“For a while, perhaps. No one could be sure. In any case, it was strictly conjecture after a point; the disease finally took him over.”
“But it’s possible?”
Ball snorted. “Yes, Mr. Pareti, it’s possible.” He shook his head as if he could not believe the way Pareti was taking this. “Remember, none of the cases was like any other. I don’t know what joys you can look forward to, but whatever they are, they’re bound to be unusual.”
Pareti stood up. “I’ll fight it off. It isn’t going to take me over like the others.”
Ball’s expression was of disgust. “I doubt it, Pareti. I never met any of the others, but from what I’ve read of them, they were far stronger men than you seem to be.”
“Why? Just because this has me shaken?”
“No, because you’re a sniveler.”
“You’re the most compassionless mother I’ve ever met!”
“I cannot pretend grief that you’ve contracted Ashton’s. You gambled, and you lost. Stop whimpering.”
“You said that before, Dr. Ball.”
“I say it again now!”
“Is that all from you?”
“That’s all from me, to be sure,” Dr. Ball said, snidely. “But it’s not all for you, I’m equally sure.”
“But you’re sure that’s all you have to tell me?”
Ball nodded, still wearing the insipid grin of the medical ghoul. He was wearing it as Pareti took two quick, short steps and jacked a fist into the doctor’s stomach, just below the heart. Ball’s eyes seemed to extrude almost as the goo extruded, and his face went three shades of gray toward matching his lab smock. Pareti held him up under the chin with his left hand and drove a short, straight right directly into the doctor’s nose.
Ball flailed backward and hit the glass-fronted instrument case, breaking the glass with a crash. Ball settled to the floor, still conscious, but in awful pain. He stared up at Pareti as the harvester turned toward the door. Pareti turned back momentarily, smiling for the first time since he had entered sick bay.
“That’s a helluva bedside manner you’ve got there, Doc.”
Then he left.
He was forced to leave the TexasTower within the hour, as the law prescribed. He received a final statement of the back pay due him for the nine month shift he had been working. He also received a sizeable termination bonus. Though everyone knew Ashton’s disease was not contagious, when he passed Peggy Flinn on his way to the exit lock, she looked at him sadly and said goodbye, but would not kiss him farewell. She looked sheepish. “Whore,” Pareti murmured, but she heard him.
A company lift had been sent for him. A big fifteen-passenger job with two stewardesses, a lounge, movie theater and pocket billiard accommodations. Before he was put on board, the Project Superintendent, headman on the TexasTower, spoke to him at the lock.
“You aren’t a Typhoid Mary; you can’t give it to anyone. It’s merely unlovely and unpredictable. That’s what they tell me. Technically, there’s no quarantine; you can go where you please. But realistically, you can appreciate that your presence in the surface cities wouldn’t be welcome. Not that you’d be missing much . . . all the action is underground.”
Pareti nodded silently. He was well over his earlier shaken reactions. He was now determined to fight the disease with the strength of his own will.
“Is that it?” he asked the Project Super.
The man nodded, and extended his hand.
Pared hesitated a moment, then shook it.
As Pared was walking down the ramp to the lift, the Project Super called after him. “Hey, Pared?”
Joe turned back.
“Thanks for belting that bastard Ball. I’ve been itching to do it for six years.” He grinned.
It was an embarrassed, brave little smile that Joe Pared returned, as he said goodbye to whom and what he was and boarded the lift for the real world.
He had free passage to the destination of his choice. He chose East Pyrites. If he were going to make a new life for himself with the money he had saved in three years working the goo fields, at least he was going to do it after one king-sized shore leave. It had been nine months since he had been anywhere near excitement—and you sure as hell couldn’t call Peggy Flinn, with her flat chest, excitement—and there was time for fun before the time to settle down.
One of the stewardesses, wearing an off-the-bosom jumper with a “kicki” skirt, paused beside his seat and smiled down at him. “Care for a drink?”
