The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

11

Referring to his bundle of notes Felix Blau stated, “Fifteen hours ago a UN-approved Chew-Z-owned ship landed on Mars and distributed its initial bindles to the hovels in the Fineburg Crescent.”

Leo Bulero leaned toward the screen, folded his hands, and said, “Including Chicken Pox Prospects?”

Briefly, Felix nodded.

“By now,” Leo said, “he should have consumed the dose of that brain-rotting filth and we should have heard from him via the satellite system.”

“I fully realize that.”

“William C. Clarke is still standing by?” Clarke was P. P. Layout’s top legal man on Mars.

“Yes,” Felix said, “but Mayerson hasn’t contacted him either; he hasn’t contacted anybody.” He shoved his documents aside. “That is all, absolutely all, I have at this point.”

“Maybe he died,” Leo said. He felt morose; the whole thing depressed him. “Maybe he had such a severe convulsion that—”

“But then we’d have heard, because one of the three UN hospitals on Mars would have been notified.”

“Where is Palmer Eldritch?”

“No one in my organization knows,” Felix said. “He left Luna and disappeared. We simply lost him.”

“I’d give my right arm,” Leo said, “to know what’s going on down in that hovel, that Chicken Pox Prospects where Barney is.”

“Go to Mars yourself.”

“Oh no,” Leo said at once. “I’m not leaving P. P. Layouts, not after what happened to me on Luna. Can’t you get a man in there from your organization who can report directly to us?”

“We have that girl, that Anne Hawthorne. But she hasn’t checked in either. Maybe I’ll go to Mars. If you’re not.”

“I’m not,” Leo repeated.

Felix Blau said, “It’ll cost you.”

“Sure,” Leo said. “And I’ll pay. But at least we’ll have some sort of chance; I mean, as it stands we’ve got nothing.” And we’re finished, he said to himself. “Just bill me,” he said.

“But do you have any idea what it would cost you if I died, if they got me there on Mars? My organization would—”

“Please,” Leo said. “I don’t want to talk about that; what is Mars, a graveyard that Eldritch is digging? Eldritch probably ate Barney Mayerson. Okay, you go; you show up at Chicken Pox Prospects.” He rang off.

Behind him Roni Fugate, his acting New York Pre-Fash consultant, sat intently listening. Taking it all in, Leo said to himself.

“Did you get a good earful?” he demanded roughly.

Roni said, “You’re doing the same thing to him that he did to you.”

“Who? What?”

“Barney was afraid to follow you when you disappeared on Luna. Now you’re afraid—”

“It’s just not wise. All right,” he said. “I’m too goddam scared of Palmer to set foot outside this building; of course I’m not going to Mars and what you say is absolutely true.”

“But no one,” Roni said softly, “is going to fire you. The way you did Barney.”

“I’m firing myself. Inside. It hurts.”

“But not enough to make you go to Mars.”

“All right!” Savagely he snapped the vidset back on again and dialed Felix Blau. “Blau, I take it all back. I’m going myself. Although it’s insane.”

“Frankly,” Felix Blau said, “in my opinion you’re doing exactly what Palmer Eldritch wants. All questions of bravery versus—”

“Eldritch’s power works through that drug,” Leo said. “As long as he can’t administer any to me I’m fine. I’ll take a few company guards along to watch that I’m not slipped an injection like last time. Hey, Blau. You still come along; okay?” He swung to face Roni. “Is that all right?”

“Yes.” She nodded.

“See? She says it’s okay. So will you come along with me to Mars and you know, hold my hand?”

“Sure, Leo,” Felix Blau said. “And if you faint I’ll fan you back to consciousness. I’ll meet you at your office in—” He examined his wristwatch. “Two hours. We’ll map out details. Have a fast ship ready. And I’ll bring a couple of men along I have confidence in, too.”

“That’s it,” Leo said to Roni as he broke the connection. “Look what you got me to do. You seized Barney’s job and if I don’t get back from Mars maybe you can nail down my job, too.” He glared at her. Women can get a man to do anything, he realized. Mother, wife, even employee; they twist us like hot little bits of thermoplastic.

Roni said, “Is that really why I said it, Mr. Bulero? Do you really believe that?”

