Time was escaping from them. And all the world, including all of Mr. Bulero’s employees, especially his Pre-Fash consultants, grew and augmented themselves, bloomed into maturity. I’ll never be the New York Pre-Fash consultant, he said to himself. I’ll always be stuck here in Detroit where nothing, absolutely nothing new originates.
If he could snare the position of New York Pre-Fash consultant—my life would mean something, he realized. I’d be happy because I’d be doing a job that made full use of my ability. What the hell else would I need? Nothing else; that’s all I ask.
“I’m going out,” he said to Emily and set down his glass; going to the closet, he got his coat.
“Will you be back before I go to bed?” Mournfully, she followed him to the door of the conapt, here in building 11139584—counting outward from downtown New York—where they had lived two years, now.
“We’ll see,” he said, and opened the door.
In the hallway stood a figure, a tall gray man with bulging steel teeth, dead pupiless eyes, and a gleaming artificial hand extended from his right sleeve. The man said, “Hello, Mayerson.” He smiled; the steel teeth shone.
“Palmer Eldritch,” Barney said. He turned to Emily. “You’ve seen his pics in the homeopapes; he’s that incredibly famous big industrialist.” Naturally he had recognized Eldritch, and at once. “Did you want to see me?” he asked hesitantly; it all had a mysterious quality to it, as if it had all somehow happened before but in another way.
“Let me talk to your husband a moment,” Eldritch said to Emily in a peculiarly gentle voice; he motioned and Barney stepped out into the hail. The door shut behind him; Emily had closed it obediently. Now Eldritch seemed grim; no longer gentle or smiling he said, “Mayerson, you’re using your time badly. You’re doing nothing but repeating the past. What’s the use of my selling you Chew-Z? You’re perverse; I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ll give you ten more minutes and then I’m bringing you back to Chicken Pox Prospects where you belong. So you better figure out very damn fast what you want and if you understand anything finally.”
“What the hell,” Barney said, “is Chew-Z?”
The artificial hand lifted; with enormous force Palmer Eldritch shoved him and he toppled.
“Hey,” Barney said weakly, trying to fight back, to nullify the pressure of the man’s immense strength. “What—”
And then he was flat on his back. His head rang, ached; with difficulty he managed to open his eyes and focus on the room around him. He was waking up; he had on, he discovered, his pajamas, but they were unfamiliar: he had never seen them before. Was he in someone else’s conapt, wearing their clothes? Some other man…
In panic he examined the bed, the covers. Beside him—
He saw an unfamiliar girl who slept on, breathing lightly through her mouth, her hair a tumble of cottonlike white, shoulders bare and smooth.
“I’m late,” he said, and his voice came out distorted and husky, almost unrecognizable.
“No you’re not,” the girl murmured, eyes still shut. “Relax. We can get in to work from here in—” She yawned and opened her eyes. “Fifteen minutes.” She smiled at him; his discomfort amused her. “You always say that, every morning. Go see about coffee. I’ve got to have coffee.”
“Sure,” he said, and scrambled out of bed.
“Mr. Rabbit,” the girl said mockingly. “You’re so scared. Scared about me, about your job—and always running.”
“My God,” he said. “I’ve turned my back on everything.”
“What everything?”
“Emily.” He stared at the girl, Roni Something-or-other, at her bedroom. “Now I’ve got nothing,” he said.
“Oh fine,” Roni said with embittered sarcasm. “Now maybe I can say some nice things to you, to make you feel good.”
He said, “And I did it just now. Not years ago. Just before Palmer Eldritch came in.”
“How could Palmer Eldritch ‘come in’? He’s in a hospital bed out in the Jupiter or Saturn area; the UN took him there after they pried him from the wreck of his ship.” Her tone was scornful, and yet there was a note of curiosity in it.
“Palmer Eldritch appeared to me just now,” he said, doggedly. He thought, I have to get back to Emily. Sliding, stooping, he grabbed up his clothes, stumbled with them to the bathroom, and slammed the door behind him. Rapidly he shaved, changed, emerged, and said to the girl, who still lay in bed, “I have to go. Don’t be sore at me; I have to do it.”
A moment later, without having had breakfast, he was descending to the ground-level floor and after that he stood under the antithermal shield, searching up and down for a cab.
The cab, a fine, shiny new model, whipped him in almost no time to Emily’s conapt building; in a blur he paid it, hurried inside, and in a matter of seconds was ascending. It seemed as if no time had passed, as if time had ceased and everything waited, frozen, for him; he was in a world of fixed objects, the sole moving thing.
At her door he rang the buzzer.
The door opened and a man stood there. “Yes?” The man was dark, reasonably good-looking, with heavy eyebrows and carefully combed, somewhat curly hair; he held the morning ‘pape in one hand—behind him Barney saw a table of breakfast dishes.
Barney said, “You’re—Richard Hnatt.”
“Yes.” Puzzled, he regarded Barney intently. “Do I know you?”
Emily appeared, wearing a gray turtle-neck sweater and stained jeans. “Good heavens. It’s Barney,” she said to Hnatt. “My former. Come in.” She held the door wide open for him and he entered the apt. She seemed pleased to see him.
“Glad to meet you,” Hnatt said in a neutral tone, starting to extend his hand and then changing his mind. “Coffee?”
“Thanks.” Barney seated himself at the breakfast table at an unset place. “Listen,” he said to Emily; he couldn’t wait: it had to be said now even with Hnatt present. “I made a mistake in divorcing you. I’d like to remarry you. Go back on the old basis.”
Emily, in a way which he remembered, laughed with delight; she was overcome and she went off to get him a cup and saucer, unable to answer. He wondered if she would ever answer; it was easier for her—it appealed to the lazy slob in her—just to laugh. Christ, he thought and stared straight ahead, fixedly.
Across from him Hnatt seated himself and said, “We’re married. Did you suppose we were just living together?” His face was dark but he seemed in control of himself.
Barney said, speaking to Emily and not to Hnatt, “Marriages can be broken. Will you remarry me?” He rose and took a few hesitant steps in her direction; at that moment she turned and, calmly, handed him his cup and saucer.
“Oh no,” she said, still smiling; her eyes poured over with light, that of compassion. She understood how he felt, that this was not an impulse only. But the answer was still no, and, he knew, it would always be; her mind was not even made up—there was, to her, simply no reality to which he was referring. He thought, I cut her down, once, cut her off, lopped her, with thorough knowledge of what I was doing, and this is the result; I am seeing the bread as they say which was cast on the water drifting back to choke me, water-soaked bread that will lodge in my throat, never to be swallowed or disgorged, either one. It’s precisely what I deserve, he said to himself; I made this situation.
Returning to the kitchen table he numbly seated himself, sat as she filled his cup; he stared at her hands. Once these were my wife’s, he said to himself. And I gave it up. Self-destruction; I wanted to see myself die. That’s the only possible satisfactory explanation. Or was I that stupid? No; stupidity wouldn’t encompass such an enormity, so complete a willful—
Emily said, “How are things, Barney?”