Seconds (18 page)

“I have none, as it happens. But I was going to—”

“You were perhaps reared in the Protestant faith?”

“Yes.”

“And you were never converted to any other?”

“Well, no.”

“Good. That is,” Dr. Morris amended with a smile, “I mean ‘good' in the sense that we have a certain definition. I don't mean to suggest that being a Protestant is any better than being a Catholic or a Jew, and as a matter of fact, I would be qualified, if I may say so, to serve you in either of those faiths as well.”

Wilson gazed at him uncertainly.

“Meaning that I have been ordained,” said Dr. Morris modestly, “in each. Rabbi, priest, minister. I admit it's unusual, and perhaps a bit ‘advanced,' as you might put it, but on the other hand, the company is anxious to cover as much ground as possible at minimum expense. A praiseworthy attitude, mind you, although it does indicate that at the moment the religious department—meaning my humble self—is perhaps a mite less influential than it will surely become some day. I foresee the time,” he declared, “when there will be at least one minister for each faith, Mr. Wilson. With perhaps a department head of sufficient experience,” he added, meaningfully, “to exercise adequate supervision.”

“Yes, I see,” said Wilson. “But as for my questions—”

Dr. Morris ignored the unasked questions. “The workload is already tremendous, Mr. Wilson. Too much for any one man, actually, especially when one has to keep switching back and forth from Gospel to Torah, depending on the client. And then, you can imagine my trepidation, sir, when I consider it is a distinct statistical possibility that one day I may be confronted with a Moslem!” He nodded his head sagely at Wilson. “I've warned them, Mr. Wilson. I've given them plenty of notice. But they merely keep putting me off. ‘Budgetary problems.' That's what they say. The unfortunate part is that it's true, I suppose. Corners must be cut. Costs must be reduced. I know that. But at the same time . . .”

Wilson sat stolidly in his chair, hoping that Dr. Morris's complaints would run their course before the orderlies reappeared to hustle him to some other stage of his briefing. From time to time he nodded politely, and muttered civil phrases of agreement, but as the time passed and Dr. Morris showed no signs of reaching a conclusion, his impatience rose up, together with a certain anxiety.

“You must tell me, Dr. Morris,” be broke in finally, “what's going to happen to me. I've got to know that.”

“What's going to happen to you? Why, my good sir, this is the end of your briefing. No more stages, Mr. Wilson. When we have finished”—the minister glanced at his wristwatch—“then you will be conducted back to the dayroom to rejoin your comrades.”

“I don't mean that. I mean . . .” Wilson's voice trailed off. He waved his hands, seeking adequate words. “I mean . . . ultimately.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Morris, and as if recalled to his professional duties, he composed his features into a more pious expression. “Ultimately, Mr. Wilson. Ultimately, we will be called to face the Creator and render up our last account. It happens to all of us, sir.”

“But what about
me
—now?”

“Every mortal man must experience the translation from earthly habitation—”

“That's not an answer!” Wilson's impatience now was almost beyond endurance. He found that his heart was pounding, that his skin was flushed with perspiration, and that his hand had reached out to grasp, as if for support, the statuette on the desk. “You aren't giving me a straight answer, Dr. Morris! You know what I've got to find out!”

“Don't shout, sir, please.” Dr. Morris's piety had taken on a coloration of alarm. He smiled placatingly, but his right hand edged stealthily to the corner of the desk, toward a call-button. “Get a grip on yourself, Mr. Wilson. And by the way, that statuette is plastic, sir, and might easily be cracked.”

Wilson withdrew his hand. “Please,” he asked, in a more controlled voice. “Just answer my question. Only one question, that's all. Don't ring for the orderlies, Dr. Morris, I beg you. Just—”

“All right, Mr. Wilson. It's only that this room is so confoundedly small, and when someone starts shouting, it's sheer bedlam. If the company'd only give me an office of decent size—”

“My question,” Wilson said quickly, to forestall another review of administrative shortcomings, “is—what actually happens in what they call surgery?”

“Well, I'm no surgeon, Mr. Wilson. I'm not in attendance on those occasions, sir, as I'm sure you will realize—”

“You're being evasive, Dr. Morris.”

