The Pleasure Tube Read online

  A BERKLEY BOOK

  published by

  BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  Copyright © 1979, by Robert Onopa

  All rights reserved

  Published by arrangement with the author's agent

  All rights reserved which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address

  Berkley Publishing Corporation

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  SBN 425-03941-2

  BERKLEY BOOKS are published by

  Berkley Publishing Corporation

  BERKLEY BOOK ® TM 757,375

  Printed in the United States of America Berkley Edition, MARCH, 1979

  Kindle Edition created from the Berkley original by John Michener of Mediaspring.com, February, 2011.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART I

  Chapter 1 Recovery

  Chapter 2 Welcome to thePleasureTube

  Chapter 3 Biosphere Reserve

  Chapter 4 Videon Spectacular

  PART II

  Chapter 5 Welcome to LasVenus

  Chapter 6 Risk Venture Vector

  PART III

  Chapter 7 Moonloop

  Chapter 8 Vietahiti

  Chapter 9 Trip to the Sun

  Epilogue

  Pleasure is itself unlimited and belongs to that class of things which does not, and never will, contain within itself, or have derived from itself, either a beginning, a middle, or an end.

  Plato, Philebus

  Still image: a woman frozen in space, fixed in inky blackness, the funnel of infinity pierced by diamond points of light, stars in the celestial sea. She floats as a swimmer, her palms flat and forward. Her hair streams behind—yet no breeze. Her expression intense and incomprehensible, lips slightly parted to show the glistening edges of teeth—a kiss or a cry—silent in the void.

  PART I:

  EVENT HORIZON [=df the practical limits of a black hole, the sphere within which its gravity does not permit the escape of light; a point of no return.]

  Chapter 1

  Recovery

  DAEDALUS SEQUENCE 33.2871//

  SPLASHDOWN//

  12 August 06:42:19//

  We hit the water and penetrate for what seems a minute and surge back up, as if pushed by an immense hand.

  My stomach cringes and folds, snaps into a knot. I black out for the blink of an eye.

  I think: four years ago.

  Salt-rich air spills in as the hatch is blown. How I know we are upside down, not the entering divers: my spittle ascends; hints of my digestion swirl on the roof of my mouth.

  The motion of the sea is weather of a heavy medium. In the reentry capsule's aquarium light, I am lowered like a child from the liftoff rig by four hands, guided through the hatch to a rubber boat.

  Huge sea, small voices, wind in the face, the light enormous.

  Helped into the launch. There is a large, sleek carrier on station kilometers off.

  I try my voice: "Everyone all right?"

  "Pretty much, sir, welcome back. We do have one anomaly in the first rig we are listing as a psychotic episode. One man is in very bad shape."

  "Who? Is he hurt physically?"

  "Negative, they're only listing psychotic episode; his name is Cooper. Which one are you?"

  An image of Cooper runs through my mind, his large frame hunched in dim light. "My name is Voorst," I tell the J.G. "Rawley Voorst."

  "You're the other one they want to talk to, sir. They're waiting for you on deck. Prepare to winch up."

  We were almost four years out on the Daedalus; now four years have passed since then. Yet those days stay with me: a looping program whose features I also recall in daydreams, nightmares, sudden visions which paralyze me with their simultaneous confusion and clarity. During those days time itself seemed to coincide with computer-maddening formulas for conic distortions, whirlpools, spirals of decreasing radius and increasing range—a terrifyingly simple future compounded now by its existence in the past. SciCom's report identified in our point of entry an incipient parabola of return. That seems only information produced by the channel to contain it, the wormhole's shape the girth of the worm. There must be more to it: consider the formula for a single wormhole which leads simultaneously to the worm's both ends. Spooked then, spooked now.

  ///thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube///

  light sensuous sauna

  fantasy co-op

  lubricious service personnel

  foods of the world

  aquaplease paradise

  garden tactile videon

  ///thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube///

  "Let's put it this way," Taylor says loudly into the wind, pointing with the stem of his pipe at a hull section being towed in between hovering tugs. "Who punched the code for impact event after the blow? Just who made the decision?"

  The carrier deck is landlike, a metal field on the sea with only the slightest roll. I am still wet from the transfer, my feet sog in my boots, my flight suit clings to my thighs. "Look," I say, "you'll have to ask Werhner, he does those things. I was busy with the ship. Or ask Cooper."

  "Yes, but..."

  "The investigation was finished on range close to four years ago. You have those tapes." I squint into the sunlight in the direction of the hull section and the tugs, watch an intense gold-silver reflection that rolls to show a wide swath of charred metal along the hull section's side.

  "We'll debrief on Guam at SciCom—Agana Base," Taylor says. "What you're going to need is patience, this is a slow process. Maybe think about the event, just what you were doing at the event, we'll start from there."

  "That's all in the log," I tell him. "I put everything I know into the log. What I need is a vacation. I've got it coming."

  "Your hand is bleeding."

  "What?"

  "You must have cut your hand," Taylor says, pointing his pipestem to my side. "How did that happen?'

