BLAINE hurried into a gigantic office building and found six theatrical agents listed on the board. He picked Barnex, Scofield & Styles, and took the elevator to their offices on the 19th floor.
He entered a luxurious waiting room paneled with gigantic solidographs of smiling actresses. At the far end of the room, a pretty receptionist raised an inquiring eyebrow at him.
Blaine went up to her desk. “I’d like to see someone about my act.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “We’re all filled.”
“This is a very special act.”
“I’m really terribly sorry. Perhaps next week.”
“Look,” Blaine said, “my act is really unique. You see, I’m a man from the past.”
“I don’t care if you’re the ghost of Scott Merrivale,” she said sweetly. “We’re filled. Try us next week.”
Blaine turned to go. A short, stocky man breezed past him, nodding to the receptionist.
“Morning, Miss Thatcher.”
“Morning, Mr. Barnex.”
Barnex! One of the agents! Blaine hurried after him and grabbed his sleeve.
“Mr. Barnex,” he said, “I have an act—”
“Everybody has an act,” said Barnex.
“But this act is unique!”
“Everybody’s act is unique. Let go my sleeve, friend. Try us next week.”
“I’m from the past!” Blaine cried, suddenly feeling foolish.
Barnex turned and stared at him. He looked as though he might be on the verge of calling the police, or Bellevue. But Blaine plunged recklessly on.
“I really am!” he said. “I have absolute proof. The Rex Corporation snatched me out of the past. Ask them!”
“Rex?” Barnex said. “Yeah, I heard something about that snatch over at Lindy’s . . . Hmmm. Come into my office, Mister—”
“Blaine, Tom Blaine.” He followed Barnex into a tiny, cluttered cubicle. “Do you think you can use me?”
“Maybe,” Barnex said, motioning Blaine to a chair. “It depends. Tell me, Mr. Blaine, what period of the past are you from?”
“I have an intimate knowledge of the nineteen thirties, forties and fifties. By way of stage experience, I did some acting in college, and a professional actress friend of mine once told me I had a natural way of—”
“That’s 20th century?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
THE agent shook his head. “Too bad. Now if you’d been a sixth century Swede or a seventh century Jap, I could have found work for you. I’ve had no difficulty booking appearances for our first century Roman or our fourth century Saxon, and I could use a couple more like them. But it’s damned hard finding anyone from those early centuries, now that time travel is illegal. And B.C. is completely out.”
“But what about the 20th century?” Blaine asked.
“It’s filled.”
“Filled?”
“Sure. Ben Therler from 1953 gets all the available stage appearances.”
“I see,” Blaine said, getting slowly to his feet. “Thanks anyhow, Mr. Barnex.”
“Not at all,” said Barnex. “Wish I could help. If you’d been from any time or place before the 11th century, I could probably book you. But there’s not much interest in recent stuff like the 19th and 20th centuries . . . Say, why don’t you go see Therler? It isn’t likely, but maybe he can use an understudy or something.” He scrawled an address on a piece of paper and handed it to Blaine.
Blaine took it, thanked him again, and left.
In the street, he stood for a moment, cursing his luck. His one unique and indisputable talent, his novelty value, had been usurped by Ben Therler of 1953! Really, he thought, time travel should be kept more exclusive. It just wasn’t fair to drop a man here and then ignore him.
He wondered what sort of man Therler was. Well, he’d find out. Even if Therler didn’t need an understudy, it would be a pleasure and relief to talk to someone from home. And Therler, who had lived here longer, might have some ideas on what a 20th century man could do in 2110.
Blaine flagged a helicab and gave the address. In fifteen minutes, he was in Therler’s apartment building, pressing the doorbell.
A SLEEK, chubby, complacent-looking man opened the door. He was wearing a pork-pie hat, a tweed jacket with heavily padded shoulders, a narrow regimental-stripe tie, pegged gray flannel slacks and orange suede shoes.
“You the photographer?” he asked. “You’re too early.”
Blaine shook his head. “Mr. Therler, you’ve never met me before. I’m from your own century. I’m from 1958.”
