It became necessary to learn how to read. The Hollow shows had taught him letters, numbers, and the phonetic reading of short words, but he had never actually read a book. The first book he read was Abbott's
Flatland
, and its archaic language and bizarre ideas fired his imagination. Months ran into years as he pursued his studies of Quantum Mechanics, General Field Theory, Geometrodynamics, Relativistic Cosmology, Mathematical Logic, and the Philosophy of Science. And sometimes, for a break, he'd study the history of Dadaism and Surrealism—he was a particular fan of Marcel Duchamp.
He discovered that if he slept on a table, the cleaning robots would not disturb him, so he began spending his nights in the library. That way he no longer had to plug into the Dream Machine. If he slept at home it was impossible not to plug in, for the bed had a weight sensor which set off a "reminder bell" if the bed's occupant wasn't properly jacked in.
There was even a Dreamfood tap in the library's lounge, so he soon stopped going home entirely. When he told his parents he was living in the library, they were proud . . . until they discovered that Vernor was not learning a technical skill which might give him a chance of someday having a job. Being a Dreamer was, of course, a job of sorts . . . every day's Hollowcast to Dreamtown ended with a slogan intended to encourage this belief: "Us needs you 'cause you're Younique!" But no amount of propaganda, no number of Hollows of the President saying, "Us is Users. Dream Us our tomorrow." could erase the Dreamers' sad and hidden knowledge of their uselessness.
But to study physics and mathematics? What was the good of that? There were no physicists any more, although being a physicist was not expressly illegal. What
was
illegal was to conduct experiments in a laboratory. It was too dangerous . . . dangerous to the experimenter, and dangerous to the society that he might use his new discoveries on. Mathematics and theoretical physics were legal, but no one would pay people to do them; the common conception being that Phizwhiz was much better at science than any human could be.
Like all common conceptions about science, this was false. Phizwhiz was not much of a scientist. He knew enough to question old hypotheses, but he had no access to that inner vision of the Absolute which shines through the work of the true scientist.
Vernor had heard of the Us's attempts to give Phizwhiz soul by plugging him into certain Dreamers' minds, and he sometimes felt that if anyone would ever be able to survive such an experience it would be Vernor Maxwell. He took many strange trips lying on his library table, smoking seeweed or tripping on LSD. He had seen the world go solid and shatter into dust, leaving only a pure shimmer of abstract relations. He had watched the gnat of his consciousness speed urgently across his inner landscape as another part of himself tried to catch and dissect it, naming all the parts for once and all. He no longer could tell the difference between a good trip and a bad trip . . . or rather this artificial distinction had fallen away.
One day the news spread that a man had entered into full communication with Phizwhiz and survived. Vernor watched him in the Hollownest of a bar near the library. The man's name was Andy Silver. To the viewer in the Nest, Silver appeared to be leaning against one wall.
Silver had blond hair and a funny way of holding his elbows out from his body. He smiled often, though not necessarily in synchronization with what he was saying Occasionally he did not appear to know where he was, but this did not seem to disturb him. An invisible voice, which the viewer could imagine to be his own, interviewed Andy Silver.
"Are you the guy that plugged into Phizwhiz last week?"
Silver glanced around, then stared at a spot to Vernor's left. "You bet your ass," he replied.
"What was it like, Andy?"
Silver began pacing around the room, "What's
any
thing like? Real compared to what?" He paused, then continued, "Let's say it's like walking in a garden of light. And every flower is a number. And every number is your name . . . " His voice trailed off and he sat down, looking quietly across the room like a man with all the time in the world.
"How is it, Andy, that you managed to come unscathed through an experience which has shattered the minds of all the others who attempted it?"
"You call this unscathed?" Silver shot back, bursting into laughter, "No, seriously, gate, it was no big deal for me. I've been getting high every day for ten years now so most of my brain's gone anyway . . . " For an instant his eyes rolled and his head seemed to be on fire, but then he continued. "All kidding aside, Jim, I've been studying metamathematics, and actually I was in just the right place to get on top of Phizwhiz. LSD and a good scientific training's all it took. Couldn't have done it without the Professor, though."