  I look down and see a trickle of blood spreading onto my palm, the heel of my hand is nicked open, I lick it with my tongue. "Must have jammed it on a vane key when we splashed down," I tell him, tasting the salt of my blood, the salt of the sea. "That's happened before."

  He is still looking at me. I notice the bushiness of his eyebrows, the thickness of his lips. "How do you feel about being back?" he asks flatly. "All that relative earth time, eight years your own—how do you feel?"

  "Fine," I say. "Just fine." I am still thinking: four years ago.

  RETRIEVE//

  R/V Daedalus//

  Flt Vane Eng Class 2//

  Station/Rawley Voorst//

  Log Entry 1441-44//

  Flt yr 3/Day 349+//

  Codex 292-1441-1444+//

  RETRIEVE IN FULL BEGIN BEGIN BEGIN

  Proper Time: 16:23:08// Awoke to another day of severe turbulence, the dome instruments in the console room reading macroweather storms in all spectra. The ship continues to pitch and yaw. Almost everyone is under with motion sickness, this is day eight of instability. Thrusters, vanes, microweather ports—all our control systems are again slow to respond to Maxine's programs, Cooper in and out of the dome. We have been compensating with manual systems for vane/lift/drop, using microweather entirely for propulsion, the work almost all mine to do, though Werhner is lending a hand when he's able. At the moment we curl in a far, snaky arm of the Crab nebula, along a front we have been chased by since the Pleiades. There are endless debates in SciCom, endlessly repetitious; the grav field of the huge ghostly star we first saw six months ago is only days—my own guess is perhaps thirty hou
rs—ahead. Its diminishing light makes it the almost certain field of a black hole; still no conclusive approach from SciCom, nothing yet on tangent angle. I continue to work its macroweather front with retrievable microweather on the face of the larger system. If that front signals the well-formed cyclonic depression it appears to, today, I repeat, today, we should reach a lull. Theoretically, SciCom reports, well off any grav field or event horizon, well off our point of no return. In the last hour the Committee Pilot abdicated again at a painful briefing—sick men—in SciCom the endless debate goes on. I am the only one holding my rations—is it the work I do? Stiff watch ahead; at least manually the ship is responding well.

  I fly by default another day. I wonder who really knows.

  Shift one/neg grav intrudes//

  CONT. 1442 CONT CONT CONT

  Proper Time: 20:17:53// We have crossed into the lull. Becoming apparent why Maxine's programs are working slow—Werhner detecting time slip between field of information and control—reading into proper time— how can that be? SciCom meeting again with Committee Pilot. I can't go.

  Shift one/time distor//

  CONT. 1443 CONT CONT CONT

  Proper Time: SEE CODEX// Dome more brilliant than I have ever seen before along starboard, spectrum yellow-white—yet that acts like the lull—port inky, muddy violet, but that is where the other front is, approaching by grav and mag sensors, otherwise blind. Werhner behaving as if he hadn't been dead sick for the past week, eating at the console. We have decided that he goes back to SciCom for choice range and decision. As if there were any other choices, I see only two. First: to tangent this front and use it to propel us back and free. Second: to lay on the thrusters and go through. SciCom circuits overloaded, Committee Pilot patching out for more room. I have never seen such a lull. At least our console terminal...

  END R,//CODEX??//SEE CODEX SEE CODEX

  ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

  EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS A & B SEQ ALL AUXILIARY SYSTEMS DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL DAMAGE CONTROL

  ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM

  EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT INTRUSION EVENT

  The Guam sun floods through the dusty window.

  "Why can't I see Cooper?"

  "Partly it's quarantine, standard procedure. Partly it's because today he's in Houston. He's been transferred to Houston."

  Smug bastard; I have been asking to see Cooper for a week. He wrote the report; I cannot imagine what SciCom is after that's not in the report. Cooper and I avoided one another on the way back—there was the affair with Maxine, and he always seemed to me odd, reclusive, a huge, bearded man who never said what was on his mind—but I never saw him break. Where was he in the ship then? Does it matter?

  It has taken me a day to see this information officer. Guam is a morass of requisition systems, authority flows, activity program officers; bad enough before, incredible now. The island landscape—lazy, flapping palms, eroded red hills patched with dusty green scrub, an absolute sun—only fertilizes my growing boredom. Houston. Werhner will sigh and shrug.

  ///thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube///

  reserve now

  fourteen days and nights

  a world of your own

  twenty-eight to two-eighty credits

  orgo-toto

  three separate program classes

  CONTINUOUS MOVEMENT

  LasVenus

  suborbitai/deep space

  LA SoCal

  olde earthe/moonloop

  TRIP TO THE SUN

  risk venture vector

  symphonic synesthetic harmonics

  the EnergyWest grand prix

  megastars in sidereal concert

  NoAm biosphere reserve

  SoPac tropical reserve

  THE PLEASURE TUBE

  dial from any codex terminal//106pleasuretube//dial from any codex terminal tubes daily//1.a. trans-port//tubes daily//1.a trans-port//tubes daily////thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube//thePleasureTube/thePleasureTube////

  It is Taylor I see one day; his dark, bushy eyebrows never move. He alternates with Knuth, an intense little man who acts as if he were a foot taller—I wonder if his neck hurts sometimes. Today Knuth.

