The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Page 12

  And this time, he saw, was one of them; she got that stubborn look in her eyes, the refusal to be normally passive. “I think it’s up to me,” she said with dignity. “And I intend to continue.”

  Shrugging, he roamed about the conapt. He had no power over her; nor did he care. But was that true? Did he really not care? An image appeared in his mind, of Emily devolving…and at the same time trying to work on her pots, trying to be creative. It was funny—and dreadful.

  “Listen,” he said roughly. “If that guy actually loves you—”

  “But I told you,” Emily said. “It’s my decision.” She returned to her wheel; a great tall pot was being thrown, and he walked over to get a good look at it. A nice one, he decided. And yet—familiar. Hadn’t she done such a pot already? He said nothing, however; he merely studied it. “What do you suppose you’re going to do?” Emily asked. “Who could you work for?” She seemed sympathetic and it made him remember how, recently, he had blocked the sale of her pots to P. P. Layouts. Easily, she could have held a great animosity toward him, but it was typical of her not to. And of course she knew that it was he who had turned Hnatt down.

  He said, “My future may be decided. I got a draft notice.”

  “Good grief. You on Mars; I can’t picture it.”

  “I can chew Can-D,” he said. “Only—” Instead of having a Perky Pat layout, he thought, maybe I’ll have an Emily layout. And spend time, in fantasy, back with you, back to the life I deliberately, moronically, turned my back on. The only really good period of my life, when I was genuinely happy. But of course I didn’t know it, because I had nothing to compare it to…as I have now. “Is there any chance,” he said, “that you’d like to come?”

  She stared at him and he stared back, both of them dumbfounded by what he had proposed.

  “I mean it,” he said.

  “When did you decide that?”

  “It doesn’t matter when I decided it,” he said. “All that matters is that that’s how I feel.”

  “It also matters how I feel,” Emily said quietly; she then resumed potting. “And I’m perfectly happy married to Richard. We get along just swell.” Her face was placid; beyond doubt she meant every word of it. He was damned, doomed, consigned to the void which he had hollowed out for himself. And he deserved it. They both knew that, without either saying it.

  “I guess I’ll go,” he said.

  Emily didn’t protest that, either. She merely nodded.

  “I hope in the name of God,” he said, “that you’re not devolving. I think you are, personally. I can see it, in your face for instance. Look in the mirror.” With that he departed; the door shut after him. Instantly he regretted what he had said, and yet it might be a good thing…it might help her, he thought. Because I could see it. And I don’t want that; nobody does. Not even that jackass of a husband of hers that she prefers over me…for reasons I’ll never know, except perhaps that marriage to him has the aspect of destiny. She’s fated to live with Richard Hnatt, fated never to be my wife again; you can’t reverse the flow of time.

  You can when you chew Can-D, he thought. Or the new product, Chew-Z. All the colonists do. It’s not available on Earth but it is on Mars or Venus or Ganymede, any of the frontier colonies.

  If everything else fails, there’s that.

  And perhaps it already had failed. Because—

  In the last analysis he could not go to Palmer Eldritch. Not after what the man had done—or tried to do—to Leo. He realized this as he stood outdoors waiting for a cab. Beyond him the midday street shimmered and he thought, Maybe I’ll step out there. Would anyone find me before I died? Probably not. It would be as good a way as any…

  So there goes my last hope of employment. It would amuse Leo that I’d balk here. He’d be surprised and probably pleased.

  Just for the hell of it, he decided, I’ll call Eldritch, ask him, see if he would give me a job.

  He found a vidphone booth and put through a call to Eldritch’s demesne on Luna.

  “This is Barney Mayerson,” he explained. “Previously top Pre-Fash consultant to Leo Bulero; as a matter of fact I was second in command at P. P. Layouts.”

  Eldritch’s personnel manager frowned and said, “Well? What do you want?”

  “I’d like to see about a job with you.”

  “We’re not hiring any Pre-Fash consultants. Sorry.”

  “Would you ask Mr. Eldritch, please?”

