“It manufactures Rex Power Systems,” she said, “which are used to power spaceships, reincarnation machines, hereafter drivers, and the like. It was a development of the Rex Power Systems that snatched you from your car at the moment after death and brought you into the future. The trouble is, you aren’t the man we were trying to save.”
“Who were you trying to save?”
“A religious leader of your time. We wanted him to endorse our product.”
Blaine looked puzzled.
MARIE Thorne went on. “We’re in the scientific afterlife business,” she told him. “We can guarantee a life after death. But the organized religions don’t like our form of salvation. They boycott us. Their adherents form a large potential market for our product. If we could get the endorsement of a progressive religious leader, it would help break down the sales resistance.”
“What happened to the man you tried to save?” Blaine asked.
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Marie said. “You appeared in his place. It was very startling.”
“I can imagine,” said Blaine. “But what is this scientific hereafter? How does it work?”
“Would you mind signing the release?”
The paper stated that he, Thomas Blaine, agreed not to bring suit against the Rex Corporation for their unauthorized saving of his life in the year 1958 and the subsequent transporting of that life to a host body in New York in the year 2110.
Blaine signed. “Now,” he said, “about this scientific hereafter—”
“There isn’t time,” Marie told him. “It works. Just take my word for it. You’ll see a part of the process almost immediately.”
“I will?”
“Yes. Mr. Reilly is going to undertake an immediate reincarnation. He’s been putting it off, trying to find a really suitable body. But his own body is deteriorating fast. His doctor advises reincarnation at once, and his grandfather is insisting on it.”
“Reilly’s grandfather? How old is he?”
“He was eighty-one when he died.”
“What?”
“Yes, he died about sixty years ago. Reilly’s father is dead, too, but he didn’t stay in the Threshold, which is a pity because he had excellent business sense. An extra advisory ghost is always useful. Why are you staring at me, Blaine? Oh, I forgot, you don’t know the setup. It’s very simple, really. You’ll pick it up as you go along.”
“I hope so,” Blaine said.
“Of course you will. The nurse will bring you some clothes. Please dress at once. Mr. Reilly wants to make you a business offer before he undertakes his reincarnation.”
“What kind of an offer?”
“I’d better let him tell you himself,” Marie Thorne said, and briskly left the room.
IV
THE nurse brought him lunch on a tray. The bearded doctor came in, examined him and declared him perfectly fit There was not the slightest trace of rebirth depression, he declared, and the death trauma was obviously overrated. No reason why Blaine shouldn’t be up and about.
The nurse came back with clothing, a blue shirt, brown slacks, and soft, bulbous gray shoes. The outfit, she assured him, was quite conservative.
Blaine ate with good appetite. But before dressing, he examined his new body in the full-length bathroom mirror. It was the first chance he’d had for a careful appraisal.
His former body had been tall and lean, with straight black hair and a good-humored boyish face. In thirty-two years, he had grown used to that quick, deft, easy-moving body. With good grace, he had accepted its constitutional flaws, its occasional illnesses, and had glorified them into virtues, into unique properties of the personality that resided within them. For his body’s limitations, far more than its capabilities, seemed to express his own particular essence.
He had been fond of that body.
His new body was a shock.
It was heavily muscled, barrel-chested, broad-shouldered. It felt top-heavy, for the legs were a little short in proportion to the herculean torso. His hands were large and calloused. Blaine made a fist and gazed at it respectfully. He could probably fell an ox with a single blow, if an ox were procurable.
His face was square and bold, with a prominent jaw, wide cheekbones and a Roman nose. His hair was blond and curly. His eyes were a steely blue. It was a somewhat handsome, slightly brutal face.
“I don’t like it,” Blaine said emphatically. “And I hate curly blond hair.”
His new body had considerable physical strength, but he had always disliked sheer physical strength. The body looked clumsy, graceless, difficult to manage. It was the kind of body that bumped into chairs and stepped on people’s toes, shook hands too vigorously, talked too loudly and sweated profusely. Clothes would always bulge and constrict this body. It would need continual hard exercise to keep in shape, and Blaine detested exercise. Perhaps he would even have to diet; the body looked as though it had a slight tendency toward fat.
