The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (19 page)

“That’s right,” his future self said, scrutinizing her sharply. “You can test it out by putting your hand into it.”

She did so; Barney Mayerson saw her hand pass into his body and disappear. “I’ve seen phantasms before,” she said, withdrawing her hand; now she was more composed. “But never of you, dear. Everyone who consumed that abomination became a phantasm at one time or another, but recently they’ve become less frequent to us. At one time, about a year ago, you saw them everytime you turned around.” She added, “Hepburn-Gilbert finally saw one of himself; just what he deserved.”

“You realize,” his future self said to Roni, “that he’s under the domination of Eldritch, even though to us the man is dead. So we have to work cautiously. Eldritch can begin to affect his perception at any time, and when that happens he’ll have no choice but to react accordingly.”

Speaking to Barney, Roni said, “What
can
we do for you?”

“He wants to get back to Mars,” his future self said. “They’ve got an enormously complicated scheme screwed together to destroy Eldritch via the interplan courts; it involves him taking an Ionian epilepsygenic, KV-7. Or can’t you remember back to that?”

“But it never got into the courts,” Roni said. “Eldritch settled. They dropped litigation.”

“We can transport you to Mars,” his future self said to Barney, “in a P. P. Layouts ship. But that won’t accomplish anything because Eldritch will not only follow you and be with you on the trip; he’ll be there to greet you—a favorite outdoor sport of his. Never forget that a phantasm can go anywhere; it’s not bounded by time or space. That’s what makes it a phantasm, that and the fact that it has no metabolism, at least not as we understand the word. Oddly, however, it is affected by gravity. There have been a number of studies lately on the subject; anyhow not much is yet known.” Meaningfully he finished, “Especially on the subtopic, How does one return a phantasm to its own space and time—exorcise it.”

Barney said, “You’re anxious to get rid of me?” He felt cold.

“That’s right,” his future self said calmly. “Just as anxious as you are to get back; you know now you made a mistake, you know that—” He glanced at Roni and immediately ceased. He did not intend to refer to the topic of Emily in front of her.

“They’ve made some attempts with high-voltage, low-amperage electroshock,” Roni said. “And with magnetic fields. Columbia University has—”

“The best work so far,” his future self said, “is in the physics department of Cal, out on the West Coast. The phantasm is bombarded by Beta particles which disintegrate the essential protein basis for—”

“Okay,” Barney said. “I’ll leave you alone. I’ll go to the physics department at Cal and see what they can do.” He felt utterly defeated; he had been abandoned even by himself, the ultimate, he thought with impotent, wild fury. Christ!

“That’s strange,” Roni said.

“What’s strange,” his future self said, tipping his chair back, folding his arms and regarding her.

“Your saying that about Cal,” Roni said. “As far as I know they’ve never done any work with phantasms out there.” To Barney she said quietly, “Ask to see both his hands.”

Barney said, “Your hands.” But already the creeping alteration in the seated man had begun, in the jaw especially, the idiosyncratic bulge which he recognized so easily. “Forget it,” he said thickly; he felt dizzy.

His future self said mockingly, “God helps those who help themselves, Mayerson. Do you really think it’s going to do any good to go knocking all around trying to dream up someone to take pity on you? Hell,
I
pity you; I told you not to consume that second bindle. I’d release you from this if I knew how, and I know more about the drug than anyone else alive.”

“What’s going to happen to him?” Roni asked his future self, which was no longer his future self; the metamorphosis was complete and Palmer Eldritch sat tilted back at the desk, tall and gray, rocking slightly in the wheeled chair, a great mass of timeless cobwebs shaped, almost as a cavalier gesture, in quasi-human form. “My good God, is he just going to wander around here
forever?
”

“Good question,” Palmer Eldritch said gravely. “I wish I knew; for myself as well as him. I’m in it a lot deeper than he, remember.” Addressing Barney he said, “You grasp the point, don’t you, that it isn’t necessary for you to assume your normal Gestalt; you can be a stone or a tree or a jethopper or a section of antithermal roofing. I’ve been all those things and a lot more. If you become inanimate, an old log for instance, you’re no longer conscious of the passage of time. It’s an interesting possible solution for someone who wants to escape his phantasmic existence. I don’t.” His voice was low. “Because for me, returning to my own space and time means death, at Leo Bulero’s instigation. On the contrary; I can live on only in this state. But with you—” He gestured, smiling faintly. “Be a rock, Mayerson. Last it out, however long it is before the drug wears off. Ten years, a century. A million years. Or be an old fossil bone in a museum.” His gaze was gentle.