  "The exact sequence," he begins, tapping his pencil. Several times before he has asked the same question, in precisely the same way, with the identical emphasis on exact.

  I tell him what he can read in the log, what he has read in the log, everything is there. I remember hearing Werhner saying, seeing the silver-blue ball of earth, how lucky we were to have come back. Lucky?

  RETRIEVE//

  R/V Daedalus//

  Station/Rawley Voorst//

  Log Entry 1446//

  Flt yr 3/Day 350+//

  Codex 292-1446+//

  RETRIEVE IN FULL BEGIN BEGIN BEGIN

  Proper Time: See Codex//Postevent record. Some­thing terrible has happened, we have blown part of the ship. Three dead, we have lost port pontoon and program, hatch seared at the console room, Damage Control has secured the ship, we are on auxiliary. I don't think they had a chance. There just wasn't any warning. SciCom reading data. Committee Pilot reading data, I am holding at powerdown but we are screaming—we are still being propelled by the shock—I am going to use that to ride through this sector and use the vanes for what's ahead. What instruments we have now read impact event, unanalyzed interstellar material, data on what we hit must have gone in the blow. My recollections: I was holding vane angle in the lull, taping the log and watching Werhner eat. I felt myself become violently ill, I first thought it was from watching him, then focusing on the panel I saw lull figures then everything going red— instantly, don't know if it was a trick of vision, but the red seemed to sweep the panels right to left along with the first strong jolt I felt even in my bones. I don't remember anything else. I blacked out quickly, Werhner says that happened to him, too. It happened so incredibly fast, falling, my perceptions seemed to become detached, then a chill, as if I were diving into darkness. When I came to, I had a gash on the heel of my hand—and this is the strangest thing—it had coagulated. I mean almost healed. It must have been a vane trigger key I fell against, or a whole row. I immediately began resetting instruments, we were just getting auxiliary, when I noticed Werhner lying in a pool of vomit, coming around. Then the rescue attempt. There were only small fragments. Trace. The bodies, the debris, must have just been blown away, vaporized. The ship is responding well, under full control, but we still have no program and damn near lost. Repeat, I am going to retain propulsion from the shock to ride through the weather ahead, we are just getting navigation. When we blew there was nothing showing, absolutely nothing, other than that lull, that zero condition. Nothing.

  Werhner is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling in the cottage we have been assigned on Guam. The air is heavy, the light trade winds ripe. He is still wearing his bathing suit. Sweat beads on his chest, runs as he raises himself on his elbow.

  "Somebody went through my things," he says. "Somebody went through your things. Nothing missing, but somebody was in here."

  I have just returned from another series of encephalograms, kinesthograms, redundant examinations. My torpor dissipates. I fold through my clothes, my books, my papers.... "What the hell?" The cover of Dean's Deep Space Transpositions is creased; my clothes are in disarray.

  Werhner is sitting on the edge of the cot now, popping a pinkish pill into his mouth, swallowing it without water.

  "I'm going to get out of here," I tell him. "This is too much. We've been here three weeks."

  "Cooper's the only one who's left the base," Werhner says flatly. "I don't know what the hell is going on—these goons spend half their time questioning each other about procedure, the whole dome crew is still here on Guam— Tamashiro, Levsky, Dawes. I think... Look, Rawley, I think they're trying to set us up, to stick the blow on us. What did your tests show?"

  "Nothing abn
ormal. The same readings as last week. And the week before. And the day after we landed."

  "Still having those nightmares?"

  "Werhner," I say, "they go away. This is a nightmare, this place. Who can live this way? The same questions, steamed food, and look at that cot, that cot's killing my back. I'm going to get out of here."

  "Me, too," Werhner says—he is picking up his diving mask and snorkel and fins. "To the reef? Utama Bay?'

  "Not now. I've got something to do."

  "No swim? Gonna watch the vidi?"

  "I wish I were flying," I tell him. "I didn't think I'd ever miss it, but I do now. I need to get out of this place."

  "Good luck." He smiles sardonically.

  Chapter 2

  Welcome to thePleasureTube

  light sensuous sauna

  fantasy co-op

  lubricious service personnel

  foods of the world

  aquaplease paradise garden

  tactile videon

  THE PLEASURE TUBE

  reserve now

  fourteen days and nights

  a world of your own

  twenty-eight to two-eighty credits

  orgo-toto

  three separate program classes

  CONTINUOUS MOVEMENT

  LasVenus

  suborbitai/deep space

  LA SoCal

  olde earthe/moonloop

  TRIP TO THE SUN

  risk venture vector

  symphonic synesthetic harmonics

  the EnergyWest grand prix

  megastars in sidereal concert

  NoAm biosphere reserve