dice and such. This was easy to fix by a video call. There had been times in the past when certain services to the Extra-terrestrial Zoology and Botanical Tanks had made me discreetly popular with the faculty, and anyway they thought I was doing them a favor. They promised to keep the little diver busy for an indefinite period.
I reported to Florence, and after a certain amount of feminine shall-I-shan’t-I, she came back to the Asteroid-Central.
This time I did not turn on the television-wall. I lay still. I said nothing. I hardly thought at all. And after several years compressed themselves into every minute, my own true honey, Florence, slid open the communicating door and came into the room.
She walked shyly toward me, hiding modestly within a floating nightgown as opaque as a very clear soap bubble.
I stood up, held out my arms and she came toward me, smiling—and stopped to pick up something on the carpet.
“Ooo, Sol! Look! A Jupiter diamond!”
She held up the largest and most expensive diamond I have ever seen.
I was just going to claim credit for this little gift when another appeared, and another, and a long line marching over the carpet like an ant trail. They came floating in under the door.
Now love is for vacations, and between my own sweet Florence and a diamond mine there is no comparison. I put on my dicyanin glasses and saw the baby diver was back and at work teleporting. I said so, but this time there were no hysterics from Florence.
“I was just thinking of him,” she said, “and wishing you had brought me a Jupiter diamond instead.”
“Well, honey, it looks as if you’ve got both.”
I watched her scrambling on the carpet, gathering handfuls of diamonds and not in the least interested in me.
On Antimony IX, the little divers switched from one space-time point to another simultaneously, and the baby diver had come back from the Solar Party Convention the same way. I thought of it and it came; Florence had just thought of it and here it was. But now it seemed to be flitting lightly from Earth to Jupiter and back with diamonds, so perhaps there was no interplanetary distance to a mind.
This had a future. I could see myself with a winter and a summer planet of my own, even happily paying Earth, Solar and Galactic taxes.
“Well, honey, don’t you worry,” I said. “You don’t like divers, so I’ll take it back and give you something else. Just leave it to Sol.”
“Take your foot off that diamond, Sol Jones! You gave me this dear little diver and he’s mine!”
*
She sat back on her heels and thought. The evidence of her thinking immediately came trickling through the door—Venusian opals set in a gold bracelet half a pound heavy, Martian sleeze furs, spider-web stockings, platinum belts. The room was beginning to look like a video fashion center, a Galactic merchandise mart. And after Florence put on a coat and opened the door, her ideas began to get bigger.
“This is fun!” she cried, teleporting like mad. “Why, I can have anything in the Galaxy just by thinking about it!”
“Now, honey, think of the benefits to humanity! This is too big to be used for personal gain. This should be dedicated—”
“This is dedicated to me, Sol Jones, so just you keep your fingers off it. Why, the cute little thing—look, he’s been out to Saturn for me!”
I made a decision.