“PHYSICAL strength is all very well,” Blaine told himself, “if one has a purpose for it. Otherwise it’s just a nuisance and a distraction, like trawling equipment on a racing yacht.”
The body was bad enough, but the face was worse. Blaine had never liked strong, harsh, rough-hewn faces. They were fine for sandhogs, army sergeants, jungle explorers and the like, but not for a man who enjoyed cultured society. Such a face was obviously incapable of subtlety of expression. All nuance, the delicate interplay of line and plane, would be lost. With this face, you could grin or frown; only gross emotions would show.
Experimentally, he smiled boyishly at the mirror. The result was a satyr’s leer.
“I’ve been gypped,” Blaine said bitterly.
It was apparent to him that the qualities of his present mind and his new body were opposed. Cooperation between them seemed impossible. Of course, his personality might reshape his body; on the other hand, his body might have some demands to make on his personality.
“We’ll see,” Blaine told his formidable body, “who’s boss.”
On his left shoulder was a long, jagged scar. He wondered how the body had received so grievous a wound. Then he began wondering where the body’s real owner was. Could he still be lodged in the brain, lying doggo, waiting a chance to take over?
Speculation was useless. Later, perhaps, Blaine would find out. He took a final look at himself in the mirror.
He didn’t like what he saw. He was afraid he never would.
“Well,” Blaine said at last, “dead men can’t be choosers.”
He turned from the mirror and began dressing. Later, Marie Thorne came and took him to Mr. Reilly’s tower apartment.
MR. Reilly sat erect and almost lost in a great, soft, thronelike chair. His wrinkled translucent skin was stretched tight across his skull and clawed hands, and bone and tendon showed clearly through the leathery, shrunken flesh. Blaine had the impression of blood coursing sluggishly through the brittle, purple varicosed veins, threatening momentarily to stop. Yet Reilly’s posture was firm and his eyes were lucid in his humorous monkey face.
“Please be seated, sir,” Mr. Reilly said. “You too, Miss Thorne. I was just discussing you with my grandfather, Mr. Blaine.”
Blaine glanced around, almost expecting to see the sixty-years-dead grandfather looming spectrally over him. But there was no sign of him in the ornate, high-ceilinged room.
“He’s gone now,” Mr. Reilly explained. “Poor Grandfather can maintain an ectoplasmic state for only a brief time. But even so, he’s better off than most ghosts. He tells me I must begin my reincarnation immediately.”
“And are you?” Blaine asked. “Of course. Ghosts generally have the power of viewing the future, you know. I could hardly go against his advice.”
Blaine’s expression must have changed, for Reilly asked, “Don’t you believe in ghosts, Mr. Blaine?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Of course not. I suppose the word has unfortunate connotations for your twenti
eth-century mind. Clanking chains, skeletons, all that nonsense. But words change their meaning, and even reality is altered as mankind alters and manipulates nature.”
“I see,” Blaine said politely. “You consider that doubletalk,” Mr. Reilly said good-naturedly. “It wasn’t meant to be. Consider the manner in which words change their meaning. In the twentieth century, ‘atoms’ became a catchall word for imaginative writers with their ‘atom guns’ and ‘atom-powered ships.’ An absurd word, which any level-headed man would do well to ignore, just as you level-headedly ignore ‘ghosts.’ Yet a few years later, ‘atoms’ conjured a picture of very real and imminent doom. No level-headed man could continue to ignore the word!”
REILLY smiled reminiscently.
“ ‘Radiation’ changed from a dull textbook term to a source of cancerous ulcers. ‘Space-sickness’ was an abstract and unloaded term in your time. But in fifty years it meant hospitals filled with twisted bodies. Words tend to change, Mr. Blaine, from an abstract, fanciful, or academic use to a functional, realistic, everyday use. It happens when manipulation catches up with theory.”
