He was sitting on a bench; at least the body he had clicked into was sitting on a bench, of dark wood worn shiny without benefit of varnish, by the seats of many pairs of pants.
The bench was in a room; low-ceilinged, dimly lit. Oil lamps shone on rows of bottles. There were others in the room—
Keep your head, J. Prosper. Let's take a look at this astral body of ours first.
Astral body? Sounds silly, but that's what the demon said. Maybe demons are silly.
Prosper Nash bent the head of his new body to look at himself. The first things he saw were his hands—bigger than the hands of his other, mundane, body, with a ring in which was set a huge star sapphire.
Beyond the hands he observed with some horror that lace cuffs from a concealed shirt were turned back over the sleeves of his coat. A roll of the eyes showed that a lace collar sprouted out of the collar of his jacket and lay across his shoulders. He was in a black velvet suit with knee pants.
Little Lord Fauntleroy!
Not quite. The pants disappeared into high boots with wide floppy tops, and a strap across each instep with a gleaming buckle. He bent an ankle to observe that the footgear had high heels like those of a Texan boot.
He tensed the muscles of his right arm, and discreetly pinched the biceps and deltoid with the fingers of his left. Hm-m-m, nice! No wonder Bechard was so willing to take an astral body in exchange for a mundane one!
So far the astral body appeared to have the usual number of everything, and to be substantially if somewhat eccentrically dressed. Maybe the astral plane went in for that sort of thing. The other customers in the dramshop were also costumed rather than merely clad.
Nash put his elbow on the table and started to rest his chin on his fist. He got another shock: he had a goatee, a little inverted isosceles triangle of whisker extending from his lower lip to the point of his chin. He quickly ran his hand around his face. The mustache, which in his mundane body had been a close-cut Anthony Eden affair, now ended in a pair of inch-long waxed spikes. And his hair came down to his shoulders.
So he'd wanted to be a dashing cavalier, eh? Well, he was one, all right, all right. Did that mean he had to act like a cavalier? How was a cavalier supposed to act?
How, indeed?
Chapter II.
How did a dashing cavalier dash? He couldn't go everywhere at a dead run, especially in those boots. Though d'Artagnan had come pretty close to it, at least in the old Douglas Fairbanks movie.
Time enough to worry about that later. The room now held Nash's attention.
Nearby sat a solitary gent in plate armor, trying to drink beer out of a mug the size of a child's sand bucket. Something was wrong with the catch that should have held up the visor of his armet. The knight carefully pushed up the visor, where it stayed for the nonce. He picked up the mug in both hands—it had no handle—and almost got it to his lips when the visor fell down with a clang. The knight carefully set down the mug and repeated the process. After the fourth try he just sat there with slow tears coursing down his ruddy cheeks.
At the next table a man in a matador outfit was talking to a beautiful girl dressed like a movie producer's idea of an Egyptian princess. Beyond them was an earnestly conversing group: a samurai in several gorgeous kimonos, the outer one with yard-wide sleeves that stuck out like wings; and two others with long blond hair and bearskin bathing suits.
The astralites were certainly a colorful lot, thought Nash; the men—even the massive bartender—ruggedly handsome; the women, from the three or four in sight, inhumanly beautiful. Were they all astral bodies of real people like himself, or was the whole astral plane a product of the imagination of J. Prosper Nash? Well, maybe the so-called real world, was too—no, stop it; that's a goofy philosophy called sol—solastice—solipism! You ended up in a nice warm cell telling the keepers they didn't exist. Skip it; worrying over such questions would be like trying to rectify a trial balance by an investigation of the Foster-Catchings monetary theories.
The customers were, if anything, a little too orderly. They spoke in the consciously subdued tones of people who not only do not want to be overheard, but expect somebody to try to overhear them. The sharp unsmiling eyes of the monolithic bartender roved from table to table with a "Just start something!" look.
Nash turned his attention back to his new body. A broad leather strap encircled his torso, over the right shoulder and under the left. At its lower end, where it hung loose against his left hip, there was a leather collar, empty, but the right size for a scabbard.
There should be some mark of identification on him. He began to search for pockets. There were none in his breeches, and for a while it seemed that there were none in his jacket, either. At last he located two small ones inside the bottom edge in the rear—in what would have been the tails if the coat had had tails. One was empty; the other contained a slightly soiled handkerchief with the initial N. Did that mean that his astral body was also named Nash?
When he moved he was aware o£ a massive, heavy belt under his coat. His exploring fingers identified this as a money belt which held up his pants by friction alone, since the latter garment had no belt loops. Investigation of the compartments of the belt located a couple of wads of bills and a fistful of change, but no papers or calling cards, except one little green square of cardboard bearing the numeral 67.
It was a comfort to know you were well heeled, but it would be still nicer to know who you were. Nash twirled the empty wine glass in his fingers, pondering, until a voice said: "Another of the same, sir?"
The speaker was evidently a waiter, but a very gorgeous waiter for such a mediocre-looking place; a veritable Adolphe Menjou of a waiter.
"Yes," said Nash. As the waiter started to go with a swish of coat tails, Nash added: "Wait. Who do you think I am?" At least that was what he intended to say, but it came out as "Oo do you senk I om?"
Oh, Lord, he thought, now he had a French accent to wrestle with!
"I wouldn't know, sir," bowed the waiter."This is the first time you've been here."
As the waiter left, a new customer entered the taproom: a man in a uniform with a scarlet tunic and a stiff-brimmed hat. Nash recognized the uniform as that of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
"Scotch and soda," the new man told the bartender.
The little buzz of conversation died, except for the tail-end of a sentence that was being spoken by one of the men in bearskins, with a jerk of his thumb toward the new arrivaclass="underline" "—diejenigen Feiglingen?"
Then the silence was complete. The Mounty turned his head slowly."What was that?"
The man in the Siegfried getup ostentatiously ignored the question, and spoke to his companions. The redcoat walked slowly over to the table where the three sat. Prosper Nash saw that his pistol holster was empty.
"Hey!" cried the bartender.
"What did you say?"
He of the bearskin glanced up, snapped: "V'steh' nicht," and turned back to his pals.
A twinkle drew Nash's eye; it was the sparkle of empty bottles being lined up on the bar by the barkeep.
Fssh!
Nash turned back toward the group at the table in time to see a steinful of beer envelop the Mounty's face. Then the fur-clad ones pushed their table over and climbed across it to get at their enemy. Other tables went over booming, too.
Nash's right hand made an instinctive grab for his left hip—more of his astral body's habits, he thought. There was no sword there, of course, and, anyway, it was not his business to get mixed up in barroom brawls, even if this one might have been deliberately staged to rouse his strongest prejudices—
And then he had a glimpse of the samurai drawing a dagger from one of his sleeves, which were big enough to contain a whole arsenal. Since everybody else was disarmed, this was going too far. If he, Nash, weren't nearly blind without his glasses, he'd—