Return from the Stars by Stanislaw Lem Page B

contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons—lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. A handful of crystal corn—my books. I selected a number of works on history and sociology, a few on statistics and demography, and what the girl from Adapt had recommended on psychology. A couple of the larger mathematical textbooks—larger, of course, in the sense of their content, not of their physical size. The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that—as it told me—it was linked directly, through electronic catalogues, to templates of every book on Earth. As a rule, a bookstore had only single "copies" of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the content of the work was recorded in a crystal.
    The originals—crystomatrices—were not to be seen; they were kept behind pale blue enameled steel plates. So a book was printed, as it were, every time someone needed it. The question of printings, of their quantity, of their running out, had ceased to exist. Actually, a great achievement, and yet I regretted the passing of books. On learning that there were secondhand bookshops that had paper books, I went and found one. I was disappointed; there were practically no scientific works. Light reading, a few children's books, some sets of old periodicals.
    I bought (one had to pay only for the old books) a few fairy tales from forty years earlier, to find out what were considered fairy tales now, and I went to a sporting-goods store. Here my disappointment had no limit. Athletics existed in a stunted form. Running, throwing, jumping, swimming, but hardly any combat sports. There was no boxing now, and what they called wrestling was downright ridiculous, an exchange of shoves instead of a respectable fight. I watched one world-championship match in the projection room of the store and thought I would burst with anger. At times I began laughing like a lunatic. I asked about American free-style, judo, ju-jitsu, but no one knew what I was talking about. Understandable, given that soccer had died without heirs, as an activity in which sharp encounters and bodily injuries came about. There was hockey, but it wasn't hockey! They played in outfits so inflated that they looked like enormous balls. It was entertaining to see the two teams bounce off each other, but it was a farce, not a match. Diving, yes, but from a height of only four meters. I thought immediately of my own (my own!) pool and bought a folding springboard, to add on to the one that would be at Clavestra. This disintegration was the work of betrization. That bullfights, cockfights, and other bloody spectacles had disappeared did not bother me, nor had I ever been an enthusiast of professional boxing. But the tepid pap that remained did not appeal to me in the least. The invasion of technology in sports I had tolerated only in the tourist business. It had grown, especially, in underwater sports.
    I had a look at various equipment for diving: small electric torpedoes one could use to travel along the bottom of a lake; speedboats, hydrofoils that moved on a cushion of compressed air; water microgleeders, everything fitted with special safety devices to guard against accidents.
    The racing, which enjoyed a considerable popularity, I could not consider a sport; no horses, of course, and no cars—remote-control machines raced one another, and bets could be placed on them. Competition had lost its importance. It was explained to me that the limits of man's physical capability had been reached and