Pulcher marched into the unemployment office the next morning with an air of determination far exceeding what he really felt. Talk about loyalty to a client! But he had spent the whole night brooding about it, and Dickon had been right.
The clerk blinked at him and wheezed: “Gee, you’re Mr. Pulcher, aren’t you? I never thought I’d see
you
here. Things pretty slow?”
Pulcher’s uncertainty made him belligerent. “I want to rent my body,” he barked. “Am I in the right place or not?”
“Well, sure, Mr. Pulcher. I mean, you’re not, if it’s voluntary, but it’s been so long since they had a voluntary that it don’t make much difference, you know. I mean, I can handle it for you. Wait a minute.” He turned away, hesitated, glanced at Pulcher and said, “I better use the other phone.”
He was gone only a minute. He came back with a look of determined embarrassment. “Mr. Pulcher. Look. I thought I better call Charley Dickon. He isn’t in his office. Why don’t you wait until I can clear it with him?”
Pulcher said grimly, “It’s already cleared with him.”
The clerk hesitated. “But—Oh. All right,” he said miserably, scribbling on a pad. “Right across the street. Oh, and tell them you’re a volunteer. I don’t know if that will make them leave the cuffs off you, but at least it’ll give them a laugh.” He chuckled.
Pulcher took the slip of paper and walked sternly across the street to the Tourist Rental Agency, Procurement Office, observing without pleasure that there were bars on the windows. A husky guard at the door straightened up as he approached and said genially, “All right, sonny. It isn’t going to be as bad as you think. Just gimme your wrists a minute.”
“Wait,” said Pulcher quickly, putting his hands behind him. “You won’t need the handcuffs for me. I’m a volunteer.”
The guard said dangerously, “Don’t kid with me, sonny.” Then he took a closer look. “Hey, I know you. You’re the lawyer. I saw you at the Primary Dance.” He scratched his ear. He said doubtfully, “Well, maybe you are a volunteer. Go on in.” But as Pulcher strutted past he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder and, click, click, his wrists were circled with steel. He whirled furiously. “No hard feelings,” boomed the guard cheerfully. “It costs a lot of dough to get you ready, that’s all. They don’t want you changing your mind when they give you the squeeze, see?”
“The squeeze—? All right,” said Pulcher, and turned away again. The squeeze. It
didn’t sound so good, at that. But he had a little too much pride left to ask the guard for details. Anyway, it couldn’t be
too
bad, he was sure. Wasn’t he? After all, it wasn’t the same as being executed … .
An hour and a half later he wasn’t so sure.
They had stripped him, weighed him, fluorographed him, taken samples of his blood, saliva, urine and spinal fluid; they had thumped his chest and listened to the strangled pounding of the arteries in his arm.
“All right, you pass,” said a fortyish blonde in a stained nurse’s uniform. “You’re lucky today, openings all over. You can take your pick—mining, sailing, anything you like. What’ll it be?”
“What?”
“While you’re
renting.
What’s the matter with you? You got to be doing something while your body’s rented, you know. Of course, you can have the tank if you want to. But they mostly don’t like that. You’re conscious the whole time, you know.”
Pulcher said honestly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But then he remembered. While a person’s body was rented out there was the problem of what to do with his own mind and personality. It couldn’t stay in the body. It had to go somewhere else. “The tank” was a storage device, only that and nothing more; the displaced mind was held in a sort of pickling vat of transistors and cells until its own body could be returned to it. He remembered a client of his boss’s, while he was still clerking, who had spent eight weeks in the tank and had then come out to commit a murder. No. Not the tank. He said, coughing, “What else is there?”
The nurse said impatiently, “Golly, whatever you want, I guess. They’ve got a big call for miners operating the deep gas generators right now, if you want that. It’s pretty hot, is all. They burn the coal into gas, and of course you’re right in the middle of it. But I don’t think you feel much. Not
too
much. I don’t know about sailing or rocketing, because you have to have some experience for that. There might be something with the taxi company, but I ought to tell you usually the renters don’t want that, because the live drivers don’t like seeing the machines running cabs. Sometimes if they see a machine-cab they tip it over. Naturally, if there’s any damage to the host machine it’s risky for you.”