"Which Professor are you referring to, Mr. Silver?"
Silver seemed puzzled at the question, but then he gathered himself to recite, "My beloved teacher, Professor G. Kurtowski, without whose writings and conversations I could never have reached this point."
"Thank you, Andy Silver, the first man to survive a full brain interlock with Phizwhiz. And now, Users, it is our great privilege to welcome the Governor."
The Governor's Hollow walked into the Nest. He was an amazingly evil-looking man who perpetually held his teeth bared in what he imagined to be a smile. Silver gave him the finger, but the Governor brushed past him and stepped forward to buttonhole the Users.
"Always glad to see you," he began, "You're Younique!" His standard opening. He continued, "We are fortunate to have in our fine City a man whose courage and strength of character open before us the exciting vista of a revitalized Phizwhiz."
Silver had turned around so that his back faced the Governor. Curious, Vernor walked across the Hollownest to get on Silver's other side so as to see his face. That was one of the nice things about Hollows, a complete three-dimensional image of the actors was always there in the Nest with you.
Silver was leaning forward confidentially over his cupped right hand. "Hey, man, glad you were hip enough to come over here," he whispered. The Governor was still extolling the bright future in store for the lucky Users in his care. Silver raised his hand and continued, "You know what I got in this hand? ZZ-74, man. That's what really put me on top. ZZ-74." He winked, then turned back to his original position facing the Governor's fat, talking back.
ZZ-74? Vernor had never heard of it before. No one else in the bar's Nest had bothered to go hear Silver's secret message, but surely many others in the City had. ZZ-74? His attention was drawn back to the Governor's speech.
"We need more Andy Silvers. I urge any citizen who feels able to withstand the titanic mental pressure of merging with the greatest computer the world has ever seen to come forward. Andy Silver is going to put together a team of Dreamers willing and able to get Phizwhiz moving again. More than ever before . . . Us is Users and Users is Us!" The Governor seemed about to leave, but struck with a sudden afterthought, he turned to Silver, "Andy, what do you want to call this team?"
Silver looked at the Governor coolly, "The Angels," he said, "We'll be the Angels."
They gave Silver a floor in the main Phizwhiz building downtown, and the next day Vernor was there. Half the Dreamers in town seemed to have gotten there before him. After waiting two hours to get into the building, he gave up and went back to the library. It might, after all, be wise to study some more science and ride out a few more heavy trips before putting his mind on the line. Maybe the whole thing was a hoax, a trick by the Governor to get acid-heads to volunteer for some kind of brain obliteration. Although LSD was legal, it was clear that the Governor disliked freaks.
But Andy Silver's feat was not a hoax, as became evident over the next few months. New gadgets began appearing in the stores. The shows on the Hollows improved greatly. There was a rash of exciting fads. The laws against gardening and painting were dropped, and many people took up these enjoyable, but slightly dangerous hobbies. One man went on a rampage, killing six with his gardening tools, and paintings and slogans which were not good for the public to see began appearing on the sides of buildings and in the walktubes; but Andy Silver prevailed upon Phizwhiz to let the gardening and painting continue. There was even talk of legalizing laboratory science again.
The Us was not entirely happy with all the changes in Phizwhiz's behavior which Andy Silver was bringing about. For his part, Silver made no secret of his revolutionary sentiments . . . occasionally going so far as to state that Phizwhiz should be destroyed. But the public was so enchanted with the life and excitement which he had brought, that it would have been politically impossible to arrest him—even if the Us had been sure it wanted to.
Silver had assembled a core of four other Angels from the many who had volunteered: three men and a woman. Most people never made it past the initial screening, and all the rest, except the four we're talking about, failed the actual machine test . . . losing their minds in the process. Applications for a position with the Angels dropped off drastically as the word of this got around, and Vernor could now have gotten in for a test easily enough, but he hesitated to do this. It would probably be better to get some ZZ-74 first.