“Is that so?” said Therler, with obvious suspicion.
“It’s the truth,” Blaine said. “I was snatched by the Rex Corporation. You can check my story with them.”
Therler shrugged his shoulders. “Well, what is it you want?”
“I was hoping you might be able to use an understudy or something—”
“No, no, I never use an understudy,” Therler said, starting to close the door.
“I didn’t think you did. The real reason I came was just to talk to you. It gets pretty lonely being out of one’s century. I wanted to talk to someone from my own age. I thought maybe you’d feel that way, too.”
“Me? Oh!” Therler said, smiling with sudden stage warmth. “Oh, you mean about the good old twentieth century! I’d love to talk to you about it sometime, pal. Little old New York! The Dodgers and Yankees, the hansoms in the park, the roller-skating rink in Rockefeller Plaza. I sure miss it all! But I’m afraid I’m a little busy now.”
“Certainly,” Blaine said. “Some other time.”
“Fine! I’d really love to!” said Therler, smiling even more brilliantly. “Call my secretary, will you, old man? Schedules, you know. We’ll have a really great old gab some one of these days. I suppose you could use a spare dollar or two—”
Blaine shook his head.
“Then ’bye,” Therler said heartily. “And do call soon.”
Blaine hurried out of the building. It was bad enough being robbed of your novelty value; it was worse being robbed by an out-and-out phony, a temporal fraud who’d never been within a hundred years of 1953. The Rockefeller roller-skating rink! And those clothes! Everything about the man screamed counterfeit.
But Blaine was probably the only man in 2110 who could detect the impostor.
THAT afternoon, Blaine purchased a change of clothing and a shaving kit. He found a room in a cheap hotel on Ninth Avenue. For the next week, he continued looking for work.
He tried the restaurants, but found that human dishwashers were a thing of the past. At the docks and spaceports, robots were doing most of the heavy work. One day he was tentatively approved for a position as package-wrapping inspector at Gimbel-Macy’s. But the personnel department, after carefully studying his personality profile, irritability index and suggestibility rating, vetoed him in favor of a dull-eyed little man from Queens who held a master’s degree in packaging.
Blaine was wearily returning to his hotel one evening when he recognized a face in the dense crowd. It was a man he would have known instantly, anywhere. He was about Blaine’s age, a compact, red-headed, snub-nosed man with slightly protruding teeth and a small red blotch on his neck. He carried himself with a certain jaunty assurance, the unquenchable confidence of a man for whom something always turns up.
“Ray!” Blaine shouted. “Ray Melhill!” He pushed through the crowd and seized him by the arm. “Ray! How’d you get out?”
The man pulled his arm away and smoothed the sleeve of his jacket. “My name is not Melhill.”
“It’s not? Are you sure?”
“Of course I am sure,” the man said, starting to move away.
Blaine stepped in front of him. “Wait a minute. You look exactly like him, even down to the radiation scar. Are you sure you aren’t Ray Melhill, a flow-control man off the spaceship Bremen?”
“Quite certain,” the man said coldly. “You have confused me with someone e
lse, young man.” Blaine stared hard as the man started to walk away. Then he reached out, caught the man by a shoulder and swung him around.
“You dirty body-thieving swine!” Blaine shouted, his big right fist shooting out.
The man who so exactly resembled Melhill was knocked back against a building and slid groggily to the pavement. Blaine started for him, and people moved quickly out of his way.
“Berserker!” a woman screamed. Someone else took up the cry. Blaine caught sight of a blue uniform shoving through the crowd toward him.
A flathat! Blaine ducked into the crowd. He turned a corner quickly, then another, slowed to a walk and looked back. The policeman was not in sight. Blaine started walking again to his hotel.
It had been Melhill’s body, but Ray no longer occupied it. There had been no last-minute reprieve for him, no final chance. His body had been taken from him and sold to the old man whose querulous mind wore the jaunty body like a suit of ill-fitting, too-youthful clothes.
