Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

Telemart Three

Four days after the honeymoon, Ted Trymble came home from golf and found his wife had been unfaithful to him. The evidence was there—right outside his front door—for all the world to see.

“Why did you do it, Maggie?” he demanded, setting his clubs down in a corner with exaggerated care. He kept his face immobile and his voice crisp, pretending to be not unduly shocked, though inwardly he was praying to hear it was all a mistake.

But Maggie smiled her calm, careless smile and shrugged, “It was just an impulse,” she said. “An irresistible impulse.”

Ted went to the window and eyed the evidence. The black Turbo-Cadillac was almost as long as the house, and its haunches gleamed in the late afternoon sun like those of a panther about to spring. So she was admitting it, just like that.

“Maggie,” he said reasonably. “Everybody gets that kind of impulse now and then, but they just have to learn to control it.”

“I can’t,” she replied blandly. “When I find something I like—I buy it.”

“I see.” Ted went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb from the the refrigerator and squirted some of the frothy liquid into his mouth. He sat down in the cool seclusion of the dining alcove to consider the matter of his wife’s dereliction. Maggie’s parents had left her a lump sum of almost $100,000, the income from which was just enough to maintain Ted and her in modest comfort for the rest of their lives. When they got engaged the agreement was that the capital would be kept intact. Ted was a personable young man and he knew he could probably have married real money; but he had exchanged his boyish hopes of someday owning a private airplane and yacht for the certitude of never having to work. And he had been prepared to stick to the bargain because marriage was, in his opinion, still a sacred covenant.

The trouble was that Maggie appeared not to share his high sense of principle—for she had just blown a noticeable fraction of their livelihood in one afternoon. A pang of anguish caused Ted’s fingers to clamp inwards on the plastic bulb, and a wavering stream of beer leaped across the kitchen. He composed himself with an effort and went back into the lounge.

“I forgive you this time, Maggie,” he said stiffly. “I guess it won’t do any harm for me to be seen in a better car, but you must promise not to do it again.”

“Of course, honey.” Maggie spoke a lack of effort which Ted found disturbing, and she went on flicking the glowing pages of a tri-di magazine.

Two days later he came in from a morning’s workout in the gymnasium to find that his fears had been well founded. Maggie was sporting a bracelet of genuine green-veined Venusian gold costing roughly ten times as much as its counterpart in Earth gold would have done.

“I promised not to buy another car,” was her defence. “This isn’t another car, is it? It doesn’t look much like a car to me.” She flirted her wrist in his face and the bracelet’s chunky links clicked like the action of a well-oiled rifle.

“It isn’t a car,” Ted agreed, ‘but it’s something we can afford even less. What about our investments?”

“This is an investment. Isn’t gold an investment?”

“Not that kind. Don’t you ever read the financial pages? Don’t you know that big nuclear powered ships have just been proved out on the Venus and Mars hauls? The cost of Venusian gold at the moment is ninety per cent freight charge, but by this time next year it’ll be as common as dirt.”

Maggie sniffed disbelievingly. “Well, I was bored sitting here by myself. Other girls’ husbands stay at home with them.”

“Bored!” Ted was aghast. “You absolutely seem to forget that when those other guys are swanning round the house watching television and getting fat, I’m working hard to build up my health. That’s a marriage partner’s most important duty—to keep himself healthy.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Maggie whispered. “What have I done?”

Three days later, while Ted was surfing, she bought a luminous mink costing as much as the car and the bracelet put together. Ted examined the price tag then went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb in each hand and expended them in a foaming orgasm of fury. When calmness returned he went back to the lounge and greeted his wife with a numb smile.

“It has just occurred to me that I’ve been neglecting you a little, Maggie. Let’s go out tonight and see what we can do about hitting the town.”

Maggie’s eye flickered with enthusiasm as she hurried away to engage in lengthy cosmetic rituals, and that night she really did hit the town. When she was too full of assorted liquors to be aware of what was happening, Ted pushed her out through the window of their third floor bedroom.

The fall did not kill Maggie, but the damage to her lower spine was such that she was confined to a wheelchair for life. As the Trymbles’ house was tall and narrow—with a steep flight of steps at the door—Ted felt that his wife was as good as dead. She could not, at any rate, get to the expensive stores in which she would be tempted to further acts of infidelity.

With a mimimum of prompting from him she sold the car and the coat at a relatively small loss, but insisted on retaining the bracelet of green-veined Venusian gold.

“What’s the point of keeping it?” he pleaded. “I mean, you don’t even go out now.”

