Authors: Robert Silverberg
"Why don't you just go to hell?" Weiner said casually. "No, don't. You're too cute. We got some cute espers on Mars, too. You want some fun tonight? My name's Nat Weiner, and this is my friend, Ron Kirby.
Reynolds
Kirby. He's a stuffed shirt, but we can give him the slip." The Martian's grip on the slender arm grew tighter. "What do you say?"
The girl didn't say anything. She simply frowned, and Weiner made a strange face and released her arm. Kirby, watching, had to repress a grin. Weiner was running into trouble all over the place. This was a complicated world.
"Go across the street," the girl whispered. "They'll help you there."
She turned without waiting for a reply and faded into the dimness. Weiner passed a hand over his forehead as though brushing cobwebs from his brain. He struggled to his feet, ignoring Kirby's proffered arm.
"What kind of place is this?" he asked.
"A sniffer palace."
"Will they preach to me here?"
"They'll just fog your brain a little," said Kirby. "Want f to try?"
"Sure. I told you I wanted to try everything. I don't get a chance to come to Earth every day."
Weiner grinned, but it was a somber grin. He didn't seem to have the bounce he had had an hour ago. Of course, getting knocked out by the Vorster had sobered him some. He was still game, though, ready to soak up all the sins this wicked planet had to offer.
Kirby wondered whether he was making as big a mess of this assignment as it seemed. There was no way of I knowing—not yet. Later, of course, Weiner might well protest the handling he had received, and Kirby might find himself abruptly transferred to less sensitive duties. That was not a pleasant thought. He regarded his career as an important matter, perhaps the only important matter in his life. He did not want to wreck it in a night.
They moved toward the sniffer booths.
"Tell me," Weiner said. "Do those people really believe - all that crap about the electron?"
"I really don't know. I haven't made a study of it, Nat."
"You've watched the movement appear. How many members does it have now?"
"A couple of million, I guess."
"That's plenty. We have only seven million people on all of Mars. If you've got this many joining this nutty f cult—"
"There are lots of new religious sects on Earth today," Kirby said. "It's an apocalyptic time. People are hungry for reassurance. They feel the Earth's being left behind by the stream of events. So they look for a unity, for some way out of all the confusion and fragmentation."
"Let them come to Mars if they want a unity. We got work for everybody, and no time to stew about the allness of it all." Weiner guffawed. "The hell with it. Tell me about this sniffer stuff."
"Opium's out of fashion. We inhale the more exotic mercaptans. The hallucinations are said to be entertaining."
"Said
to be? Don't you know? Kirby, don't you have firsthand information about
anything?
You aren't even I alive. You're just a zombi. A man needs some vices, Kirby."
The U.N. man thought of the Nothing Chamber waiting for him in the lofty tower on balmy Tortola. His face was a stony mask. He said, "Some of us are too busy for vices. But this visit of yours is likely to be a great education for me, Nat. Have a sniff."
A robot rolled up to them. Kirby clapped his right thumb against the lambent yellow plate set in the robot's chest. The light brightened as Kirby's print-pattern was recorded.
"We'll bill your Central," the robot said. Its voice was absurdly deep: pitch troubles on the master tape, Kirby suspected. When the metal creature rolled away, it was listing a bit to starboard. Rusty in the gut, he figured. An even chance that he wouldn't get billed. He picked up a sniffer mask and handed it to Weiner, who sprawled out
comfortably on the couch along the wall of the booth. Weiner donned the mask. Kirby took another and slipped it over his nose and mouth. He closed his eyes and settled into the webfoam cradle near the booth's entrance. A moment passed; then he tasted the gas creeping into his nasal passages. It was a revolting sour-sweet smell, a sulfuric smell.
Kirby waited for the hallucination.
