The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (15 page)

“Tell me specifically what it is in this thing.”

“It’s epilepsy, Mayerson. The Q form, the strain whose causes no one is sure of, whether it’s due to organic injury that can’t be detected with the EEG or whether it’s psychogenic.”

“And the symptoms?”

Faine said, “Grand mal.” After a pause he said, “Sorry.”

“I see,” Barney said. “And how long will I have them?”

“We can administer the antidote after the litigation but not before. A year at the most. So now you can see what I meant when I said that you’re going to be in a position to more than atone for not bailing out Leo when he needed it. You can see how this illness, claimed as a side-effect of Chew-Z, will—”

“Sure,” Barney said. “Epilepsy is one of the great scarewords. Like cancer, once. People are irrationally afraid of it because they know it can happen to them, any time, with no warning.”

“Especially the more recent Q form. Hell, they don’t even have a theory about it. What’s important is that with the Q form no organic alteration of the brain is involved, and that means we can restore you. The tube, there. It’s a metabolic toxin similar in action to metrazol; similar, but unlike metrazol it continues to produce the attacks—with the characteristically deranged EEG pattern during those intervals—until it’s neutralized—which as I say we’re prepared to do.”

“Won’t a blood-fraction test show the presence of this toxin?”

“It will show the presence of
a
toxin, and that’s exactly what we want. Because we will sequester the documents pertaining to the physical and mental induction exams which you recently took…and we’ll be able to prove that when you arrived on Mars there was no Q-type epilepsy and no toxicity. And it’ll be Leo’s—or rather your—contention that the toxicity in the blood is a derivative of Chew-Z.”

Barney said, “Even if I lose the suit—”

“It will still greatly damage Chew-Z sales. Most colonists have a nagging feeling anyhow that the translation drugs are in the long run biochemically harmful.” Faine added, “The toxin in that tube is relatively rare. Leo obtained it through highly specialized channels. It originates on Io, I believe. One certain doctor—”

“Willy Denkmal,” Barney said.

Faine shrugged. “Possibly. In any case there it is in your hand; as soon as you’ve been exposed to Chew-Z you’re to take it. Try to have your first grand mal attack where your fellow hovelists will see you; don’t be off somewhere on the desert farming or bossing autonomic dredges. As soon as you’ve recovered from the attack, get on the vidphone and ask the UN for medical assistance. Have their disinterested doctors examine you; don’t apply for private medication.”

“It would probably be a good idea,” Barney said, “if the UN doctors could run an EEG on me during an attack.”

“Absolutely. So try if possible to get yourself into a UN hospital; in all there’re three on Mars. You’ll be able to put forward a good argument for this because—” Faine hesitated. “Frankly, with this toxin your attacks will involve severe destructiveness, toward yourself and to others. Technically they’ll be of the hysterical, aggressive variety concluding in a more or less complete loss of consciousness. It’ll be obvious what it is right from the start, because—or so I’m told—you’ll reveal the typical tonic stage, with great muscular contractions, and then the clonic stage of rhythmic contraction alternating with relaxation. After which of course the coma supervenes.”

“In other words,” Barney said, “the classic convulsive form.”

“Does it frighten you?”

“I don’t see where that matters. I owe Leo something; you and I and Leo know that. I still resent the word ‘atonement,’ but I suppose this is that.” He wondered how this artificially induced illness would affect his relationship with Anne. Probably this would terminate the thing. So he was giving up a good deal for Leo Bulero. But then Leo was doing something for him, too; getting him off Mars was no minor consideration.

“We’re taking it for granted,” Faine said, “that they’ll make an attempt to kill you the moment you retain an attorney. In fact they’ll—”

“I’d like to go back to my hovel, now.” He moved off. “Okay?”

“Fine. Go pick up the routine there. But let me give you a word of advice as regards that girl. Doberman’s Law—remember, he was the first person to marry and then get divorced on Mars?—states that in proportion to your emotional attachment to someone on this damn place the relationship deteriorates. I’d give you two weeks at the most, and not because you’ll be ill but because that’s standard. Martian musical chairs. And the UN encourages it because it means, frankly, if I may say so, more children to populate the colony. Catch?”

“The UN,” Barney said, “might not sanction my relationship with her because it’s on a somewhat different basis than you’re describing.”

“No it’s not,” Faine said calmly. “It may seem so to you, but I watch the whole planet, day in, night out. I’m just stating a fact; I’m not being critical. In fact I’m personally sympathetic.”

