“No, please, make the routine charge. But may I do you some service?” She inclined her head. The clerk bowed in return. “A picture perhaps?”
“If madam permits.”
“My latest stereo. Face or full?”
He bowed without speaking.
“I’ll send both. They shall cross your brief in the tubes.”
“You are very kind.”
“Thank you. Clearing.” The screen went blank. “Well, Perry, we’ll know soon. But I must get the poor chap his pictures. I didn’t mean to offend him, but he was too touchy.” She returned in a moment with two thin sheets and started to roll them up. Noticing Perry’s interest, she paused. “Would you care to see them?”
“Yes, of course.” The first picture was Diana’s face in natural colors with a half smile warming it. But Perry was startled almost into dropping it. For the portrait was completely stereoscopic. It was as if he were looking through a window of cellophane at Diana herself posed stationary three feet back of the frame.
“How in the world are these done?”
“I’m neither an optics student nor a photographer, but I know the picture really does have some depth to it. It’s a colloid about a half centimeter thick. It is done with two cameras, so it works only on one axis. Turn it around sideways.” He did so. The picture went perfectly flat although remaining a fine photograph. “Now tilt it about forty-five degrees.” He did so and had the upsetting sensation of watching Diana’s beautiful features melt and run until no picture was visible, but just an iridescense like oil on water. “You have to look at it along the right axis and within a narrow view angle, but when you do the two images blend in the stereo illusion. The brain interprets the confused double image given by two separated eyes as depth and by duplicating that confusion, they achieve the illusion.”
Perry stared at the picture a moment more and tilted and twisted it. Diana watched with interest and sympathetic amusement. “May I see the other picture?”
“Here it is.” Perry glanced at it, then swallowed. He had grown accustomed to Diana’s nudity, more or less, and had been too much occupied mentally to think much about it, but nevertheless he had been aware of it in one corner of his mind all the time. Still, he was startled to discover that the second picture portrayed all of Diana in her own sweet simplicity, nothing more, and that it was as amazingly lifelike as the first, real enough to pinch. He swallowed again.
“You intend to send this, er—uh, these pictures to a man you’ve just met on the phone.”
“Oh, yes, he wants them and I can afford it. And I was a bit rude. Of course some people would think it a bit brash for me to give him anything as intimate as a facial portrait but I don’t mind.”
“But,—uh—”
“Yes, Perry?”
“Oh, well, nothing I guess. Never mind.”
III
Later while Diana monkeyed with the gadgets in the Demeter niche, the green light and gong note announced a tube delivery. “Get it, will you, Perry?” she called. “I’ve got both hands full.” Perry puzzled with the controls, then found a small lever that opened the receptacle. He brought over the roll to Diana. “Read it aloud, Perry, while I finish dinner.” He unrolled it and first noticed a picture of a young man who resembled his own memory of himself. He commenced to read. “Gordon 932-016-755-82A, Genes class JM, born 2057 July 7. Qualified and matriculated Arlington Health School 2075, transferred (approved) Adler Memorial Institute of Psychology 2077. Selected for research when Extra-sensory station was established by Master Fifield in 2080. Author ofAStudy of Deviant Data in Extra-Sensory Perception. Co-author (with Pandit Kalimohan Chandra Roy) ofProteus: a History of the Ego. Address Sanctuary (F-2), California. Unofficially reported in voluntary corporal abdication in 2083 August and transferred at the request of Sanctuary Council to inactive status 2085 August, body to remain in Sanctuary. Credit account on transfer to inactive $11,018.32 less depreciation $9,803.09, credit account re-entered with service deduction $9802.09 less $500 credit convenience book $9,302.09 (enclosed).”
Attached to the end of the roll was a small wallet or notebook. Inside Perry found that the leaves were money, conventional money, differing only slightly in size and design from money in 1939. In the back of the book was a pad of blank credit drafts, a check book.
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