“All right,” Barney said. “Here I come.” He hopped from the cab of the dredge, flailing with the wrench.
The creature dashed at him.
Almost to him, five feet away, it suddenly squealed, veered, and ran past, not touching him. He spun, and watched it go. “Unclean,” it thought to itself; it halted at a safe distance and fearfully regarded him, tongue lolling. “You’re an unclean thing,” it informed him dismally.
Unclean, Barney thought. How? Why?
“You just are,” the predator answered. “Look at yourself. I can’t eat you; I’d be sick.” It remained where it was, drooping with disappointment and–aversion. He had horrified it.
“Maybe we’re all unclean to you,” he said. “All of us from Earth, alien to this world. Unfamiliar.”
“Just you,” it told him flatly. “Look at–ugh!–your right arm, your hand. There’s something intolerably wrong with you. How can you live with yourself? Can’t you cleanse yourself some way?”
He did not bother to look at his arm and hand; it was unnecessary.
Calmly, with all the dignity that he could manage, he walked on, over the loosely packed sand, toward his hovel.
That night, as he prepared to go to bed in the cramped bunk provided by his compartment at Chicken Pox Prospects, someone rapped on his closed door. “Hey, Mayerson. Open up.”
Putting on his robe he opened the door.
“That trading ship is back,” Norm Schein, excited, grabbing him by the lapel of his robe, declared. “You know, from the Chew-Z people. You got any skins left? If so–”
“If they want to see me,” Barney said, disengaging Norm Schein’s grip from his robe, “they’ll have to come down here. You tell them that.” He shut the door, then.
Norm loudly departed.
He seated himself at the table on which he ate his meals, got a pack–his last–of Terran cigarettes from the drawer, and lit up; he sat smoking and meditating, hearing above and around his compartment the scampering noises of his fellow hovelists. Large-scale mice, he thought. Who have scented the bait.
The door to his compartment opened. He did not look up; he continued to stare down at the table surface, at the ashtray and matches and pack of Camels.
“Mr. Mayerson.”
Barney said, “I know what you’re going to say.”
Entering the compartment, Palmer Eldritch shut the door, seated himself across from Barney, and said, “Correct, my friend. I let you go just before it happened, before Leo fired the second time. It was my carefully considered decision. And I’ve had a long time to dwell on the matter; a little over three centuries. I won’t tell you why.”
“I don’t care why,” Barney said. He continued to stare down.
“Can’t you look at me?” Palmer Eldritch said.
“I’m unclean,” Barney informed him.
“WHO TOLD YOU THAT?”
“An animal out in the desert. And it had never seen me before; it knew it just by coming close to me.” While still five feet away, he thought to himself. Which is fairly far.
“Hmm. Maybe its motive–”
“It had no goddam motive. In fact just the opposite– it was half-dead from hunger and yearning to eat me. So it must be true.”
“To the primitive mind,” Eldritch said, “the unclean and the holy are confused. Merged merely as taboo. The ritual for them, the–”
“Aw hell,” he said bitterly. “It’s true and you know it. I’m alive, I won’t die on that ship, but I’m defiled.”
“By me?”
Barney said, “Make your own guess.”
After a pause Eldritch shrugged and said, “All right. I was cast out from a star system–I won’t identify it because to you it wouldn’t matter–and I took up residence where that wild, get-rich-quick operator from your system encountered me. And some of that has been passed on to you. But not much. You’ll gradually, over the years, recover; it’ll diminish until it’s gone. Your fellow colonists won’t notice because it’s touched them, too; it began as soon as they participated in the chewing of what we sold them.”
“I’d like to know,” Barney said, “what you were trying to do when you introduced Chew-Z to our people.”
“Perpetuate myself,” the creature opposite him said quietly.
He glanced up, then. “A form of reproduction?”
“Yes, the only way I can.”
With overwhelming aversion Barney said, “My God. We would all have become your children.”
