The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Page 19

  Well, he thought, two more hours of independent life, plus the time it takes to travel to Mars. Maybe ten hours of private existence, and then—swallowed. And all over Mars that hideous drug is being distributed; think, picture, the numbers confined to Palmer’s illusory worlds, his nets that he casts. What do those Buddhists in the UN like Hepburn-Gilbert call it? Maya. The veil of illusion. Sheoot, he thought dismally, and reached to snap on his intercom in order to requisition a fast ship for the flight. And I want a good pilot, he remembered; too many autonomic landings of late have been failures: I don’t intend to be splattered all over the countryside—especially that countryside.

  To Miss Gleason he said, “Who’s the best interplan pilot we have?”

  “Don Davis,” Miss Gleason said promptly. “He has a perfect record in—you know. His flights from Venus.” She did not refer explicitly to their Can-D enterprise; even the intercom might be tapped.

  Ten minutes later the travel arrangements had all been made.

  Leo Bulero leaned back in his chair, lit a large green Havana-leaf claro cigar which had been housed in a helium-filled humidor, probably for years…the cigar, as he bit the end off, seemed dry and brittle; it cracked under the pressure of his teeth and he felt disappointment. It had appeared so good, so perfectly preserved in its coffin. Well, you never know, he informed himself. Until you get right to it.

  His office door opened. Miss Gleason, the ship-requisition papers in her hands, entered.

  The hand which held the papers was artificial; he made out the glint of undisguised metal and at once he raised his head to scrutinize her face, the rest of her. Neanderthal teeth, he thought; that’s what those giant stainless steel molars look like. Reversion, two hundred thousand years back; revolting. And the luxvid or vidlux or whatever they were eyes, without pupils, only slits. Jensen Labs of Chicago’s product, anyhow.

  “Goddam you, Eldritch,” he said.

  “I’m your pilot, too,” Palmer Eldritch, from within the shape of Miss Gleason, said. “And I was thinking of greeting you when you land. But that’s too much, too soon.”

  “Give me the papers to sign,” Leo said, reaching out.

  Surprised, Palmer Eldritch said, “You still intend to make the trip to Mars?” He looked decidedly taken aback.

  “Yes,” Leo said, and waited patiently for the requisition papers.

  Once you’ve taken Chew-Z you’re delivered over. At least that’s how dogmatic, devout, fanatical Anne Hawthorne would phrase it. Like sin, Barney Mayerson thought; it’s the condition of slavery. Like the Fall. And the temptation is similar.

  But what’s missing here is a way by which we can be freed. Would we have to go to Prox to find it? Even there it may not exist. Not in the universe anywhere.

  Anne Hawthorne appeared at the door of the hovel’s transmitter room. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure,” Barney said. “You know, we got ourselves into this. No one made us chew Chew-Z.” He dropped his cigarette to the floor and erased its life with the toe of his boot. “And you won’t give me your bindle,” he said. But it was not Anne denying it to him. It was Palmer Eldritch, operating through her, holding back.

  Even so, I can take it from her, he realized.

  “Stop,” she said. Or rather it said.

  “Hey,” Norm Schein yelled from the transmitter room, jumping to his feet, amazed. “What are you doing, Mayerson? Let her—”

  The strong artificial arm struck him; the metal fingers clawed and it was almost enough; they pried at his neck, knowingly, alert to the spot where death could most effectively be administered. But he had the bindle and that was it; he let the creature go.

  “Don’t take it, Barney,” she said quietly. “It’s just too soon after the first dose. Please.”

  Without answering he started off, toward his own compartment.

  “Will you do one thing for me?” she called after him. “Divide it in half, let me take it with you. So I can be along.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Maybe I can help you by being there.”

  Barney said, “I can make it on my own.” If I can reach Emily before the divorce, before Richard Hnatt shows up—as I first did, he thought. That’s the only place I have any real chance. Again and again, he thought. Try! Until I’m successful.

  He locked the door.

  As he devoured the Chew-Z he thought about Leo Bulero. You got away. Probably because Palmer Eldritch was weaker than you. Is that it? Or was Eldritch simply paying out the line, letting you dangle? You could come here and stop me; now, though, there’s no stopping. Even Eldritch warned me; speaking through Anne Hawthorne; it was too much even for him, and now what? Have I gone so far that I’ve plunged to the bottom out of even his sight? Where even Palmer Eldritch can’t go, where nothing exists.

