Part 2

"You are more fortunate than most," he went on, still standing between me and the mess hall. "Some people come here year after year, or they go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation of contrast--soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment'; only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe."

Then the film dissolved--finally and completely--from the surface of my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks could have passed so swiftly?

"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you prefer," said the Captain.

* * * * *

Bertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the moment--this moment--it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes, that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.

We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers, our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape--all impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.

I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and desserts--an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier, a little less responsive.

When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted tours to the Himalayas now, or to the "lost" cities of the South American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We will bide our time, much as others do.

But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble and checkers).

We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails, when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the vision of year's end and another glorious vacation.

End of Project Gutenberg's Two Whole Glorious Weeks, by Will Worthington