He went into the bedroom and tested the bed and it was satisfactorily soft. He examined the dresser and the full-length glass and peeked into the bathroom and saw that it was equipped with an automatic shaver and massager, that it had a shower and tub, an exercising machine and a number of other gadgets that he couldn't place.
And the third room.
It was almost bare by the standards of the other two. In the center of it stood a chair with great flat arms and on each of the arms many rows of buttons.
He approached the chair cautiously, wondering what it was - what kind of trap it was. Although that was foolish, for there were no traps on Kimon. This was Kimon, the land of opportunity, where a man might make a fortune and live in luxury and rub shoulders with an intelligence and a culture that was the best yet found in the galaxy.
He bent down over the wide arms of the chair and found that each of the buttons was labeled. They were labeledHistory,Poetry,Drama,Sculpture,Literature,Painting,Astronomy,Philosophy,Physics,Religions and many other things. And there were several that were labeled with words he'd never seen and had no meaning to him.
He stood in the room and looked around at its starkness and saw for the first time that it had no windows, but was just a sort of box - a theater, he decided, or a lecture room. You sat in the chair and pressed a certain button and -
But there was no time for that. An hour to dress for dinner, the cabinet had said, and some of that hour was already gone.
The luggage was in the bedroom and he opened the bag that held his dinner clothes. The jacket was badly wrinkled.
He stood with it in his hands, staring at it. Maybe the wrinkles would hang out. Maybe -
But he knew they wouldn't.