To Be Continued - 1953–58 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume One

by Robert Silverberg

  “He’s a politician,” Hollis said. “By which I mean a man who’s in public life. He wants to run for a high office. He’s a capable man, but with your talent for projection, combined with his own inner drive, he’s sure to win.”

  “You mean you have the other man picked out already?”

  “He’s been picked out and waiting for nearly a year. I told him I would get a great actor to serve as the counterweight on this little see-saw. He’s been waiting. I had you in mind, but it took this flop tonight to make you come around. You will go along with this, won’t you?”

  Jenner shut his eyes for a moment and drew the burning smoke deep into his lungs. He felt like gagging. He was drained of all strength; if Hollis had snapped off the light, he would have fallen asleep on the spot, clothes and all.

  He said, after a moment, “So, I’ll be taking another man into my head with me. And that supposedly will make me a star again. Ah—have you ever tried this stunt before?”

  “You and he will be the first subjects,” Hollis confessed.

  “And you’re confident nothing will go wrong?”

  “I’m not confident at all,” Hollis said quietly. “It ought to work; but it might make both of you gibbering lunatics instead.”

  “And still you’re ready to try this on me?” Jenner asked.

  “I wouldn’t want you going into it without a warning. But the odds are good in favor of a successful outcome; otherwise I wouldn’t dream of asking you to play along with me.”

  Jenner stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. He glanced around at the books on the shelves, at the single painting, at the austere furniture. “How long will it take?”

  “About six months. I have to edit two tapes, don’t forget. And we can’t do all the work overnight.”

  “Will it cost me anything?”

  Hollis laughed. “Mark, I’d pay you to do this if you wanted me to. I want to help you—and to see if my theories were right.”

  “I hope they are.” Jenner stood up, coming to his full height, squaring his shoulders, trying to play the role of a successful actor even now, when he was nothing but a hollow has-been. “Okay,” he said in the resonant Jenner tones. “I commit myself into thy hands, Holly. I’ve lost everything else a man can lose; I guess it doesn’t matter much if I lose my mind.”

  Jenner woke up in the middle of the next afternoon. He had been asleep for thirteen hours, and he had needed it. Hollis was gone, having left a note explaining that he had to attend a rehearsal in Manhattan, and would be back about five. Jenner dressed slowly, remembering the conversation of the night before, realizing that he had effectively pledged his soul to the unmephistophelian Hollis.

  He turned Hollis’ sheet of notepaper over and scrawled his own note: “Going downtown to settle my affairs. Will return later tonight.” He took the Undertube back to Manhattan, taxied from the tube station to his hotel, and checked out, settling his bill with cash. For two years he had lived in a twenty-dollar-a-week room in a midtown hotel, with no more personal property than he needed. Most of his possessions had been in storage since the breakup with Helene in ’75; he kept hardly enough in the hotel room to fill a single suitcase.

  He packed up and left. Dragging the suitcase that contained three changes of clothing, his makeup kit, his useless script for Misty Isle, and the 1974-77 volume of his scrapbook, Jenner set out for the Tube station again. It was five-thirty. If he made good connections, he could reach Hollis’ place a little after six. And that gave him time for a little bit of fortification first.

  He stopped at a Lexington Avenue bar and had two martinis. On the third drink he shifted to Gibsons. By the fourth, he had acquired a slatternly-looking bar girl with thick orange lipstick; he bought her the requested rye-and-soda, had one himself, then went into the washroom and got sick. When he came out, the girl was gone. Shrugging, Jenner wandered to another bar and had two more martinis, this time successfully keeping them down. A hundred yards up the block, he had another Gibson.

  He reached Hollis’ place at half past ten, sober enough to walk on his own steam, but too drunk to remember what he had done with his suitcase. He kept insisting that Hollis call the police and have them search for the grip, but Hollis merely smiled amiably and ignored him, leading him to the bedroom and putting him to bed. A moment before he fell asleep, Jenner reflected that it was just as well he had lost the suitcase. With it, he had lost his pitiful press clippings of the last four years, as well as his makeup kit and his final script. Now he could shed his past with alacrity; he had no albatrosses slung around his neck.

