Multi-column

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Thoughts

Highlights

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I mean, after all; you have to consider we’re only made out of dust. That’s admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn’t forget that. But even considering, I mean it’s a sort of bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with we can make it. You get me? 🔗

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However, he was on Earth; the gravity that made him sway was familiar and normal. 🔗

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In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on the outskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate breakfast indifferently while, with something greater than indifference, he glanced over the morning homeopape’s weather-syndrome readings of the previous day. 🔗

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And there’s no pressure I can put on the UN to exempt him.
And simply because I supply those colonists with their Can-D, he said to himself. I mean, somebody has to; they’ve got to have it. Otherwise what good are the Perky Pat layouts to them?
And in addition it was one of the most profitable trading operations in the Sol system. Many truffle skins were involved.
The UN knew that, too. 🔗

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You can’t make healthy people sick just by giving an order.
Or can you? 🔗

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in concert the users’ minds fused, became a new unity–or at least that was the experience. A few sessions of Can-D chewing in togetherness and he would know all there was to know about Pia Jurgens; 🔗

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By an irony he, the creator and manufacturer of the Perky Pat microworld, preferred to use Can-D in a vacuum; what did a Terran have to gain from a layout, inasmuch as it was a mill of the conditions obtaining in the average Terran city? For settlers on a howling, gale-swept moon, huddled at the bottom of a hovel against frozen methane crystals and things, it was something else again; Perky Pat and her layout were an entree back to the world they had been born to. 🔗

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Opening his desk drawer he got out his box of Cuesta Reys, the very finest; he offered the box to Miss Fugate, who gratefully accepted one of the slender dark cigars. He, too, took a cigar; he lit hers and then his, and leaned back in his chair. “You know who Palmer Eldritch is?” 🔗

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Miss Fugate whispered, “The headlines say that Palmer Eldritch is dead.” She blinked, looked around her with amazement, then slowly focused on him; she regarded him with a confused mixture of fear and uncertainty, almost palpably edging back; she retreated from him, huddled against her chair, her fingers interlocked. “And you’re accused of having done it, Mr. Bulero. Honest; that’s what the headline says.”
“You mean I’m going to murder him?” 🔗

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But his curiosity was aroused. In all his manifold operations he had never found the need of killing anyone under any circumstances. Whatever it was that would occur between him and Palmer Eldritch had to be unique; definitely a trip to Ganymede was indicated. 🔗

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He offered Hnatt the stack of brown, wrinkled, truffle-skins which served as tender in the Sol system: the only molecule, a unique protein amino acid, which could not be duplicated by the Printers, the Biltong life forms employed in place of automated assembly lines by many of Terra’s industries. 🔗

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He himself was a believer; he affirmed the miracle of translation–the near-sacred moment in which the miniature artifacts of the layout no longer merely represented Earth but became Earth. And he and the others, joined together in the fusion of doll-inhabitation by means of the Can-D, were transported outside of time and local space. Many of the colonists were as yet unbelievers; to them the layouts were merely symbols of a world which none of them could any longer experience. But, one by one, the unbelievers came around. 🔗

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Without looking up, Fran said, “We’ve got Perky Pat all the way downtown in her new Ford hardtop convert and parked and a dime in the meter and she’s shopped and now she’s in the analyst’s office reading Fortune. But what does she pay?” 🔗

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Although some–not in this hovel-claimed that the power to insure translation did not come from the Can-D but from the accuracy of the layout. 🔗

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“I believe,” Fran said slowly, as she disengaged her fingers from his and stood by the hall door of the compartment, “that whether it’s a play of imagination, of drug-induced hallucination, or an actual translation from Mars to Earth-as-it-was by an agency we know nothing of–” 🔗

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“It should be a purifying experience. We lose our fleshly bodies, our corporeality, as they say. And put on imperishable bodies instead, for a time anyhow. Or forever, if you believe as some do that it’s outside of time and space, that it’s eternal. 🔗

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“Spirituality,” he said with disgust as he fished up the packet of Can-D from its cavity beneath the compartment. “A denial of reality, and what do you get instead? Nothing.” 🔗

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While translated one could commit incest, murder, anything, and it remained from a juridical standpoint a mere fantasy, an impotent wish only. 🔗