He took a good, long, hard look at her. “Yes. Because you’re insatiably ambitious. I really believe that.”

“You’re wrong.”

“If I don’t come back from Mars will you come after me?” He waited but she did not answer; he saw hesitation on her face, and at that he loudly laughed. “Of course not,” he said.

Stonily, Roni Fugate said, “I must get back to my office; I have new flatware to judge. Modern patterns from Capetown.” Rising, she departed; he watched her go, thinking, She’s the real one. Not Palmer Eldritch. If I do get back I’ve got to find some method of quietly dumping her. I don’t like to be manipulated.

Palmer Eldritch, he thought suddenly, appeared in the form of a small girl, a little child—not to mention later on when he was that dog. Maybe there is no Roni Fugate; maybe it’s Eldritch.

The thought chilled him.

What we have here, he realized, is not an invasion of Earth by Proxmen, beings from another system. Not an invasion by the legions of a pseudo human race. No. It’s Palmer Eldritch who’s everywhere, growing and growing like a mad weed. Is there a point where he’ll burst, grow too much? All the manifestations of Eldritch, all over Terra and Luna and Mars, Palmer puffing up and bursting—pop, pop, POP! Like Shakespeare says, some damn thing about sticking a mere pin in through the armor, and goodbye king.

But, he thought, what in this case is the pin? And is there an open spot into which we can thrust it? I don’t know and Felix doesn’t know and Barney; I’ll make book that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea of how to cope with Eldritch. Kidnap Zoe, the man’s elderly, ugly daughter? Palmer wouldn’t care. Unless Palmer is also Zoe; maybe there is no Zoe, independent of him. And that’s the way we’ll all wind up unless we figure out how to destroy him, he realized. Replicas, extensions of the man, inhabiting three planets and six moons. The man’s a protoplasm, spreading and reproducing and dividing, and all through that damn lichen-derived non-Terran drug, that horrible, miserable Chew-Z.

Once more at the vidset he dialed Allen Faine’s satellite. Presently, a trifle insubstantial and weak but nevertheless there, the face of his prime disc jockey appeared. “Yes, Mr. Bulero.”

“You’re positive Mayerson hasn’t contacted you? He’s got the code book, hasn’t he?”

“Got the book, but still nothing from him. We’ve been monitoring every transmission from Chicken Pox Prospects. We saw Eldritch’s ship land near the hovel—that was hours ago—and we saw Eldritch get out and go up to the hovelists, and although our cameras didn’t pick this up I’m sure the transaction was consummated at that instant.” Faine added, “And Barney Mayerson was one of the hovelists who met Eldritch at the surface.”

“I believe I know what happened,” Leo said. “Okay, thanks, Al.” He rang off. Barney went below with the Chew-Z, he realized. And right away they all sat down and chewed; that was the end, just as it was for me on Luna. Our tactics required that Barney chew away, Leo realized, and so we played right into Palmer’s dirty, semimechanical hands; once he had the drug in Barney’s system we were through. Because Eldritch somehow controls each of the hallucinatory worlds induced by the drug; I know it—know it!–that the skunk is in all of them.

The fantasy world that Chew-Z induces, he thought, are in Palmer Eldritch’s head. As I found out personally.

And the trouble is, he thought, that once you get into one of them you can’t quite scramble back out; it stays with you, even when you think you’re free. It’s a one-way gate, and for all I know I’m still in it now.

However that did not seem likely. And yet, he thought, it shows how afraid I am—as Roni Fugate pointed out. Afraid enough to (I’ll admit it) abandon Barney there like he abandoned me. And Barney was using his precog ability, so he had foresight, almost to the point where it was like what I have now, like hindsight. He knew in advance what I had to learn by experience. No wonder he balked.

Who gets sacrificed? Leo asked himself. Me, Barney, Felix Blau—which of us gets melted down for Palmer to guzzle? Because that’s what we are potentially for him: food to be consumed. It’s an oral thing that arrived back from the Prox system, a great mouth, open to receive us.

But Palmer’s not a cannibal. Because I know he’s not human; that’s not a man there in that Palmer Eldritch skin.