A number of other people had heard Silver mention ZZ-74 on the Hollows. Lots of people, including the loach, were looking to score some, but there wasn't any around. The general consensus was that ZZ-74 must be a drug which was being manufactured in an underground laboratory . . . perhaps by the mysterious Professor G. Kurtowski.
Since the Us had not yet been able to obtain and analyze a sample of ZZ-74, they could not be sure that it was safe, so it was declared illegal, although the government was all too eager to legalize ZZ-74, if only they could find the formula and swing into production. A good demand for the stuff had built up on the strength of Silver's mention of it, and the Us was not adverse to making hay while the sun shines. They asked, then demanded, that the Angels surrender their cache of the illegal substance, but to no avail. Finally a raid was staged, but no unfamiliar drugs were found in the Angels' possession.
Vernor followed all this with interest, and he began looking into the writings of G. Kurtowski. His early papers were concerned with ironing out various imperfections in the Everett-Wheeler many-universe-interpretation of quantum mechanics. Toward the end of his publishing career, however, a number of surprising empirical predictions had begun to appear in his papers. Vernor was unable to discover if the experiments which Kurtowski suggested had ever been carried out, and Phizwhiz seemed to have no information at all on what the Professor had been doing for the last twenty years. Evidently Kurtowski was alive in an underground laboratory somewhere.
Again, Vernor was tempted to try to join the Angels, but again his caution held him back. He was twenty-three. He might have spent the rest of his life in the library, preparing for an ever-receding future, but one day Andy Silver came to see him.
Most days the library was practically deserted. There would be a few people viewing infocubes in the small Hollownests around the first-floor lounge, and maybe a couple of people punching questions into the Information Terminal in the middle of the lounge; but Vernor usually had the upstairs to himself. It was here that they had the microfiches with the marvelous access and viewing system that made picking out and reading any book in existence no harder than reaching across a desk and turning a dial.
On an average day the only interruptions were from the cleaning robots. Occasionally someone might wander up and spend a few hours at one of the other viewers, but never before had someone come up to read over Vernor's shoulder. He turned in some annoyance and immediately recognized Andy Silver's ethereally cynical face.
"I've been thinking about you a lot," Vernor said, standing up. "You got any of that dope?"
Silver smiled at and through Vernor, "Vernor Maxwell," he said, "I came out here to find you."
"How'd you know I was here?" Vernor asked.
"The Professor told me. He keeps an eye out for people who read his stuff and ask about him. You want dope? You'll get it, don't worry." Silver felt in his pockets, "You got any seeweed on you?"
"Sure," Vernor said. "This is where I live. Just a minute." Vernor kept most of his possessions wedged under a couch's cushions. He lifted up a cushion and took out a stick of weed. "This is really good shit," he said. "I grew this under ultraviolet light."
"High energy," Silver said, lighting up and inhaling deeply. "You want to be an Angel, Vernor?" Just like that.
"I don't know if I can handle it," Vernor confessed, "That's why I haven't come in for a test."
"It's not as hard as you think," Silver said. "It's just the squares who can't handle it. You know how to trip, right?" He passed the reefer to Vernor.
"Yeah." Deep drag.
"Most people don't. I mean, hardly
any
one does. They know how to get wasted, or how to get high, or how to feel good, or how to pick the nose, or bleed on the floor, or booga-loo, or WHAT," Silver suddenly shouted, "WHAT AM I
TALKING
ABOUT?"
"Tripping," Vernor shot back.
Andy Silver chuckled through his smile. "You'll be O.K. Let's take a walk."
They finished the seeweed on the way out to the street. It was good stuff, and being with Andy Silver provided an incredible contact high as well.
They walked a few blocks in the gathering dusk. Vernor wanted to ask about the Professor Kurtowski, but the stoned silence was too comfortable to break. As they drew abreast of a staircase down through the sidewalk to the walk-tubes, Silver suddenly pressed something into Vernor's hand.
"Take this," he said. "It'll help you study," and then he was gone.
It was a small pill the size of an aspirin tablet. "ZZ-74," Vernor murmured reverently, and swallowed it.