“And ghosts?”
“The process has been similar. Mr. Blaine, you’ll simply have to change your concept of the word.”
“It’ll be difficult,” Blaine said. “But necessary. Remember, there was always a lot of evidence in their favor. The prognosis for their existence, you might say, was favorable. And when life after death became fact instead of wishful thinking, ghosts became fact.”
“I think I’ll have to see one first,” Blaine said.
“Undoubtedly you will. But let’s get down to business. Frankly, Mr. Blaine, your presence here is something of an embarrassment to us.”
“I regret that.”
“It wasn’t your fault, of course. But look at the position we’re in. We set up an expensive experiment and buy a costly host body. We expect to snatch a progressive cleric from your time to use in our campaign to sell the organized religions.”
“I guess I won’t be much help there,” Blaine said.
“No. And what’s worse, you bring us no information about the Threshold.”
“What’s the Threshold?”
“It is the interface region between Earth and the hereafter, through which you passed on your way here. We expected valuable data about the Threshold. But you have no recollection of it. None at all! The religions could use that fact against us, Blaine, if it ever leaked out.”
“Look,” Blaine said, “I’m grateful to you people for saving my life, even if you did it accidentally. You certainly don’t think I’m going to spill your secrets, do you?”
“Mistakes can happen,” Reilly pointed out. “Accidents can occur. You might change your mind. No, Mr. Blaine, you should not be here in 2110, a walking proof of bad judgment. Therefore, sir, I’d like to make a proposition.”
“I’m listening,” Blaine said. “Suppose Rex buys you hereafter insurance, thus ensuring your life after death—would you consent to suicide?”
Blaine blinked rapidly, stunned. “No. Certainly not.”
“Why not?” Reilly asked.
FOR a moment, the reason seemed self-evident. What creature consents to take its own life? Unhappily, Man does. So Blaine had to stop and sort his thoughts.
“First of all,” he said, “I’m not fully convinced about this hereafter.”
“Suppose we convince you,” Mr. Reilly said. “Would you commit suicide then?”
“No!”
“But how shortsighted! Mr. Blaine, consider your position. This age is alien to you, inimical, unsatisfactory. What kind of work can you do? Who can you talk with, and about what? You can’t even walk the streets without being in deadly peril of your life.”
“I’LL find out how things work here,” Blaine said.
“But you can never really know, never understand! You’re in the same position a caveman would be, thrown haphazardly into your own 1958. He’d think himself capable enough, I suppose, on the basis of his experience with sabertooth tigers and hairy mastodons. Perhaps some kind soul would even warn him about gangsters. But what good would it do? Would it save him from being run over by a car, electrocuted on a subway track, asphyxiated by a gas stove, falling through an elevator shaft, cut to pieces on a power saw, or breaking his neck in the bathtub.”
“You have to be born to those things in order to walk unscathed among them, Mr. Blaine. And even so, these things happened to people in your age when they relaxed their attention for a moment! How much more likely would our caveman be to stumble?”
“You’re exaggerating the situation,” Blaine said, feeling a light perspiration form on his forehead.
“Am I? The dangers of the forest are as nothing to the dangers of the city. And when the city becomes a super-city—”
“I won’t commit suicide,” Blaine declared. “I’ll take my chances. Let’s drop the subject.”
“Why can’t you be reasonable?” Mr. Reilly demanded in annoyance. “Kill yourself now and save us all a lot of trouble. I can outline your future for you if you don’t. Perhaps, by sheer nerve and animal cunning, you’ll survive for a year. Even two. It won’t matter, in the end it’s suicide anyhow. You’re a suicide type. Suicide is written all over you—you were born for it, Blaine! You’ll kill yourself wretchedly in a year or two, slip out of your maimed flesh with relief—but with no hereafter to welcome your tired mind.”
“You’re crazy!” Blaine protested.