  And of course, he thought, I can’t get back up.

  His head ached and he shut his eyes involuntarily. It was as if his brain, alive and frightened, had physically stirred; he felt it tremble. Altered metabolism, he realized. Shock. I’m sorry, he said to himself, apologizing to his somatic part. Okay?

  “Help,” he said, aloud.

  “Aw, help—my ass,” a man’s voice grated. “What do you want me to do, hold your hand? Open your eyes or get out of here. That period you spent on Mars, it ruined you and I’m fed up. Come on!”

  “Shut up,” Barney said. “I’m sick; I went too far. You mean all you can do is bawl me out?” He opened his eyes, and faced Leo Bulero, who was at his big, littered oak desk. “Listen,” Barney said. “I’m on Chew-Z; I can’t stop it. If you can’t help me then I’m finished.” His legs bent as if melting as he made his way to a nearby chair and seated himself.

  Regarding him thoughtfully, smoking a cigar, Leo said, “You’re on Chew-Z now?” He scowled. “As of two years ago—”

  “It’s banned?”

  “Yeah. Banned. My God. I don’t know if it’s worth my talking you; what are you, some kind of phantasm from the past?”

  “You heard what I said; I said I’m on it.” He clenched his fists.

  “Okay, okay.” Leo puffed masses of heavy gray smoke, agitatedly. “Don’t get excited. Hell, I went ahead and saw the future, too, and it didn’t kill me. And anyhow, for chrissakes, you’re a precog—you ought to be used to it. Anyhow—” he leaned back in his chair, swiveled about, then crossed his legs. “I saw this monument, see? Guess to who. To me.” He eyed Barney, then shrugged.

  Barney said, “I have nothing to gain, nothing at all, from this time period. I want my wife back. I want Emily.” He felt enraged, upsurging bitterness. The bile of disappointment.

  “Emily.” Leo Bulero nodded. Then, into his intercom, he said, “Miss Gleason, please don’t let anything bother us for a while.” He again turned his attention to Barney, surveying him acutely. “That fellow Hnatt—is that his name?—got hauled in by the UN police along with the rest of the Eldritch organization; see, Hnatt had this contract that he signed with Eldritch’s business agent. Well, they gave him the choice of a prison sentence—okay, I admit it’s unfair, but don’t blame me—or emigrating. He emigrated.”

  “What about her?”

  “With that pot business of hers? How the hell could she conduct it from a hovel underneath the Martian desert? Naturally she dumped the dumb jerk. Well so see if you had waited—”

  Barney said, “Are you really Leo Bulero? Or are you Palmer Eldritch? And this is to make me feel even worse—is that it?”

  Raising an eyebrow, Leo said, “Palmer Eldritch is dead.”

  “But this isn’t real; this is a drug-induced fantasy. Translation.”

  “The hell it isn’t real.” Leo glared at him. “What does that make me, then? Listen.” He pointed his finger angrily at Barney. “There’s nothing unreal about me; you’re the one who’s a goddam phantasm, like you said, out of the past. I mean, you’ve got the situation completely backward. You hear this?” He banged on the surface of his desk with all the strength
in his hands. “The sound reality makes. And I say that your ex-wife and Hnatt are divorced; I know because she sells her pots to us for minning. In fact, she was in Roni Fugate’s office last Thursday.” Grumpily, he smoked his cigar, still glaring at Barney.

  “Then all I have to do,” Barney said, “is look her up.” It was as simple as that.

  “Oh yeah,” Leo agreed, nodding. “But just one thing. What are you going to do with Roni Fugate? You’re living with her in this world that you seem to like to imagine as unreal.”

  Astounded, Barney said, “After two years?”

  “And Emily knows it because since she’s been selling her pots to us through Roni the two of them have become buddies; they tell each other their secrets. Look at it from Emily’s viewpoint. If she lets you come back to her Roni’ll probably stop accepting her pots for minning. It’s a risk, and I bet Em won’t want to take it. I mean, we give Roni absolute say-so, like you had in your time.”

  Barney said, “Emily would never put her career ahead of her own life.”