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It was always Saturday. 🔗

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We should try to obtain as much from this as possible. Our time is short enough as it is
 at least so it seems to me.” She smiled wanly. “So drive as fast as you can; I want to get to the ocean.” 🔗

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“We’re here,” she said presently, “to do what we can’t do back at the hovel. Back where we’ve left our corruptible bodies. As long as we keep our layouts in repair this–” She gestured at the ocean, then once more touched herself, unbelievingly. “It can’t decay, can it? We’ve put on immortality.” 🔗

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The waves of the ocean lapped at the two of them as they silently reclined together on the beach, two figures comprising the essences of six persons. 🔗

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We won after all, he thought as he deftly unhooked her bra, began to unbutton her shirt, unzipped her skirt, and removed her laceless slipperlike shoes in one swift operation; he was busy everywhere and Fran sighed, this time not wearily. 🔗

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He had with him a weapon so small, so intangible, that even the most thorough search couldn’t disclose it. Some time ago a surgeon at Washington, D.C. had sewn it into his tongue: a self-guiding, high-velocity poison dart, modeled on Soviet Russian lines
 but vastly improved, in that once it had reached its victim it obliterated itself, leaving no remains. The poison, too, was original; it did not curtail heart or respiratory action; in fact it was not a poison but a filterable virus which multiplied in the victim’s blood stream, causing death within forty-eight hours. It was carcinomatous, an importation from one of Uranus’s moons, and still generally unknown; it had cost him a great deal. All he needed to do was stand within arm’s length of his intended victim and manually squeeze the base of his tongue, protruding the same simultaneously in the victim’s direction. 🔗

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“Called Chew-Z, with the slogan: be choosy. Chew Chew-Z.” 🔗

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Below lay the tomb world, the immutable cause-and-effect world of the demonic. At median extended the layer of the human, but at any instant a man could plunge–descend as if sinking–into the hell-layer beneath. Or: he could ascend to the ethereal world above, which constituted the third of the trinary layers. Always, in his middle level of the human, a man risked the sinking. And yet the possibility of ascent lay before him; any aspect or sequence of reality could become either, at any instant. Hell and heaven, not after death but now! Depression, all mental illness, was the sinking. And the other
 how was it achieved?
Through empathy. Grasping another, not from outside but from the inner. For example, had he ever really looked at Emily’s pots as anything more than merchandise for which a market existed? No. What I ought to have seen in them, he realized, is the artistic intention, the spirit she’s revealing intrinsically. 🔗

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“I’ve discussed your dilemma with Mr. Mayerson and he will contact Felix Blau as you requested. Mr. Mayerson thinks he recalls reading in a homeopape once about a UN camp much as you are experiencing, somewhere in the Saturn region, for retarded children. Perhaps–” 🔗

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“God,” Eldritch said, “promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it.” 🔗

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“When we return to our former bodies–you notice the use of the word ‘former,’ a term you wouldn’t apply with Can-D, and for good reason–you’ll find that no time has passed. We could stay here fifty years and it’d be the same; we’d emerge back at the demesne on Luna and find everything unchanged, and anyone watching us would see no lapse of consciousness, as you have with Can-D, no trance, no stupor. Oh, maybe a flicker of the eyelids. A split second; I’m willing to concede that.” 🔗

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You can reincarnate in any form you wish, or that’s wished for you, as in this situation.” 🔗

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“With Chew-Z one can pass from life to life, be a bug, a physics teacher, a hawk, a protozoon, a slime mold, a streetwalker in Paris in 1904, a–”
“Even,” Leo said, “a gluck. Which one of us is the gluck, there?”
“I told you; I made it out of a portion of myself. You could shape something. Go ahead–project a fraction of your essence; it’ll take material form on its own. What you supply is the logos. Remember that?” 🔗

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“Because however wonderful being Perky Pat and Walt is for a while, eventually they’re forced to return to their hovels. Do you know how that feels, Leo? Try it sometime; wake up in a hovel on Ganymede after you’ve been freed for twenty, thirty minutes. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.” 🔗

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When the little period of escape is over and the colonist returns
 he’s not fit to resume a normal, daily life. He’s demoralized. 🔗

