The Second Trip

by Robert Silverberg

  “Greenwich,” said the voice of the computer, and the train slid placidly to a halt on its cushion of compressed air.

  The Rehab Center was north of the city, in the old estate district, which through inspired and desperate zoning arrangements had managed to resist the grinding glacier of population pressures which had devastated most of suburbia. Several acts of reconstruction and rehabilitation had been performed on the Center itself. The main building, a gray pseudo-Tudor stone pile three stories high, with groined stockbroker-Gothic ceilings and leaded-glass windows, had been a private residence in the middle twentieth century, the mansion of some old robber baron, a speculator in energy options. In the end the speculator had outsmarted himself and gone into bankruptcy; the big house then had been transformed into the headquarters of a therapy cult that relied a good deal on year-round nudity, and it was in this era that the five plastic geodesic domes had been erected, forming a giant pentagram around the main building, to serve as wintertime solaria. Recriminations and lawsuits did the cult in within five years, and the place became an avant-garde secondary school, where the scions of the Connecticut gentry took courses in copulatory gymnastics, polarity traumas, and social relativity. The various minor outbuildings, with many ingenious electronic facilities, were added at this time. The school collapsed before it had produced its first graduating class, and the county, taking possession of the premises for nonpayment of realty taxes, speedily turned it into the first Rehab Center in the western half of the state in order to qualify for the federal matching-funds grant then being offered; the national government, eager to get the Rehab program off to a fast start, was throwing its meager resources around quite grandly then.

  As one rode up the thousand-yard-long driveway leading to the main building, one could behold all the discrete strata of construction marking the epochs of the Center’s past, and, if one were imaginatively inclined, one might envision the old speculator placing phone calls from poolside, the health fanatics toasting in the solaria, the youthful scholars elaborately fornicating on the lawn, all at once, while through the leafy glades wandered today’s candidates for personality rehabilitation, smiling blankly as voices out of earphones purred their past to them.

  Macy saw none of these things today, not even the driveway. For, as he emerged from the tube station in downtown Greenwich and looked about for an autotaxi to take him up to the Center, he felt a sensation much like that of a hatchet landing between his shoulder blades, and toppled forward, dazed and retching, sprawling to the pavement. For some moments he lay half-conscious on the elegant blue and white terrazzo tiling of the station entrance. Then, recovering somewhat, he managed to scramble up until he crouched on hands and knees, like a tipsy sprinter awaiting the starter’s gun. More than that he could not do. Rising to a standing position was beyond him now. Flushed, sweating, stricken, he waited for his strength to return and hoped someone would help him up.

  No one did. The commuters obligingly parted their ranks and flowed by him to either side. A boulder in a stream. No one offers to assist a boulder. Perhaps they have a lot of epileptics in Greenwich. Can’t let yourself get worked up over one of those. Damned troublemakers always flopping on their faces, chewing on their tongues: how’s a man going to get to work on time if he stops for them every morning?

  Macy listened to time tolling in his head. One minute, two, three. What had happened? This was the second time in the last eighteen hours that he’d been clubbed down from within. Hamlin?

  —You bet your ass.

  What did you do to me?

  —Gave you a leetle twitch in the autonomic nervous system. I’m sitting right here looking at it. A bunch of ropes and cords, the most complicated frigging mess you could imagine. I just reached out and went plink.

  Another shaft of pain between the shoulder blades.

  Stop it, Macy said. Jesus, why are you doing that?

  —Self-preservation. Like you said a little while ago, self-preservation has to come before concern for others, right?

  Can you hear all my thoughts?

  —Enough of them. Enough to know when I’m being threatened.

  Threatened?

  —Sure. Where were you heading when I knocked you off your feet?

  The Rehab Center, Macy admitted.

  —That’s right. And what were you going to do there?

  I was going for my weekly post-therapy therapy session.

  —Like shit you were. You were going to tell the doctors that I had come back to life.

  And if I was?

  —Don’t try to play innocent. You were going to have them blot me out again, right? Right Macy?

