The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (9 page)

Roni Fugate murmured, “I’m sorry, Mr. Bulero, but there’s a creature under your desk.”

Bending, Leo peered under the desk.

A thing had squeezed itself between the base of the desk and the floor; its eyes regarded him greenly, unwinking.

“Get out of there,” Leo said. To Barney he said, “Get a yardstick or a broom, something to prod it with.”

Barney left the office.

“Damn it, Miss Fugate,” Leo said, smoking rapidly on his pipe, “I hate to think what that is under there. And what it signifies.” Because it might signify that Eldritch—within the little girl Monica—had been right when she said
See if I care. Wait and see where it gets you.

The thing from beneath the desk scuttled out, and made for the door. It squeezed under the door and was gone.

It was even worse than the glucks. He got one good look at it.

Leo said, “Well, that’s that. I’m sorry, Miss Fugate, but you might as well return to your office; there’s no point in our discussing what actions to take toward the imminent appearance of Chew-Z on the market. Because I’m not talking to anyone; I’m sitting here babbling away to myself.” He felt depressed. Eldritch had him and also the validity, or at least the seeming validity, of the Chew-Z experience had been demonstrated; he himself had confused it with the real. Only the malign bug created by Palmer Eldritch—deliberately—had given it away.

Otherwise, he realized, I might have gone on forever.

Spent a century, as Eldritch said, in this ersatz universe.

Jeez, he thought. I’m licked. “Miss Fugate,” he said, “please don’t just stand there; go back to your office.” He got up, went to the water cooler, and poured himself a paper cup of mineral water. Drinking unreal water for an unreal body, he said to himself. In front of an unreal employee. “Miss Fugate,” he said, “are you really Mr. Mayerson’s mistress?”

“Yes, Mr. Bulero,” Miss Fugate said, nodding. “As I told you.”

“And you won’t be mine.” He shook his head. “Because I’m too old and too evolved. You know—or rather you don’t know—that I have at least a limited power in this universe. I could make over my body, make myself young.” Or, he thought, make you old. How would you like that? he wondered. He drank the water, and tossed the cup in the waste chute; not looking at Miss Fugate he said to himself, You’re my age, Miss Fugate. In fact older. Let’s see; you’re about ninety-two, now. In this world, anyhow; you’ve aged, here…time has rolled forward for you because you turned me down and I don’t like being turned down. In fact, he said to himself, you’re over one hundred years old, withered, juiceless, without teeth and eyes. A thing.

Behind him he heard a dry, rasping sound, an intake of breath. And a wavering, shrill voice, like the cry of a frightened bird. “Oh, Mr. Bulero—”

I’ve changed my mind, Leo thought. You’re the way you were; I take it back, okay? He turned, and saw Roni Fugate or at least something standing there where she had last stood. A spider web, gray fungoid strands wrapped one around another to form a brittle column that swayed…he saw the head, sunken at the cheeks, with eyes like dead spots of soft, inert white slime that leaked out gummy, slow-moving tears, eyes that tried to appeal but could not because they could not make out where he was.

“You’re back the way you were,” Leo said harshly, and shut his own eyes. “Tell me when it’s over.”

Footsteps. A man’s. Barney, re-entering the office. “Jesus,” Barney said, and halted.

Eyes shut, Leo said, “Isn’t she back the way she was yet?”

“
She
? Where’s Roni? What’s this?”

Leo opened his eyes.

It was not Roni Fugate who stood there, not even an ancient manifestation of her; it was a puddle, but not of water. The puddle was alive and in it bits of sharp, jagged gray splinters swam.

The thick, oozing material of the puddle flowed gradually outward, then shuddered, and retracted into itself; in the center the fragments of hard gray matter swam together, and cohered into a roughly shaped ball with tangled, matted strands of hair floating at its crown. Vague eyesockets, empty, formed; it was becoming a skull, but of some life-formation to come: his unconscious desire for her to experience evolution in its horrific aspect had conjured this monstrosity into being.

The jaw clacked, opening and shutting as if jerked by wicked, deeply imbedded wires; drifting here and there in the fluid of the puddle it croaked, “But you see, Mr. Bulero, she didn’t live that long. You forgot that.” It was, remotely but absolutely, the voice—not of Roni Fugate—but Monica, as if drumming at the far-distant end of a waxed string. “You made her past one hundred but she only is going to live to be seventy. So she’s been dead thirty years, except you made her alive; that was what you intended. And even worse—” The toothless jaw waggled and the uninhabited pockets for eyes gaped. “She evolved not while alive but there in the ground.” The skull ceased piping, then by stages disintegrated; its parts once more floated away and the semblance of organization again dissipated.