Now Blaine knew his friend was really dead. He drank silently to him in a neighborhood bar before returning to the hotel.
BLAINE was stopped by the clerk as he passed the desk. “Blaine? Got a message for you. Just a minute.”
Blaine waited, wondering whom it could be from. Marie? But he hadn’t called Marie yet, and wasn’t planning to until he found work.
The clerk came back and handed him a slip of paper. The message read: “There is a Communication awaiting Thomas Blaine at the Spiritual Switchboard, 23rd Street Branch. Hours, nine to five.”
“I wonder how anybody knew where I was,” Blaine said.
“Spirits got their ways,” the clerk told him. “Man I know, his dead mother-in-law tracked him down through three aliases, a Transplant and a complete skin job. He was hiding from her in Ethiopia.”
“I don’t have any dead mother-in-law,” said Blaine.
“No? Who you figure’s trying to reach you?” the clerk asked.
“I’ll find out tomorrow and let you know,” Blaine said.
But his sarcasm was wasted. The clerk had already turned back to his correspondence course on Atomic Engine Maintenance.
11.
THE 23rd Street Branch of the Spiritual Switchboard was a large graystone building near Third Avenue. Engraved above the door was the statement: “Dedicated to Free Communication Between Those on Earth and Those Beyond.”
Blaine entered the building and studied the directory. It gave floor and room numbers for Messages Incoming, Messages Outgoing, Translations, Abjurations, Exorcisms, Offerings, Pleas, and Exhortations. He wasn’t sure which classification he fell under, or what the classifications signified, or even the purpose of the Spiritual Switchboard. He took his slip of paper to the information booth.
“That’s Messages Incoming,” a pleasant, gray-haired receptionist told him. “Straight down the hall to Room 32A.”
“Thank you.” Blaine hesitated, then asked, “Could you explain something to me?”
“Certainly,” the woman said. “What do you wish to know?”
“Well—I hope this doesn’t sound too foolish—what is all this?”
The gray-haired woman smiled. “That’s a difficult question to answer. In a philosophical sense, I suppose you might call the Spiritual Switchboard a move toward a greater oneness, an attempt to discard the dualism of mind and body, and to substitute—”
“No,” Blaine said. “I mean literally.”
“Literally? Why, the Spiritual Switchboard is a privately endowed, tax-free organization, chartered to act as a clearing house and center for communications to and from the Threshold Plane of the Hereafter. In some cases, of course, people don’t need our aid and can communicate directly with their departed ones. But more often, there is a need for amplification. This center possesses the proper equipment to make the deceased audible to our ears. And we perform other services, such as abjurations, exorcisms, exhortations and the like, which become necessary from time to time when flesh interacts with spirit.”
She smiled warmly at him. “Does that make it any clearer?”
“Oh, it does—yes, indeed,” Blaine said faintly, “and thank you very much,” and went down the hall to Room 32A.
IT was a small gray room with several armchairs and a loudspeaker set in the wall. Blaine sat down, wondering what was going to happen.
“Tom Blaine!” bawled a disembodied voice from the loudspeaker.
“Huh? What?” Blaine asked, jumping to his feet and moving toward the door.
“Tom! How are you, boy?” Blaine, his hand on the doorknob, suddenly recognized the voice. “Ray Melhill?”
“Right! I’m up there where the rich folks go when they die! Pretty good, huh?”
“I guess it is, if you say so,” Blaine answered uncertainly. “But, Ray, how? I thought you didn’t have any hereafter insurance.”
“I didn’t. Let me tell you the whole story. They came for me maybe an hour after they took you. I was so damned angry, I thought I’d go out of my mind. I stayed angry right through the anesthetic, right through the wiping. I was still angry when I died.”
“What was dying like?” Blaine asked.
“It was like exploding. I could feel myself scattering all over the place, growing big as the Galaxy, bursting into fragments, and the fragments bursting into smaller fragments, and all of them were me.
“And what happened?”