Pulcher said faintly, “I’ll try mining.”
He went out of the room in a daze, a small bleached towel around his middle his only garment and hardly aware of that. His own clothes had been whisked away and checked long ago. The tourist who would shortly wear his body would pick his own clothes; the haberdashery was one of the more profitable subsidiaries of the Tourist Agency.
Then he snapped out of his daze as he discovered what was meant by “the squeeze.”
A pair of husky experts lifted him onto a slab, whisked away the towel, unlocked and tossed away the handcuffs. While one pinned him down firmly at the shoulders, the other began to turn viselike wheels that moved molded forms down upon him. It was like a sectional sarcophagus closing in on him. Pulcher had an instant childhood recollection of some story or other—the walls closing in, the victim inexorably squeezed to death. He yelled, “Hey, hold it! What are you doing?”
The man at his head, bored, said, “Oh, don’t worry. This your first time? We got to keep you still, you know. Scanning’s close work.”
“But—”
“Now shut up and relax,” the man said reasonably. “If you wiggle when the tracer’s scanning you you could get your whole personality messed up. Not only that, we might damage the body an’ then the Agency’d have a suit on its hands, see? Tourists don’t like damaged bodies … . Come on, Vince. Get the legs lined up so I can do the head.”
“But—” said Pulcher again, and then, with effort, relaxed. It was only for twenty-four hours, after all. He could stand anything for twenty-four hours, and he had been careful to sign up for only that long. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s only for twenty-four hours.”
“What? Oh, sure, friend. Lights out, now; have a pleasant dream.”
And something soft but quite firm came down over his face.
He heard a muffled sound of voices. Then there was a quick ripping feeling, as though he had been plucked out of some sticky surrounding medium.
Then it
hurt.
Pulcher screamed. It didn’t accomplish anything, he no longer had a voice to scream with.
Funny, he had always thought of mining as something that was carried on underground. He was under
water.
There wasn’t any doubt of it. He could see vagrant eddies of sand moving in a current; he could see real fish, not the hydrogen Zeppelins of the air; he could see bubbles, arising from some source in the sand at his feet—No! Not at his feet. He didn’t have feet. He had tracks.
A great steel bug swam up in front of him and said raspingly, “All right, you there, let’s go.” Funny again. He didn’t hear the voice with ears—he didn’t have ears, and there was no stereophonic sense—but he did, somehow, hear. It seemed to be speaking inside his brain. Radio? Sonar? “Come on!” growled the bug.
Experimentally Pulcher tried to talk. “Watch it!” squeaked a thin little voice, and a tiny, many-treaded steel beetle squirmed out from under his tracks. It paused to rear back and look at him. “Dope!” it chattered scathingly. A bright flame erupted from its snout as it squirmed away.
The big bug rasped, “Go on, follow the burner, Mac.” Pulcher thought of walking, rather desperately. Yes. Something was happening. He lurched and moved. “Oh, God,” sighed the steel bug, hanging beside him, watching with critical attention. “This your first time? I figured. They always give me the new ones to break in. Look, that burner—the little thing that just went down the cline, Mac! That’s a burner. It’s going to burn the hard rock out of a new shaft. You follow it and pull the sludge out. With your
buckets
, Mac.”
Pulcher gamely started his treads and lurchingly followed the little burner. All around him, visible through the churned, silty water, he caught glimpses of other machines working. There were big ones and little ones, some with great elephantine flexible steel trunks that sucked silt and mud away, some with wasp’s stingers that planted charges of explosive, some like himself with buckets for hauling and scooping out pits. The mine, whatever sort of mine it was to be, was only a bare scratched-out beginning on the sea floor as yet. It took him—an hour? a minute? he had no means of telling time—to learn the rudiments of operating his new steel body.