After a time Roni said, “Maybe he’s right, Barney.”

Barney walked to the desk, picked up a glass paperweight, and then set it down.

“We can’t touch him,” Roni said, “but he can—”

“The ability of phantasms to manipulate material objects,” Palmer Eldritch said, “makes it clear that they
are
present and not merely projections. Remember the poltergeist phenomenon…they were capable of hurling objects all around the house, but they were incorporeal, too.”

Mounted on the wall of the office gleamed a plaque; it was an award which Emily had received, three years before his own time, for ceramics she had entered in a show. Here it was; he still kept it.

“I want to be that plaque,” Barney decided. It was made of hardwood, probably mahogany, and brass; it would endure a long time and in addition he knew that his future self would never abandon it. He walked toward the plaque, wondering how he ceased being a man and became an object of brass and wood mounted on an office wall.

Palmer Eldritch said, “You want my help, Mayerson?”

“Yes,” he said.

Something swept him up; he put out his arms to steady himself and then he was diving, descending an endless tunnel that narrowed—he felt it squeeze around him, and he knew that he had misjudged. Palmer Eldritch had once more thought rings around him, demonstrated his power over everyone who used Chew-Z; Eldritch had done something and he could not even tell what, but anyhow it was not what he had said. Not what had been promised.

“Goddam you, Eldritch,” Barney said, not hearing his voice, hearing nothing; he descended on and on, weightless, not even a phantasm any longer; gravity had ceased to affect him, so even that was gone, too.

Leave me something, Palmer, he thought to himself. Please. A prayer, he realized, which had already been turned down; Palmer Eldritch had long ago acted—it was too late and it always had been. Then I’ll go ahead with litigation, Barney said to himself; I’ll find my way back to Mars somehow, take the toxin, spend the rest of my life in the interplan courts fighting you—and winning. Not for Leo and P. P. Layouts but for me.

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. Hmmm.” 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 goddam 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 intersystem 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.

At once he stalked from the cabin and down the corridor until he reached the locked control booth; he rapped on it with his steel knuckles and after an interval the heavy reinforced bulkhead door opened.

“Yes, Mr. Eldritch.” The young blond-haired pilot, nodding with respect.

He said, “Send out a message.”

The pilot produced a pen and poised it over his notepad mounted at the rim of the instrument board. “Who to, sir?”

“To Mr. Leo Bulero.”

“To Leo…Bulero.” The pilot wrote rapidly. “Is this to be relayed to Terra, sir? If so—”

“No. Leo is near us in his own ship. Tell him—” He pondered rapidly.

“You want to talk with him, sir?”

“I don’t want him to kill me,” he answered. “That’s what I’m trying to say. And you with me. And whoever else is on this slow transport, this idiotically huge target.” But it’s hopeless, he realized. Somebody in Felix Blau’s organization, carefully planted on Venus, saw me board this ship; Leo knows I’m here and that’s it.

“You mean business competition is that tough?” the pilot said, taken by surprise; he blanched.

Zoe Eldritch, his daughter in dirndl and fur slippers, appeared. “What is it?”

He said, “Leo’s nearby. He’s got an armed ship, by UN permission; we were lured into a trap. We never should have gone to Venus. Hepburn-Gilbert was in on it.” To the pilot he said, “Just keep trying to reach him. I’m going back to my cabin.” There’s nothing I can do here, he said to himself, and started out.

“Hell,” the pilot said, “you talk to him; it’s you he’s after.” He slid from his seat, leaving it pointedly vacant.