“It’s company for me. Something I can look at.”

“But there must be more interesting things to look at—how about a television set?”

To Ted’s surprise, his wife showed interest in the suggestion. “If I sell the bracelet will you get me a set?”

“Of course, sweetie.”

“Any kind of a television set?”

He sensed the trap immediately, but in his mind’s eye he could see the big nuclear-powered ships speeding towards Earth with cargoes of cheaper Venusian gold, and he decided to play along. “Any kind of set you want, Maggie. You know how bad I feel about you being tied to that chair all the time.”

“That’s nice of you, honey. I’d like a Telemart Three.”

Ted swallowed unhappily. He detested television as an opiate which sapped a man’s strength of body and mind, and he even had an aversion to reading about the bewildering technical developments in the field. But he knew about the Telemart Three.

The set was ordered that day and Ted’s unhappiness increased as he watched the technicians position the eight-foot proscenium and arch at one end of the lounge. Working with blunt efficiency they ripped out the floor below the proscenium and ran a mass of cables, conduits and wave guides down to the raw materials tank they were installing in the basement. Four hours later the job was completed, and a Telemart sales exec. formally presented Maggie with a white-and-gold brochure. He then placed the remote control set in her hand with the air of an English archbishop conferring the orb and sceptre of his sovereign.

“This is your on-off switch and channel selector,” he said, addressing himself intensely to Maggie and ignoring Ted. He moved the switch and a pretty girl in a silver dress appeared on the proscenium, singing in the low voice of a French diseuse. The only way in which she could be distinguished from real flesh-and-blood was a slight tendency to glow, which made her brighter than the other people in the room.

“Oops,” the sales exec. said. “If the image is too bright you do this.” He moved a knob and the girl dimmed to normality.

“It’s wonderful,” Maggie breathed. “When do we get the commercials?”

“You shouldn’t have long to wait,” the exec. said benignly, his eyes gleaming behind their old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. A few seconds later the silver girl finished her song and vanished, to be replaced by a handsome, tanned man in beachwear. He was reclining on a sun chair on a shockingly real area of honey-coloured sand, and in his hand was a dewy-cold bottle of Tingle-lime. Ted started involuntarily—he could actually smell sea air mingled with the keen tang of the soft drink. He examined the small orifices in the edge of the proscenium, looking for visible signs of gas being emitted, but saw nothing.

“… why don’t you join me?” the image was saying. “Join me now!”

“Shall I?” Maggie asked excitedly.

“Only if you can use some Tingle-lime,” the exec. replied. “We urge all our clients to buy only what they really need.”

“We drink lots of Tingle-lime.”

“No we don’t,” Ted put in, but he was too late. Maggie had pressed the ‘accept’ button on her handset and a crate of a dozen king-size Tingle-limes appeared, amid a faint ozonic crackling, on the vestigial catwalk attached to the front of the proscenium. The exec. lifted the crate, carried it to Maggie’s chair and with a flourish opened one of the plastic bottles.

Maggie took it and sipped the green liquid eagerly. “It’s perfect—even better than the stuff we get at the store.”

“It ought to be. Anything you buy in a store is bound to have been on the shelves for some time, possibly months, but goods you buy through Telemart Three are created specially for you on the instant of purchase.”

“How can that be?” Ted felt he had been silent too long. “As I understand it, there has to be a crate of Tingle-lime at the broadcasting station. It gets scanned with Röntgen rays and the details of its molecular structure are broadcast on a separate channel from the one which carries the programmes and commercials. Right?”

“That’s true, but …’

“If someone presses the ‘accept’ button, the molecular blueprint coming through at that time is used to build up a replica of the transmitted object from the raw materials bank in the basement. Right?”

“Right again, but …’

“So how do we know the original crate of pop hasn’t been lying on a shelf at the station, possibly for months?”

“You know because the Telemart Corporation stands over its word as given in this brochure,” the exec. said in a hurt voice. He turned to Maggie. “I’m pleased that a Tingle-lime commercial was on when you made your first purchase because it demonstrates the superiority of the Telemart Three over all other models. Believe it or not, a carbonated drink is not an easy object to transmit. With older systems there was an appreciable loss of carbon dioxide pressure before the container was completely formed.

“But the Telemart Three comes so close to instantaneous construction of the transmitted object that it is possible to …”

“Oh, look,” Maggie interrupted. “There’s a commercial for liqueur chocolates. It’s ages since I’ve had a liqueur chocolate.”

Ted hurried into the ground floor room in which his wife had slept since her injury and found the bracelet of Venusian gold. He had a feeling he would need to get the best possible price for it.