Then it became boring.
Also it became painful. The first few scoops of sandy grime he carried out of the new pit made his buckets tingle. The tingle became a pain, the pain an ache, the ache a blazing
agony. He stopped. Something was wrong. They couldn’t expect him to go on like this! “Hey, Mac. Get busy, will you?”
“But it
hurts
.”
“Goddamighty, Mac, it’s
supposed
to hurt. How else would you be able to feel when you hit something hard? You want to break your buckets on me, Mac?” Pulcher gritted his—not-teeth, squared his—not-shoulders, and went back to digging. Ultimately the pain became, through habit, bearable. It didn’t become less. It just became bearable.
It was boring, except when once he did strike a harder rock than his phospher-bronze buckets could handle, and had to slither back out of the way while the burner chopped it up for him. But that was the only break in the monotony. Otherwise the work was strictly routine. It gave him plenty of time to think.
This was not altogether a boon.
I wonder, he thought with a drowned clash of buckets, I wonder what my body is doing now.
Perhaps the tenant who now occupied his body was a businessman, Pulcher thought prayerfully. A man who had had to come to Altair Nine quickly, on urgent business—get a contract signed, make a trading deal, arrange an interstellar loan. That wouldn’t be so bad! A businessman would not damage a rented property. No. At the worst, a businessman might drink one or two cocktails too many, perhaps eat an indigestible lunch. All right. So when—in surely only a few hours now—Pulcher resumed his body, the worst he could expect would be a hangover or dyspepsia. Well, what of that? An aspirin. A dash of bicarb.
But maybe the tourist would not be a businessman.
Pulcher flailed the coarse sand with his buckets and thought apprehensively: He might be a sportsman. Still, even that wouldn’t be so bad. The tourist might walk his body up and down a few dozen mountains, perhaps even sleep it out in the open overnight. There might be a cold, possibly even pneumonia. Of course, there might also be an accident—tourists did fall off the Dismal Hills; there could be a broken leg. But that was not too bad, it was only a matter of a few days rest, a little medical attention.
But maybe, Pulcher thought grayly, ignoring the teeming agony of his buckets, maybe the tenant will be something worse.
He had heard queer, smutty stories about female tenants who rented male bodies. It was against the law. But you kept hearing the stories. He had heard of men who wanted to experiment with drugs, with drink, with—with a thousand secret, sordid lusts of the flesh. All of them were unpleasant. And yet in a rented body, where the ultimate price of dissipation would be borne by someone else, who might not try one of them? For there was no physical consequence to the practitioner. If Mrs. Lasser was right, perhaps there was not even a conseqence in the hereafter.
Twenty-four hours had never passed so slowly.
The suction hoses squabbled with the burners. The scoops quarreled with the dynamiters. All the animate submarine mining machines constantly irritably snapped at each other. But the work was getting done.
It seemed to be a lot of work to accomplish in one twenty-four-hour day, Pulcher thought seriously. The pit was down two hundred yards now, and braced. New wet-setting concrete pourers were already laying a floor. Shimmery little spiderlike machines
whose limbs held chemical testing equipment were sniffing every load of sludge that came out now for richness of ore. The mine was nearly ready to start producing.
After a time Pulcher began to understand the short tempers of the machines. None of the minds in these machines were able to forget that, up topside, their bodies were going about unknown errands, risking unguessed dangers. At any given moment that concrete pourer’s body, for instance, might be dying … might be acquiring a disease … might be stretched out in narcotic stupor, or might gayly be risking dismemberment in a violent sport. Naturally tempers were touchy.
There was no such thing as rest, as coffee-breaks or sleep for the machines; they kept going. Pulcher, when finally he remembered that he had had a purpose in coming here, it was not merely some punishment that had come blindly to him for a forgotten sin, began to try to analyze his own feelings and to guess at the feelings of the others.