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 centre of the bare illusion room in an expectant attitude.
Laurie was instantly reminded of a scene long ago, when he was a boy of ten. He was in the woods of Berkshire with his sister Lena, and they had run into a clearing and discovered an old man standing in just the same position, as if listening enchanted.
‘Hello,’ the old man said when he saw them. ‘Don’t be frightened – I’m only standing here listening to the cuckoo.’
‘Pooh, they’re commoner than pigeons at this time of year,’ thirteen year old Lena said. ‘If you heard them in winter, that would be something to listen to!’
‘They don’t have seasons in London, or cuckoos on Venus,’ the old man told her. ‘That’s why they’re wonderful to me – for years I’ve lived only in those two places.’
‘Then you’re lucky,’ Lena said – she was at a very contradictory stage at present. ‘Daddy’s going to take us to Venus when Laurie’s bigger, isn’t he, Laurie?’
Laurie did not answer. He was frightened; this strange man with the green flecks on his cheek reminded him of something – something too big and threatening to be grasped. He tugged urgently at Lena’s hand.
She accepted his signal and burst into a run, dragging him down a bank deep in last year’s leaves and this year’s bluebells. Laurie looked back over his shoulder: the man had disappeared, very suddenly, very oddly.
But he couldn’t just have gone like that, Laurie thought. It was against nature.
He called, ‘Mr. Esmond!’
No answer, only the mighty beech trees humming in their new green.
Nobody in sight.
‘Funny,’ Laurie commented aloud, running his dusty hands down his overalls. And it was funny; it was queer; his head felt queer and his stomach queasy.
He was suddenly glad he had no need to linger further. The illusion machine was working beautifully: these beeches looked so solid that he hesitated to walk into them. He felt his way to the door and let himself back into Mr. Esmond’s living quarters. For a moment he paused, looking back.
The woods were irresistibly real. You could not convince yourself they were mere projections. As he closed the door, he heard a distant call: ‘Cuckoo.’
Something would not come clear in Laurie’s mind, would not focus. He shook his head vaguely, trying to puzzle things out. For