  Well—

  —Admit it!

  Macy, crouching on the shining tiles, attempted to call for help. A soft mewing sound came from him. The commuters continued to stream past. A flotilla of attaché cases and portable terminals. Please. Please. Help me.

  From Hamlin, a second time:

  —Admit it!

  Let me alone.

  Macy felt a sudden explosion of agony behind his breastbone. As if a hand had clasped itself about his heart for a quick powerful squeeze. Setting the valves aflap, emptying the ventricles, pinching the aorta.

  —I’m learning my way around in here, pal. I can do all kinds of things today that I couldn’t swing yesterday. Like tickling your heart. Isn’t that a lovely sensation? Now, suppose you tell me why you were in such a hurry to get to the Rehab Center, and it better be the right answer.

  To have you obliterated again, Macy confessed miserably.

  —Yes. Yes. The dirty truth will out! You were conspiring in my murder, weren’t you? I never murdered anybody in my life, you understand, I merely took a few liberties with my prick, and nevertheless the state was pleased to order my death—

  Your rehabilitation, said Macy.

  —My death, Hamlin shot back at him, giving him a tug on the right triceps by way of emphasis. They killed me and put somebody else in my body, only I came back to life, and you were going to have them kill me again. We don’t need to debate the semantics of the point. Stand up, Macy.

  Macy cautiously tested his strength and found that his legs now would support him. He rose, very slowly, feeling immensely fragile. A few tottering steps. Knees shaking. Skin clammy. Dryness in the throat.

  —Now, friend, we have to get something understood. You aren’t going to go to the Rehab Center today. You aren’t going to go there at all, ever again, because the Center is a dangerous place for me, and so in order to keep you away I’ll have to make it a dangerous place for you too. Let me give you just a taste of what will happen to you if you come within five miles of a Rehab Center. Just a taste.

  Again, the hand tightening around his heart. But no mere squeeze this time. A fierce, gripping full-strength clench. It knocked Macy down once more. Gradually the inner grasp was relaxed, but it left him nauseated and feeble, and a terrible thunder reverberated in his chest. Cheek to the tile, he kicked his legs in a frenzy of pain. This time his anguish was too visible to be ignored, and he was seized by passersby and hoisted to his feet.

  “You okay? Some kind of fit?”

  “Please—if I could just sit down somewhere—”

  “You need a doctor?”

  “It’s only a little chest spasm—I’ve had them before—”

  They took him inside. A bench in the waiting room. Advert globes floating in the air. Blinking their messages into his face. He was numb. Impossible even to think. A constant stream of people flowing by. Trains arriving, departing. Voices. Colors. After a while, his strength returned.

  —If you try to go back for reconditioning, Macy, that’s what I’ll do to you, and not just a little squeeze. If necessary I’ll shut off your heart altogether. I can do it. I see where the nerve connections are now.

  But then you’ll die too, Macy said.

  —That’s true. If it’s necessary for me to interrupt the life-processes of this body that we’re sharing, we’ll both
die. So what? I don’t expect you to commit suicide for the sake of getting rid of me. But I’m perfectly prepared to commit suicide for the sake of keeping you from getting rid of me, because I’ve got no choice. I’m a dead man anyway if you get inside a Rehab Center. So I offer you the ultimate threat. Keep away, or else. It wouldn’t be smart of you to call my bluff. For both our sakes, don’t.

  I’m supposed to show up for weekly post-therapy sessions, though.

  —Skip them.

  It’s part of the court decree. If I don’t show up, they’re likely to issue a warrant for me.

  —We’ll worry about that when the time comes. Meanwhile forget about therapy sessions.

  But we can’t share a body, Macy protested. It’s insanity. There’s no room for two of us.

  —Don’t worry about that now, either. We’ll work something out. For the time being we’re sharing, and you fucking well better accept the idea. Now get yourself aboard a city-bound train. Put some distance between me and that Center.