“—and I can only advise you,” the minister continued, “to make your peace with yourself and your God, whether you happen to have one or not . . .”

Wilson nodded his head. He kept nodding it. The words of Dr. Morris seemed somehow to have become connected with those muscles of his neck which governed nodding, so that each word produced a corresponding little jerking movement of the head.

“ . . . ‘Our time is a very shadow that passeth away,' ” Dr. Morris droned on, quoting with liberality from both Jewish and Christian sources, “ ‘and man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble . . .' ”

As he spoke, the minister kept glancing furtively at his watch, and at the door, occasionally giving Wilson a reassuring smile, and then blinking in an abstracted way around the room, as though even while providing his visitor with divine consolation, he were still preoccupied with the lowly status of the religious department.

“ ‘I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were, um, dead, yet shall he live . . .' ”

Dr. Morris began to speak more hastily, sometimes getting his quotations jumbled, or uttering those that were inappropriate to the occasion, and Wilson's nodding, too, continued at a faster pace. He tried to hold his head still, but in vain. He finally seized his head with his hands, attempting both to stop its movements and to cover his ears. Dr. Morris was right; the office was too small, too terribly small. The walls seemed to lean against each other, separated only by a tiny cushion of air, and the air itself was being sucked away by the vacuum of the minister's voice, so that soon the substance would be quite gone, and there would be nothing to prevent the walls from flopping down on them.

He shouted something at the walls. His eyes were closed, his ears blocked tightly by his hands, his body doubled up in the chair waiting for the room to fold him flat. The only thing to do was shout. Shout for help.

Then he felt something nip at his arm; a single tooth. He looked wildly around.

Dr. Morris had departed. The orderlies had returned, and one of them was holding an empty syringe. But the walls, at least, had not fallen.

“I want to see my contract,” Wilson said. “I've got a right to see my contract.” He glared at the orderlies, who remained impassive. “It's bound to be in the contract, if it's there—and it couldn't be there because I read it myself.” He raised his hands imploringly. “At least, I
think
I read it.”

The orderlies gently raised him to his feet and moved him to the door.

“It wasn't exactly a contract, come to think of it,” Wilson said. “It was in the form of a will, actually, but a man can't legally will his living body for medical or commercial purposes—it simply can't be done, gentlemen!” The orderlies grunted with the effort of propelling him along the corridor, but made no other response. “It's against the common law! It's against all moral standards! Of course, I realize that the will was made by a man who no longer exists,” Wilson added, attempting to anticipate what would undoubtedly be the company's counterarguments, “and that in my present form I am, in a sense, actually a creation of the company, so that possibly there are certain proprietary rights involved . . . But only skin-deep, gentlemen! Only skin-deep! I mean, you can take back the pound of flesh, but the blood—that's mine, isn't it? . . . Isn't it?” he echoed plaintively, as the orderlies carefully conveyed him into a small room and eased him down on an old-fashioned black leather sofa. He tried to rise, but his legs refused to push him up. He stared down at them in perplexity.

“Do you feel calmer, sir?” one of the orderlies inquired, not unkindly.

“Oh—well, yes,” said Wilson, truthfully. His arm ached a bit where the needle had gone in, but otherwise he was physically at ease. “It's not a question of calmness, my young friends,” he added, “but of justice. Human justice.” He sought to describe the shape of justice with his hands, but they, too, declined to obey him, preferring to remain limply folded in his lap, and when he glanced up from them, he discovered that the orderlies had gone.

“Hello, Mr. Wilson.”

It was the company president, seated across the little room in a sagging wooden chair.

“I'm sorry—I guess I didn't notice you, sir,” said Wilson.

“Not at all,” the old man said, with a deprecatory gesture. “I'm not the noticeable type, my boy.” He sighed and fumbled with his vest, from which two buttons were missing. “I'm sorry about all of this, Mr. Wilson,” he finally said. “I really hoped you'd make it. I hoped you'd find your dream come true.”

“I never had a dream.”