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“Take the medieval doctrine of substance versus accidents,” the child said pleasantly. “My accidents are those of this child, but my substance, as with the wine and the wafer in transubstantiation–” 🔗

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“Alone,” Leo said. “You mean each person goes to a different subjective world? It’s not like the layouts, then, because everyone in the group who takes Can-D goes to the layout, the men to Walt, the women into Perky Pat. But that means you’re not here.” Or, he thought, I’m not here. But in that case 🔗

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Leo said, “Hey, Palmer.” His voice was uncontrolled, babylike with fear. “Hey, you know what? I give up; I really do.”
The carpet of the office beneath his feet rotted, became mushy, and then sprouted, grew, alive, into green fibers; he saw that it was becoming grass. And then the walls and the ceiling caved in, collapsed into fine dust; the particles rained noiselessly down like ashes. And the blue, cool sky appeared, untouched, above.
Seated on the grass, with the stick in her lap and the suitcase containing Dr. Smile beside her, Monica said, “Did you want Mr. Mayerson to remain? I didn’t think so. I let him go with the rest that you made. Okay?” She smiled up at Leo. 🔗

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“At this moment,” Dr. Smile explained, “Palmer Eldritch, although considerably upset and angered, is intravenously providing you with a substance which counters the injectable Chew-Z previously administered; you will return shortly.” It added, “That is, shortly, even instantly, in terms of the time-flow in that world. As to this–” It chuckled. “It could seem longer.”
“How longer?”
“Oh, years,” Dr. Smile said. “But quite possibly less. Days? Months? Time sense is subjective, so let’s see how it feels to you; do you not agree?” 🔗

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Palmer Eldritch is an invader and this is how we’ll all wind up, here like this, on a plain of dead things that have become nothing more than random fragments; this is the “reincarnation” that he promised Hepburn-Gilbert. 🔗

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IN MEMORIUM. 2016 A.D. NEAR THIS
 SPOT THE ENEMY OF THE SOL SYSTEM
 PALMER ELDRITCH WAS SLAIN IN FAIR
 COMBAT WITH THE CHAMPION OF OUR
 NINE PLANETS, LEO BULERO OF TERRA. 🔗

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The elevator had arrived, self-regulated; he stepped into it. “I’ll see you,” he said, and touched the button; the doors shut, cutting off his view of Roni. I’ll see you in what the Neo-Christians call hell, he thought to himself. Probably not before. Not unless this already is, and it may be, hell right now. 🔗

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It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me. 🔗

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“I’m on my way to the draft board. To give myself up.”
“There’s nothing in writing, is there? You haven’t signed.”
“No.”
“Good. Then it’s not too late.”
Barney said, “But on Mars I can chew Can-D.”
“Why do you want to do that, for godssake?”
“Then I can be back with Emily.”
“Who’s Emily?”
“My previous wife. Who I kicked out because she became pregnant. Now I realize it was the only happy time of my life. In fact I love her more now than I ever did; it’s grown instead of faded.”
“Look,” Icholtz said. “We can supply you with all the Chew-Z you want and it’s superior; you can live forever in an eternal unchanging perfect now with your ex-wife. So there’s no problem.” 🔗

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the Reformed Branch of the NeoAmerican Church, the New Christian Church of the United States and Canada. 🔗

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“It’s experienced as real; that’s all I know.”
“So are dreams.”
“But this is stronger,” he pointed out. “Clearer. And it’s done in–” He had started to say communion. “In company with others who really go along. So it can’t be entirely an illusion. Dreams are private; that’s the reason we identify them as illusion. But Perky Pat–” 🔗

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Therefore the existence of Can-D, the experience of group translation, did not fully explain it. Maybe, he thought, it’s been the transition by gradual stages of Earth to the hell-like blasted wasteland which all of them could foresee–hell, experience!–that had done it; the hope of another life, on different terms, had been reawakened. 🔗

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“The way out,” Mary Regan said quietly to him, seating herself on the side of the bench opposite Tod Morris, “is through one or the other of the translating drugs, Mr. Mayerson. Otherwise, as you can see–” She put her hand on his shoulder; the physical touch was there already. “It would be impossible. We’d simply wind up killing one another in our pain.”
“Yes,” he said. “I see.” But he had not learned that by coming to Mars; he had, like every other Terran, known that early in life, heard of colony life, the struggle against the lure of internecine termination to it all in one swift surrender. 🔗