Pareti’s thoughts were hardly of liquor. She was a high-breasted, long-legged item with light turquoise hair. But he knew she had been apprised of his ailment, and her reaction would be the same as Peggy Flinn’s.
He smiled up at her, thinking of what he would like to do with her if she were amenable. She took his hand and led him back to one of the washrooms. She led him inside, bolted the door, and dropped her clothes. Pared was so astonished he had to let her undress him. It was cramped and close in the tiny bathroom, but the stewardess was marvelously inventive, not to mention limber.
When she was done with him, her face flushed, her neck spotted with little purple love-bites, her eyes almost feverish, she mumbled something about being unable to resist him, gathered up her clothes without even putting them on, and with acute embarrassment, floundered out of the bathroom, leaving him standing there with his pants down around his shoes.
Pared looked at himself in the mirror. Again. He seemed to be doing nothing but staring into mirrors today. What stared out at him was himself, bald Pareti. He had the suddenly pleasurable feeling that whatever manner the goo infection in his body was taking to evolve itself, it would probably make him irresistible to women. All at once he could not find it in his heart to think too unkindly of the goo.
He had happy dreams of what joys and delights were in store for him if the goo, for instance, built him as big as a horse, or if it heightened this already obvious attraction women had for him, or if it—
He caught himself.
Uh-uh. No thank you. That was just what had happened to the other five. They had been taken over by the goo. It had done what it had wanted with them. Well, he was going to fight it, battle it from invading him from the top of his bald head to the soles of his uncalloused feet.
He got dressed.
No indeed not. He wasn’t going to enjoy any more sex like he’d just had. And it became obvious to him that whatever the goo had done to the attraction-waves of his personality, it had also heightened his perceptions in that area. It had been the best he’d ever had.
He was going to grab a little fun in East Pyrites, and then buy himself a packet of land topside, find the right woman, settle down, and buy himself a good position with one of the companies.
He went back into the cabin of the lift. The other stewardess was on duty. She didn’t say anything, but the one who had taken Pareti into the toilet did not show herself through the remainder of the flight, and her replacement kept staring at Joe as though she wanted to nibble him with tiny teeth.
East Pyrites, Nevada, was located eighty-seven miles south of the radioactive ghost town that had been called Las Vegas. It was also three miles below it. It was conservatively rated one of the marvels of the world. Its devotion to vice was obsessive, amounting to an almost puritanical drive to pleasure. In East Pyrites the phrase had been coined: PLEASURE IS A STERN DUTY IMPOSED ON US BY THE WORLD.
In East Pyrites, the fertility cults of antiquity had been revived in deadly seriousness. Pareti found this to be true as he stepped out of the dropshaft on the seventieth underlevel. A mass gangbang was in progress, in the middle of the intersection of Dude Avenue and Gold Dust Blvd., between fifty male members of the Ishtar Boppers and ten lovely girls who had signed in blood their membership to the Swingers of Cybele.
He carefully avoided the imbroglio. It looked like fun, but he wasn’t going to aid and abet the goo in taking him over.
He hailed a taxi and stared at the scenery. The Templ
e of Strangers was served by the virgin daughters of the town’s leading citizens; executions for impiety were held publicly in the Court of the Sun; Christianity was in disrepute. It wasn’t any fun.
The old Nevadan custom of gambling was still observed, but had been elaborated, ramified, and extended. In East Pyrites, the saying, “You bet your life,” had real and sinister meanings.
Many of the practices in East Pyrites were un-Constitutional; others were implausible; and some were downright inconceivable.
Pareti loved it at once.
He selected the Round-The-World Combination Hotel, close to the Hall of Perversions, just across the street from the verdant expanse of Torture Garden. In his room, he showered, changed, and tried to decide what to do first. Dinner in the Slaughterhouse, of course. Then perhaps a little mild exercise in the cool darkness of the Mudbath Club. After that—
He suddenly became aware that he was not alone. Someone or something was in the room with him.
He looked around. There was apparently nothing wrong, except that he could have sworn that he had put his jacket on a chair. Now it was on the bed, near him.