  He woke up at nine the next morning, feeling unaccountably clear-headed and cheerful. The smell of frying bacon reached his nostrils. From the kitchen, Hollis yelled, “Go take a quick shower. Breakfast’ll be ready when you come out.”

  They breakfasted in silence. At twenty of ten, they finished their coffee. Hollis said quietly, “All right, Mark. Are you ready to begin?”

  Walt Hollis had rigged an experimental laboratory in his fourth room and he installed Jenner in the middle of it. The room was no more than twelve by fifteen, and it seemed to Jenner that there was an enormous amount of equipment in it. He himself sat in a comfortable chair in the center of the room, facing a diabolically-complex bit of apparatus with fluorescent light-rings and half a dozen theatrical gelatins to provide a shifting pattern of illuminated color. There was a big tape recorder in the room, with a fifteen-inch reel primed and loaded. There were instruments that Jenner simply could not identify at all; he had no technical background, and he merely classified them as “electronic” and let it go at that.

  The room’s window had been carefully curtained off; the door frame was lined with felt. When Hollis chose, he could plunge the room into total darkness. Jenner felt an irrational twinge of fear. Obscurely, the machine facing him reminded him of a dentist’s drill, an instrument he had always feared and hated. But this drill would bite deep into his mind.

  “I won’t be in the room with you,” Hollis said. “I’ll be monitoring from outside. Any time you want me, just raise your right hand and I’ll come in. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Jenner muttered.

  “First I’ve got a pill for you, Mark. Proclorperazine. It’s an ataractic.”

  “A tranquilizer?”

  “Call it that; it’s just to ease your nerves. You’re very tense right now, you know. You’re afraid of what I’m going to do.”

  “Damned right I’m afraid. But you don’t see me getting up and running out!”

  “Of course not,” Hollis said. “Here. Take it.”

  While Jenner swallowed the pill, Hollis busily rolled up the actor’s sleeve and swabbed his arm with alcohol. Jenner watched, already relaxing, as Hollis readied a glittering hypodermic.

  “This is the hypnosis-inducing drug, Mark.”

  “Sodium pentothal? Amytal?”

  “Of that family of ego-depressants, yes.” Hollis deftly discharged the syringe’s contents into one of Jenner’s veins. “I’ve had medical help in preparing this project,” he said. “Sit back. Stretch your feet out. Relax, Mark.”

  Jenner relaxed. He was vaguely conscious of Hollis’ final reassuring pat on the shoulder, of the fact that the small man had left the room, that the room had gone dark. He heard a faint hum that might have come either from the tape recorder or from the strange apparatus in the middle of the room.

  Colored lights began to play on him. Wheels of bright plastic whirled before his eyes. Jenner stared, fascinated, feeling his tension drain away. All he had to do was relax. Rest. Everything would be all right. Relax.

  “Can you hear me, Mark?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Good. Do you feel any discomfort?”

  “No discomfort.”

  “Fine. Listen to me, Mark.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I mean really listening, now. Listening with your brain and not just your ears. Are you listening to me, Mark?”

  “I�
�m listening.”

  “Excellent. This is what I want you to do for me, Mark. I want you to go back and think about your life. Then I want you to tell me all about yourself. Everything. From the beginning.”

  Spring, 1941. Mark Jenner was four years old. Mark Jenner’s brother Tom had reached the ninth of the twelve years he was to have. Tom Jenner had been fighting, against his mother’s express orders, and he had been knocked down and bruised.

  Mark Jenner stared up at his older brother. Tom’s cheek was scraped and bloody, and one side of his mouth was starting to swell puffily.

  “Mama’s gonna murder you,” Mark chortled. “Said you wasn’t supposed to fight.”

  “Wasn’t fighting,” Tom said.

  “I saw you! You picked on Mickey Swenson and he knocked you down and made your face all bloody!”

  “You wouldn’t tell mama that, would you?” Tom asked in a low voice. “If she asked you what happened to me, I mean.”