“Don’t fret about that now, Mr. Mayerson,” it said, and laughed in a humanlike, jovial way. “Just tend your little garden up top, get your water system going. Frankly I long for death; I’ll be glad when Leo Bulero does what he’s already contemplating… he’s begun to hatch it, now that you’ve refused to take the brain-metabolism toxin. Anyhow, I wish you luck here on Mars; I would have enjoyed it, myself, but things didn’t work out and that’s that.” Eldritch rose to his feet, then.
“You could revert,” Barney said. “Resume the form you were in when Palmer encountered you. You don’t have to be there, inhabiting that body, when Leo opens fire on your ship.”
“Could I?” Its tone was mocking. “Maybe something worse is waiting for me if I fail to show up there. But you wouldn’t know about that; you’re an entity whose lifespan is relatively short, and in a short span there’s a lot less–” It paused, thinking.
“Don’t tell me,” Barney said. “I don’t want to know.”
The next time he looked up, Palmer Eldritch was gone.
He lit another cigarette. What a mess, he thought. This is how we act when finally we do contact at long last another sentient race within the galaxy. And how it behaves, badly as us and in some respects much worse. And there’s nothing to redeem the situation. Not now.
And Leo thought that by going out to confront Eldritch with that tube of toxin we had a chance. Ironic.
And here I am, without having even consummated the miserable act for the courts’ benefit, physically, basically, unclean.
Maybe Anne can do something for me, he thought suddenly. Maybe there are methods to restore one to the original condition–dimly remembered, such as it was–before the late and more acute contamination set in. He tried to remember but he knew so little about Neo-Christianity. Anyhow it was worth a try; it suggested there might be hope, and he was going to need that in the years ahead.
After all, the creature residing in deep space which had taken the form of Palmer Eldritch bore some relationship to God; if it was not God, as he himself had decided, then at least it was a portion of God’s Creation. So some of the responsibility lay on Him. And, it seemed to Barney, He was probably mature enough to recognize this.
Getting Him to admit it, though. That might be something else again.
However, it was still worth talking to Anne Hawthorne; she might know of techniques for accomplishing even that.
But he somehow doubted it. Because he held a terrifying insight, simple, easy to think and utter, which perhaps applied to himself and those around him, to this situation.
There was such a thing as salvation. But–
Not for everyone.
On the trip back to Terra from their unsuccessful mission to Mars, Leo Bulero endlessly nitpicked and conferred with his colleague, Felix Blau. It was now obvious to both of them what they would have to do.
“He’s all the time traveling between a master-satellite around Venus and the other planets, plus his demesne on Luna,” Felix pointed out in summation. “And we all recognize how vulnerable a ship in space is; even a small puncture can–” He gestured graphically.
“We’d need the UN’s cooperation,” Leo said gloomily. Because all he and his organization were allowed to possess were side arms. Nothing that could be used by one ship against another.
“I’ve got what may be some interesting data on that,” Felix said, rummaging in his briefcase. “Our people in the UN reach into Hepburn-Gilbert’s office, as you may or may not know. We can’t compel him to do anything, but we can at least discuss it.” He produced a document. “Our Secretary-General is worried about the consistent appearance of Palmer Eldritch in every one of the so-called ‘reincarnations’ that users of Chew-Z experience. He’s smart enough to correctly interpret what that implies. So if it keeps happening undoubtedly we can get more cooperation from him, at least on a sub rosa basis; for instance–”
Leo broke in, “Felix, let me ask you something. How long have you had an artificial arm?”
Glancing down, Felix grunted in surprise. And then, staring at Leo Bulero, he said, “So do you, too. And there’s something the matter with your teeth; open your mouth and let’s see.”
Without answering, Leo got to his feet and went into the men’s room of the ship to survey himself in the floorlength mirror.
There was no doubt of it. Even the eyes, too. Resignedly he returned to his seat beside Felix Blau. Neither of them said anything for a while; Felix rattled his documents mechanically–oh God, Leo thought; literally mechanically!–and Leo alternated between watching him and dully staring out the window at the blackness and stars of interplan space.