Astounded, Barney said, “After two years?”
“And Emily knows it because since she’s been selling her pots to us through Roni the two of them have become buddies; they tell each other their secrets. Look at it from Emily’s viewpoint. If she lets you come back to her Roni’ll probably stop accepting her pots for minning. It’s a risk, and I bet Em won’t want to take it. I mean, we give Roni absolute say-so, like you had in your time.”
Barney said, “Emily would never put her career ahead of her own life.”
“You did. Maybe Em learned from you, got the message. And anyhow, even without that Hnatt guy, why would Emily want to go back to you? She’s leading a very successful life, with her career; she’s planet-famous and she’s got skin after skin salted away… you want the truth? She’s got all the men she wants. Any darn time. Em doesn’t need you; face it, Barney. Anyhow, what’s lacking about Roni? Frankly I wouldn’t mind—”
“I think you’re Palmer Eldritch”, Barney said.
“Me?” Leo tapped his chest. “Barney, I killed Eldritch; that’s why they put up that monument to me.” His voice was low and quiet but he had flushed deep red. “Do I have stainless steel teeth? Do I have an artificial arm?” Leo lifted up both his hands. “Well? And my eyes—”
Barney moved toward the door of the office.
“Where are you going?” Leo demanded.
“I know,” Barney said as he opened the door, “that if I can see Emily even for just a few minutes—”
“No you can’t, fella,” Leo said. He shook his head, firmly.
Waiting in the corridor for the elevator Barney thought, Maybe it really was Leo. And maybe it’s true.
So I can’t succeed without Palmer Eldritch.
Anne was right; I should have given half the bindle back to her and then we could have tried this together. Anne, Palmer… it’s all the same, it’s all him, the creator. That’s who and what he is, he realized. The owner of these worlds. The rest of us just inhabit them and when he wants to he can inhabit them, too. Can kick over the scenery, manifest himself, push things in any direction he chooses. Even be any of us he cares to. All of us, in fact, if he desires. Eternal, outside of time and spliced-together segments of all other dimensions… he can even enter a world in which he’s dead.
Palmer Eldritch had gone to Prox a man and returned a god.
Aloud, as he stood waiting for the elevator, Barney said, “Palmer Eldritch, help me. Get my wife back for me.” He looked around; no one was present to overhear him.
The elevator arrived. The doors slid aside. Inside the elevator waited four men and two women, silently.
All of them were Palmer Eldritch. Men and women alike: artificial arm, stainless steel teeth… the gaunt, hollowed-out gray face with Jensen eyes.
Virtually in unison, but not quite, as if competing with each other for first chance to utter it, the six people said, “You’re not going to be able to get back to your own world from here, Mayerson; you’ve gone too far, this time, taken a massive overdose. As I warned .you when you snatched it away from me at Chicken Pox Prospects.”
“Can’t you help me?” Barney said. “I’ve got to get her back.”
“You don’t understand,” the Palmer Eldritches all said, collectively shaking their heads; it was the same motion that Leo had just now made, and the same firm no. “As was pointed out to you: since this is your future you’re already established here. So there’s no place for you; that’s a matter of simple logic. Who’m I supposed to snare Emily for? You? Or the legitimate Barney Mayerson who lived naturally up to this time? And don’t think he hasn’t tried to get Emily back. Don’t you suppose—and obviously you haven’t—that as the Hnatts split up he made his move? I did what I could for him, then; it was quite a few months ago, just after Richard Hnatt was shipped to Mars, kicking and protesting the whole way. Personally I don’t blame Hnatt; it was a dirty deal, all engineered by Leo, of course. And look at yourself.” The six Palmer Eldritches gestured contemptuously. “You’re a phantasm, as Leo said; I can see through you, literally. I’ll tell you in more accurate terminology what you are.” From the six the calm, dispassionate statement came, then. “You’re a ghost.”
Barney stared at them and they stared back placidly, unmoved.
“Try building your life on that premise,” the Eldritches continued. “Well, you got what St. Paul promises, as Anne Hawthorne was blabbing about; you’re no longer clothed in a perishable, fleshly body—you’ve put on an ethereal body in its place. How do you like it, Mayerson?” Their tone was mocking, but compassion showed on the six faces; it showed in the weird, slitted mechanical eyes of each of them. “You can’t die; you don’t eat or drink or breathe air… you can, if you wish, pass directly through walls, in fact through any material object you care to. You’ll learn that, in time. Evidently on the road to Damascus Paul experienced a vision relating to this phenomenon. That and a lot more besides.” The Eldritches added, “I’m inclined, as you can see, to be somewhat sympathetic to the Early– and Neo-Christian point of view, such as Anne holds. It assists in explaining a great deal.”
Barney said, “What about you, Eldritch? You’re dead, killed two years ago by Leo.” And I know, he thought, that you’re suffering what I am; the same process must have overtaken you, somewhere along the route. You gave yourself an overdose of Chew-Z and now for you there’s no return to your own time and world, either.
“That monument,” the six Eldritches said, murmuring together like a rattling, far-off wind, “is highly inaccurate. A ship of mine had a running gun-battle with one of Leo’s, just off Venus; I was aboard, or supposed to be aboard, ours. Leo was aboard his. He and I had just held a conference together with Hepburn-Gilbert on Venus and on the way back to Terra Leo took the opportunity to jump our ship. It’s on that premise that the monument was erected—due to Leo’s astute economic pressure, applied in all the proper political bodies. He got himself into the history books once and for all.”
Two persons, a well-dressed executive-type young man and a girl who was possibly a secretary, strolled down the hall; they glanced curiously at Barney and then at the six creatures within the elevator.
The creatures ceased to be Palmer Eldritch; the change took place before him. All at once they were six individual, ordinary men and women. Utterly heterogeneous.
Barney walked away from the elevator. For a measureless interval he roamed the corridors and then, by ramp, descended to ground level where the P. P. Layouts directory was situated. There, reading it, he located his own name and office number. Ironically—and this bordered on being just too much—he held the title he had tried to pry by force out of Leo not so long ago; he was listed as Pre-Fash Supervisor, clearly outranking every individual consultant. So again, if he had only waited—
Beyond doubt Leo had managed to bring him back from Mars. Rescued him from the world of the hovel. And this implied a great deal.
The planned litigation—or some substitute tactic—had succeeded. Would, rather. And perhaps soon.
The mist of hallucination cast up by Palmer Eldritch, the fisherman of human souls, was enormously effective, but not perfect. Not in the long run. So had he stopped consuming Chew-Z after the initial dose—
Perhaps Anne Hawthorne’s possession of a bindle had been deliberate. A means of maneuvering him into taking it once again and very quickly. If so, her protests had been spurious; she had intended that he seize it, and, like a beast in a superior maze, he had scrambled for the glimpsed way out. Manipulated by Palmer Eldritch through every inch of the way.
And there was no path back.
If he was to believe Eldritch, speaking through Leo. Through his congregation everywhere. But that was the key word, if.