Too many questions, Jerome told himself as the drifts of sleep gathered in his brain. Too much to think about…
“Come on, lad—you can’t lie in your pit for ever!”
The man whose words had aroused Jerome had the button eyes, wide mouth and protruding circular ears of a storybook gnome, but the most remarkable things about him, as far as Jerome was concerned, were his short hair and Earth-style shirt and slacks. Still not properly awake, Jerome allowed himself to be deceived by the irrational hope that he had escaped from a protracted and vivid nightmare. He sat upright on the couch, eagerly, then realized he was in the same circular room as before, a chamber carved into the rock strata of Mercury. The clarity of his unaided vision was confirmation enough.
“Name’s Joe Thwaite,” the stranger said. “Spinster of this parish for the last eleven years, but before that resident in the beautiful township of Barrow-in-Furness.”
“Barrow-in-Furness?” Jerome began to feel lost. “Isn’t that in England?”
“Certainly is. Best town in the whole ruddy country.”
Jerome was still adrift between two worlds. “But you don’t have an English accent.”
“And you don’t have an American one. Not any more.” Thwaite produced a gnomish grin. “Accents are mainly a matter of muscle development, and you’ve got Dorrinian speech centres now, so you speak with a good Dorrinian twang—just like everybody else around here.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
Thwaite peered closely into Jerome’s face. “You must have been drugged to the eyeballs, lad. Don’t you remember anything of what Pirt told you about the colony?”
“The colony? It’s all so…”
“Look, the main thing to remember is that transfers work both ways,” Thwaite said. “We’ve got more than a hundred Terrans here. Everybody the Dorrinians swapped places with in the last few decades—even the ones who burned up.”
Jerome struggled to encompass what the other man was saying. It had been explained to him that each personality transfer was a reciprocal event, but he had been too stupefied to take the thought to its logical conclusion.
He was not the only one of his kind on Mercury.
There had to be a colony of reluctant exiles—men and women who had shared the devastating experience of losing consciousness on Earth and awakening on a distant planet. According to Thwaite, even those individuals who had attracted the public’s interest by “dying’ of spontaneous combustion were members of the colony—in which case he could actually dredge many of his fellow exiles’ names out of his memory.
Jerome felt a coolness on his spine as he considered the idea. His capacity for wonder had been overloaded by the events of the recent past, but there was a singular and disquieting strangeness in the thought of walking into a room and being introduced to a series of people whose names he associated with the horrific photographs in the Examiner’s files. How was he supposed to relate to a man or woman who had first registered on his consciousness as an image of a mound of ash terminating in a pair of slippered feet? And that was not to be the worst of his tribulations…
“Is there somebody called Sammy?” he said warily. “Sammy Birkett?”
“Yes, he was brought in just a few hours before…” Thwaite broke off, his narrow brow contracting. “How did you know?”
“I was there when the transfer went wrong. I saw him…his body…burn up.”
“You mean you were actually there!” The black cabochons of Thwaite’s eyes glinted with malicious pleasure. “That sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen. Belzor must have got them buggers running around in the proverbial ever-decreasing circles. Come on, lad—on your feet! The others have got to hear about this.” Thwaite picked up a small draw-neck bag which had been lying beside the couch and produced from it a shirt, slacks and underwear which he handed to Jerome. Although the garments bore no labels they were of commercial quality and could have passed as being made on Earth.
“Where am I supposed to go?” Jerome said.
“You’ll soon get clued in. For starters, this bag contains all your worldly goods—which means a spare set of clothes and a toothbrush,” Thwaite said. “The Dorries supply you with that much free of charge. They say it’s out of the goodness of their hearts. Don’t you believe it! The Marks and Sparks look is supposed to help us feel more at ease, but it’s actually to set us apart and make us easy to keep an eye on. Same with our hair. When you see anybody who isn’t done up like an Armenian poofter you know he’s a transplant from Earth.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Jerome said, deriving some slight comfort from identification of a familiar character-type. Thwaite’s homely presence made Mercury appreciably less alien. Jerome stood up, put on the proffered underpants and winced as the rayon-like material came in contact with his groin.
“That’s something else they give us for nothing,” Thwaite commented. “Free vasectomies. When a supertele comes near his transfer time he gets snipped. Prevents the Terrans from producing hybrids.”
“Hybrids?”
“Maybe that isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean. Would the offspring of two Terries in Dorrie bodies be classified as Terries or Dorries?”
“Good question,” Jerome said, finding unexpected difficulty in dealing with a shirt button.
“Damn right it’s a good question!” Thwaite tugged thoughtfully at one of his protuberant ears. “Have to give the Dorries their due, though—they could have de-balled us instead. Know something, lad? I’d been finished with the old how’s-your-father for five or six years when I got transferred. Sixty-six I was. There I was…sat there in The Globe in Ulverston, downing a pint of Hartley’s best…Used to take the bus through to Ulverston every Thursday, “cause it’s market day and the pubs stay open right through…Next thing I knew I was awakening up in this very room…just where you are now…”
Jerome looked up, momentarily abandoning the attempt to button his shirt. “A shock to the system.”
Thwaite’s lips developed a wry quirk. “You never spoke a truer word, lad. I’m used to most things around here after eleven years, but I can’t get used to doing without my beer. You know, I sometimes think they could keep all their free love if I could just have a few pints of Hartley’s best every now and then.”
“Can’t you brew your own beer?”
“The Dorries don’t go in for alcohol, and the air in this place is so well scrubbed there aren’t any wild yeasts.”
“There’s something wrong with the buttons on this shirt,” Jerome said.
“It’s your Dorrie fingers that’s wrong—they’ve never dealt with buttons before.”
“But surely I can exercise full control over them.”
“Think so? Just wait till you try using a knife and fork. It’ll be a week before you can eat your dinner properly.” Thwaite came closer and efficiently buttoned Jerome’s shirt. “You’ll have to manage the trousers yourself, lad—nobody’s going to start rumours about me being a poofter.”
“I should hope not.” Jerome remained silent for a moment as he concentrated on the task of clothing his younger, slimmer body, then the sheer abnormality of his circumstances overwhelmed him one more, like tidal waters that had been only temporarily checked. “I keep expecting to find it’s all a dream.”
“It’s no dream, lad. You’re on the planet Mercury and, from what Pirt told me, you had some advance knowledge of the set-up to cushion the shock for you. Others weren’t so lucky.”
“All right,” Jerome said. “Exactly where am I on Mercury?”
“At the north pole. About sixty feet down.”