In spite of intensive bargaining, and even a certain amount of abject pleading, he dropped over $5,000 on the bracelet. He went to his favourite gymnasium and spent two hours trying to work the tension toxins out of his body, but all the while a gloomy certainty that he had made a major blunder was building up in him. Finally, half-way through a set of deep knee bends, he made a decision—Maggie would have to give him a sacred vow not to use the Telemart for anything beyond normal household shopping. If necessary he would even sit with her at nights until satisfied she was going to play the game.

He showered quickly and drove home in his ageing rotary-engined Pontiac. The tall narrow house was in darkness except for a dim, shifting light in the window of the lounge. Ted sprinted up the stone steps and went into the house, but he had trouble opening the lounge door. There seemed to be something heavy preventing it from moving. He got his head into the room and blinked incredulously at what he saw.

Maggie was sitting close to the proscenium, watching a noisy powerboat race, but she was almost hidden from his view by a pile of cartons and boxes, most of which had been opened. In the first seconds he picked out three new table lamps, a gilt-framed painting which looked like a Renoir, several of the recently developed four-legged turkeys in polythene skins, a salon-type hair drier, numerous hat boxes, and a de luxe Micropedia Britannica complete with reclining chair and ceiling projector.

Ted was unable to suppress a plaintive whimpering sound as he forced his way into the room. “You bitch,” he moaned. “You faithless bitch.”

“What did you say, honey?” Maggie twisted a knob on the handset and the sound of the jockeying speedboats faded away. She wheeled her chair round to face Ted and he saw the Telemart brochure was open on her knees.

“What do you think you’re doing, Maggie? They don’t give this stuff away, you know—our bank account is automatically debited every time you press that button.”

Maggie shrugged. “I’ve been enjoying myself—which makes a nice change. Ted, honey, you really should look at this brochure. You don’t have to buy just what they show you in the commercials—Telemart offers all kind of services I never dreamed …’ She stopped speaking as he picked up one of the turkeys and hurled it at the vista of boats beyond the proscenium arch. The bird passed through a red boat, hit the wall of the room and bounced back out on to the floor.

“I’m going to kill you,” Ted announced. “I’m a fair-minded man, and I don’t like the idea of killing you, but you give me no choice.”

“You’ve been drinking!”

“I’m cold sober.” He looked around the room, selected one of the new table lamps and removed its ornate shade, leaving himself with a serviceable blunt instrument.

Maggie clutched the Telemart’s handset to her bosom in a strangely protective gesture. “Don’t come near me!”

“In a way I blame myself,” Ted said sadly, hefting the base of the lamp. “I should have known you weren’t ready for the responsibilities of marriage.” He stepped over a cluster of perfume bottles and swung downwards at Maggie’s head. She twisted away from the lamp and it crunched into the back of the wheelchair, tipping it over. Maggie went sprawling among the hat boxes. Breathing heavily, Ted stood over her and raised the base with both hands, noting with one part of his mind that she was still holding the handset and was, in fact, twisting a red knob on it. Poor mindless lump, he thought as he brought the club down.

“Drop it right there, fellow,” a voice said close behind him. Ted spun and saw a hard-faced young man in a grey suit stepping down from the truncated catwalk attached to the proscenium. The stranger was holding an automatic pistol.

“Who … ?”Ted’s voice faltered as he tried to grasp the enormity of what was happening. “What is this?”

The stranger smiled unpleasantly. “You can’t have studied the section of the Telemart brochure covering our new Three Star Protection Service for clients’ lives and property.”

“Protection?”

“Yes. As soon as we get an emergency signal a trained security man who is on duty at the station is instantaneously transmitted into the home—and in this case I’d say I made it just in time.”

‘But they can’t do that!” Ted had an overpowering sense of outrage. “After a while there’d be hundreds of duplicates of you running about the city. Telemart can’t go around creating extra people—we’re overpopulated as it is.”

A shadow crossed the stranger’s face. “That’s taken care of. They deliberately programme a flaw into the haemoglobin structure of any duplicates they have to transmit. A massive embolism will kill me in a few hours. It’s a hell of a prospect.” The stranger raised his right hand and levelled the pistol.

“Just a minute,” Ted said desperately. “There must be some arrangement we can come to. I’ve got money …’

The stranger regarded him with cold, tortured eyes. “What good is money to a duplicate like me? I’ve got a short life, and all I can do is make it as gay as possible.”

He aimed the pistol right between Ted’s eyes, and pulled the trigger.