“I don’t know. Maybe being so angry helped. I was stretched as far as I could go—any further and it wouldn’t be me—and then I just simply came back together again. Some people do. Like I told you, a few out of every million have always survived without hereafter training. I was one of the lucky ones.”
“Lucky,” Blaine repeated bitterly. “I tried to do something for you, but you’d already been sold.”
“I know,” Melhill said. “Thanks anyhow, Tom. And say, thanks for popping that slob. The one wearing my body.”
“You saw that?”
“I’ve been keeping my eyes open,” Melhill said. “By the way, I like that Marie. Nice-looking kid.”
“Thanks. Ray, what’s the hereafter like?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t?”
“I’m not in the hereafter yet, Tom. I’m in the Threshold. It’s a preparatory stage, a sort of bridge between Earth and the hereafter. I wish I could explain. On Earth, I always wondered what the Threshold was like. No one could ever describe it. I suppose it bothers you.”
“I’d like to know.”
“Well, let me try. It’s a sort of grayness, with Earth on one side and the hereafter on the other. Only it’s not like that, because there aren’t any directions. I mean both Earth and the hereafter are on the same side, sort of, only—”
“Superimposed?”
“No, not all! Look, the hereafter is a sort of grayness, but it’s all color, too. That’s the secret, really. I mean once you understand that color is direction and form is position—no. Let me put it this way. Sounds and colors are the same, we’ll start there. That’s why the form part is so important for understanding direction, which is actually position. Are you getting any of this?”
“I’m afraid not,” Blaine said. “It sounds all mixed up.”
“IT’S perfectly clear to me,” Melhill said, “but explaining is like talking about the Taj Mahal to a man who’s been blind from birth. Only more so. Anyhow, let’s just say that Earth is on one side and the hereafter on the other, and drop it there.”
“Why don’t you cross over?” Blaine asked.
“Not yet,” Melhill said. “It’s a one-way street into the hereafter. Once you cross over, you can’t come back. There’s no more contact with Earth.”
Blaine thought about that for a moment. “Then when are you going to cross over, Ray?”
“I don’t rightly know. I thought I’d stay in Threshold for a while and keep an eye on things.”
“Keep an eye on me, you mean.”
“Well .
. .”
“Thanks a lot, Ray, but don’t do it. Go into the hereafter. I can take care of myself.”
“Sure you can,” Melhill said. “But I think I’ll stick around for a while anyhow. You’d do it for me, wouldn’t you? So don’t argue. Now look, I suppose you know you’re in trouble?”
Blaine nodded. “You mean the zombie?”
“For one, yes. I don’t know who he is or what he wants from you, Tom, but it can’t be good. You’d better be a long way off when he finds out. But that wasn’t the trouble I meant.”
“You mean I have more?”
“Afraid so. You’re going to be haunted, Tom.”
In spite of himself, Blaine laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Melhill demanded indignantly. “You think it’s a joke to be haunted?”
“I suppose not. But is it really so serious?”
“Lord, you’re ignorant,” Melhill said. “Do you know anything about ghosts? How they’re made and what they want?”
“Tell me.”
“Well, there are three possibilities when a man dies. First, his mind can just explode, scatter, dissipate; and that’s the end of him. Second, his mind can hold together through the death trauma; and he finds himself in the Threshold, a spirit. I guess you know about those two.”
“Go on,” said Blaine.
“The third possibility is this: His mind breaks during the death trauma, but not enough to cause dissipation. He pulls through into the Threshold. But the strain has been permanently disabling. He’s insane. And that, my friend, is how a ghost is born.”
“Hmm,” Blaine said. “So a ghost is a mind that went insane during the death trauma?”
“Right. He’s insane, and he haunts.”
“But why?”
“Ghosts haunt,” Melhill said, “because they’re filled with twisted hatred, anger, fear and pain. They won’t go into the hereafter. They want to spend as much time as they can on Earth, where their attention is still fixed. They want to frighten people, hurt them, drive them insane. Haunting is the most asocial thing they can do; it’s their madness. Look, Tom, since the beginning of mankind . . .”
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