After a time Barney said, “Get us out of here, Leo.”

Leo said, “Hey, Palmer.” His voice was uncontrolled, babylike with fear. “Hey, you know what? I give up; I really do.”

The carpet of the office beneath his feet rotted, became mushy, and then sprouted, grew, alive, into green fibers; he saw that it was becoming grass. And then the walls and the ceiling caved in, collapsed into fine dust; the particles rained noiselessly down like ashes. And the blue, cool sky appeared, untouched, above.

Seated on the grass, with the stick in her lap and the suitcase containing Dr. Smile beside her, Monica said, “Did you want Mr. Mayerson to remain? I didn’t think so. I let him go with the rest that you made. Okay?” She smiled up at Leo.

“Okay,” he agreed chokingly. Looking around him he saw now only the plain of green; even the dust which had composed P. P. Layouts, the building and its core of people, had vanished, except for a dim layer that remained on his hands, on his coat; he brushed it off, reflexively.

Monica said, “ ‘From dust thou art come, o man; to dust shalt—’ ”

“Okay!” he said loudly. “I get it; you don’t have to hammer me over the noggin with it. So it was irreal; so what? I mean, you made your goddam point, Eldritch; you can do anything here you want, and I’m nothing, I’m just a phantom.” He felt hatred toward Palmer Eldritch and he thought, If I ever get out of here, if I can escape from you, you bastard…

“Now, now,” the girl said, her eyes dancing. “You are not going to use language like that; you really aren’t, because I won’t let you. I won’t even say what I’ll do if you continue, but you know me, Mr. Bulero. Right?”

Leo said, “Right.” He walked off a few steps, got out his handkerchief, and mopped the perspiration from his upper lip and neck, the hollow beneath his adam’s apple where it was so hard, in the mornings, to shave. God, he thought, help me. Will You? And if You do, if You can reach into this world, I’ll do anything, whatever You want; I’m not afraid now, I’m sick. This is going to kill my body, even if it’s just an ectoplasmic, phantom-type body.

Hunched over, he was sick; he vomited onto the grass. For a long time—it seemed a long time—that kept up and then he was better; he was able to turn, and walk slowly back toward the seated child with her suitcase.

“Terms,” the child said flatly. “We’re going to work out an exact business relationship between my company and yours. We need your superb network of ad satellites and your transportation system of late-model interplan ships and your God-knows-how-extensive plantations on Venus; we want everything, Bulero. We’re going to grow the lichen where you now grow Can-D, ship it in the same ships, reach the colonists with the same well-trained, experienced pushers you use, advertise through pros like Allen and Charlotte Faine. Can-D and Chew-Z won’t be competing because there’ll just be the one product, Chew-Z; you’re about to announce your retirement. Understand me, Leo?”

“Sure,” Leo said, “I hear.”

“Will you do it?”

“Okay,” Leo said. And pounced on the child.

His hands closed about her windpipe; he squeezed. She stared into his face, rigidly, her mouth pursed, saying nothing, not even trying to struggle, to claw him or get away. He continued squeezing, for a time so long that it seemed as if his hands had grown fast to her, become fixed in place forever, like gnarled roots of some ancient, diseased, but still-living plant.

When he let go she was dead. Her body settled forward, then twisted and fell to one side, to come to rest supine on the grass. No blood. No sign even of a struggle, except that her throat was a dark, mottled, blackish red.

He stood up, thinking, Well, did I do it? If he—she or it, whatever it is—dies here, does that take care of it?

But the simulated world remained. He had expected it to dwindle away as her—Eldritch’s—life dwindled away.

Puzzled, he stood without moving an inch, smelling the air, listening to a far-off wind.
Nothing
had changed except that the girl had died. Why? What ailed the basis on which he had acted? Incredibly, it was wrong.

Bending, he snapped on Dr. Smile. “Explain it to me,” he said.