But what it was he had no concept at all. So much could happen in the vast expanses between Sol and Proxima, either going or coming. Maybe it happened, he thought, when Palmer was going; maybe he ate the Proxmen during those ten years, cleaned the plate there, and so then came back to us. Ugh. He shivered.

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.

“Goddamn 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 playing 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 sat 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 to 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 goddamn 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? Do 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 can’t 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 was 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; she had intended that he seize it, and, like a beast in a superior maze, he had scrambled 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 has 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—”

“Then I never recovered from my first dose.”

“Right; you never got back to clear-cut reality. As you would have if you had abstained another twenty-four hours. Those phantasms of Eldritch, imposed on normal matter, would have faded away entirely; you would have been free. But Eldritch got you to accept that second, stronger dose; he knew you had been sent to Mars to operate against him, although he didn’t have any idea in what way. He was afraid of you.”

It sounded strange to hear that; it did not ring right. Eldritch, with all he had done and could do—but Eldritch had seen the monument of the future; he knew that somehow, in some manner, they were going to kill him after all.

The door of the office abruptly opened.

Roni Fugate looked in and saw the two of them; she said nothing—she simply stared, open-mouthed. And then at last murmured, “A phantasm. I think it’s the one standing, the one nearest me.” Shakily, she entered the office, shutting the door after her.

“That’s right,” his future self said, scrutinizing her sharply. “You can test it out by putting your hand into it.”

She did so; Barney Mayerson saw her hand pass into his body and disappear. “I’ve seen phantasms before,” she said, withdrawing her hand; now she was more composed. “But never of you, dear. Everyone who consumed that abomination became a phantasm at one time or another, but recently they’ve become less frequent to us. At one time, about a year ago, you saw them everytime you turned around.” She added, “Hepburn-Gilbert finally saw one of himself; just what he deserved.”

“You realize,” his future self said to Roni, “that he’s under the domination of Eldritch, even though to us the man is dead. So we have to work cautiously. Eldritch can begin to affect his perception at any time, and when that happens he’ll have no choice but to react accordingly.”

Speaking to Barney, Roni said, “What can we do for you?”

“He wants to get back to Mars,” his future self said. “They’ve got an enormously complicated scheme screwed together to destroy Eldritch via the interplan courts; it involves him taking an Ionian epilepsygenic, KY-7. Or can’t you remember back to that?”

“But it never got into the courts,” Roni said. “Eldritch settled. They dropped litigation.”

“We can transport you to Mars,” his future self said to Barney, “in a P. P. Layouts ship. But that won’t accomplish anything because Eldritch will not only follow you and be with you on the trip; he’ll be there to greet you– a favorite outdoor sport of his. Never forget that a phantasm can go anywhere; it’s not bounded by time or space. That’s what makes it a phantasm, that and the fact that it has no metabolism, at least not as we understand the word. Oddly, however, it is affected by gravity. There have been a number of studies lately on the subject; anyhow not much is yet known.” Meaningfully he finished, “Especially on the subtopic, How does one return a phantasm to its own space and time–exorcise it.”

Barney said, “You’re anxious to get rid of me?” He felt cold.

“That’s right,” his future self said calmly. “Just as anxious as you are to get back; you know now you made a mistake, you know that—” He glanced at Roni and immediately ceased. He did not intend to refer to the topic of Emily in front of her.

“They’ve made some attempts with high-voltage, low-amperage electroshock,” Roni said. “And with magnetic fields. Columbia University has—”

“The best work so far,” his future self said, “is in the physics department at Cal, out on the West Coast. The phantasm is bombarded by Beta particles which disintegrate the essential protein basis for—”

“Okay,” Barney said. “I’ll leave you alone. I’ll go to the physics department at Cal and see what they can do.” He felt utterly defeated; he had been abandoned even by himself, the ultimate, he thought with impotent, wild fury. Christ!

“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 tunnel that narrowed—he felt it squeeze around him, and he knew that he had misjudged. Palmer Eldritch had once more thought rings around him, demonstrated his power over everyone who used Chew-Z; Eldritch had done something and he could not even tell what, but anyhow it was not what he had said. Not what had been promised.

“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 winning. Not for Leo and P. P. Layouts but for me.

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.