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“You learn to get by from day to day,” Sam Regan said sympathetically to him. “You never think in longer terms. Just until dinner or until time for bed; very finite intervals and tasks and pleasures. Escapes.” 🔗

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Impatience said. “Chew-Z is garbage; it’s habit forming, toxic, and what’s worse leads to lethal, escape-dreams, not of Terra but of–” She gestured with the pistol. “Grotesque, baroque fantasies of an infantile, totally deranged nature. 🔗

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“So what you get is a whole evening’s entertainment, say sad version in the style of Jack Wright of like for instance Vanity Fair. Wow!” 🔗

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“Think the least gift that he giveth is great; and the most despisable things take as special gifts and as great tokens of love.’ That would include life here on Mars, wouldn’t it? This despisable life, shut up in these–hovels. 🔗

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“Iconoclasm,” Anne said. “I want to smash their idols and that’s what Perky Pat and Walt are. I want to because I–” She was silent, then. “I envy them. It’s not religious fervor; it’s just a very mean, cruel streak. I know it. If I can’t join them–”
“You can. You will. So will I. But not right away.” 🔗

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Isn’t a miserable reality better than the most interesting illusion? Or is it illusion, Barney? I don’t know anything about philosophy; you explain it to me because all I know is religious faith and that doesn’t equip me to understand this. These translation drugs.” 🔗

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I could fall in love with that girl , he said to himself. Not like Roni Fugate or even like Emily but something new. Better? he wondered. Or is this desperation? Exactly what I saw Anne do just now with the Can-D, gulp it down because there is nothing else, only darkness. It is this or the void. And not for a day or a week but–forever. So I’ve got to fall in love with her. 🔗

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Bending down, Barney Mayerson picked up the small doll, Perky Pat in her yellow shorts and red-striped cotton t-shirt and sandals. This now was Anne Hawthorne, he realized. In a sense that no one quite understood. And yet he could destroy the doll, crush it, and Anne, in her synthetic fantasy life, would be unaffected. 🔗

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If he could help her perhaps he could help himself. And if not–
He had an intuition that otherwise they were both finished. Mars, for both himself and Anne, would mean death. And probably soon. 🔗

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“In the New Testament. His letters to for instance the Corinthians or the Romans
 you know. Paul says our enemy is death; it’s the final enemy we overcome, so I guess it’s the greatest. We’re all blighted, according to Paul, not just our bodies but our souls, too; both have to die and then we can be born again, with new bodies not of flesh but incorruptible. See? You know, when I was Perky Pat, just now
 I had the oddest feeling that I was–it’s wrong to say this or believe it, but–”
“But,” Barney finished for her, “it seemed like a taste of that. But you expected it, though; you knew the resemblance–you mentioned it yourself, on the ship.” A lot of people, he reflected, had noticed it, too.
“Yes,” Anne admitted. “But what I didn’t realize is–” In the darkness she turned toward him; he could just barely make her out. “Being translated is the only hint we can have of it this side of death. So it’s a temptation. If it wasn’t for that dreadful doll, that Perky Pat–”
“Chew-Z,” Barney said. 🔗

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Holding the paper to the light he read the top line; it blazed out in huge black letters.
GOD PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE. WE CAN DELIVER IT. 🔗

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“Not the big lie,” Barney said, “but instead the big truth.” Which, he wondered, is worse? Hard to tell. Ideally, Palmer Eldritch would drop dead for the blasphemia shouted by the pamphlet, but evidently that was not going to occur. An evil visitor oozing over us from the Prox system, he said to himself, offering us what we’ve prayed for over a period of two thousand years. And why is this so palpably bad? Hard to say, but nevertheless it is. Because maybe it’ll mean bondage to Eldritch, such as Leo experienced; Eldritch will be with us constantly from now on, infiltrating our lives. And He who has protected us in the past simply sits passive.
Each time we’re translated, he thought, we’ll see–not God–but Palmer Eldritch. 🔗

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One of the laws of thermal dynamics, he thought. The exchange of heat; molecules passing between us, hers and mine mingling in–entropy? Not yet, he thought. 🔗