  “Mr. Eldritch has already expressed himself on the matter.”

  Barney hung up. He left the vidphone booth.

  He was not really surprised.

  If they had said, Come to Luna for an interview, would I have gone? Yes, he realized. I’d have gone but at some point I’d have pulled out. Once I had firmly established that they’d give me the job.

  Returning to the vidphone booth he called his UN selective service board. “This is Mr. Barney Mayerson.” He gave them his official code-ident number. “I received my notice the other day. I’d like to waive the formalities and go right in. I’m anxious to emigrate.”

  “The physical can’t be bypassed,” the UN bureaucrat informed him. “Nor can the mental. But if you choose you may come by any time, right now if you wish, and take both.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I will.”

  “And since you are volunteering, Mr. Mayerson, you get to pick—”

  “Any planet or moon is fine with me,” he said. He rang off, left the booth, found a cab, and gave it the address of the selective service board near his conapt building.

  As the cab hummed above downtown New York another cab rose and zipped ahead of it, wig-wagging its side fins in a rocking motion.

  “They are trying to contact us,” the autonomic circuit of his own cab informed him. “Do you wish to respond?”

  “No,” Barney said. “Speed up.” And then he changed his mind. “Can you ask them who they are?”

  “By radio, perhaps.” The cab was silent a moment and then it stated, “They claim to have a message for you from Palmer Eldritch; he wants to tell you that he will accept you as an employee and for you not to—”

  “Let’s have that again,” Barney said.

  “Mr. Palmer Eldritch, whom they represent, will employ you as you recently requested. Although they have a general rule—”

  “Let me talk to them,” Barney said.

  A mike was presented to him.

  “Who is this?” Barney said into it.

  An unfamiliar man’s voice said, “This is Icholtz. From Chew-Z Manufacturers of Boston. May we land and discuss the matter of your employment with our firm?”

  “I’m on my way to the draft board. To give myself up.”

  “There’s nothing in writing, is there? You haven’t signed.”

  “No.”

  “Good. Then it’s not too late.”

  Barney said, “But on Mars I can chew Can-D.”

  “Why do you want to do that, for godssake?”

  “Then I can be back with Emily.”

  “Who’s Emily?”

  “My previous wife. Who I kicked out because she became pregnant. Now I realize it was the only happy time of my life. In fact I love her more now than I ever did; it’s grown instead of faded.”

  “Look,” Icholtz said. “We can supply you with all the Chew-Z you want and it’s superior; you can live forever in an eternal unchanging perfect now with your ex-wife. So there’s no problem.”

  “But maybe I don’t want to work for Palmer Eldritch.”

  “You applied!”

  “I’ve got doubts,” Barney said. “Grave ones. I tell you; don’t call me, I’ll call you. If I don’t go into the service.” He handed the mike back to the cab. “Here. Thanks.”

  “It’s patriotic to go into the service,” the cab said.

  “Mind your own business,” Barney said.

  “I think you’re doing the right thing,” the cab said, anyhow.

  “If only I had gone to Sigma 14-B to save Le
o,” he said. “Or was it Luna? Wherever he was; I can’t even remember now. It all seems like a disfigured dream. Anyhow if I had I’d still be working for him and everything would be all right.”

  “We all make mistakes,” the cab said piously.

  “But some of us,” Barney said, “make fatal ones.” First about our loved ones, our wife and children, and then about our employer, he said to himself.

  The cab hummed on.

  And then, he said to himself, we make one last one. About our whole life, summing it all up. Whether to take a job with Eldritch or go into the service. And whichever we choose we can know this:

  It was the wrong alternative.

  An hour later he had taken his physical; he had passed and thereupon the mental was administered by something not unlike Dr. Smile.

  He passed that, too.

  In a daze he took the oath (“I swear to look upon Earth as the mother and leader,” etc.) and then, with a folio of greetings!-type information, was ejected to go back to his conapt and pack. He had twenty-four hours before his ship left for—wherever they were sending him. They had not as yet uttered this. The notification of destination, he conjectured, probably began, “ ‘Mene, mene, tekel.’ ” At least it should, considering the possible choices to which it was limited.

