The female — another term was woman—spoke into a small implement of hydrocarbon-based plastic. “They will bring it, and the paper.” She got out of bed and went into another room. After hydraulic noises, she returned.
A moment later, Donald — he couldn’t very well call himself Pmurt any more — realized he had certain hydraulic needs of his own. He went into that room himself. As the woman had, he closed the door. His body put one foot in front of the other on automatic pilot, as it were. He knew he would soon get the hang of walking, but for now it seemed a strange and insecure way to move.
He almost had what would have been an unfortunate accident before he figured out how to untangle himself from the false skins in which humans wrapped themselves. The flush lever told him which device to use to ease himself. The woman had used it, so he did as well.
He looked at himself in the mirror. Yes, he was hideous, too. He would just have to get used to it. This was what he had until such time as the judges decided he’d been punished enough. And if this was what he had, he needed to make the most of it.
Breakfast arrived on two trays while he was tending to things. Cooked ova, strips of grilled smoked meat, shredded and fried tubers, a cup with some strong-smelling hot liquid in it…He glanced at the woman to see how she used the metal implements by the plate, then imitated her. His body let him know the food was good of its kind.
Also on his tray lay the New York Post. The date told him he was here almost a hundred years after Peaslee’s spirit had been taken into the past. And his picture, in garments quite different from those now enveloping him, was on the front page. HOTEL MAGNATE TO OPEN NEW ONE BY ARKHAM RESERVOIR! the headline shouted.
Seeing the name of Arkham, as opposed to hearing it, reminded him the Peaslee creature had taught at a university there. Miskatonic, Pmurt remembered. He wondered if the university was still operating. Humans and their institutions seemed ephemeral to him.
He read further. There might be protesters by the hotel. The reservoir was alleged to be polluted—“accursed” was the odd word one of the protesters used — although the authorities insisted it was safe for drinking and all other purposes.
If the authorities said something was so, so it was bound to be. Thus Pmurt, with his long experience of the Great Race’s civilization, firmly believed. Some of the things he’d heard from human spirits cast back in time made him wonder how true it was for mankind, but he did not wonder long. Authorities were authorities for good reason. So his long experience as a ten-foot rugose cone assured him.
After he and the female finished eating, she said, “We should get dressed. Can’t go in our pajamas, after all.”
“No?” Pmurt said. The woman made a noise that indicated amusement among these creatures. “No,” Pmurt repeated, more firmly this time.
The closet showed him more clothes than he knew what to do with, in the most literal sense of the words. He found an outfit not too different from the one the newspaper showed. That seemed to be public garb. Even after he figured out buttons and zippers, it was none too comfortable. Tying his cravat and shoes were special trials. He had not needed to worry about such things in his proper body.
The woman’s clothes seemed much simpler than his. He wondered why the sexes had such contrasting wrappings. That was a question for another time, though. Someone knocked on the living area’s outer door: plainly a call for attention. Pmurt tried to pull the doorknob before realizing it turned, but no one saw the mistake. He got the door open.
A man in the hallway said, “Sir, the limo is ready to take you and the missus to the airport for the flight to Arkham.”
The Peaslee creature had written of motorized conveyances. This one was quieter, smoother riding, and altogether more luxurious than those writings would have led Pmurt to expect. Humans must have made respectable progress in the mechanical arts across the intervening century.
Air travel, in Peaslee’s time, had barely begun. Now it seemed altogether routine. The flight was nearly as smooth as the ground transport had been. Another quiet, comfortable limo awaited Pmurt and the female in Arkham. It whisked them them to a large, gaudy hotel by the side of a lake — no, as Pmurt recalled from the Post story, it was a reservoir. If he looked to the south, he could see the dam.
Humans paraded near the hotel, chanting and carrying signs. Others, by their uniform clothing likely order-keepers, prevented them from coming too close. A subordinate male whose expression Pmurt instinctively recognized as worried told him, “Sir, you promised you’d meet with their spokesperson.”
“Well, if I promised, I’d better do it,” Pmurt said. “Bring whoever it is to me, why don’t you?”
That spokesperson was a female, older and less attractive than the one that seemed to belong to Pmurt. “I am Louise Pierce, professor of environmental science at Miskatonic University,” she said. “My great-great grandfather, Ammi Pierce, barely survived the alien infestation now buried below the surface of the reservoir here.”
Remembering the Post story again, Pmurt replied, “That’s a bunch of superstitious hooey.” He didn’t know just what hooey meant, but liked the sound of it.
Professor Pierce shook her head. “It’s not. Something from another world visited what was the Gardner farm in the 1880s, and bad things happened afterwards. Contemporary accounts are quite clear about that. The reservoir may have diluted the problem over the past eighty or ninety years, but hasn’t dissolved it. Despite filtration, Arkham has high rates of insanity and birth defects. And the water in the reservoir is the likeliest cause. Believe me, I drink only bottled water from out of state. Sensible people here do.”
“My people say it’s safe,” Pmurt declared. “The state says it’s safe. I’m not afraid of it. I’d drink it straight out of the reservoir.” Yes, he trusted duly constituted authority.
Professor Pierce looked alarmed. “I wouldn’t do that. I really wouldn’t, not for anything. Even after a long lifetime and enormous dilution, it can’t possibly be safe. If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.”
“Everything will be fine. You watch and you’ll see. All these stories about the water, they’re nothing but”—Pmurt paused, casting about for a phrase, and found one in a Post story that had nothing to do with the human whose body he now inhabited—“nothing but fake news, that’s what they are.”
He called for his aide. “What do you need, sir?” the male asked, appearing as if out of nowhere.
“Bring me a big glass of water from the edge of the lake,” Pmurt said. “A big one, you hear?”
“Are you…sure that’s a good idea, sir?” the aide asked.
“Do what I pay you to do,” Pmurt replied. In every suitably complex society of which he knew, that was a potent argument. So it proved here. The aide fidgeted for a moment, but then went off to do what he was paid to do.
“Really, you don’t need to show off like this, not with unfiltered water from that…that unholy reservoir,” Professor Pierce said.
Pmurt laughed. What the Peaslee creature had written of the holy and the unholy struck him as particularly ridiculous. The aide came back with a large tumbler. He carried it carefully so the water wouldn’t slosh…or touch him. Pmurt took it from him. “Looks like water.” He sniffed. “Smells like water.” He raised it to his lips. “Tastes like water, too.” So it did; it was cool and refreshing. He drained the tumbler, then handed it back, empty, to the aide. He smiled what he somehow knew to be a mocking smile at the scholar from Miskatonic University. “You see? I didn’t blow up or anything. Fake news, like I told you.”