After a moment’s hesitation he reached for the jacket. The garment slid away from him. “Try to catch me!” it said, in a coy, insipid voice. Pareti grabbed for it, but the jacket danced away from him.
Pareti stared at it. Wires? Magnets? A joke of the management of the hotel? He knew instinctively that he would find no rational way in which the coat had moved and talked. He gritted his teeth and stalked it.
The jacket moved away, laughing, dipping like a bat. Pareti cornered it behind the room’s massage unit, and managed to grab a sleeve. I’ve got to have this goddamn thing sent out to be cleaned and burned, he thought insanely.
It lay limp for a moment. Then it curled around and tickled the palm of his hand.
Pareti giggled involuntarily, then flung the garment away from him and hurried out of the room.
Descending by dropshaft to the street, he knew that had been the true onset of the disease. It had altered the relationship between him and an article of clothing. An inanimate object. The goo was getting bolder.
What would it do next?
He was in a soft place called The Soft Place. It was a gambling hall whose innovation was an elaborate game called Sticklt. The game was played by seating oneself before a long counter with a round polyethylene-lined hole in the facing panel, and inserting a certain portion of the anatomy therein. It was strictly a man’s game, of course.
One placed one’s bets on the flickering light-panels that covered the counter-top. These lights were changed in a random pattern by a computer programmer, and through the intricacies of the betting and odds, various things happened behind the facing panels, to whomever happened to be inserted in the playing-hole. Some of the things were very nice indeed. Some were not.
Ten seats down to his right, Pared heard a man scream, high and shrill, like a woman. An attendant in white came with a sheet and a pneumatic-stretcher, and took the bettor away. The man to Pareti’s left was sitting forward, up tight against the panel, moaning with pleasure. His WINNER light was flashing.
A tall, elegant woman with inky hair came up beside Pareti’s chair. “Honey, you shouldn’t be wasting anything as nice as you here. Why don’t we go downshaft to my brig and squam a little . . .”
Pared panicked. He knew the goo was at work again. He withdrew from the panel just as the flickering lights went up LOSER in front of him, and the distinct sound of whirring razor blades came out of the playing-hole. He saw his bets sucked into the board, and he turned without looking at the woman, knowing she would be the most gorgeous creature he had ever seen. And he didn’t need that aggravation on top of everything else.
He ran out of The Soft Place. The goo, and Ashton’s disease, were ruining his good time of hell-for-leather. But he was not, repeat not, going to let it get the better of him. Behind him, the woman was crying.
He was hurrying, but he didn’t know where he was going. Fear encased him like a second self. The thing he ran from was within him, pulsing and growing within him, running with him, perhaps moving out ahead of him. But the empty ritual of flight calmed him, left him better able to think.
He sat down on a park bench beneath an obscenely shaped purple lamp post. The neon designs were gagging and suggestive. It was quiet here—except for the Muzak—he was in the world famous Hangover Square. He could hear nothing—except the Muzak—and the stifled moans of a tourist expiring in the bushes.
What could he do? He could resist, he could close out the effects of Ashton’s disease by concentration . . .
A newspaper fluttered across the street and plastered itself around his foot. Pareti tried to kick it away. It clung to his foot, and he heard it whisper, “Please, oh please do not spurn me.”
“Get away from me!” Pareti screamed. He was suddenly terrified; he could see the newspaper crinkle as it tried to unsnap his shoe buttons.
“I want to kiss your feet,” the newspaper pleaded. “Is that so terrible? Is it wrong? Am I so ugly?”
“Let go!” Pareti shouted, tugging at the paper, which had formed into a pair of giant white lips.
A man walked past him, stopped, stared, and said, “Jim, that’s the damndest bit I ever saw. You do that as a lounge act or just for kicks?”
“Voyeur!” the newspaper hissed, and fluttered away down the street.
“How do you control it?” the man asked. “Special controls in your pocket or something?”
