Bending down, Barney Mayerson picked up the small doll, Perky Pat in her yellow shorts and red-striped cotton t-shirt and sandals. This now was Anne Hawthorne, he realized. In a sense that no one quite understood. And yet he could destroy the doll, crush it, and Anne, in her synthetic fantasy life, would be unaffected.
“I’d like to marry her,” he said aloud, suddenly.
“Who?” Tod asked. “Perky Pat or the new girl?”
“He means Perky Pat,” Norm Schein said, and snickered.
“No he doesn’t,” Helen said severely. “And I think it’s fine; now we can be four couples instead of three couples and one man, one odd man.”
“Is there any way,” Barney said, “to get drunk around here?”
“Sure,” Norm said. “We’ve got liquor–it’s dull ersatz gin, but it’s eighty proof; it’ll do the job.”
“Let me have some,” Barney said, reaching for his wallet.
“It’s free. The UN supply ships drop it in vats.” Norm went to a locked cupboard, produced a key, and opened it.
Sam Regan said, “Tell us, Mayerson, why you feel the need to get drunk. Is it us? The hovel? Mars itself?”
“No.” It was none of those; it had to do with Anne and the disintegration of her identity. Her use of Can-D all at once, a symptom of her inability to believe or to cope, her giving up. It was an omen, in which he, too, was involved; he saw himself in what had happened.
If he could help her perhaps he could help himself. And if not–
He had an intuition that otherwise they were both finished. Mars, for both himself and Anne, would mean death. And probably soon.
NINE
After she emerged from the experience of translation Anne Hawthorne was taciturn and moody. It was not a good sign; he guessed that she, too, now had a premonition similar to his. However, she said nothing about it; she merely went at once to get her bulky outer suit from his compartment.
“I have to get back to Flax Back Spit,” she explained. “Thank you for letting me use your layout,” she said to the hovelists who stood here and there, watching her as she dressed. “I’m sorry, Barney.” She hung her head. “It was unkind to leave you the way I did.”
He accompanied her, on foot, across the flat, nocturnal sands to her own hovel; neither of them spoke as they plodded along, keeping their eyes open, as they had been told to, for a local predator, a jackal-like telepathic Martian life form. However, they saw nothing.
“How was it?” he asked her at last.
“You mean being that little brassy blonde-haired doll with all her damn clothes and her boyfriend and her car and her–” Anne, beside him, shuddered. “Awful. Well, that’s not it. Just–pointless. I found nothing there. It was like going back to my teens.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. There was that about Perky Pat.
“Barney,” she said quietly, “I have to find something else and soon. Can you help me? You seem smart and grown-up and experienced. Being translated is not going to help me… Chew-Z won’t be any better because something in me rebels, won’t take it–see? Yes, you see; I can tell. Hell, you wouldn’t even try it once, so you must understand.” She squeezed his arm, and clung tightly to him in the darkness. “I know something else, Barney. They’re tired of it, too; all they did was bicker while they–we–were inside those dolls. They didn’t enjoy it for a second, even.”
“Gosh,” he said.
Flashing her lantern ahead, Anne said, “It’s a shame; I wish they did. I feel sorrier for them than I do for–” She ceased, walked on for a time in silence, and then abruptly said, “I’ve changed, Barney. I feel it in myself. I want to sit down here–wherever we are. You and I alone in the dark. And then you know what… I don’t have to say, do I?”
“No,” he admitted. “But the thing is, you’d regret it afterward. I would, too, because of your reaction.”
“Maybe I’ll pray,” Anne said. “Praying is hard to do; you have to know how. You don’t pray for yourself; you pray what we call an intercessive prayer: for others. And what you pray to isn’t the God Who’s in the heavens out there somewhere… it’s to the Holy Spirit within; that’s different, that’s the Paraclete. Did you ever read Paul?”
“Paul who?”