  Mark blinked. “If she asked, I’d have to tell.”

  “No,” Tom said. His still-pudgy hands gripped Mark’s shoulders painfully. “We’re gonna go inside. I’m gonna tell mama I tripped on a stone and fell down.”

  “But you were fighting! With Mickey Swenson.”

  “We don’t have to tell mama that. We can tell her something else—make up a story.”

  “But…”

  “All you have to do is say I fell down, that I wasn’t fighting with anybody. And I’ll give you a nickel. Okay?”

  Mark looked puzzled. How could he tell mama something that was not true? It seemed easy enough. All he had to do was move his mouth and the sounds would come out. It seemed important to Tom. Already Mark was beginning to believe that Tom had really fallen, that there had been no fight.

  They trooped into the house, the dirty little boy and the dirty littler one. Mrs. Jenner appeared, looming high over both of them, her hands upraised at the sight of her eldest son’s battered face.

  “Tom! What happened?”

  Before Tom could reply, Mark said gravely, “Tom tripped on a stone. He fell down and hurt himself.”

  “Oh! You poor dear—does it hurt?”

  As Mrs. Jenner trooped Tom off to the bathroom for repairs, Mark Jenner, four years old, experienced a curious warm sensation of pride. He had told his first conscious lie. He had spoken something that was not the truth, had done it deliberately with the hope of a reward. He did not know it then, but his career as an actor had begun auspiciously.

  Spring, 1954. Mark Jenner was seventeen, a junior at Noah Webster High School, Massilon, Ohio. He was six feet one and weighed 152 pounds. He was carrying the schoolbooks of Joanne Lauritszon, sixteen years eight months old. The Mark Jenner of 1977 saw her for what she was: a raw, newly-fledged female with a padded chest and a shrill voice. The Mark Jenner of 1954 saw her as Aphrodite.

  It took all his skill to work the conversation to the subject of the forthcoming Junior Prom. It took all his courage to invite the girl who walked at his side.

  It took all his strength to endure her as she said, “But I’ve got a prom date already, Mark. I’m going with Nat Hospers.”

  “Oh—yes, of course. Sorry. I should have figured it out myself.”

  And he handed her back her books and ran stumbling away, cursing himself for his awkwardness, cursing Hospers for his car and his football-player muscles and his aplomb with girls. Mark had saved up for months for the prom; he had vowed he would die of grief if Joanne refused him. Somehow, he did not die.

  Autumn, 1964. Hollywood. Mark Jenner was twenty-seven, rugged-looking and tanned, drawing three thousand dollars a week during the filming of Lovely to Look At. He sat at the best table in Hollywood’s most exclusive night club, and opposite him, resplendent in her ermine wrap, sat the queen of filmland, Helene Bryan, lovely, moist-lipped, high-bosomed, that month blazoned on the covers of a hundred magazines in near nudity. She was twenty. She had been a coltish ten-year-old, interested only in dolls and frills, the year Mark Jenner had first thought he had fallen in love. Now he had fallen in love with her, with this $250,000-a-year goddess of sexuality.

  An earlier Mark Jenner might have drawn back timidly from such a radiant beauty, but the Mark Jenner of 1964 was afraid of no one, of nothing. He smiled at the blonde girl in the ermine wrap.

  He said, “Helene, will you marry me?”

  “Of course, darling! Of course!”

  Spring, 1975. Mark Jenner was thirty-eight. Three Days in Marrakesh had played nine days on Broadway. The night that closing notices went up, Mark Jenner pub-crawled until 3 A.M. The sour taste of cheap tap beer was in his mouth as he staggered home, feeling the ache in his feet and the soreness in his soul. He had not even bothered to remove the gray makeup from his hair. With it, he looked sixty years old, and right now he felt sixty, not thirty-eight. He wondered if Helene would be asleep.

  Helene was not asleep; Helene was up, and packing. She wore a simple cotton dress and no makeup at all, and for once she looked her thirty-one years, instead of seeming to be in her late teens or very early twenties. She had the suitcase nearly full. Jenner had been expecting this for a long time, and now that it had come he was hardly surprised. He was too numb to react emotionally. He dropped heavily on the bed and watched her pack.

