He heard, then, a laugh. It was Palmer Eldritch’s laugh but it was emerging from–
Himself.
Looking down at his hands, he distinguished the left one, pink, pale, made of flesh, covered with skin and tiny, almost invisible hair, and then the right one, bright, glowing, spotless in its mechanical perfection, a hand infinitely superior to the original one, long since gone.
Now he knew what had been done to him. A great translation–from his standpoint, anyhow–had been accomplished, and possibly everything up to now had worked with this end in mind.
It will be me, he realized, that Leo Bulero will kill. Me the monument will present a narration of.
Now I am Palmer Eldritch.
In that case, he thought after a while as the environment surrounding him seemed to solidify and clear, I wonder how he is making out with Emily.
I hope pretty badly.
TWELVE
With vast trailing arms he extended from the Proxima Centaurus system to Terra itself, and he was not human; this was not a man who had returned. And he had great power. He could overcome death.
But he was not happy. For the simple reason that he was alone. So he at once tried to make up for this; he went to a lot of trouble to draw others along the route he had followed.
One of them was Barney Mayerson.
“Mayerson,” he said, conversationally, “what the hell have you got to lose? Figure it out for yourself; you’re washed up as it stands–no woman you love, a past you regret. You realize you took a decisively wrong course in your life and nobody made you do it. And it can’t be repaired. Even if the future lasts for a million years it can’t restore what you lost by, so to speak, your own hand. You grasp my reasoning?”
No answer.
“And you forget one thing,” he continued, after waiting. “She’s devolved, from that miserable evolution therapy that ex-Nazi-type German doctor runs in those clinics. Sure, she–actually her husband–was smart enough to discontinue the treatments right away, and she can still turn out pots that sell; she didn’t devolve that much. But–you wouldn’t like her. You’d know; she’d be just a little more shallow, a shade sillier. It would not be like the past, even if you got her back; it’d be changed.”
Again he waited. This time there was an answer. “All right!”
“Where would you like to go?” he continued, then. “Mars? I’ll bet. Okay, then back to Terra.”
Barney Mayerson, not himself, said, “No. I left voluntarily; I was through; the end had come.”
“Okay. Not Terra. Let’s see. Hmm.” He pondered. “Prox,” he said. “You’ve never seen the Prox system and the Proxers. I’m a bridge, you know. Between the two systems. They can come here to the Sol system through me any time they want–and I allow them. But I haven’t allowed them. But how they are eager.” He chuckled. “They’re practically lined up. Like the kiddies’ Saturday afternoon movie matinee.”
“Make me into a stone.”
“Why?”
Barney Mayerson said, “So I can’t feel. There’s nothing for me anywhere.”
“You don’t even like being translated into one homogeneous organism with me?”
No answer.
“You can share my ambitions. I’ve got plenty of them, big ones–they make Leo’s look like dirt.” Of course, he thought, Leo will kill me not long from now. At least as time is reckoned outside of translation. “I’ll acquaint you with one. A minor one. Maybe it’ll fire you up.”
“I doubt it,” Barney said.
“I’m going to become a planet.”
Barney laughed.
“You think that’s funny?” He felt furious.
“I think you’re nuts. Whether you’re a man or a thing from intersystem space; you’re still out of your mind.”
“I haven’t explained,” he said with dignity, “precisely what I meant when I said that. What I mean is, I’m going to be everyone on the planet. You know what planet I’m talking about.”
“Terra.”
“Hell no. Mars.”
“Why Mars?”
“It’s–” He groped for the words. “New. Undeveloped. Full of potential. I’m going to be all the colonists as they arrive and begin to live there. I’ll guide their civilization; I’ll be their civilization!”
No answer.
“Come on. Say something.”
Barney said, “How come, if you can be so much, including a whole planet, I can’t be even that plaque on the wall of my office at P. P. Layouts?”