“In the New Testament. His letters to for instance the Corinthians or the Romans… you know. Paul says our enemy is death; it’s the final enemy we overcome, so I guess it’s the greatest. We’re all blighted, according to Paul, not just our bodies but our souls, too; both have to die and then we can be born again, with new bodies not of flesh but incorruptible. See? You know, when I was Perky Pat, just now… I had the oddest feeling that I was–it’s wrong to say this or believe it, but–”
“But,” Barney finished for her, “it seemed like a taste of that. But you expected it, though; you knew the resemblance–you mentioned it yourself, on the ship.” A lot of people, he reflected, had noticed it, too.
“Yes,” Anne admitted. “But what I didn’t realize is–” In the darkness she turned toward him; he could just barely make her out. “Being translated is the only hint we can have of it this side of death. So it’s a temptation. If it wasn’t for that dreadful doll, that Perky Pat–”
“Chew-Z,” Barney said.
“That’s what I was thinking. If it was like that, like what Paul says about the corruptible man putting on incorruption–I couldn’t stop myself, Barney; I’d have to chew Chew-Z. I wouldn’t be able to wait until the end of my life… it might be fifty years living here on Mars–half a century!” She shuddered. “Why wait when I could have it now?”
“The last person I talked to,” Barney said, “who had taken Chew-Z, said it was the worst experience of his life.”
That startled her. “In what way?”
“He fell into the domain of someone or something he considered absolutely evil, someone he was terrified of. And he was lucky–and he knew it–to get away again.”
“Barney,” she said, “why are you on Mars? Don’t say it’s because of the draft; a person as smart as you could have gone to a psychiatrist–”
“I’m on Mars,” he said, “because I made a mistake.” In your terminology, he reflected, it would be called a sin. And in my terminology, too, he decided.
Anne said, “You hurt someone, didn’t you?”
He shrugged.
“So now for the rest of your life you’re here,” Anne said. “Barney, can you get me a supply of Chew-Z?”
“Pretty soon.” It would not be long before he ran into one of Palmer Eldritch’s pushers; he was certain of that. Putting his hand on her shoulder he said, “But you can get it for yourself just as easily.”
She leaned against him as they walked, and he hugged her; she did not resist–in fact she sighed with relief. “Barney, I have something to show you. A leaflet that one of the people in my hovel gave me; she said a whole bundle had been dropped the other day. It’s from the Chew-Z people.” Reaching into her bulky coat she rummaged about, then; in the glare of the lantern he saw the folded paper. “Read it. You’ll understand why I feel as I do about Chew-Z… why it’s such a spiritual problem for me.”
Holding the paper to the light he read the top line; it blazed out in huge black letters.
GOD PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE. WE CAN DELIVER IT.
“See?” Anne said.
“I see.” He did not even bother to read the rest; folding the paper back up he returned it to her, feeling heavyhearted. “Quite a slogan.”
“A true one.”
“Not the big lie,” Barney said, “but instead the big truth.” Which, he wondered, is worse? Hard to tell. Ideally, Palmer Eldritch would drop dead for the blasphemia shouted by the pamphlet, but evidently that was not going to occur. An evil visitor oozing over us from the Prox system, he said to himself, offering us what we’ve prayed for over a period of two thousand years. And why is this so palpably bad? Hard to say, but nevertheless it is. Because maybe it’ll mean bondage to Eldritch, such as Leo experienced; Eldritch will be with us constantly from now on, infiltrating our lives. And He who has protected us in the past simply sits passive.
Each time we’re translated, he thought, we’ll see–not God–but Palmer Eldritch.
Aloud he said, “If Chew-Z fails you–”
“Don’t say that.”
“If Palmer Eldritch fails you, then maybe–” He stopped. Because ahead of them lay the hovel Flax Back Spit; its entrance light glowed dimly in the Martian gloom. “You’re home.” He did not like to let her go; his hand on her shoulder, he clung to her, thinking back to what he had said to his fellow hovelists about her. “Come back with me,” he said. “To Chicken Pox Prospects. We’ll get formally, legally married.”