There were people who spent hours each day in these i booths, he knew. The government kept raising the tax to discourage the sniffers, but they came anyway, even at ten, twenty, thirty dollars a sniff. The gas itself wasn't addictive, not in the metabolic way that heroin got to you. It was more of a psychological addiction, something you could break if you really tried, but which nobody cared to try to break: like the sex addiction, like mild alcoholism. For some it was a kind of religion. Everyone to his own, creed; this was a crowded world, harboring many beliefs.
A girl made of diamonds and emeralds was walking through Kirby's brain.
The surgeons had cut away every scrap of living flesh on her body. Her eyeballs had the cold glitter of precious gems; her breasts were globes of white onyx tipped with ruby; her lips were slabs of alabaster; her hair was fashioned from strings of yellow gold. Blue fire flickered around her, Vorster fire, crackling strangely.
She said, "You're tired, Ron. You need to get away from yourself."
"I know. I'm using the Nothing Chamber every other day now. I'm fighting off a crackup."
"You're too rigid, that's your trouble. Why don't you visit my surgeon? Have yourself changed. Get rid of all that stupid meat. For this I say, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption."
"No," Kirby muttered. "It isn't so. All I need is some rest. A good swim, sunshine, decent amount of sleep. But they dumped that mad Martian on me."
The hallucination laughed shrilly, rippled her arms, performed a sinuous convolution. They had sliced away fingers and replaced them with spikes of ivory. Her fingernails were of polished copper. The mischievous tongue that flicked out from between the alabaster lips was a serpent of gaudy flexiplast. "Behold," she crooned voluptuously, "I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed."
"In a moment," Kirby said. "In the twinkling of an eye. The trumpet shall sound."
"And the dead shall be raised incorruptible. Do it, Ron. You'll look so much handsomer. Maybe you can hold the next marriage together a little better, too. You miss her—admit it. You ought to see what she looks like now. Full fathom five thy loved one lies. But she's happy. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality."
"I'm a human being," Kirby protested. "I'm not going to turn myself into a walking museum piece like you. Or like
her,
for that matter. Even if it's becoming fashionable for men to have it done."
The blue glow began to pulse and throb around the vision in his brain. "You need something, though, Ron. The Nothing Chamber isn't the answer. It's—nothing. Affiliate yourself. Belong. Work isn't the answer, either. Join. Join. You won't carve yourself? All right, become a Vorster, then. Surrender to the Oneness. Let death be swallowed up in victory."
"Can't I just remain myself?" Kirby cried.
"What you are isn't enough. Not now. Not any more. These are hard times. A troubled world. The Martians make fun of us. The Venusians despise us. We need new organization, new strength. The sting of death is in sin, and the strength of sin is the law. Grave, where is thy victory?"
A riotous swirl of colors danced through Kirby's mind. The surgically altered woman pirouetted, leaped and bobbed, flaunted the jewel-bedecked flamboyance of herself in his face. Kirby quivered. He clawed fitfully at the mask. For this nightmare he had paid good money? How could people let themselves become addicts of this sort of thing—this tour through the swamps of one's own mind?
Kirby wrenched the sniffer mask away and threw it to the floor of the booth. He sucked clean air into his lungs, fluttered his eyes, returned to reality.
He was alone in the booth.
The Martian, Weiner, was gone.
Four
The robot who ran the sniffer palace was of no help.
"Where'd he go?" Kirby demanded.
"He left," came the rusty reply. "Eighteen dollars sixty cents. We will bill your Central."
"Did he say where he was going?"
"We did not converse. He left.
Awwwrk!
We did not converse. I will bill your Central.
Awwwrk!"
Sputtering a curse, Kirby rushed out into the street. He glanced involuntarily at the sky. Against the darkness he saw the lemon-colored letters of the timeglow streaming in the firmament, irregularly splotched with red:
2205 HOURS EASTERN STANDARD TIME
WEDNESDAY MAY 8 2077
BUY FREEBLES—THEY CRUNCH!