  SIX

  HOME again, midmorning. His head throbbing. Not a peep out of Hamlin all the way back. The apartment seemed to have undergone a strange transformation in the two hours of his absence: previously a neutral place, wholly lacking emotional connotations, and now an alien and sinister cell, cramped and repellent.

  The flat’s dark new tone astonished him. Its mysterious autumnal resonances. Its shadows where no shadows had been. Nothing had changed in it, really. Lissa hadn’t moved any furniture around or sprayed the walls a different color. And yet. And yet, how frightening it all looked now. How out of place he felt in it. That L-shaped bedroom, low ceiling, narrow bed jammed up against flimsy wall, old-fashioned light fixture dangling, bilious green paint, cheap smeary Picasso prints, slit of a window revealing splotchy May sunshine and two scraggly trees across the street—how ugly it looked, how coarse, how constricted, how squashed! Did people really live in places like this? Tiny bathroom, slick pink tiles. Not even an ultrasonic cleanser, just archaic sink and tub and crapper. A microscopic kitchen-dinette affair, everything jammed together, table, freezer, telephone screen, disposal unit, stove. At least a tiny buzz-cleanser for the dirty dishes. A sitting-room, cheap red plastic couch, some books, cassettes, a video unit.

  A prison for the soul. Our impoverished century: this is the best we can afford for human beings, after our long orgies of waste and destruction. For the last couple of weeks, this apartment had been his refuge, his harbor, his hermitage; if he thought about it at all, which he doubted, it had been in a friendly way. Why did it turn him off now? After a moment, he believed he knew. Hamlin’s sensibility now underlay his own. The sculptor’s sophisticated perceptions bleeding through to the Macy levels of their shared mind. Hamlin’s loathing for the apartment tinged Macy’s view of it. To Hamlin the proportions were wrong, the ambiance vile, the psychological texture of the place slimy and grimy, the inner environmental color a nasty one. Macy shivered. He visualized Hamlin as a kind of abscess in his brain, a pocket of pus, inaccessible, destructive.

  Lissa was still in bed. That bothered him. The Protestant ethic: sleeping late equals rejection of life.

  But she wasn’t asleep. Stirring lazily, sitting up, knuckles to eyes. A purring yawn. “Everything taken care of?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  He told her about the episode at the Greenwich terminal. Writhing on the blue and white terrazzo with fire in his chest. Hamlin playfully strumming the harp of his autonomic nervous system. Lissa listened, big-eyed, somber-faced, and said finally, “What are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “But that’s hideous. Having him inside you like a parasite. A crab hiding in your head. Like a case of brain cancer. Look, maybe if I call the Rehab Center—”

  A warning twinge from Hamlin, deep down.

  “No,” Macy said.

  “I could tell them what’s happened. Maybe this has happened before. Maybe they know some way to deal with him.”

  “The moment they tried anything,” he said, “Hamlin would stop my heartbeat. I know that.”

  “But if there’s some drug that might knock him out—I could slip it to you somehow—”

  “He’s listening right now, Lissa. Don’t you think he’ll be on guard constantly? He may not even need to sleep. We can’t take chances.”

  “But how can you go on with somebody else inside your head, trying to take you over?”

  Macy pondered that one. “What makes you think he’s trying to take me over?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He wants his body back. He’ll try to cut you down, one block of nerves at a time, until there’s nothing left of you at all. He’ll push you out. And then he’ll be Nat Hamlin again.”

  “He just said he wanted to share the body with me,” Macy muttered.

  “Will he stop there? Why should he?”

  “But Nat Hamlin’s a proscribed criminal. Legally he doesn’t even exist any more. If he tried to return to life—”

  “Oh, he’d go on using the Macy identity,” Lissa said. “Only he’d take up sculpting again, in another country, maybe. He’d look up his old friends. He’d be the old Hamlin, except his passport would say Macy, and—” She halted. “He’d look up his old friends,” she repeated. She seemed to be examining the idea from various angles. “Old friends such as me.”

  “Yes. You.” In a tone that he recognized as unpleasant, but which he found impossible to alter, Macy said, “He could even marry you. As he was originally planning to do.”