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I’ll take the toxin , he said to himself. And I’ll go into court and sue the bastards for Leo’s sake. Because I owe that to him. But I’m not returning to Earth; either I make it here or not at all. With Anne Hawthorne, I hope, but if not, then alone or with someone else; I’ll live out Doberman’s Law, as Faine predicts. Anyhow it’ll be here on this miserable planet, this “promised land.”
Tomorrow morning, he decided, I’ll begin clearing away the sand of fifty thousand centuries for my first vegetable garden. That’s the initial step. 🔗

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It’s an attitude, he decided. And we–all of us who comprised P. P. Layouts–contributed willingly to it. We gave them an out, something painless and easy. And now Palmer Eldritch has arrived to put the finish on the process. We laid the path for him, myself included, and so what now? Is there any way that I can, as Faine put it, atone? 🔗

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“I think I’d probably bet on the trap, too.” I’ve got a great respect for traps, he reflected. In other words a situation in which none of the doors lead out. No matter how they happen to be marked. 🔗

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Amazing , he thought, how strong the self-destructive drive can be. 🔗

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No one could fail to identify him; since his crash on Pluto the homeopapes had printed one pic after another. Of course the pics were ten years out of date, but this was still the man. Gray and bony, well over six feet tall, with swinging arms and a peculiarly rapid gait. And his face. It had a ravaged quality, eaten away; as if, Barney conjectured, the fat-layer had been consumed, as if Eldritch at some time or other had fed off himself, devoured perhaps with gusto the superfluous portions of his own body. He had enormous steel teeth, these having been installed prior to his trip to Prox by Czech dental surgeons; they were welded to his jaws, were permanent: he would die with them. And–his right arm was artificial. Twenty years ago in a hunting accident on Callisto he had lost the original; this one of course was superior in that it provided a specialized variety of interchangeable hands. At the moment Eldritch made use of the five-finger humanoid manual extremity; except for its metallic shine it might have been organic.
And he was blind. At least from the standpoint of the natural-born body. But replacements had been made – at the prices which Eldritch could and would pay; that had been done just prior to his Prox voyage by Brazilian oculists. They had done a superb job. The replacements, fitted into the bone sockets, had no pupils, nor did any ball move by muscular action. Instead a panoramic vision was supplied by a wide-angle lens, a permanent horizontal slot running from edge to edge. 🔗

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The entire figure was insubstantial; dimly, through it, the landscape showed. It was a figment of some sort, artificially produced, and the irony came to him: so much of the man was artificial already, and now even the flesh and blood portions were, too. 🔗

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Palmer Eldritch danced back, lithely, bounding upward in the slight Martian gravity; like a balloon–Barney stared but did not believe–he floated off, grinning with his huge steel teeth, waggling his artificial arm, his lank body slowly rotating. Then, as if reeled in by a transparent line, he progressed in a jerky sine-wave motion toward the ship. All at once he was gone. 🔗

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The next he knew, his wife was bending over him. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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throat, never to be swallowed or disgorged, either one. It’s precisely what I deserve, he said to himself; I made this situation. 🔗

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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 🔗

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Can’t the past be altered? he asked himself. Evidently not. Cause and effect work in only one direction, and change is real. So what’s gone is gone and I might as well get out of here. 🔗

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“You’re still behaving that way and it’s still a mistake. Be true to yourself.” And, all at once, he grinned at Barney, grinned–and one dead eye flicked off, as if in a mechanical wink.
It was Palmer Eldritch now. Completely. 🔗

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“Don’t give up,” Eldritch said. “Remember: this is only the initial time you’ve made use of Chew-Z; you’ll have other times later. You can keep chipping away until eventually you get it.” 🔗

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Barney said, “It’s an illusory world in which Eldritch holds the key positions as god; he gives you a chance to do what you can’t really ever do–reconstruct the past as it ought to have been. But even for him it’s hard. Takes time.” 🔗

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“It’s absolutely not like a dream.” It was worse, he realized. More like being in hell, he thought. Yes, that’s the way hell must be: recurrent and unyielding. But Eldritch thought in time, with sufficient patience and effort, it could be changed. 🔗