  “You did. Maybe Em learned from you, got the message. And anyhow, even without that Hnatt guy, why would Emily want to go back to you? She’s leading a very successful life, with her career; she’s planet-famous and she’s got skin after skin salted away…you want the truth? She’s got all the men she wants. Any darn time. Em doesn’t need you; face it, Barney. Anyhow, what’s lacking about Roni? Frankly I wouldn’t mind—”

  “I think you’re Palmer Eldritch,” Barney said.

  “Me?” Leo tapped his chest. “Barney, I killed Eldritch; that’s why they put up that monument to me.” His voice was low and quiet but he had flushed deep red. “Do I have stainless steel teeth? I have an artificial arm?” Leo lifted up both his hands. “Well? And my eyes—”

  Barney moved toward the door of the office.

  “Where are you going?” Leo demanded.

  “I know,” Barney said as he opened the door, “that if I can see Emily even for just a few minutes—”

  “No you can’t, fella,” Leo said. He shook his head, firmly.

  Waiting in the corridor for the elevator Barney thought, Maybe it really was Leo. And maybe it’s true.

  So I cannot succeed without Palmer Eldritch.

  Anne was right; I should have given half the bindle back to her and then we could have tried this together. Anne, Palmer…it’s all the same, it’s all him, the creator. That’s who and what he is, he realized. The owner of these worlds. The rest of us just inhabit them and when he wants to he can inhabit them, too. Can kick over the scenery, manifest himself, push things in any direction he chooses. Even be any of us he cares to. All of us, in fact, if he desires. Eternal, outside of time and spliced-together segments of all other dimensions…he can even enter a world in which he’s dead.

  Palmer Eldritch had gone to Prox a man and returned a god.

  Aloud, as he stood waiting for the elevator, Barney said, “Palmer Eldritch, help me. Get my wife back for me.” He looked around; no one was present to overhear him.

  The elevator arrived. The doors slid aside. Inside the elevator waited four men and two women, silently.

  All of them were Palmer Eldritch. Men and women alike: artificial arm, stainless steel teeth…the gaunt, hollowed-out gray face with Jensen eyes.

  Virtually in unison, but not quite, as if competing with each other for first chance to utter it, the six people said, “You’re not going to be able to get back to your own world from here, Mayerson; you’ve gone too far, this time, taken a massive overdose. As I warned you when you snatched it away from me at Chicken Pox Prospects.”

  “Can’t you help me?” Barney said. “I’ve got to get her back.”

  “You don’t understand,” the Palmer Eldritches all said, collectively shaking their heads; it was the same motion that Leo had just now made, and the same firm no. “As we pointed out to you: since this is your future you’re already established here. So there’s no place for you; that’s a matter of simple logic. Who’m I supposed to snare Emily for? You? Or the legitimate Barney Mayerson who lived naturally up to this time? And don’t think he hasn’t tried to get Emily back. Don’t you suppose—and obviously you haven’t—that as the Hnatts split up he made his move? I did what I could for him, then; it was quite a few months ago, just after Richard Hnatt was shipped to Mars, kicking and protesting the whole way. Personally I don’t blame Hnatt; it was a dirty deal, all engineered by Leo, of course. And look at yourself.” The six Palmer Eldritches gestured contemptuously. “You’re a phantasm, as Leo said; I can see through you, literally. I’ll tell you in more accurate terminology what you are.” From the six the calm, dispassionate statement came, then. “You’re a ghost.”

  Barney stared at them and they stared back placidly, unmoved.

  “Try building your life on that premise,” the Eldritches continued. “Well, you got what St. Paul promises, as Anne Hawthorne was blabbing about; you’re no longer clothed in a perishable, fleshly body—you’ve put on an ethereal body in its place. How do you like it, Mayerson?” Their tone was mocking, but compassion showed on the six faces; it showed in the weird, slitted mechanical eyes of each of them. “You can’t die; you don’t eat or drink or breathe air…you can, if you wish, pass directly through walls, in fact through any material object you care to. You’ll learn that, in time. Evidently on the road to Damascus Paul experienced a vision relating to this phenomenon. That and a lot more besides.” The Eldritches added, “I’m inclined, as you can see, to be somewhat sympathetic to the Early-and Neo-Christian point of view, such as Anne holds. It assists in explaining a great deal.”