  I’m in, he said to himself with every sort of reaction: gladness, relief, terror, and then the melancholy that came with an overwhelming sense of defeat. Anyhow, he thought as he rode back to his conapt, this beats stepping out into the midday sun, becoming, as they say, a mad dog or an Englishman.

  Or did it?

  Anyhow, this was slower. It took longer to die this way, possibly fifty years, and that appealed to him more. But why, he did not know.

  However, he reflected, I can always decide to speed it up. On the colony world there are undoubtedly as many opportunities for that as there are here, perhaps even more.

  While he was packing his possessions, ensconced for the last time in his beloved, worked-for conapt, the vidphone rang.

  “Mr. Bayerson—” A girl, some minor official of some sub-front-office department of the UN’s colonizing apparatus. Smiling.

  “Mayerson.”

  “Yes. What I called for, you see, is to tell you your destination, and—lucky you, Mr. Mayerson!—it will be the fertile area of Mars known as Fineburg Crescent. I know you’ll enjoy it there. Well, so goodbye, sir, and good luck.” She kept right on smiling, even up until he had cut off the image. It was the smile of someone who was not going.

  “Good luck to you, too,” he said.

  Fineburg Crescent. He had heard of it; relatively, it actually was fertile. Anyhow the colonists there had gardens: it was not, like some areas, a waste of frozen methane crystals and gas descending in violent, ceaseless storms year in, year out. Believe it or not he could go up to the surface from time to time, step out of his hovel.

  In the corner of the living room of his conapt rested the suitcase containing Dr. Smile; he switched it on and said, “Doctor, you’ll have a bit of trouble believing this, but I have no further need of your services. Goodbye and good luck, as the girl who isn’t going said.” He added by way of explanation, “I volunteered.”

  “Cdryxxxxx,” Dr. Smile blared, slipping a cog down below in the conapt building’s basement. “But for your type—that’s virtually impossible. What was the reason, Mr. Mayerson?”

  “The death wish,” he said, and shut the psychiatrist off; he resumed his packing in silence. God, he thought. And a little while ago Roni and I had such big plans; we were going to sell out Leo on a grand scale, go over to Eldritch with an enormous splash. What happened to all that? I’ll tell you what happened, he said to himself; Leo acted first.

  And now Roni has my job. Exactly what she wanted.

  The more he thought of it the angrier it made him, in a baffled sort of way. But there was nothing he could do about it, at least not in this world. Maybe when he chewed Can-D or Chew-Z he could inhabit a universe where—

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Hi,” Leo said. “Can I come in?” He entered the apt, wiping his immense forehead with a folded handkerchief. “Hot day. I looked in the ’pape and it’s gone up six-tenths of—”

  “If you came to offer me my job back,” Barney said, pausing in his packing, “it’s too late because I’ve entered the service. I’m leaving tomorrow for the Fineburg Crescent.” It would be a final irony if Leo wanted to make peace; the ultimate turn of the blind wheels of creation.

  “I’m not offering you your job back. And I know you’ve been inducted; I’ve got informants in the selective service and anyhow Dr. Smile notified me. I was paying him—you didn’t know this, of course—to report to me on your progress in declining under stress.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  Leo said, “I want you to accept a job with Felix Blau. It’s all worked out.”

  “The rest of my life,” Barney said quietly, “will be spent at Fineburg Crescent. Don’t you understand?”

  “Take it easy. I’m trying to make the best of a bad situation and you’d better, too. Both of us acted too hastily, me in firing you, you in giving yourself up to your Dracula-type selective service board. Barney, I think I know a way to ensnare Palmer Eldritch. I’ve hashed it out with Blau and he likes the idea. You’re to pose as a colonist—” Leo corrected himself. “Or rather go ahead, live your actual colonist-type life, become one of the group. Now, one of these days, probably in the next week, Eldritch is going to start peddling Chew-Z in your area. They may right away approach you; anyhow we hope so. We’re counting on it.”