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Nevertheless he unscrewed the lid of the tube.
A tiny, frail voice, emanating from the opened tube, piped, “You’re being watched, Mayerson. And if you’re up to some kind of tactic we’ll be required to step in. You will be severely restricted. Sorry.”
He put the lid back on the tube, and screwed it tight with shaking fingers. And the tube had been–empty! 🔗

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What Eldritch did to Leo on Luna or Sigma 14-B or wherever he’s done to me, too. And eventually he’ll snare us all. Just like this. Isolated. The communal world is gone. At least for me; he began with me. 🔗

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She’s the real one. Not Palmer Eldritch. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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Once you’ve taken Chew-Z you’re delivered over. At least that’s how dogmatic, devout, fanatical Anne Hawthorne would phrase it. Like sin, Barney Mayerson thought; it’s the condition of slavery. Like the Fall. And the temptation is similar.
But what’s missing here is a way by which we can be freed. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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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. 🔗

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Most of what Eldritch did–or does, if you prefer to regard it that way–consists of manufacturing surface changes: he makes things appear the way he wants, but that doesn’t mean they are. 🔗

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recovery from the drug is excessively retarded and gradual; it’s a series of levels, each progressively less an induced illusion and more compounded of authentic reality. Sometimes the process takes years. 🔗

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How does one return a phantasm to its own space and time–exorcise it.” 🔗

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“Okay,” Barney said. “I’ll leave you alone. I’ll go to the physics department at Cal and see what they can do.” He felt utterly defeated; he had been abandoned even by himself, the ultimate, he thought with impotent, wild fury. Christ! 🔗

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It’s an interesting possible solution for someone who wants to escape his phantasmic existence. I don’t.” His voice was low. “Because for me, returning to my own space and time means death, at Leo Bulero’s instigation. On the contrary; I can live on only in this state. But with you–” He gestured, smiling faintly. “Be a rock, Mayerson. Last it out, however long it is before the drug wears off. Ten years, a century. A million years. Or be an old fossil bone in a museum.” 🔗

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He heard, then, a laugh. It was Palmer Eldritch’s laugh but it was emerging from–
Himself. 🔗

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It will be me, he realized, that Leo Bulero will kill. Me the monument will present a narration of.
Now I am Palmer Eldritch.
In that case , he thought after a while as the environment surrounding him seemed to solidify and clear, I wonder how he is making out with Emily.
I hope pretty badly. 🔗

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But here was the essence of the future: interlaced possibilities. And long ago he had accepted this, learned how to deal with it; he intuitively knew which time-line to choose. 🔗

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If it was good enough for Palmer Eldritch it was good enough for him. Because Eldritch had lived many lives; there had been a vast, reliable wisdom contained within the substance of the man or creature, whatever it was. The fusion of himself with Eldritch during translation had left a mark on him, a brand for perpetuity: it was a form of absolute awareness. He wondered, then, if Eldritch had gotten anything back from him in exchange. Did I have something worth his knowing? he asked himself. Insights? Moods or memories or values? 🔗

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Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox
 and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. 🔗

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Barney said, “Don’t be afraid of it. It’s just trying to live, like the rest of us are.” 🔗

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“That thing,” he said, speaking to them all, especially to Norm Schein and his wife, “has a name which you’d recognize if I told it to you. Although it would never call itself that. We’re the ones who’ve titled it. From experience, at a distance, over thousands of years. But sooner or later we were bound to be confronted by it. Without the distance. Or the years.”
Anne Hawthorne said, “You mean God.”
It did not seem to him necessary to answer, beyond a slight nod.
“But–evil?” Fran Schein whispered.
“An aspect,” Barney said. “Our experience of it. Nothing more.” Or didn’t I make you see that already? he asked himself. Should I tell you how it tried to help me, in its own way? And yet–how fettered it was, too, by the forces of fate, which seem to transcend all that live, including it as much as ourselves. 🔗

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“He can’t help us very much,” Barney said. “Some, maybe. But he stands with empty, open hands; he understands, he wants to help. He tries, but
 it’s just not that simple. Don’t ask me why. Maybe even he doesn’t know. Maybe it puzzles him, too. Even after all the time he’s had to mull over it.” And all the time he’ll have later on, Barney thought, if he gets away from Leo Bulero. 🔗

