Behind him Roni Fugate, his acting New York Pre-Fash consultant, sat intently listening. Taking it all in, Leo said to himself.
“Did you get a good earful?” he demanded roughly.
Roni said, “You’re doing the same thing to him that he did to you.”
“Who? What?”
“Barney was afraid to follow you when you disappeared on Luna. Now you’re afraid—”
“It’s just not wise. All right,” he said. “I’m too goddam scared of Palmer to set foot outside this building; of course I’m not going to Mars and what you say is absolutely true.”
“But no one,” Roni said softly, “is going to fire you. The way you did Barney.”
“I’m firing myself. Inside. It hurts.”
“But not enough to make you go to Mars.”
“All right!” Savagely he snapped the vidset back on again and dialed Felix Blau. “Blau, I take it all back. I’m going myself. Although it’s insane.”
“Frankly,” Felix Blau said, “in my opinion you’re doing exactly what Palmer Eldritch wants. All questions of bravery versus—”
“Eldritch’s power works through that drug,” Leo said. “As long as he can’t administer any to me I’m fine. I’ll take a few company guards along to watch that I’m not slipped an injection like last time. Hey, Blau. You still come along; okay?” He swung to face Roni. “Is that all right?”
“Yes.” She nodded.
“See? She says it’s okay. So will you come along with me to Mars and you know, hold my hand?”
“Sure, Leo,” Felix Blau said. “And if you faint I’ll fan you back to consciousness. I’ll meet you at your office in—” He examined his wristwatch. “Two hours. We’ll map out details. Have a fast ship ready. And I’ll bring a couple of men along I have confidence in, too.”
“That’s it,” Leo said to Roni as he broke the connection. “Look what you got me to do. You seized Barney’s job and if I don’t get back from Mars maybe you can nail down my job, too.” He glared at her. Women can get a man to do anything, he realized. Mother, wife, even employee; they twist us like hot little bits of thermoplastic.
Roni said, “Is that really why I said it, Mr. Bulero? Do you really believe that?”
He took a good, long, hard look at her. “Yes. Because you’re insatiably ambitious. I really believe that.”
“You’re wrong.”
“If I don’t come back from Mars will you come after me?” He waited but she did not answer; he saw hesitation on her face, and at that he loudly laughed. “Of course not,” he said.
Stonily, Roni Fugate said, “I must get back to my office; I have new flatware to judge. Modern patterns from Capetown.” Rising, she departed; he watched her go, thinking, She’s the real one. Not Palmer Eldritch. If I do get back I’ve got to find some method of quietly dumping her. I don’t like to be manipulated.
Palmer Eldritch, he thought suddenly, appeared in the form of a small girl, a little child—not to mention later on when he was that dog. Maybe there is no Roni Fugate; maybe it’s Eldritch.
The thought chilled him.
What we have here, he realized, is not an invasion of Earth by Proxmen, beings from another system. Not an invasion by the legions of a pseudo human race. No. It’s Palmer Eldritch who’s everywhere, growing and growing like a mad weed. Is there a point where he’ll burst, grow too much? All the manifestations of Eldritch, all over Terra and Luna and Mars, Palmer puffing up and bursting—pop, pop, POP! Like Shakespeare says, some damn thing about sticking a mere pin in through the armor, and goodbye king.
But, he thought, what in this case is the pin? And is there an open spot into which we can thrust it? I don’t know and Felix doesn’t know and Barney; I’ll make book that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea of how to cope with Eldritch. Kidnap Zoe, the man’s elderly, ugly daughter? Palmer wouldn’t care. Unless Palmer is also Zoe; maybe there is no Zoe, independent of him. And that’s the way we’ll all wind up unless we figure out how to destroy him, he realized. Replicas, extensions of the man, inhabiting three planets and six moons. The man’s a protoplasm, spreading and reproducing and dividing, and all through that damn lichen-derived non-Terran drug, that horrible, miserable Chew-Z.
Once more at the vidset he dialed Allen Faine’s satellite. Presently, a trifle insubstantial and weak but nevertheless there, the face of his prime disc jockey appeared. “Yes, Mr. Bulero.”
“You’re positive Mayerson hasn’t contacted you? He’s got the code book, hasn’t he?”
“Got the book, but still nothing from him. We’ve been monitoring every transmission from Chicken Pox Prospects. We saw Eldritch’s ship land near the hovel—that was hours ago—and we saw Eldritch get out and go up to the hovelists, and although our cameras didn’t pick this up I’m sure the transaction was consummated at that instant.” Faine added, “And Barney Mayerson was one of the hovelists who met Eldritch at the surface.”
“I believe I know what happened,” Leo said. “Okay, thanks, Al.” He rang off. Barney went below with the Chew-Z, he realized. And right away they all sat down and chewed; that was the end, just as it was for me on Luna. Our tactics required that Barney chew away, Leo realized, and so we played right into Palmer’s dirty, semimechanical hands; once he had the drug in Barney’s system we were through. Because Eldritch somehow controls each of the hallucinatory worlds induced by the drug; I know it—know it!–that the skunk is in all of them.
The fantasy world that Chew-Z induces, he thought, are in Palmer Eldritch’s head. As I found out personally.
And the trouble is, he thought, that once you get into one of them you can’t quite scramble back out; it stays with you, even when you think you’re free. It’s a one-way gate, and for all I know I’m still in it now.
However that did not seem likely. And yet, he thought, it shows how afraid I am—as Roni Fugate pointed out. Afraid enough to (I’ll admit it) abandon Barney there like he abandoned me. And Barney was using his precog ability, so he had foresight, almost to the point where it was like what I have now, like hindsight. He knew in advance what I had to learn by experience. No wonder he balked.
Who gets sacrificed? Leo asked himself. Me, Barney, Felix Blau—which of us gets melted down for Palmer to guzzle? Because that’s what we are potentially for him: food to be consumed. It’s an oral thing that arrived back from the Prox system, a great mouth, open to receive us.
But Palmer’s not a cannibal. Because I know he’s not human; that’s not a man there in that Palmer Eldritch skin.
But what it was he had no concept at all. So much could happen in the vast expanses between Sol and Proxima, either going or coming. Maybe it happened, he thought, when Palmer was going; maybe he ate the Proxmen during those ten years, cleaned the plate there, and so then came back to us. Ugh. He shivered.
Well, he thought, two more hours of independent life, plus the time it takes to travel to Mars. Maybe ten hours of private existence, and then—swallowed. And all over Mars that hideous drug is being distributed; think, picture, the numbers confined to Palmer’s illusory worlds, his nets that he casts. What do those Buddhists in the UN like Hepburn-Gilbert call it? Maya. The veil of illusion. Sheoot, he thought dismally, and reached to snap on his intercom in order to requisition a fast ship for the flight. And I want a good pilot, he remembered; too many autonomic landings of late have been failures: I don’t intend to be splattered all over the countryside—especially that countryside.
To Miss Gleason he said, “Who’s the best interplan pilot we have?”
“Don Davis,” Miss Gleason said promptly. “He has a perfect record in—you know. His flights from Venus.” She did not refer explicitly to their Can-D enterprise; even the intercom might be tapped.