  Barney rose to his feet. “And I’m supposed to jump to and buy.”

  “Right.”

  “Why?”

  “You file a complaint—our legal boys will draw it up for you—with the UN. Declaring that the goddam miserable unholy crap produced highly toxic side effects in you; never mind what, now. We’ll escalate you into a test case, compel the UN to ban Chew-Z as harmful, dangerous—we’ll keep it off Terra completely. Actually it’s ideal, you quitting your job with P. P. and going into the service; it couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

  Barney shook his head.

  “What’s that mean?” Leo said.

  “I’m out of it.”

  “Why?”

  Barney shrugged. Actually he did not know. “After the way I let you down—”

  “You panicked. You didn’t know what to do; it’s not your job. I should have had Smile contact the head of our company police, John Seltzer. All right, so you made a mistake. It’s over.”

  “No,” Barney said. Because, he thought, of what I learned from it about myself; I can’t forget that. Those insights, they only go one way, and that’s straight at your heart. And they’re poison-filled.

  “Don’t brood, for chrissakes. I mean, it’s morbid; you still have a whole lifetime ahead, even if it is at Fineburg Crescent; I mean, you’d probably have been drafted anyhow. Right? You agree?” Agitated, Leo paced about the living room. “What a mess. All right, don’t help us out; let Eldritch and those Proxers do whatever it is they’re up to, taking over the Sol system or even worse, the entire universe, starting with us.” He halted, glared at Barney.

  “Let me—think it over.”

  “Wait’ll you take Chew-Z. You’ll find out. It’s going to contaminate us all, starting inside and working to the surface—it’s utter derangement.” Wheezing with exertion, Leo paused to cough violently. “Too many cigars,” he said, weakly. “Jeez.” He eyed Barney. “The guy’s given me a day, you know that? I’m supposed to capitulate and if not—” He snapped his fingers.

  “I can’t be on Mars that soon,” Barney said. “Let alone be set up to buy a bindle of Chew-Z from a pusher.”

  “I know that.” Leo’s voice was hard. “But he can’t destroy me that soon; it’ll take him weeks, maybe even months. And by then we’ll have someone in the courts who can show damages. I recognize this doesn�
��t sound to you like much, but—”

  Barney said, “Contact me when I’m on Mars. At my hovel.”

  “I’ll do that! I’ll do that!” And then, half to himself, Leo said, “And it’ll give you a reason.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing, Barney.”

  “Explain.”

  Leo shrugged. “Hell, I know the spot you’re in. Roni’s got your job; you were right. And I had you traced; I know you went beeline-wise to your ex. You still love her and she won’t come with you, will she? I know you better than you know yourself. I know exactly why you didn’t show up to bail me out when Palmer had me; your whole life has led up to your replacing me and now that’s collapsed, you have to start over with something new. Too bad, but you did it to yourself, by overreaching. See, I don’t plan to step aside, never did. You’re good, but not as an executive, only as Pre-Fash boy; you’re too petty. Look at how you turned down those pots of Richard Hnatt’s. That was a dead giveaway, Barney. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.” Barney said finally. “Possibly you’re right.”

  “Well, so you learned a lot about yourself. And you can start again, Fineburg Crescent-wise.” Leo slapped him on the back. “Become a leader in your hovel; make it creative and productive or whatever hovels do. And you’ll be a spy for Felix Blau; that’s big-time.”

  Barney said, “I could have gone over to Eldritch.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t. Who cares what you might have done?”

  “You think I did the right thing to volunteer for the service?”

  Leo said quietly, “Fella, what the hell else could you do?”

  There was no answer to that. And they both knew it.

  “When the urge strikes you,” Leo said, “to feel sorry for yourself, remember this. Palmer Eldritch wants to kill me…I’m a lot worse off than you.”

  “I guess so.” It rang true, and he had one more intuition to accompany that.

  His situation would become the same as Leo’s the moment he initiated litigation against Palmer Eldritch.