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“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 jet-hopper 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 tu
“Goddamn 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 the 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 wi
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.
12
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.”