“I’m never wrong about suicide types,” Mr. Reilly said obstinately. “I can always spot them. Grandfather agrees with me, and he’s never wrong. So if you’ll only—”
“No,” Blaine said. “I won’t kill myself. I’m afraid you’ll have to hire it done.”
“That’s not my way,” said Mr. Reilly. “I won’t coerce you. But come to my reincarnation today. Get a glimpse of the hereafter. Perhaps you’ll change your mind.”
Blaine hesitated, and the old man grinned at him.
“No danger, I promise you, and no tricks! Did you fear I might steal your body? I selected a better host months ago from the open market. Frankly, I wouldn’t have your body. You see, I wouldn’t be comfortable in anything so gross.”
The interview was over. Marie Thorne led Blaine out.
V
THE reincarnation room was arranged like a small theater. It was often used, Blaine learned, for company lectures and educational programs on an executive level. Today the audience had been kept small and select. The Rex board of directors was present, five middle-aged men sitting in the back row and talking quietly among themselves. Near them was a recording secretary. A government observer was present as required by law, and there was a gaunt man with a hat pulled low over his face. This man, Marie explained, was a zombie representative.
Blaine and Marie sat in front, as far from the directors as possible.
On the raised stage, under white floodlights, the reincarnation apparatus was already in place. There were two sturdy armchairs equipped with straps and wires. Between the chairs was a large glossy black machine. Thick wires connected the machine to the chair, and gave Blaine the uneasy feeling that he was going to witness an execution. Several technicians were bent over the machine, making final adjustments. Standing near them was the red-faced doctor.
Mr. Reilly came on the stage, nodded to the audience and sat down in one of the chairs. He was followed by a man in his forties with a frightened, pale, determined face. This was the host, the present possessor of the body that Mr. Reilly had contracted for. The host sat down in the other chair, glanced quickly at the audience and looked down at his hands. He seemed embarrassed. Sweat beaded his upper lip, and the armpits of his jacket were stained black. He didn’t look at Reilly, nor did Reilly look at him.
Another man came on the stage, bald and earnest-looking, wearing a dark suit with a cleric’s collar and carrying a little black book He began a whispered conversation with the two seated men.
“Brothe
r James,” Marie Thorne said. “He’s a clergyman of the Brotherhood of the Afterlife.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a new religion, outgrowth of the Crazy Years. During that time, there was a great religious controversy . . .”
The burning question of the 2040s was the spiritual status of the hereafter. It became even worse after Hereafter, Inc., announced the advent of the scientific hereafter. The corporation tried desperately hard to avoid any religious involvement, but involvement couldn’t very well be avoided. Most churchmen felt that science was unfairly pre-empting their territory. Hereafter, Inc., whether it liked or not, was considered the spokesman for a new scientific religious position: That salvation lay, not through religious, moral or ethical considerations, but through an applied, impersonal, invariant scientific principle.
Convocations, meetings and congresses were held to decide the burning question. Some groups adopted the view that the newly revealed scientific hereafter was obviously not heaven, salvation, nirvana or paradise, because the soul was not involved. Mind, they held, is not synonymous with soul, nor is the soul contained in or a part of the mind.
Granted, science had found a means of extending the existence of one portion of the mind-body entity. That was fine, but it didn’t affect the soul at all, and certainly didn’t mean immortality or heaven or nirvana or anything like that. The soul could not be affected by scientific manipulation. And the soul’s disposition after the eventual and inevitable death of the mind in its scientific hereafter would be in accordance with traditional moral, ethical and religious practices.
“WOW!” Blaine said. “I think I get what you mean. They were trying to achieve a coexistence between science and religion. But wasn’t their reasoning a little subtle for some people?”
“Yes,” Marie Thorne said, “even though they explained it much better than I’ve done, and backed it up with all sorts of analogies. But that was only one position. Others didn’t attempt coexistence. The standard religions held firm. They simply declared that the scientific hereafter was sinful. And one group solved the problem by joining the scientific position and declaring that the soul is contained in the mind.”
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