Cr.
Oct. 31
Balance brought forward Room rent 1. 25
157. 26
Then, with the consciousness of a day well ended, he went to bed.
Staring up into the darkness, he thought that now that he had a roof over his head, perhaps he could figure things out a little further. Bechard's invasion of his mundane body had displaced his soul or whatever it was up to this astral plane, which was like, yet unlike, his own—the mundane, the demon had called it—world. It had a New York City, but one that harbored strange specimens like the chevalier. The chevalier must be connected with him, somehow; looked like him, and had a name that was an obvious Frenchification of John Prosper Nash.
And the cowboy, Arizona Bill Averoff, was undoubtedly the astral body of Nash's proletarian friend of the same name. It was funny that Nash's astral body was the kind of person that Nash's mundane self liked to imagine himself as being. The same must apply to the two Averoffs, with those Western pulps Bill read—by gum, that must be the explanation! An astral body was a sort of projection of the mundane body, the person it fancied itself as—
That left a lot of questions unanswered; how astral bodies came into existence, for instance. He had seen how they died—just evaporated. Still it explained the dramatic diversity of human types; people liked to imagine themselves as something outstanding: either what they openly strove to be, or a secret ideal totally different from their everyday character. Witness the Egyptian princesses, samurai, and the rest. Nash was willing to bet that the offensively Nordic gents in the winged hats came from the section of the astral New York corresponding to Yorkville.
Another problem raised its head. If a mundane body had a mundane soul, did an astral body have an astral soul? If so, what had become of that of Jean-Prospère de Nêche? Had it merely been suppressed, or had it been displaced up to still another plane—
The sun in his eyes routed him out of slumber before he knew it. As he got out of bed he discovered a lot of stiff and bruised places, and thought it was too bad he had not imagined an astral self that was invulnerable as well as dashing. The spikes of his mustache had come partly unraveled, and though he could repair the damage somewhat by vigorous twirling, he had no pomade to do a really good job. For that matter he would have to put up with bristling cheeks and furry teeth until he could either buy a set of toilet articles or located his own. They must exist somewhere in the city.
The ambassadorial proprietor met him at the door of the dining room with an apron tied over his cutaway, and bowed him to a table already occupied by a young man in bright-blue zipper-closed boots, tight blue breeches, and a rubbery-looking blue shirt.
The azure young man smiled pleasantly, and Nash bade him good morning. While they waited for the innkeeper to hand around the eggs, Nash asked: "Does he run the place all by himself?"
"He has a day clerk and a cook, but otherwise he does everything," said the young man."Poor Aristide has the usual trouble finding anybody to work for him. The last three clerks he's had have gone off to join the Home Defense. Might even take a crack at it myself."
"Yes?" said Nash."What's your present line, if I may ask?" The French accent was giving him less trouble.
"Nothing at the moment. I've been trying to revive the Cosmobile project, but no luck."
"What's that?" asked Nash.
"You've never heard of it? My word. You see, I and a lot of others were created to be Interplanetary Patrolmen. But there's no Interplanetary Patrol, for the good reason that there's no interplanetary traffic. So as the first step we formed a company to build a Cosmobile. But there was the usual trouble."
"What usual trouble?"
"Oh, everybody wanted to be boss. They're splendid fellows, but they just couldn't realize that the job belonged to me, because of my natural gifts of leadership." The young man shrugged and sighed."We tried using soulless ones, but they're mostly too stupid to handle a pick and shovel, let alone anything delicate like assembling a spaceship. It's too bad, because the theoretical knowledge does exist. Only nobody could agree on how to apply it. It's like trying to steal the Shamir."
Nash straightened up sharply at this. He asked: "Where's the Shamir?"
Eyebrows rose."My word, I thought everybody knew that. On the desert island, of course. But look here, pal, in strict confidence, I'm just about on my uppers. If you could let me have a few dollars—I'll give you a note—"
" 'Fraid not," said Nash hastily."I'm unemployed myself." He pushed his chair back.
"But listen, pal, you wouldn't want a man with my qualifications to get killed in a beastly little Home Defense operation—"
Nash fled into the lobby, where the maitre d'hôtel glanced up from his ledger and tipped him a wink and murmured: "I see you got away from young Farnsworth. Shall I keep your room?"
"Uh-huh, please," said Nash. He would have liked to ask more questions about the Shamir, but the azure one might come out any minute.
The street outside looked far more cheerful than it had felt the previous night. The indescribable mixture of architectural styles was revealed in all its grotesque glory. Mercifully the trees hid much of it. As Nash, blinking in the, sunshine, looked about him, his eyes picked up the weed-grown hill he had crossed in the dark.
The memory of his encounter came to the surface of his mind with a rush. He walked quickly in the opposite direction. Ahead of him the street ran straight, sloping down slightly to a chink of blue.
The buildings became smaller and more widely and irregularly spaced. There was a California bungalow, and a Cape Cod cottage, and a log cabin, and a box of prefabricated steel sheets. Then the buildings fell away, and Nash was looking across the broad reach of the North River. He must be about opposite Hoboken; Stevens Point was in plain sight. But the hill, instead of being crowned by the nineteenth-century Stevens mansion, was brooded over by a Norman castle.
Directly in front of him the shore plunged into the river in a tumble of big rocks, out of which a few piles of a former pier crazily stuck. There were other piers up and down the river; some small piers with ships in them down, and one huge unfinished one up. The ships were smallish vessels, at least half of them sail-powered.
Nash sat down on the top of one of the piles. He meant to think, but the warmth of the sun and the blueness of the water seduced him into simply sitting.
A triangle of white swam past his vision: the sail of a catboat in mid-river. The tide was carrying it down fast. Nash reflected that normally the press of river traffic would have made such a course extremely hazardous, but the astral plane's North River seemed to have neither ferries nor tugs.
Something winked from the hull of the catboat, and two seconds later the sound of a gunshot came to Nash's ears. Nash looked to see what they could be shooting at on this peaceful river. A vessel the size of a Coast Guard cutter, with smoke billowing from a tall thin stack, was crawling up-river toward the catboat. The white triangle wavered as the latter came about, but having done so it made no headway against the current, and the steam vessel crept closer. There were flashes from both ships, followed by reports; then the shooting stopped. Nash stood up in a fruitless attempt to see what was happening, but all he could make out was the two little boats meeting, and then drifting down toward Staten Island together.
The astral plane might be a world peopled with ideal beings, but the result was certainly not an ideal world—at least not according to the usual concept of a pacific and prosperous one. People getting shot and stabbed right and left—
A crunch on the gravel made Nash turn. A man was standing nearby, feet together and hands in the pants pockets of his suit, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, and looking past Nash at the river. The man had a severely handsome face in whose right eye a monocle was stuck."See what happened?" asked this individual out of the side of his mouth.