“Thanks,” Barney said, and walked away, flashing his light ahead of him in the direction of his hovel; tied about his throat the small bleeper signal which told him when he was nearing—and more important when he was
not
nearing—his hovel began to sound louder: a one-frog pond of comfort close to his ear.

I’ll take the toxin, he said to himself. And I’ll go into court and sue the bastards for Leo’s sake. Because I owe that to him. But I’m not returning to Earth; either I make it here or not at all. With Anne Hawthorne, I hope, but if not, then alone or with someone else; I’ll live out Doberman’s Law, as Faine predicts. Anyhow it’ll be here on this miserable planet, this “promised land.”

Tomorrow morning, he decided, I’ll begin clearing away the sand of fifty thousand centuries for my first vegetable garden. That’s the initial step.

TEN

Next day both Norm Schein and Tod Morris spent the early hours with him, teaching him the knack of operating the bulldozers and dredges and scoops which had fallen into various stages of ruin; most of the equipment, like old tomcats, could be coaxed into one more effort. But the results did not amount to much; they had been discarded for too long.

By noon he was exhausted. So he treated himself to a break, resting in the shade of a mammoth, rusty tractor, eating a cold-rations lunch and drinking tepid tea from a thermos which Fran Schein had been kind enough to bring up to him.

Below, in the hovel, the others did whatever it was they customarily did; he didn’t care.

On all sides of him their abandoned, decaying gardens could be seen and he wondered if soon he would forget his, too. Maybe each new colonist had started out this way, in an agony of effort. And then the torpor, the hopelessness, claimed them. And yet, was it so hopeless? Not really.

It’s an attitude, he decided. And we—all of us who comprised P. P. Layouts—contributed willingly to it. We gave them an out, something painless and easy. And now Palmer Eldritch has arrived to put the finish on the process. We laid the path for him, myself included, and so what now? Is there any way that I can, as Faine put it, atone?

Approaching him, Helen Morris called cheerfully, “How’s the farming coming?” She dropped down beside him and opened a fat seed catalog with the UN stamp plainly marked throughout. “Observe what they’ll provide
free
; every seed known to thrive here, including turnips.” Resting against him, she turned the pages. “However, there’s a little mouselike burrowing mammal that shows up on the surface late at night; be prepared for that. It eats everything. You’ll have to set out a few self-propelling traps.”

“Okay,” Barney said.

“It’s quite some sight, one of those homeostatic traps taking off across the sand in pursuit of a marsle-mouse. God, they go fast. Both the mouse and the trap. You can make it more interesting by placing a bet. I usually bet on the trap. I admire them.”

“I think I’d probably bet on the trap, too.” I’ve got a great respect for traps, he reflected. In other words a situation in which none of the doors lead out. No matter how they happen to be marked.

Helen said, “Also the UN will supply two robots free of charge for your use. For a period not to exceed six months. So better plan ahead wisely as to how you want to employ them. The best is to set them to work constructing irrigation ditches. Ours is mostly no good now. Sometimes the ditches have to run two hundred miles, even more. Or you can hatch out a deal—”

“No deals,” Barney said.

“But these are
good
deals; find someone nearby in one of the other hovels who’s started his own irrigation system and then abandoned it: buy it from him and tap it. Is your girl at Flax Back Spit going to come over here and join you?” She eyed him.

He did not answer; he watched, in the black Martian sky with its noontime stars, a circling ship. The Chew-Z man? The time, then, had come for him to poison himself so that an economic monopoly could be kept alive, a sprawling, interplan empire from which he now derived nothing.

Amazing, he thought, how strong the self-destructive drive can be.

Helen Morris, straining to see, said, “Visitors! It’s not a UN ship, either.” She started toward the hovel at once. “I’ll go tell them.”

With his left hand he reached into his coat and touched the tube deep in the interior pocket, thinking to himself, Can I actually do this? It didn’t seem possible; there was nothing in his makeup historically which would explain it. Maybe, he thought, it’s from despair at having lost everything. But he didn’t think so; it was something else.

As the ship landed on the flat desert not far off he thought, Maybe it’s to reveal something to Anne about Chew-Z. Even if the demonstration is faked. Because, he thought, if I accept the toxin into my system
she won’t try Chew-Z
. He had a strong intuition of that. And it was enough.

From the ship stepped Palmer Eldritch.