  “The show closed tonight,” he said.

  “I know. Holly phoned and told me all about it, at midnight.”

  “I’m sorry I came home late. I stopped to condole with a few friends.”

  The brisk packing motions continued unabated. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Helene…”

  “I’m just taking this one suitcase, Mark. I’ll wire you my new address when I’m in Los Angeles, and you can ship the rest of my things out to me.”

  “Divorce?”

  “Separation. I can’t watch you this way any more, Mark.”

  He smiled. “No. It isn’t fun to watch a man fall apart, I guess. Goodbye, Helene.”

  He was too drained of energy to care to make a scene. She finished packing, locked the suitcase, and went into the study to make a phone call. Then she left, without saying goodbye. Jenner sat smiling stupidly for a while after the door slammed, slowly getting used to the fact that it was all over at last. He rose, went to the side-board, poured himself a highball-glass of gin. He gulped it. He cried.

  Late winter, 1977. Mark Jenner was forty years old. He sat in a special chair in Walt Hollis’ apartment while lights played on his tranquil face…

  It was three months and many miles of mylar tape before Hollis was satisfied. Jenner had gone through a two-hour session each morning, reminiscing with unhesitating frankness. It had not been like the analysis at all; the analysis had not been successful because he had lied to the analyst frequently and well, digging up bits of old parts and offering them as his personal experiences, out of perverse and no doubt psychotic motivations.

  This was different. He was drugged; he spewed forth his genuine past, and when the session was over he had no recollection of what he had said. Hollis never told him. Sometimes Jenner would ask, as he drowned his grogginess in a post-session cup of coffee, but Hollis would never reply.

  From ten to twelve every day, Jenner recorded. From one to three, Hollis cloistered himself in the little room and edited the tapes. From three to six every day, Jenner was banished from the house while his counterpart in the project occupied the little room. Jenner never got so much as a glimpse of the other.

  When the three months had elapsed, when Jenner had finally surrendered as much of his past life as he could yield, when Hollis had edited the formless stream of consciousness into a continuous, consecutive, and intelligible pattern, the time came to enter the second stage of the process. Now there were new drugs, new patterns of light, new responses. Jenner did not speak; he listened. His subconscious lay open, receptive, absorbing all that reached it and locking it in for permanent possession.

  And slowly, the personality of a man formed in Jenner’s min
d, embedding itself deep in layers of consciousness previously private, inextricably meshing itself with the web of memories that was Mark Jenner.

  This man was like Jenner in many ways. He was physically commanding; his voice had the ring of authority, and people listened when he spoke. But as Jenner watched the man’s life shape itself from day to day, from year to compressed and edited year, he realized the difference. The other had chosen to be personally dominating as well. He, Jenner, had sacrificed his personality in order to be able to don many masks. A politician or a statesman must thrust his ego forward; an actor must bury his.

  The other man, Jenner’s mind told him, was forty-two years old. A severe attack of colitis five years back was the only serious illness he had had. He stood six feet one and a half, weighed 190 pounds, was mildly hyperthyroid metabolically, and never slept more than five hours a night.

  He had a law degree from a major university—Hollis had edited the school’s identity out. He had been married twice, divorcing his first wife on grounds of her adultery, and he had two children by his second wife, who regarded him with the awe one usually reserves for a paternal parent. He had been an assistant district attorney and had schemed for his superior’s disgrace; eventually he had succeeded to the post himself, and had consciously been involved in the judicial murder of an innocent man.

  Despite this, he thought of himself, by and large, as liberal and enlightened. He had served two terms in the Congress of the United States, representing an important Eastern state. He hoped to be elected to the Senate in the 1978 elections. Consulting an almanac, Jenner discovered that many Eastern states would be electing senators in 1978: Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia. About all Jenner learned from that was that his man was not officially an inhabitant of New York, Pennsylvania, or Connecticut.