Free The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) by Robert Sheckley

introduce them to the United States, but the results are mediocre. A blond college student who says, “Hi, I’m Harley,” as he leads you to your table is not the same as the professional French waiter who comports himself with a dignity bordering on both sides of disdain.
    No, the scene does not transplant. If you wanted to get the atmosphere just right in your Café de Paris in Heartland, U.S.A., you’d also have to import a couple of Moroccans in long robes to go from table to table selling souvenir drums. And you’d have to explain to the customers that nobody actually ever buys a souvenir drum, since these vendors are supplied by the Mairie de Paris to lend local color.
    It is curious how we are always trying to obtain the virtues of There, the charming foreign place, for our uses Here, in the dull old hometown. Modern life consists of living Here and importing the important things from There: romance, fashions, lifestyles.
    Here and There are eternal categories, never to be abolished or subsumed one under another. No matter how far you travel, you always live Here. And the place you’re trying to get to, where the romance and adventure are, and the culture, is There, out of reach.
    When you transport yourself physically from Here to There a curious condition ensues. First there’s the illusion of having arrived There at last, where the good things are. You even get to enjoy a brief period during which time There retains its pristine quality, when things stand out in all their uniqueness; but the decay of strangeness is already taking place, perceptual fade-out, habituation, and soon what you behold is no longer charming, but merely quaint. All too soon, There turns into just one more Here.
    One good thing that happens is that Here, after you absent yourself from it long enough, reverts to its There state. This is automatic, just like all Theres become Heres after you occupy them.
    Here and There. You and It. Eternal categories, opposition, struggle. You versus It. The conquest of It by You. The eternal law by which strangeness is converted into familiarity.
    I was musing on these and similar matters, as I strolled the sidewalks of the inner city which lies at the center of the City of Light. For mark my words, the area which I call Châtelet-les-Halles, between the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Étienne-Marcel, and further bounded east and west by the Boulevard Sébastopol and the Rue du Temple, is a miniature hypermodern city where the ancient and the contemporary are thrown into constant abrupt juxtapositions. Interpenetrating in a small space of no more than several acres, you have a major modern art museum, a rail and subway terminus, a street of sex shops, a fountain filled with fire-swallowers and glass-eaters (tough-looking gentlemen accompanied by their girlfriends, who carry the lunch and the bottle of gasoline). Stone façades both ancient and modern connect on different levels. There are open spaces and closed spaces, all bound together by curving concrete walls and incorporating, here and there, an ancient structure. The South Americans have their own cafés in this quarter, places to meet in the ever-renewing exile that is the fate of modern South America. They come to Paris with their songs and their politics, and they are but the latest wave. Still here are all the other exiles, from the Maghreb and black Africa, from Iran and the Arab countries, from wherever dissidence is punished by long jail sentences or death.
    Burdened with my thoughts, I ate dinner in one of the little restaurants on the Rue des Blancs and returned to my hotel room. I had been planning to freshen up and then go out again, to savor the Paris night and perhaps turn up a lead or two about Alex. Instead, I decided to lie down on the bed and indulge in melancholia. As I fumbled for the wall switch, a voice said from within my room, “Don’t bother with the light just yet, mon vieux. It’s much more comfortable here in the