Sighing, Barney Mayerson seated himself and clicked on the ship’s transmitter; he set it to the emergency frequency, lifted the microphone, and said into it, “You bastard, Leo. You’ve got me; you coaxed me out where you could get at me. You and that damn fleet of yours, already set up and operating before I got back from Prox—you had the head start.” He felt more angry than frightened, now. “We’ve got nothing on this ship. Absolutely nothing to protect ourselves with—you’re shooting down an unarmed target. This is a cargo carrier.” He paused, trying to think what else to say. Tell him, he thought, that I’m Barney Mayerson and that Eldritch will never be caught and killed because he’ll translate himself from life to life forever? And that in actuality you’re killing someone you know and love?

Zoe said, “
Say
something.”

“Leo,” he said into the microphone, “let me go back to Prox. Please.” He waited, listening to the static from the receiver’s speaker. “Okay,” he said, then. “I take it back. I’ll never leave the Sol system and you can never kill me, even with Hepburn-Gilbert’s help, or whoever it is in the UN you’re operating in conjunction with.” To Zoe he said, “How’s that? You like that?” He dropped the microphone with a clatter. “I’m through.”

The first bolt of laser energy nearly cut the ship in half.

Barney Mayerson lay on the floor of the control booth, listening to the racket of the emergency air pumps wheezing into shrill, clacking life. I got what I wanted, he realized. Or at least what Palmer said I wanted. I’m getting death.

Beyond his ship Leo Bulero’s UN-model trim fighter maneuvered for the placing of a second, final bolt. He could see, on the pilot’s view-screen, the flash of its exhausts. It was very close indeed.

Lying there he waited to die.

And then Leo Bulero walked across the central room of his compartment toward him.

Interested, Anne Hawthorne rose from her chair, said, “So you’re Leo Bulero. There’re a number of questions, all pertaining to your product Can-D—”

“I don’t produce Can-D,” Leo said. “I emphatically deny that rumor. None of my commercial enterprises are in any way illegal. Listen, Barney; did you or did you not consume that—” He lowered his voice; bending over Barney Mayerson, he whispered hoarsely. “You know.”

“I’ll step outside,” Anne said, perceptively.

“No,” Leo grunted. He turned to Felix Blau, who nodded. “We realize you’re one of Blau’s people,” Leo said to her. Again he prodded Barney Mayerson, irritably. “I don’t think he took it,” he said, half to himself. “I’ll search him.” He began to rummage in Barney’s coat pockets and then in his inside shirt. “Here it is.” He fished out the tube containing the brain-metabolism toxin. Unscrewing the cap he peered in. “Unconsumed,” he said to Blau, with massive disgust. “So naturally Faine heard nothing from him. He backed out.”

Barney said, “I didn’t back out.” I’ve been a long way, he said to himself. Can’t you tell? “Chew-Z,” he said. “Very far.”

“Yeah, you’ve been out about two minutes,” Leo said with contempt. “We got here just as you locked yourself in; some fella—Norm something—let us in with his master key; he’s in charge of this hovel, I guess.”

“But remember,” Anne said, “the subjective experience with Chew-Z is disconnected to our time-rate; to him it may have been hours or even days.” She looked sympathetically in Barney’s direction. “True?”

“I died,” Barney said. He sat up, nauseated. “You killed me.”

There was a remarkable, nonplused silence.

“You mean me?” Felix Blau asked at last.

“No,” Barney said. It didn’t matter. At least not until the next time he took the drug. Once that happened the finish would arrive; Palmer Eldritch would be successful, would achieve survival. And that was the unbearable part; not his own death—which eventually would arrive anyhow—but Palmer Eldritch’s putting on immortality. Grave, he thought; where’s your victory over this—thing?

“I feel insulted,” Felix Blau complained. “I mean, what’s this about someone killing you, Mayerson? Hell, we roused you out of your coma. And it was a long, difficult trip here and for Mr. Bulero—my client—in my opinion a risky one; this is the region where Eldritch operates.” He glanced about apprehensively. “Get him to take that toxic substance,” he said to Leo, “and then let’s get back to Terra before something terrible happens. I can feel it.” He started toward the door of the compartment.

Leo said, “Will you take it, Barney?”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?” Weariness. Even patience.

“My life means too much to me.” I’ve decided to halt in my atoning, he thought. At last.

“What happened to you while you were translated?”

He rose to his feet; he barely made it.