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But I know you’re wrong, Barney. Something which stands with empty, open hands is not God. It’s a creature fashioned by something higher than itself, as we were; God wasn’t fashioned and He isn’t puzzled.” 🔗

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He’s here inside each of us and in a higher life form such as we’re talking about He would certainly be even more manifest. But–let me tell you my cat joke. 🔗

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“The cat was not the steak. But–the cat might be a manifestation which the steak was taking at that moment. The key word happens to be is. Don’t tell us, Barney, that whatever entered Palmer Eldritch is God, because you don’t know that much about Him; no one can. But that living entity from intersystem space may, like us, be shaped in His image. A way He selected of showing Himself to us. If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter. So don’t talk ontology, Barney; don’t say is.” 🔗

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“When you grabbed me, to take that bindle of Chew-Z; you know what I saw? I mean actually saw, not just believed.”
“An artificial hand. And a distortion of my jaw. And my eyes–”
“Yes,” she said tightly. “The mechanical, slitted eyes. What did it mean?”
Barney said, “It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.” In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called–stigmata. 🔗

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The Presence abides with us, potentially if not actually. 🔗

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All three stigmata–the dead, artificial hand, the Jensen eyes, and the radically deranged jaw.” Symbols of its inhabitation, he thought. In our midst. But not asked for. Not intentionally summoned. And–we have no mediating sacraments through which to protect ourselves; we can’t compel it, by our careful, time-honored, clever, painstaking rituals, to confine itself to specific elements such as bread and water or bread and wine. It is out in the open, ranging in every direction. It looks into our eyes; and it looks out of our eyes.
“It’s a price,” Anne decided. “That we must pay. For our desire to undergo that drug experience with that Chew-Z. Like the apple originally.” Her tone was shockingly bitter. 🔗

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That thing, which we know only in its Terran body, wanted to substitute me at the instant of its destruction; instead of God dying for man, as we once had, we faced–for a moment– a superior–the superior power asking us to perish for it.
Does that make it evil? he wondered. 🔗

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we all have it, we all would like to see a goat or a lamb cut to pieces and incinerated instead of ourselves. Oblations have to be made. And we don’t care to be them. In fact our entire lives are dedicated to that one principle. And so is its. 🔗

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“I’d like to know,” Barney said, “what you were trying to do when you introduced Chew-Z to our people.”
“Perpetuate myself,” the creature opposite him said quietly.
He glanced up, then. “A form of reproduction?”
“Yes, the only way I can.” 🔗

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He lit another cigarette. What a mess, he thought. This is how we act when finally we do contact at long last another sentient race within the galaxy. And how it behaves, badly as us and in some respects much worse. And there’s nothing to redeem the situation. Not now. 🔗

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After all, the creature residing in deep space which had taken the form of Palmer Eldritch bore some relationship to God; if it was not God, as he himself had decided, then at least it was a portion of God’s Creation. So some of the responsibility lay on Him. And, it seemed to Barney, He was probably mature enough to recognize this. 🔗

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There was such a thing as salvation. But–
Not for everyon 🔗

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There was such a thing as salvation. But–
Not for everyon 🔗

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I think Palmer Eldritch made a mistake; he went too far.”
“Maybe it couldn’t help it,” Leo said. Maybe the damn organism was like a protoplasm; it had to ingest and grow–instinctively it spread out farther and farther. Until it’s destroyed at the source, Leo thought. And we’re the ones to do it, because I’m personally Homo sapiens evolvens: I’m the human of the future right here sitting in this seat now. If we can get the UN’s help.
I’m the Protector, he said to himself, of our race. 🔗

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It’s nothing more than faith in powers implanted in me from the start which I can–in the end–draw on and beat him with. So in a sense it isn’t me; it’s something in me that even that thing Palmer Eldritch can’t reach and consume because since it’s not me it’s not mine to lose. I feel it growing. Withstanding the external, nonessential alterations, the arm, the eyes, the teeth–it’s not touched by any of these three, the evil, negative trinity of alienation, blurred reality, and despair that Eldritch brought back with him from Proxima. Or rather from the space in between. 🔗

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We have lived thousands of years under one old-time plague already that’s partly spoiled and destroyed our holiness, and that from a source higher than Eldritch. And if that can’t completely obliterate our spirit, how can this? 🔗