  “His wife is still alive, I’m sure.”

  “That marriage was legally dissolved at the time he was sentenced,” Macy said. “It’s automatic. They cut all ties. Officially, he wouldn’t be Hamlin even if he took over. He’d be Macy, and Macy is single. There you are, Lissa.” The edge of cruelty coming into his voice again. “You’d finally get to be his wife. What you’ve always wanted.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want it any more.”

  “You said you loved him.”

  “I once did love him. But I told you, that’s all dead now. The things he did. The crimes. The rapes.”

  “The first time we met,” said Macy heavily, “when you were still insisting on calling me Nat, you made a point of saying you were still in love with me. The old me. Him. You said it two or three times. Talking about how much you missed him. Refusing to believe that there was somebody new living behind his face.”

  “You misunderstand,” she said. “I felt so lonely. So fucking lost. And all of a sudden I was standing next to somebody I knew; somebody out of the past—I just wanted help, I had to talk to him—I mean, I crashed right into you in the street, was I supposed to walk away and not even say hello?”

  “You saw my Rehab badge and you ignored it.”

  “I didn’t see it at all.”

  “You must have blanked it out deliberately. You knew Nat Hamlin had been put away for Rehab.”

  “You’re shouting at me.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I’m tense as hell, Lissa. Look, so you saw somebody in the street and you thought he was Nat Hamlin, so you said hello, but did you have to tell him you were still in love with him, too?”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “You said it.”

  “What else could I do?” she asked. Her voice was shrill now. “Stand there and say, Hello, you look like Nat Hamlin who I used to love, and of course I don’t love him any more and in any case he’s been wiped out but since you look just like him I’ll fall in love with you instead, so let’s go home and ball a little? How could I say that? But I couldn’t let you just vanish without saying something to you. I was making a stab at the past, trying to catch it, trying to bring it back. The beautiful past, before the hellish part started. And you were my only link to that, Paul, and I was excited, and I said Nat, Nat, I talked about being in love—”

  “Exactly. You called me Nat, and said you were st
ill in love with—”

  “Why are you doing this to me, Paul?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Chewing on me. Shouting. All these questions.”

  “I’m trying to find out which one of us you’re really loyal to. Hamlin or me. Which side you’re going to take when the struggle for this body gets rough.”

  “You aren’t trying to find out any such thing. You just want to hurt me.”

  “Why should I want to—”

  “How would I know? Because you blame me for bringing him back to life, maybe. Because you hate me for having loved him once. Because he’s sitting inside you right now forcing you to hurt me. I don’t know. Christ, I don’t know at all. Only why do you need to find out where my loyalty is? Didn’t I tell you last night that I didn’t want him coming back? Didn’t I offer to call the Rehab Center just now?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “So how could I possibly be on his side? I want him to be wiped out. I want him gone forever. I want—oh, Christ—”

  She halted suddenly. Leaping from the bed as though stung, arms and legs flying stiffly out from her torso. Turning toward him. Her face contorted, the eyes bulging, the mouth a rigid hole, the muscles of her throat bunched and jutting. From her lips a bizarre clotted baritone, hoarse and unfocused, like the blunt blurtings of a deaf-mute, no words intelligible: “Mfss. Shlrrm. Skk-kk. Vshh. Vshh. Vshh.” A terrible gargling cry, all the more horrible because of the deep masculine tongue in which it was delivered.

  She lurched around the room, stumbling into things, clawing at the air. A plain case of demonic possession. What rides her?

  “Grkk. Lll. Llll. Pkd-dd.” Eyes wild, pleading. Bare breasts heaving wildly. A sheen of sweat on her skin.

  Macy rushed toward her, trying to embrace her, calm her, ease her back to the bed. She pivoted like a robot and her arm crashed across his chest, doubling him up in gasps. When he looked at her again her face was scarlet with strain and her mouth was open to the full reach of her jaws, beyond it perhaps. The wild gargling sounds still erupted from her, and her eyes registered total horror and despair.