Otherwise, he realized, I might have gone on forever.
Spent a century, as Eldritch said, in this ersatz universe.
Jeez, he thought. I’m licked. “Miss Fugate,” he said, “please don’t just stand there; go back to your office.” He got up, went to the water cooler, and poured himself a paper cup of mineral water. Drinking unreal water for an unreal body, he said to himself. In front of an unreal employee. “Miss Fugate,” he said, “are you really Mr. Mayerson’s mistress?”
“Yes, Mr. Bulero,” Miss Fugate said, nodding. “As I told you.
“And you won’t be mine.” He shook his head. “Because I’m too old and too evolved. You know—or rather you don’t know—that I have at least a limited power in this universe. I could make over my body, make myself young.” Or, he thought, make you old. How would you like that? he wondered. He dank the water, and tossed the cup in the waste chute; not looking at Miss Fugate he said to himself, You’re my age, Miss Fugate. In fact older. Let’s see; you’re about ninety-two, now. In this world, anyhow; you’ve aged, here… time has rolled forward for you because you turned me down and I don’t like being turned down. In fact, he said to himself, you’re over one hundred years old, withered, juiceless, without teeth and eyes. A thing.
Behind him he heard a dry, rasping sound, an intake of breath. And a wavering, shrill voice, like the cry of a frightened bird. “Oh, Mr. Bulero—”
I’ve changed my mind, Leo thought. You’re the way you were; I take it back, okay? He turned, and saw Roni Fugate or at least something standing there where she had last stood. A spider web, gray fungoid strands wrapped one around another to form a brittle column that swayed… he saw the head, sunken at the cheeks, with eyes like dead spots of soft, inert white slime that leaked out gummy, slow-moving tears, eyes that tried to appeal but could not because they could not make out where he was.
“You’re back the way you were,” Leo said harshly, and shut his own eyes. “Tell me when it’s over.”
Footsteps. A man’s. Barney, re-entering the office. “Jesus,” Barney said, and halted.
Eyes shut, Leo said, “Isn’t she back the way she was yet?”
“She? Where’s Roni? What’s this?”
Leo opened his eyes.
It was not Roni Fugate who stood there, not even an ancient manifestation of her; it was a puddle, but not of water. The puddle was alive and in it bits of sharp, jagged gray splinters swam.
The thick, oozing material of the puddle flowed gradually outward, then shuddered, and retracted into itself; in the center the fragments of hard gray matter swam together, and cohered into a roughly shaped ball with tangled, matted strands of hair floating at its crown. Vague eyesockets, empty, formed; it was becoming a skull, but of some life-formation to come: his unconscious desire for her to experience evolution in its horrific aspect had conjured this monstrosity into being.
The jaw clacked, opening and shutting as if jerked by wicked, deeply imbedded wires; drifting here and there in the fluid of the puddle it croaked, “But you see, Mr. Bulero, she didn’t live that long. You forgot that.” It was, remotely but absolutely, the voice—not of Roni Fugate– but Monica, as if drumming at the far-distant end of a waxed string. “You made her past one hundred but she only is going to live to be seventy. So she’s been dead thirty years, except you made her alive; that was what you intended. And even worse—” The toothless jaw waggled and the uninhabited pockets for eyes gaped. “She evolved not while alive, but there in the ground.” The skull ceased piping, then by stages disintegrated; its parts once more floated away and the semblance of organization again dissipated.
After a time Barney said, “Get us out of here, Leo.”
Leo said, “Hey, Palmer.” His voice was uncontrolled, babylike with fear. “Hey, you know what? I give up; I really do.”
The carpet of the office beneath his feet rotted, became mushy, and then sprouted, grew, alive, into green fibers; he saw that it was becoming grass. And then the walls and the ceiling caved in, collapsed into fine dust; the particles rained noiselessly down like ashes. And the blue, cool sky appeared, untouched, above.
Seated on the grass, with the stick in her lap and the suitcase containing Dr. Smile beside her, Monica said, “Did you want Mr. Mayerson to remain? I didn’t think so. I let him go with the rest that you made. Okay?” She smiled up at Leo.
“Okay,” he agreed chokingly. Looking around him he saw now only the plain of green; even the dust which had composed P. P. Layouts, the building and its core of people, had vanished, except for a dim layer that remained on his hands, on his coat; he brushed it off, reflexively.
Monica said, “From dust thou art come, oh man; to dust shalt—’”
“Okay!” he said loudly. “I get it; you don’t have to hammer me over the noggin with it. So it was irreal; so what? I mean, you made your goddamn point, Eldritch; you can do anything here you want, and I’m nothing, I’m just a phantom.” He felt hatred toward Palmer Eldritch and he thought, If I ever get out of here, if I can escape from you, you bastard…
“Now, now,” the girl said, her eyes dancing. “You are not going to use language like that; you really aren’t, because I won’t let you. I won’t even say what I’ll do if you continue, but you know me, Mr. Bulero. Right?”
Leo said, “Right.” He walked off a few steps, got out his handkerchief, and mopped the perspiration from his upper lip and neck, the hollow beneath his adam’s apple where it was so hard, in the mornings, to shave. God, he thought, help me. Will You? And if You do, if You can reach into this world, I’ll do anything, whatever You want; I’m not afraid now, I’m sick. This is going to kill my body, even if it’s just an ectoplasmic, phantom-type body.
Hunched over, he was sick; he vomited onto the grass. For a long time—it seemed a long time—that kept up and then he was better; he was able to turn, and walk slowly back toward the seated child with her suitcase.
“Terms,” the child said flatly. “We’re going to work out an exact business relationship between my company and yours. We need your superb network of ad satellites and your transportation system of late-model interplan ships and your God-knows-how-extensive plantations on Venus; we want everything, Bulero. We’re going to grow the lichen where you now grow Can-D, ship it in the same ships, reach the colonists with the same well-trained, experienced pushers you use, advertise through pros like Allen and Charlotte Faine. Can-D and Chew-Z won’t be competing because there’ll just be the one product, Chew-Z; you’re about to announce your retirement. Understand me, Leo?”
“Sure,” Leo said. “I hear.”
“Will you do it?”
“Okay,” Leo said. And pounced on the child.
His hands closed about her windpipe; he squeezed. She stared into his face, rigidly, her mouth pursed, saying nothing, not even trying to struggle, to claw him or get away. He continued squeezing, for a time so long that it seemed as if his hands had grown fast to her, become fixed in place forever, like gnarled roots of some ancient, diseased, but still-living plant.
When he let go she was dead. Her body settled forward, then twisted and fell to one side, to come to rest supine on the grass. No blood. No sign even of a struggle, except that her throat was a dark, mottled, blackish red.
He stood up, thinking, Well, did I do it? If he–she or it, whatever it is–dies here, does that take care of it?