Obligingly, Dr. Smile tinnily declared, “He is dead here, Mr. Bulero. But at the demesne on Luna—”

“Okay,” Leo said roughly. “Well, tell me how to get out of this place. How do I get back to Luna, to—” He gestured. “You know what I mean. Actuality.”

“At this moment,” Dr. Smile explained, “Palmer Eldritch, although considerably upset and angered, is intravenously providing you with a substance which counters the injectable Chew-Z previously administered; you will return shortly.” It added, “That is, shortly, even instantly, in terms of the time-flow in that world. As to this—” It chuckled. “It could seem longer.”

“
How
longer?”

“Oh, years,” Dr. Smile said. “But quite possibly less. Days? Months? Time sense is subjective, so let’s see how it feels to you; do you not agree?”

Seating himself wearily by the body of the child, Leo sighed, put his head down, chin against his chest, and prepared to wait.

“I’ll keep you company,” Dr. Smile said, “if I can. But I’m afraid without Mr. Eldritch’s animating presence—” Its voice, Leo realized, had become feeble, as well as slowed down. “Nothing can sustain this world,” it intoned weakly, “but Mr. Eldritch. So I am afraid…”

Its voice faded out entirely.

There was only silence. Even the distant wind had ceased.

How long? Leo asked himself. And then he wondered if he could, as before, make something.

Gesturing in the manner of an inspired symphony conductor, his hands writhing, he tried to create before him in the air a jet cab.

At last a meager outline appeared. Insubstantial, it remained without color, almost transparent; he rose, walked closer to it, and tried with all his strength once more. For a moment it seemed to gain color and reality and then suddenly it became fixed; like a hard, discarded chitinous shell it sagged, and burst. Its sections, only two-dimensional at best, blew and fluttered, tearing into ragged pieces—he turned his back on it and walked away in disgust. What a mess, he said to himself dismally.

He continued, without purpose, to walk. Until he came, all at once, to something in the grass, something dead; he saw it lying there and warily he approached it. This, he thought. The final indication of what I’ve done.

He kicked the dead gluck with the toe of his shoe; his toe passed entirely through it and he drew back, repelled.

Going on, hands deep in his pockets, he shut his eyes and once more prayed but this time vaguely; it was only a wish, inchoate, and then it became clear. I’m going to get him in the real world, he said to himself. Not just here, as I’ve done, but as the ’papes are going to report. Not for myself; not to save P. P. Layouts and the Can-D trade. But for—he knew what he meant. Everyone in the system. Because Palmer Eldritch is an invader and this is how we’ll all wind up, here like this, on a plain of dead things that have become nothing more than random fragments; this is the “reincarnation” that he promised Hepburn-Gilbert.

For a time he wandered on and then, by degrees, he made his way back to the suitcase which had been Dr. Smile.

Something bent over the suitcase. A human or quasi-human figure.

Seeing him it at once straightened; its bald head glistened as it gaped at him, taken by surprise. And then it leaped and rushed off.

A Proxer.

It seemed to him as he watched it go that this put everything in perspective. Palmer Eldritch had peopled his landscape with things such as this; he was still highly involved with them, even now that he had returned to his home system. This, which had appeared just now, gave an insight into the man’s mind at the deepest level; and Palmer Eldritch himself might not have known that he had so populated his hallucinatory establishment—the Proxer might have been just as much a surprise to him.

Unless of course this was the Prox system.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to follow the Proxer.

He set off in that direction and trudged for what seemed to be hours; he saw nothing, only the grass underfoot, the level horizon. And then at last a shape formed ahead; he made for it and found himself all at once confronting a parked ship. Halting, he regarded it in amazement. For one thing it was not a Terran ship and yet it was not a Prox ship either.

Simply, it was not from either system.

Nor were the two creatures lounging nearby it Proxers or Terrans; he had never seen such life forms before. Tall, slender, with reedlike limbs and grotesque, egg-shaped heads which, even at this distance, seemed oddly delicate, a highly evolved race, he decided, and yet related to Terrans; the resemblance was closer than to the Proxers.

He walked toward them, hand raised in greeting.

One of the two creatures turned toward him, saw him, gaped, and nudged its companion; both stared and then the first one said. “My God, Alec; it’s one of the old forms. You know, the near-men.”

“Yeah,” the other creature agreed.

“Wait,” Leo Bulero said. “You’re speaking the language of Terra, twenty-first-century English—so you must have seen a Terran before.”