Pareti shook his head numbly. He was so tired suddenly. He said, “You actually saw it kiss my foot?”
“I mean to tell you I saw it,” the man said.
“I hoped that maybe I was only hallucinating,” Pareti said. He got up from the bench and walked unsteadily away. He didn’t hurry.
He was in no rush to meet the next manifestation of Ashton’s disease.
In a dim bar he drank six souses and had to be carried to the public Dry-Out on the corner. He cursed the attendants for reviving him. At least when he was bagged, he didn’t have to compete with the world around him for possession of his sanity.
In the Taj Mahal he played girls, purposely aiming badly when he threw the dirks and the kris at the rapidly spinning bawds on the giant wheel. He clipped the ear off a blonde, planted one ineffectually between the legs of a brunette, and missed entirely with his other shots. It cost him seven hundred dollars. He yelled cheat and was bounced.
A head-changer approached him on Leopold Way, and offered the unspeakable delights of an illegal head-changing operation by a doctor who was “clean and very decent.” He yelled for a cop, and the little ratfink scuttled away in the crowd.
A taxi driver suggested the Vale of Tears, and though it sounded lousy, he gave the guy the go-ahead. When he entered the place—which was on the eighty-first level, a slum section of foul odors and wan street lights—he recognized it at once for what it was. A necro-joint. The smell of freshly-stacked corpses rose up to gag him.
He only stayed an hour.
There were nautch joints, and blind pigs, and hallucinogen bars, and a great many hands touching him, touching him.
Finally, after a long time, he found himself back in the park, where the newspaper had come after him. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there, but he had a tattoo of a naked seventy-year old female dwarf on his chest.
He walked through the park, but found that he had picked an unpromising route. Dogwood barked at him and caressed his shoulders; Spanish Moss sang a fandango; an infatuated willow drenched him in tears. He broke into a run, trying to get away from the importunities of cherry trees, the artless Western prattle of sagebrush, the languors of poplar. Through him, his disease was acting on the environment. He was infecting the world he passed through; no, he wasn’t contagious to humans; hell no, it was worse than that: he was a Typhoid Mary for the inanimate world! And the altered world loved him, tried to win him. Godlike, an Unmoved Mover, unable to deal with hi
s involuntary creations, he fought down panic and tried to escape from the passions of a suddenly writhing world.
He passed a roving gang of juvies, who offered to beat the crap out of him for a price, but he turned them down and stumbled on.
He came out onto Sade Boulevard, but even here there was no relief. He could hear the little paving stones whispering about him:
“Say, he’s cuter
“Forget it, he’d never look at you.”
“You vicious bitch!”
“I tell you he’ll never look at you.”
“Sure he will. Hey, Joe—”
“What did I tell you? He didn’t even look at you!”
“But he’s got to! Joe, Joe, it’s me, over here—”
Pareti whirled and yelled, “As far as I’m concerned, one paving stone looks exactly like another paving stone. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.”
That shut them up, by God! But what was this?
High overhead, the neon sign above cut-rate Sex City was beginning to flash furiously. The letters twisted and formed a new message: I AM A NEON SIGN AND I ADORE JOE PARETI!
A crowd had gathered to observe the phenomenon. “What the hell is a Joe Pareti?” one woman asked.
“A casualty of love,” Pareti told her. “Speak the name softly, the next corpse you see may be your own.”
“You’re a twisto,” the woman said.
“I fear not,” Pareti said politely, a little madly. “Madness is my ambition, true. But I dare not hope to achieve it.”
She stared at him as he opened the door and went into Sex City. But she didn’t believe her eyes when the doorknob gave him a playful little pat on the ass.
“The way it works is this,” the salesman said. “Fulfillment is no problem; the tough thing is desire, don’t you dig? Desires die of fulfillment and gotta be replaced by new, different desires. A lotta people desire to have weirdo desires, but they can’t make it onaccounta having lived a lifetime on the straights. But us here at the Impulse Implantation Center can condition you to like anything you’d like to like.”
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