Blaine shook his head.
“Then, ‘bye,” Therler said heartily. “And do call soon.”
Blaine hurried out of the building. It was bad enough being robbed of you novelty value; it was worse being robbed by an out-and-out phony, a temporal fraud who'd never been within a hundred years of 1953. The Rockefeller roller — skating rink! And even that slip hadn't been necessary. Everything about the man screamed counterfeit. But sadly, Blaine was probably the only man in 2110 who could detect the imposture.
That afternoon Blaine purchased a change of clothing and a shaving kit. He found a room in a cheap hotel on Fifth Avenue. For the next week, he continued looking for work.
He tried the restaurants, but found that human dishwashers were a thing of the past. At the docks and spaceports, robots were doing most of the heavy work. One day he was tentatively approved for a position as package-wrapping inspector at Gimbel-Macy's. But the personnel department, after carefully studying his personality profile, irritability index and suggestibility rating, vetoed him in favor of a dull-eyed little man from Queens who held a master's degree in package design.
Blaine was wearily returning to his hotel one evening when he recognized a face in the dense crowd. It was a man he would have known instantly, anywhere. He was about Blaine's age, a compact, redheaded, snub-nosed man with slightly protruding teeth and a small red blotch on his neck. He carried himself with a certain jaunty assurance, the unquenchable confidence of a man for whom something always turns up.
“Ray!” Blaine shouted. “Ray Melhill!” He pushed through the crowd and seized him by the arm, “Ray! How'd you get out?”
The man pulled his arm away and smoothed the sleeve of his jacket. “My name is not Melhill,” he said.
“It's not? Are you sure?”
“Of course I'm sure,” he said, starting to move away.
Blaine stepped in front of him. “Wait a minute. You look exactly like him, even down to the radiation scar. Are you sure you aren't Ray Melhill, a flow-control man off the spaceship Bremen?”
“Quite certain,” the man said coldly. “You have confused me with someone else, young man.”
Blaine stared hard as the man started to walk away. Then he reached out, caught the man by a shoulder and swung him around.
“You dirty body-thieving bastard!” Blaine shouted, his big right fist shooting out.
The man who so exactly resembled Melhill was knocked back against a building, and slid groggily to the pavement. Blaine started for him, and people moved quickly out of his way.
“Berserker!” a woman screamed, and someone else took up the cry. Blaine caught sight of a blue uniform shoving through the crowd toward him.
A flat-hat! Blaine ducked into the crowd. He turned a corner quickly, then another, slowed to a walk and looked back. The policeman was not in sight. Blaine started walking again to his hotel.
It had been Melhill's body; but Ray no longer occupied it. There had been no last-minute reprieve for him, no final chance. His body had been taken from him and sold to the old man whose querulous mind wore the jaunty body like a suit of ill-fitting, too-youthful clothes.
Now he knew his friend was really dead. Blaine drank silently to him in a neighborhood bar before returning to his hotel.
The clerk stopped him as he passed the desk. “Blaine? Got a message for you. Just a minute.” He went into the office.
Blaine waited, wondering who it could be from. Marie? But he hadn't called Marie yet, and wasn't planning to until he found work.
The clerk came back and handed him a slip of paper. The message read: “There is a Communication awaiting Thomas Blaine at the Spiritual Switchboard, 23rd Street Branch. Hours, nine to five.”
“I wonder how anybody knew where I was?” Blaine asked.
“Spirits got their ways,” the clerk told him. “Man I know, his dead mother-in-law tracked him down through three aliases, a Transplant and a complete skin job. He was hiding from her in Abyssinia.”
“I don't have any dead mother-in-law,” Blaine said.
“No? Who you figure's trying to reach you?” the clerk asked.
“I'll find out tomorrow and let you know,” Blaine said. But his sarcasm was wasted. The clerk had already turned back to his correspondence course on Atomic Engine Maintenance. Blaine went up to his room.
13
The 23rd Street Branch of the Spiritual Switchboard was a large graystone building near Third Avenue. Engraved above the door was the statement: “Dedicated to Free Communication Between Those on Earth and Those Beyond.”
Blaine entered the building and studied the directory. It gave floor and room numbers for Messages Incoming, Messages Outgoing, Translations, Abjurations, Exorcisms, Offerings, Pleas, and Exhortations. He wasn't sure which classification he fell under, or what the classifications signified, or even the purpose of the Spiritual Switchboard. He took his slip of paper to the information booth.
“That's Messages Incoming,” a pleasant, grey-haired, receptionist told him. “Straight down the hall to room 32A.”
“Thank you.” Blaine hesitated, then said, “Could you explain something to me?”
“Certainly,” the woman said. “What do you wish to know?”
“Well — I hope this doesn't sound too foolish — what is all this?”
The grey-haired woman smiled. “That's a difficult question to answer. In a philosophical sense I suppose you might call the Spiritual Switchboard a move toward greater oneness, an attempt to discard the dualism of mind and body and substitute —”
“No,” Blaine said. “I mean literally.”
“Literally? Why, the Spiritual Switchboard is a privately endowed, tax-free organization, chartered to act as a clearing house and center for communications to and from the Threshold plane of the Hereafter. In some cases, of course, people don't need our aid and can communicate directly with their departed ones. But more often, there is a need for amplification. This center possesses the proper equipment to make the deceased audible to our ears. And we perform other services, such as abjurations, exorcisms, exhortations and the like, which become necessary from time to time when flesh interacts with spirit.”
She smiled warmly at him. “Does that make it any clearer?”
“Thank you very much,” Blaine said, and went down the hall to room 32A.
It was a small grey room with several armchairs and a loudspeaker set in the wall. Blaine sat down, wondering what was going to happen.
“Tom Blaine!” cried a disembodied voice from the loudspeaker.
“Huh? What?” Blaine asked, jumping to his feet and moving toward the door.
“Tom! How are you, boy?”
Blaine, his hand on the doorknob, suddenly recognized the voice. “Ray Melhill?”
“Right! I'm up there where the rich folks go when they die! Pretty good, huh?”
“That's the understatement of the age,” Blaine said. ‘“But Ray, how? I thought you didn't have any hereafter insurance.”
“I didn't. Let me tell you the whole story. They came for me maybe an hour after they took you. I was so damned angry I thought I'd go out of my mind. I stayed angry right through the chloroforming, right through the wiping. I was still angry when I died.”
“What was dying like?” Blaine asked.
“It was like exploding. I could feel myself scattering all over the place, growing big as the galaxy, bursting into fragments, and the fragments bursting into smaller fragments, and all of them were me.”