The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Good question. The answer, he decided, was no. Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox… and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. From its centuries of vacant drifting as it waited for some kind of life form to pass by which it could grab and become… maybe that’s the source of its knowledge: not experience but unending solitary brooding. And in comparison I knew—had done—nothing.

At the door of the compartment Norm and Fran Schein appeared. “Hey, Mayerson; how was it? What’d you think of Chew-Z the second time around?” They entered, expectantly awaiting his answer.

Barney said, “It’ll never sell.”

Disappointed, Norm said, “That wasn’t my reaction; I liked it, and a lot better than Can-D. Except—” He hesitated, frowned, and glanced at his wife with a worried expression. “There was a creepy presence though, where I was; it sort of marred things.” He explained, “Naturally I was back—”

Fran interrupted, “Mr. Mayerson looks tired. You can give him the rest of the details later.”

Eying Barney, Norm Schein said, “You’re a strange bird, Barney. You came out of it the first time and snatched this girl’s bindle, here, this Miss Hawthorne, and ran off and locked yourself in your compartment so you could take it, and now you say—” He shrugged philosophically. “Well, maybe you just got too much in your craw all at once. You weren’t moderate, man. Me, I intend to try it again. Carefully, of course. Not like you.” Reassuring himself he said loudly, “I mean it; I liked the stuff.”

“Except,” Barney said, “for the presence that was there with you.”

“I felt it, too,” Fran said quietly. “I’m not going to try it again. I’m—afraid of it. Whatever it was.” She shivered and moved closer to her husband; automatically, from long habit, he put his arm around her waist.

Barney said, “Don’t be afraid of it. It’s just trying to live, like the rest of us are.”

“But it was so—” Fran began.

“Anything that old,” Barney said, “would have to seem unpleasant to us. We have no conception of age to that dimension. That enormity.”

“You talk like you know what it was,” Norm said.

I know, Barney thought. Because as A

“That thing,” he said, speaking to them all, especially to Norm Schein and his wife, “has a name which you’d recognize if I told it to you. Although it would never call itself that. We’re the ones who’ve titled it. From experience, at a distance, over thousands of years. But sooner or later we were bound to be confronted by it. Without the distance. Or the years.”

A

It did not seem to him necessary to answer, beyond a slight nod.

“But—evil?” Fran Schein whispered.

“An aspect,” Barney said. “Our experience of it. Nothing more.” Or didn’t I make you see that already? he asked himself. Should I tell you how it tried to help me, in its own way? And yet—how fettered it was, too, by the forces of fate, which seem to transcend all that live, including it as much as ourselves.

“Gee whiz,” Norm said, the corners of his mouth turning down in almost tearful disappointment; he looked, for a moment, like a cheated small boy.

13

Later, when his legs had ceased collapsing under him, he took A

“You know,” A

“You mean Leo?” He knew what she meant; there was no dispute about what he had just now done to Leo and to Felix Blau and the whole P. P. Layouts and Can-D organization. “Leo’s a grown man,” he pointed out. “He’ll get over it. He’ll recognize that he has to handle Eldritch himself and he will.” And, he thought, the litigation against Eldritch would not have accomplished that much; my precog ability tells me that, too.

“Beets,” A

“Were you thinking,” he said, “of coming here to live?”

“No.” Furtively, she inspected the homeostatic control box of the tractor, and picked at the frayed, partially incinerated insulation of one of its power cables. “But I expect to have di

“Listen,” he said, “that decayed ruin that you inhabit—” He broke off. Identity, he thought; I’m already acquiring it in terms of this substandard communal dwelling that could use fifty years of constant, detailed repair work by experts. “My hovel,” he said to her, “can lick your hovel. Any day of the week.”

“What about Sunday? Can you do it twice, then?”

“Sunday,” he said, “we’re not allowed to. We read the Scriptures.”

“Don’t joke about it,” A

“I wasn’t.” And he hadn’t been, not at all.

“What you said earlier about Palmer Eldritch—”

Barney said, “I only wanted to tell you one thing. Maybe two at the most. First, that he—you know what I refer to—really exists, really is there. Although not like we’ve thought and not like we’ve experienced him up to now—not like we’ll perhaps ever be able to. And second—” He hesitated.

“Say it.”

“He can’t help us very much,” Barney said. “Some, maybe. But he stands with empty, open hands; he understands, he wants to help. He tries, but… it’s just not that simple. Don’t ask me why. Maybe even he doesn’t know. Maybe it puzzles him, too. Even after all the time he’s had to mull over it.” And all the time he’ll have later on, Barney thought, if he gets away from Leo Bulero. Human, one-of-us Leo. Does Leo know what he’s up against? And if he did… would he try anyhow, keep on with his schemes?

Leo would. A precog can see something that’s foreordained.

A

“I felt,” Barney said, “about him a presence of the deity. It was there.” Especially in that one moment, he thought, when Eldritch shoved me, tried to make me try.

“Of course,” A

“The cat got the steak,” Barney said.

“Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. ‘Weigh the cat,’ someone says. They’ve had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and one guest says, ‘Okay, that’s it. There’s the steak.’ They’re satisfied that they know what happened, now; they’ve got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, ‘But where’s the cat?’”