Soma Blues by Robert Sheckley Read Free Book Online Page A

drop by. And then he left. Hob, you mustn’t breathe a word about me telling you this.”
    “Don’t worry. Can you tell me anyone else who might have bought this soma from Stanley?”
    “I gave him half a dozen names to call. I don’t know if any of them bought from him. Hob, I really don’t know.”
    “What about Etienne? Do you think he might have bought some?”
    “He’s rich enough to. The Vargas family is very prominent in Rio de Janeiro. His father has a finca on the island, you know, near San Juan. I told you the stuff Stanley had was pricey. But I have no way of knowing who he sold to.”
    “I don’t suppose you know where I could reach Etienne now?”
    “Not a clue, my dear. I’d imagine he’s gone back to Ibiza.”
     
     

 
    TWO
    Ibiza
     
     

 
    1
     
     
    Hob looked out the window and saw below, through a thin screen of clouds, the island of Ibiza appear suddenly through a cloud break. He was sitting beside a businessman, fattish and obnoxious, who had begun a conversation by telling Hob that he was from Düsseldorf, had come to Paris on business, and, finishing his appointments early, was taking a long weekend on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Had Hob ever been there? Not waiting for an answer he said that he had a friend who lived in a new condominium near Santa Eulalia—Der Sturmkönig, it was called. Had Hob ever heard of the place? It had been mentioned in European Architecture magazine as “a piquant potpourri of styles old and new.” It had three swimming pools, a Corinthian arch, a bandstand in the shape of a seashell, and three restaurants, one of which had been awarded four pigs in International Gourmand magazine. It had its own shops and food stores, and, very important, its own German butcher who made the sausages and the Schweinefleisch and the other good meats of the homeland. There followed a brief dissertation on sausages, ending with, “I am very particular about my sausages. Only the Germans know how to make proper sausages. The French sausages look amusing but have too much garlic and otherwise lack character. The English sausages are carelessly put together and made with sawdust, like their politics. Only in Germany, and especially in the Düsseldorf area, is it known how to make sausages.”
    Hob nodded agreement throughout the speech. It was the sort of old-fashioned chauvinistic talk that was so difficult to come by these days, the sort of talk that Hob, a collector of extreme nationalistic attitudes, usually liked to hear, because in his mind Europe was a big Disneyland in which each country had its own quaint colors and costumes and customs and its own special products and its own typical people in regional costumes who were always willing to make speeches about themselves. He thought it charming that the Italians had strong nationalistic opinions about pasta and the Scandinavians about akvavit, and so on, right down to the Belgians with their mussels and pommes frites. But typically, he disliked himself for having this cynical and superficial view, thought little of himself for being charmed by bogus quaintness, or even the real thing, real quaintness, whatever that is. He knew what he sought was out of touch with current realities. Europe was no longer quaint. It was in deadly earnest. But not for Americans, who, to their peril, couldn’t even take the Japanese seriously. Americans didn’t go to Europe to get a dose of reality. There was enough of that at home. They went for the local color. And if they couldn’t find it, they made it up.
    The plane dropped a wing and banked. Ibiza came fully into view, a small island that the jet could overfly in much less than a minute. There was the central spine of mountains, with the valleys on the southern side and the sheer cliffs coming down to the sea on the northern side. There was the pall of smoke over to one side, from the huge garbage pit near Santa Catalina that burned day and night and was the island’s leading