No one could fail to identify him; since his crash on Pluto the homeopapes had printed one pic after another. Of course the pics were ten years out of date, but this was still the man. Gray and bony, well over six feet tall, with swinging arms and a peculiarly rapid gait. And his face. It had a ravaged quality, eaten away; as if, Barney conjectured, the fat-layer had been consumed, as if Eldritch at some time or other had fed off himself, devoured perhaps with gusto the superfluous portions of his own body. He had enormous steel teeth, these having been installed prior to his trip to Prox by Czech dental surgeons; they were welded to his jaws, were permanent: he would die with them. And—his right arm was artificial. Twenty years ago in a hunting accident on Callisto he had lost the original; this one of course was superior in that it provided a specialized variety of interchangeable hands. At the moment Eldritch made use of the five-finger humanoid manual extremity; except for its metallic shine it might have been organic.

And he was blind. At least from the standpoint of the natural-born body. But replacements had been made—at the prices which Eldritch could and would pay; that had been done just prior to his Prox voyage by Brazilian oculists. They had done a superb job. The replacements, fitted into the bone sockets, had no pupils, nor did any ball move by muscular action. Instead a panoramic vision was supplied by a wide-angle lens, a permanent horizontal slot running from edge to edge. The accident to his original eyes had been no accident; it had occurred in Chicago, a deliberate acid-throwing attack by persons unknown, for equally unknown reasons…at least as far as the public was concerned. Eldritch probably knew. He had, however, said nothing, filed no complaint; instead he had gone straight to his team of Brazilian oculists. His horizontally slotted artificial eyes seemed to please him; almost at once he had appeared at the dedication ceremonies of the new St. George opera house in Utah, and had mixed with his near-peers without embarrassment. Even now, a decade later, the operation was rare and it was the first time Barney had ever seen the Jensen wide-angle, luxvid eyes; this, and the artificial arm with its enormously variable manual repertory, impressed him more than he would have expected…or was there something else about Eldritch?

“Mr. Mayerson,” Palmer Eldritch said, and smiled; the steel teeth glinted in the weak, cold Martian sunlight. He extended his hand and automatically Barney did the same.

Your voice, Barney thought. It originates somewhere other than—he blinked. The entire figure was insubstantial; dimly, through it, the landscape showed. It was a figment of some sort, artifically produced, and the irony came to him: so much of the man was artificial already, and now even the flesh and blood portions were, too. Is this what arrived home from Prox? Barney wondered. If so, Hepburn-Gilbert has been deceived; this is no human being. In no sense whatsoever.

“I’m still in the ship,” Palmer Eldritch said; his voice boomed from a loudspeaker mounted on the ship’s hull. “A precaution, in as much as you’re an employee of Leo Bulero.” The figment-hand touched Barney’s; he experienced a pervasive coldness slop over to him, obviously a purely psychological aversion-reaction since nothing was there to produce the sensation.

“An ex-employee,” Barney said.

Behind him, now, the others of the hovel emerged, the Scheins and Morrises and Regans; they approached like wary children as one by one they identified the nebulous man confronting Barney.

“What’s going on?” Norm Schein said uneasily. “This is a simulacrum; I don’t like it.” Standing beside Barney he said, “We’re living on the desert, Mayerson; we get mirages all the time, ships and visitors and unnatural life forms. That’s what this is; this guy isn’t really here and neither is that ship parked there.”

Tod Morris added, “They’re probably six hundred miles away; it’s an optical phenomenon. You get used to it.”

“But you can hear me,” Palmer Eldritch pointed out; the speaker boomed and echoed. “I’m here, all right, to do business with you. Who’s your hovel team-captain?”

“I am,” Norm Schein said.

“My card.” Eldritch held out a small white card and reflexively Norm Schein reached for it. The card fluttered through his fingers and came to rest on the sand. At that Eldritch smiled. It was a cold, hollow smile, an implosion, as if it had drawn back into the man everything nearby, even the thin air itself. “Look down at it,” Eldritch suggested. Norm Schein bent, and studied the card. “That’s right,” Eldritch said. “I’m here to sign a contract with your group. To deliver to you—”

“Spare us the speech about your delivering what God only promises,” Norm Schein said. “Just tell us the price.”

“About one-tenth that of the competitor’s product. And much more effective; you don’t even require a layout.” Eldritch seemed to be talking directly to Barney; his gaze, however, could not be plotted because of the structure of the lens apertures. “Are you enjoying it here on Mars, Mr. Mayerson?”

“It’s great fun,” Barney said.

Eldritch said, “Last night when Allen Faine descended from his dull little satellite to meet with you…what did you discuss?”

Rigidly, Barney said, “Business.” He thought quickly, but not quite quickly enough; the next question was already blaring from the speaker.

