“Get out,” Blaine said.
“What, buddy?”
Blaine's big hand shot out and grabbed Joe by the raincoat front. He lifted the little pusher to eye level and glared at him.
“You take your perverted little notions out of here,” Blaine said. “Guys like you have been selling off-beat kicks since the days of Babylon, and guys like me haven't been buying. Get out, before I break your neck for a quick sadistic thrill.”
He released him. Joe smoothed his raincoat and smiled nervously. “No offense, buddy, I'm going. Don't feel like it tonight. There's always another night. Transplant's in your future, farmboy. Why fight it?”
Blaine started to move forward, but Orc held him back. The little pusher scuttled out the door.
“He isn't worth dropping,” Orc said. “The flat-hats would just take you in. It's a sad, sick, dirty world, friend. Drink up.”
Blaine threw down his whiskey, still seething. Transplant! If that was the characteristic amusement of 2110 he wanted no part of it. Orc was right, it was a sad, sick, dirty world. Even the whiskey was beginning to taste funny.
He grabbed at the bar for support. The whiskey tasted very funny. What was wrong with him? The stuff seemed to be going to his head.
Orc's arm was around his shoulder. He was saying, “Well, well, my old buddy's taken himself that one too many. Guess I'd better take him back to his hotel.”
But Orc didn't know where his hotel was. He didn't even have a hotel to be taken to. Orc, that damned quick-talking straight-eyed Orc must have put something in his drink while he was talking to Joe.
In order to roll him? But Orc knew he had no money. Why then?
He tried to shake the arm off his shoulders. It was clamped in place like an iron bar. “Don't worry,” Orc was saying, “I'll take care of you, old buddy.”
The barroom revolved lazily around Blaine's head. He had a sudden realization that he was going to find out a great deal about 2110 by the dubious method of direct experience. Too much, he suspected. Perhaps a dusty library would have been better after all.
The barroom began to revolve more rapidly. Blaine passed out.
6
He recovered consciousness in a small, dimly lighted room with no furniture, no doors or windows, and only a single screened ventilation outlet in the ceiling. The floors and walls were thickly padded, but the padding hadn't been washed in a long time. It stank.
Blaine sat up, and two red-hot needles stabbed him through the eyes. He lay down again.
“Relax,” a voice said. “Them knock drops take a while to wear off.”
He was not alone in the padded room. There was a man sitting in a corner, watching him. The man was wearing only shorts. Glancing at himself, Blaine saw that he was similarly dressed.
He sat up slowly and propped himself against a wall. For a moment he was afraid his head would explode. Then, as the needles drove viciously in, he was afraid it wouldn't.
“What is this?” he asked.
“End of the line,” the man said cheerfully. “They boxed you, just like me. They boxed you and brought you in like fabrit. Now all they got to do is crate you and label you.”
Blaine couldn't understand what the man was saying. He was in no mood to decipher 2110 slang. Clutching his head, he said, “I don't have any money. Why did they box me?”
“Come off it,” the man said. “Why would they box you? They want your body, man!”
“My body?”
“Right. For a host.”
A host body, Blaine thought, such as he was now occupying. Well, of course. Naturally. It was obvious when you came to think about it. This age needed a supply of host bodies for various and sundry purposes. But how do you get a host body? They don't grow on trees, nor can you dig for them. You get them from people. Most people wouldn't take kindly to selling their own bodies; life is so meaningless without one. So how to fill the supply?
Easy. You pick out a sucker, dope him, hide him away, extract his mind, then take his body.
It was an interesting line of speculation, but Blaine couldn't continue it any longer. It seemed as though his head had finally decided to explode.
Later, the hangover subsided. Blaine sat up and found a sandwich in front of him on a paper plate, and a cup of some dark beverage.
“It's safe to eat,” the man told him. “They take good care of us. I hear the going black market price for a body is close to four thousand dollars.”
“Black market?”
“Man, what's wrong with you? Wake up! You know there's a black market in bodies just like there's an open market in bodies.”
Blaine sipped the dark beverage, which turned out to be coffee. The man introduce himself as Ray Melhill, a flow-control man off the spaceship Bremen. He was about Blaine's age, a compact, redheaded, snub-nosed man with slightly protruding teeth. Even in his present predicament he carried himself with a certain jaunty assurance, the unquenchable confidence of a man for whom something always turns up. His freckled skin was very white except for a small red blotch on his neck, the result of an old radiation burn.
“I should of known better,” Melhill said. “But we'd been transiting for three months on the asteroid run and I wanted a spree. I would of been fine if I'd stuck with the boys, but we got separated. So I wound up in a dog kennel with a greasy miranda. She knocked my drink and I wound up here.”
Melhill leaned back, his hands locked behind his head. “Me, of all people! I was always telling the boys to watch out. Stick with the gang I was always telling them. You know, I don't mind the thought of dying so much. I just hate the idea of those bastards giving my body to some dirty fat decrepit old slob so he can play around for another fifty years. That's what kills me, the thought of that fat old slob wearing my body. Christ!”
Blaine nodded somberly.
“So that's my tale of woe,” Melhill said, growing cheerful again. “What's yours?”
“Mine's a pretty long one,” Blaine said, “and a trifle wild in spots. Do you want to hear it all?”
“Sure. Plenty of time. I hope.”
“OK. It starts in the year 1958. Wait, don't interrupt me. I was driving my car…”
When he had finished, Blaine leaned back against the padded wall and took a deep breath. “Do you believe me?” he asked.
“Why not? Nothing so new about time travel. It's just illegal and expensive. And those Rex boys would pull anything.”
“The girls, too,” Blaine said, and Melhill grinned.
They sat in companionable silence for a while. Then Blaine asked, “So they’re going to use us for host bodies?”
“That's the score.”
“When?”
“When a customer totters in. I've been here a week, close as I can figure. Either of us might be taken any second. Or it might not come for another week or two.”
“And they just wipe our minds out?”
Melhill nodded.
“But that's murder!”
“It sure is,” Melhill agreed. “Hasn't happened yet, though. Maybe the flathats will pull a raid.”
“I doubt it.”
“Me too. Have you got hereafter insurance? Maybe you'll survive after death.”
“I'm an atheist,” Blaine said. “I don't believe in that stuff.”
“So am I. But life after death is a fact.”
“Get off it,” Blaine said sourly.
“It is! Scientific fact!”
Blaine stared hard at the young spacemen. “Ray,” he said, “how about filling me in? Brief me on what's happened since 1958.”
“That's a big order,” Melhill said, “and I'm not what you'd call an educated guy.”
“Just give me an idea. What's this hereafter stuff? And reincarnation and host bodies? What's happening?”
Melhill leaned back and took a deep breath. “Well, let's see. 1958. They put a ship on the moon somewhere around 1960, and landed on Mars about ten years later. Then we had that quickie war with Russia over the asteroids — strictly a deep-space affair. Or was it with China?”