“Maybe that was it,” the old man said. “Yes, that may very well have been it.” He nodded his head in a forlorn way, as if Wilson had provided him with a distressing but inevitable insight.

“I seem to be nothing but trouble for you,” Wilson said, humbly. “Coming—and going.”

“Ah, well,” the old man muttered, scratching his seamed forehead and then inspecting his fingernails. “You're not the only one, my boy.”

“You mean all the others in the dayroom?”

“Those, and others. There are other dayrooms, Mr. Wilson. We keep having to add them on, and it's taking up space required for administrative and operating divisions, I'm afraid, but there's not much we can do about it. No sir, the proportion of failures—if you'll forgive the word—is so high, my boy, that I'd be ashamed to mention it to you. But possibly it makes you feel a little better to know that you're not in a minority?”

“Not really.”

“No, I suppose not.” The president sighed again. His chair creaked sympathetically. “No, it's not a minority, I fear,” he repeated, and then, mumbling slightly, he added: “Oh, when I began the business—and that was a long time ago, son, an awfully long time—I was a young man myself . . .” He paused and blew his nose. “Um, what was I saying?”

“You were telling me about when you started the business.”

“Yes. Well, I was a young man, as I said. A young man with an idea.” He chuckled mournfully. “Believe me, Mr. Wilson, there's nothing in the world so frightening and pathetic as a young man with an idea! And an altruistic idea, to boot. That's the worst. No sir, I wasn't aiming to make a lot of money. It had to be a self-supporting commercial operation, true enough, but that was just the necessary foundation to give expression to this idea of mine. You know: helping others. Helping others to a little happiness . . . and not just the wealthy—although at first, of course, I realized that I'd have to start with those who could afford high fees—but ultimately everybody. A mass market, Mr. Wilson.” He drew out his pipe and rubbed it carefully against his cheek, then began to fill it from an old leather tobacco pouch.

“Yes?”

“Oh. Well, then the failures began. I didn't pay much attention at first, you see, being preoccupied with the administrative end of things. I thought to myself: get the business established on a firm footing, and then there'd be time to iron out the bugs. And all the time, you understand, I took comfort in the thought that in my small way I was waging a battle against human misery. I
was,
too, except . . .” He stopped to light his pipe.

“Except what, sir?”

“Eh? Oh, except that the failures kept on coming, more and more, and I finally had to admit that I might possibly have based my enterprise on a fallacy. I've always tried to be honest with myself, son. That's the only way to live honorably.” He waved his pipe, which promptly went out, and he was forced to light it again. “As for that fallacy, it was simply this: that my business seemed to attract the wrong kind of clients. In fact, I often wondered whether it didn't attract
only
the wrong kind of clients.”

“I don't quite—”

“It's simple, my boy. My clients were men who were ready to abandon their original identities . . . and why? Because, for one reason or another, they had made a botch of things (apart from material success, of course), and I can't imagine what possessed me to think that these gentlemen would be likely to do much better just because I gave them a new face and a new name.”

“But if you realized this, then why didn't you stop? I don't mean to be critical,” said Wilson, “but wasn't it just a little bit dishonest to keep on?”

The old man looked even sadder than before. “Ah, well, you're right, Wilson. But it wasn't all that easy. By the time I came to this conclusion, you see, I had built up a big organization. I had a staff running into the hundreds. I had a tremendous investment in facilities and equipment and the like, which couldn't just be turned off overnight, you know. And then, too,” he added ruefully, “I was no longer the only voice in authority, because we're a modern concern, Wilson, with profit-sharing and a board of directors and all . . .” He put his pipe away again. “And I couldn't very well take sole responsibility for throwing all these people out of work, could I? As it is, Wilson, we're having some financial difficulties. You've got no idea what the expenses are like in this sort of business,” he remarked, gloomily. “We keep needing to get more clients to help support the cost of processing those we're working on, and we have to cut all sorts of corners . . . and then, too, we've got to keep a close check on the reborns outside, because with the high incidence of failure, we never can tell when one of them might try to make trouble by, for instance, deciding to sue us in court. You can see why we couldn't let that happen, Wilson.”