“Um,” he said, disconcerted. “Okay, okay. You can be that plaque; what the hell do I care? Be anything you want–you took the drug; you’re entitled to be translated into whatever pleases you. It’s not real, of course. That’s the truth. I’m letting you in on the innermost secret; it’s an hallucination. What makes it seem real is that certain prophetic aspects get into the experience, exactly as with dreams. I’ve walked into and out of a million of them, these so-called ‘translation’ worlds; I’ve seen them all. And you know what they are? They’re nothing. Like a captive white rat feeding electric impulses again and again to specific areas of his brain–its disgusting.”
“I see,” Barney Mayerson said.
“You want to wind up in one of them, knowing this?”
After a time Barney said, “Sure.”
“Okay! I’ll make you a stone, put you by a seashore; you can lie there and listen to the waves for a couple of million years. That ought to satisfy you.” You dumb jerk, he thought savagely. A stone! Christ!
“Am I softened or something?” Barney asked, then; in his voice were for the first time strong overtones of doubt. “Is this what the Proxers wanted? Is this why you were sent?”
“I wasn’t sent. I showed up here on my own. It beats living out in dead space between hot stars.” He chuckled. “Certainly you’re soft–and you want to be a stone. Listen, Mayerson; being a stone isn’t what you really want. What you want is death.”
“Death?”
“You mean you didn’t know?” He was incredulous. “Aw, come on!”
“No. I didn’t know.”
“It’s very simple, Mayerson; I’ll give you a translation world in which you’re a rotting corpse of a run-over dog in some ditch–think of it: what a goddamn relief it’ll be. You’re going to be me; you are me, and Leo Bulero is going to kill you. That’s the dead dog, Mayerson; that’s the corpse in the ditch.” And I’ll live on, he said to himself. That’s my gift to you, and remember: in German Gift means poison. I’ll let you die in my place a few months from now and that monument on Sigma 14-B will be erected but I’ll go on, in your living body. When you come back from Mars to work at P. P. Layouts again you’ll be me. And so I avoid my fate.
It was so simple.
“Okay, Mayerson,” he concluded, weary of the colloquy. “Up and at ’em, as they say. Consider yourself dumped off; we’re not a single organism any more. We’ve got distinct, separate destinies again, and that’s the way you wanted it. You’re in a ship of Conner Freeman’s leaving Venus and I’m down in Chicken Pox Prospects; I’ve got a thriving vegetable garden up top, and I get to shack up with Anne Hawthorne any time I want–it’s a good life, as far as I’m concerned. I hope you like yours equally well.” And, at that instant, he emerged.
He stood in the kitchen of his compartment at Chicken Pox Prospects; he was frying himself a panful of local mushrooms… the air smelled of butter and spices and, in the living room, his portable tape recorder played a Haydn symphony. Peaceful, he thought with pleasure. Exactly what I want; a little peace and quiet. After all, I was used to that, out in intersystern space. He yawned, stretched with luxury, and said, “I did it.”
Seated in the living room, reading a homeopape taken from the news-service emanating from one of the UN satellites, Anne Hawthorne glanced up and said, “You did what, Barney?”
“Got just the right amount of seasoning in this,” he said, still exulting. I am Palmer Eldritch and I’m here, not there. I’ll survive Leo’s attack and I know how to enjoy, use, this life, here, as Barney didn’t or wouldn’t.
Let’s see how he prefers it when Leo’s fighter guns his merchant ship into particles. And he sees the last of a life bitterly regretted.
In the glare of the overhead light Barney Mayerson blinked. He realized after a second that he was on a ship; the room appeared ordinary, a combination bedroom and parlor, but he recognized it by the bolted-down condition of the furniture. And the gravity was all wrong; artificially produced, it failed to duplicate Earth’s.
And there was a view out. Limited, no larger in fact than a comb of bees’ wax. But still the thick plastic revealed the emptiness beyond, and he went over to fixedly peer. Sol, blinding, filled a portion of the panorama and he reflexively reached up to click the black filter into use. And, as he did so, he perceived his hand. His artificial, metallic, superbly efficient mechanical hand.