Two hours to midnight. Plenty of time for that lunatic colonial to get himself in trouble. The last thing Kirby wanted was to have a drunken, perhaps hallucinated Weiner rampaging around in New York. This assignment hadn't entirely been one of rendering hospitality. Part of Kirby's job was to keep an eye on Weiner. Martians had come to Earth before. The libertarian society was a heady wine for them.
Where had he gone?
One place to look was the Vorster hall. Maybe Weiner had gone back to raise some more hell over there. With sweat bursting from every pore, Kirby sprinted across the street, dodging the rocketing teardrops as they turbined past, and rushed into the shabby cultist chapel. The service was still going on. It didn't seem as though Weiner were there, though. Everyone obediently knelt in his pew, and there were no shouts, no screams of boozy laughter. Kirby silently loped down the aisle, checking every bench. No Weiner. The girl with the surgical face was still there, and she smiled and stretched a hand toward him. For one bizarre moment Kirby was catapulted back into his sniffer hallucination, and his flesh crawled. Then he recovered himself. He managed a faint smile to be polite and got out of the Vorster place as fast as he could.
He caught the slidewalk and let it carry him three blocks in a random direction. No Weiner. Kirby got off and found himself in front of a public Nothing Chamber place, where for twenty bucks an hour you could get wafted off to luscious oblivion. Perhaps Weiner had wandered in there, eager to toy every mind-sapping diversion the city had to offer. Kirby went in.
Robots weren't in charge here. A genuine flesh-and-blood entrepreneur came forward, a four-hundred-pounder, opulent with chins. Small eyes buried in fat regarded Kirby doubtfully.
"Want an hour of rest, friend?"
"I'm looking for a Martian," Kirby blurted. "About so high, big shoulders, sharp cheekbones."
"Haven't seen him."
"Look, maybe he's in one of your tanks. This is important. It's U.N. business."
"I don't care if it's the business of God Almighty. I haven't seen him." The fat man glanced only briefly at Kirby's identification plaque. "What do you want me to do—open my tanks for you? He didn't come in here."
"If he does, don't let him rent a chamber," Kirby begged. "Stall him and phone U,N. Security right away."
"I got to rent him if he wants. We run a public hall here, buddy. You want to get me in trouble? Look, you're all worked up. Why don't
you
climb into a tank for a little while? It'll do wonders for you. You'll feel like—"
Kirby wheeled and ran out There was nausea in the pit of his stomach, perhaps induced by the hallucinogen. There was also fright and a goodly jolt of anger. He visualized Weiner clubbed in some dark alley, his stocky body expertly vivisected for the bootleg organ banks. A worthy fate, perhaps, but it would raise hob with Kirby's reliability rating. More likely was it that Weiner, bashing around like a Chinese bull—was that the right simile, Kirby wondered?—would stir up some kind of mess that would be blasphemously difficult to clean up.
Kirby had no idea where to look. A communibooth presented itself on the corner of the next street, and he jumped in, opaquing the screens. He rammed his identification plaque into the slot and punched for U.N. Security.
The cloudy little screen grew clear. The pudgy, bearded face of Lloyd Ridblom appeared.
"Night squad," Ridblom said. "Hello, Ron. Where's your Martian?"
"Lost him. He gave me the slip in a sniffer palace."
Ridblom became instantly animated. "Want me to slap a televector on him?"
"Not yet," Kirby said. "I'd rather he didn't know we were upset about his disappearance. Put the vector on me, instead, and keep contact. And open up a routine net for him. If he shows, notify me right away. I'll call back in an hour to change the instructions if nothing's happened by then."
"Maybe he's been kidnapped by Vorsters," Ridblom suggested. "They're draining his blood for altar wine."
"Go to hell," Kirby said. He stepped out of the booth and put his thumbs briefly to his eyeballs. Slowly, purposelessly, he strolled toward the slidewalk and let it take him back to the Vorster hall. A few people were coming out of it now. There was the girl with the iridescent earshells; she wasn't content to haunt his hallucinations—she had to keep intersecting his path in real life, too.