  Barney said, “What about you, Eldritch? You’re dead, killed two years ago by Leo.” And I know, he thought, that you’re suffering what I am; the same process must have overtaken you, somewhere along the route. You gave yourself an overdose of Chew-Z and now for you there’s no return to your own time and world, either.

  “That monument,” the six Eldritches said, murmuring together like a rattling, far-off wind, “is highly inaccurate. A ship of mine had a running gun-battle with one of Leo’s, just off Venus; I was aboard, or supposed to be aboard, ours. Leo was aboard his. He and I had just held a conference together with Hepburn-Gilbert on Venus and on the way back to Terra Leo took the opportunity to jump our ship. It’s on that premise that the monument was erected—due to Leo’s astute economic pressure, applied in all the proper political bodies. He got himself into the history books once and for all.”

  Two persons, a well-dressed executive-type young man and a girl who was possibly a secretary, strolled down the hall; they glanced curiously at Barney and then at the six creatures within the elevator.

  The creatures ceased to be Palmer Eldritch; the change took place before him. All at once they were six individual, ordinary men and women. Utterly heterogeneous.

  Barney walked away from the elevator. For a measureless interval he roamed the corridors and then, by ramp, descended to ground level where the P. P. Layouts directory was situated. There, reading it, he located his own name and office number. Ironically—and this bordered on being just too much—he held the title he had tried to pry by force out of Leo not so long ago; he was listed as Pre-Fash Supervisor, clearly outranking every individual consultant. So again, if he had only waited—

  Beyond doubt Leo had managed to bring him back from Mars. Rescued him from the world of the hovel. And this implied a great deal.

  The planned litigation—or some substitute tactic—had succeeded. Would, rather. And perhaps soon.

  The mist of hallucination cast up by Palmer Eldritch, the fisherman of human souls, was enormously effective, but not perfect. Not in the long run. So had he stopped consuming Chew-Z after the initial dose—

  Perhaps Anne Hawthorne’s possession of a bindle had been deliberate. A means of maneuvering him into taking it once again and very quickly. If so, her protests had been spurious/e had intended that he seize it, and, like a beast in a superior maze, he had sc
rambled for the glimpsed way out. Manipulated by Palmer Eldritch through every inch of the way.

  And there was no path back.

  If he was to believe Eldritch, speaking through Leo. Through his congregation everywhere. But that was the key word, if.

  By elevator he ascended to the floor of his own office.

  When he opened the office door the man seated at the desk raised his head and said, “Close that thing. We don’t have a lot of time.” The man, and it was himself, rose; Barney scrutinized him and then, reflexively, shut the door as instructed. “Thanks,” his future self said, icily. “And stop worrying about getting back to your own time; you will. Most of what Eldritch did—or does, if you prefer to regard it that way—consists of manufacturing surface changes: he makes things appear the way he wants, but that doesn’t mean they are. Follow me?”

  “I’ll—take your word for it.”

  His future self said, “I realize that’s easy for me to say, now; Eldritch still shows up from time to time, sometimes even publicly, but I know and everyone else right down to the most ignorant readers of the lowest level of ’papes know that it’s nothing but a phantasm; the actual man is in a grave on Sigma 14-B and that’s verified. You’re in a different spot. For you the actual Palmer Eldritch could enter at any minute; what would be actual for you would be a phantasm for me, and the same is going to be true when you get back to Mars. You’ll be encountering a genuine living Palmer Eldritch and I don’t frankly envy you.”

  Barney said, “Just tell me how to get back.”

  “You don’t care about Emily any more?”

  “I’m scared.” And he felt his own gaze, the perception and comprehension of the future, sear him. “Okay,” he blurted, “what am I supposed to do, pretend otherwise to impress you? Anyhow you’d know.”

  “Where Eldritch had the advantage over everyone and anyone who’s consumed Chew-Z is that recovery from the drug is excessively retarded and gradual; it’s a series of levels, each progressively less an induced illusion and more compounded of authentic reality. Sometimes the process takes years. This is why the UN belatedly banned it and turned against Eldritch; Hepburn-Gilbert initially approved it because he honestly believed that it aided the user to penetrate to concrete reality, and then it became obvious to everyone who used it or witnessed it being used that it did exactly the—”