“So you do still work for Leo. In fact it was deliberately arranged to send you here to Mars in advance of our first distribution of Chew-Z. Why? Have you some idea of blocking it? There was no propaganda in your luggage, no leaflets or other printed matter beyond ordinary books. A rumor, perhaps. Word of mouth. Chew-Z is—what, Mr. Mayerson? Dangerous to the habitual user?”

“I don’t know. I’m waiting to try some of it. And see.”

“We’re all waiting,” Fran Schein said; she carried in her arms a load of truffle skins, clearly for immediate payment. “Can you make a delivery right now, or do we have to keep on waiting?”

“I can deliver your first allocation,” Eldritch said.

A port of the ship snapped open. From it popped a small jet-tractor; it sped toward them. A yard away it halted and ejected a carton wrapped in familiar plain brown paper; the carton lay at their feet and then at last Norm Schein bent and picked it up.
It
was not a phantasm. Cautiously Norm tore the wrappings off.

“Chew-Z,” Mary Regan said breathlessly. “Oh, what a lot! How much, Mr. Eldritch?”

“In toto,” Eldritch said, “five skins.” The tractor extended a small drawer, then, precisely the size to receive the skins.

After an interval of haggling the hovelists came to an arrangement; the five skins were deposited in the drawer—at once it was withdrawn and the tractor swiveled and zipped back to the mother ship. Palmer Eldritch, insubstantial and gray and large, remained. He appeared to be enjoying himself, Barney decided. It did not bother him to know that Leo Bulero had something up his sleeve; Eldritch thrived on this.

The realization depressed him and he walked, alone, to the meager cleared place which was eventually to be his garden. His back to the hovelists and Eldritch, he activated an autonomic unit; it began to wheeze and hum; sand disappeared into it as it sucked noisily, having difficulty. He wondered how long it would continue functioning. And what one did here on Mars to obtain repairs. Perhaps one gave up; maybe there were no repairs.

From behind Barney, Palmer Eldritch’s voice came. “Now, Mr. Mayerson, you can begin to chew away for the rest of your life.”

He turned, involuntarily, because this was not a phantasm; the man had finally come forth. “That’s right,” he said. “And nothing could delight me more.” He continued, then, tinkering with the autonomic scoop. “Where do you go to get equipment fixed on Mars?” he asked Eldritch. “Does the UN take care of that?”

Eldritch said, “How would I know?”

A portion of the autonomic scoop broke loose in Barney’s hands; he held it, weighed it. The piece, shaped like a tire iron, was heavy and he thought, I could kill him with this. Right here, in this spot. Wouldn’t that solve it? No toxin to produce grand mal seizures, no litigation…but there’d be retaliation from them. I’d outlive Eldritch by only a few hours.

But—isn’t it still worth it?

He turned. And then it happened so swiftly that he had no valid concept of it, not even an accurate perception. From the parked ship a laser beam reached forth and he felt the intense impact as it touched the metal section in his hands. At the same time Palmer Eldritch danced back, lithely, bounding upward in the slight Martian gravity; like a balloon—Barney stared but did not believe—he floated off, grinning with his huge steel teeth, waggling his artificial arm, his lank body slowly rotating. Then, as if reeled in by a transparent line, he progressed in a jerky sine-wave motion toward the ship. All at once he was gone. The nose of the ship clamped shut after him; Eldritch was inside. Safe.

“Why’d he do that?” Norm Schein said, eaten with curiosity, where he and the other hovelists stood. “What in God’s name went on, there?”

Barney said nothing; shakily he set the remains of the metal piece down. They were ashlike remnants only, brittle and dry; they crumbled away as they touched the ground.

“They got into a hassle,” Tod Morris said. “Mayerson and Eldritch; they didn’t hit it off, not one bit.”

“Anyhow,” Norm said, “we got the Chew-Z. Mayerson, you better stay away from Eldritch in the future; let me handle the transaction. If I had known that because you were an employee of Leo Bulero—”

“Former,” Barney said reflexively, and resumed his tinkering with the defective autonomic scoop. He had failed in his first try at killing Palmer Eldritch. Would he ever have a chance again?

Had he really had a chance just now?

The answer to both, he decided was no.

Late that afternoon the hovelists of Chicken Pox Prospects gathered to chew. The mood was one of tension and solemnity; scarcely anything was said as the bindles of Chew-Z, one by one, were unwrapped and passed around.

“Ugh,” Fran Schein said, making a face. “It tastes
awful
.”