Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  “Forgive me. It’s so dull for me here.”

  “Go on, go on, for Christ’s sake.” Pareti wobbled his hand wearily.

  “Well, the answer is ambiguous, but not unpromising,” Ball said, settling with enthusiasm into his recitation. “I told you, I believe, that the most typical thing about the disease is its atypicality. Let us consider your illustrious predecessors.

  “Case One died within a week of contracting the disease, apparently of a pneumonic complication…”

  Pareti looked sick. “Swell,” he said.

  “Ah! But Case Two,” Ball caroled, “Case Two was Ashton, after whom the Disease was named. He became voluble, almost echolalic. One day, before a considerable crowd, he levitated to a height of eighteen feet. He hung there without visible support, haranguing the crowd in a hermetic language of his own devising. Then he vanished, into thin air (but not too thin for him) and was never heard from again. Hence, Ashton’s Disease. Case Three…”

  “What happened to Ashton?” Pareti asked, a vapor of hysteria in his voice.

  Ball spread his hands, without an answer.

  Pareti looked away.

  “Case Three found that he could live underwater, though not in the air. He spent two happy years in the coral reefs off Marathon, Florida.”

  “What happened to him?” Pareti asked.

  “A pack of dolphins did him in. It was the first recorded instance of a dolphin attacking a man. We have often wondered what he said to them.”

  “And the others?”

  “Case Four is currently living in the Ausable Chasm community. He operates a mushroom farm. He’s become quite rich. We can’t detect any effect of the disease beyond loss of hair and dead skin (in that way, your cases are similar, but it may be just coincidence). He has a unique way with mushrooms, of course.”

  “That sounds good,” Pareti brightened.

  “Perhaps. But Case Five is unfortunate. A really amazing degeneration of the organs, accompanied by a simultaneous external growth of same. This left him with a definitely surrealistic look: heart hanging below his left armpit, intestines wrapped around his waist, that sort of thing. Then he began to develop a chitinous exo-skeleton, antennae, scales, feathers—his body couldn’t seem to decide what it was evolving into. It opted at last for earth-wormdom—an anaerobic species, quite unusual. He was last seen burrowing into sandy loam near Point Judith. Sonar followed him for several months, all the way to central Pennsylvania.”

  Pareti shuddered. “Did he die then?”

  Again, Ball spread his hands, no answer. “We don’t know. He may be in a burrow, quiescent, parthenogenetic, hatching the eggs of an inconceivable new species. Or he may have evolved into the ultimate skeletal form…unliving, indestructible rock.”

  Pareti clasped his hairless hands, and shivered like a child. “Jesus,” he murmured, “what a beautiful prospect. Something I can really look forward to.”

  “The form of your particular case might be pleasant,” Ball ventured.

  Pareti looked up at him with open malice. “Aren’t you the smooth bastard, though! Sit out here in the water and laugh your ass off while the goo nibbles on some guy you never met before. What the hell do you do for amusement, roast cockroaches and listen to them scream?”

  “Don’t blame me, Mr. Pareti,” the doctor said evenly. “You chose your line of work, not I. You were advised of the risks—”

  “They said hardly anybody caught the goo disease, it was all in the small type on the contract,” Pareti burst in.

  “—but you were advised of the risks,” Ball pressed on, “and you received hazard-bonus accordingly. You never complained during the three years that money was being poured into your account, you shouldn’t bellyache now. It’s rather unseemly. After all, you make approximately eight times my salary. That should buy you a lot of balm.”

  “Yeah, I made the bonuses,” Pareti snarled, “and now I’m really earning it! The Company—”

  “The Company,” Ball said, with great care, “is absolutely free of responsibility. You should indeed have read all that tiny type. But you’re correct: you are earning the bonuses now. In effect you were paid to expose yourself to a rare disease. You were gambling with the Company’s money that you wouldn’t contract Ashton’s. You gambled, and unfortunately, seem to have lost.”

  “Not that I’m getting any,” Pareti said archly, “but I’m not asking for your sympathy. I’m only asking for your professional advice, which you are paid—overpaid, in my estimation—to give. I want to know what I should do…and what I ought to expect.”

  Ball shrugged. “Expect the unexpected, of course. You’re only the sixth, you know. There’s been no clear-cut pattern established. The disease is as unstable as its progenitor…the goo. The only pattern—and I would hesitate even to suggest that it was a pattern—”

  “Stop waltzing with me, damn it! Spit it out!”

  Ball pursed his lips. He might have pressed Pareti as far as he cared to press him. “The pattern, then, would appear to be this: a radical change of relationship occurs between the victim and the external world. These can be animate transformations, like the growth of external organs and functional gills; or inanimate transformations, like the victim who levitated.”

  “What about the fourth case, the one who’s still alive and normal?”

  “He isn’t exactly normal,” the doctor said, frowning. “His relationship with his mushrooms is a kind of perverted love; reciprocated, I might add. Some researchers suspect that he has himself become a kind of intelligent mushroom.”

  Pareti bit his thumbnail. There was a wildness in his eyes. “Isn’t there any cure, anything?”

  Ball seemed to be looking at Pareti with thinly veiled disgust. “Whimpering won’t do you any good. Perhaps nothing will. I understand Case Five tried to hold off the effects as long as he could, with will power, or concentration…something ludicrous like that.”

  “Did it work?”

  “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 s
ince he had entered the sickbay.

  “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 under his breath, 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 Projects Superintendent, head man 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 shaken reactions of earlier. He was now determined to fight the Disease with the strength of his own will.

  “Is that it?” he asked the Projects Super.

  The man nodded, and extended his hand.

  Pareti hesitated a moment, then shook it.

  As Pareti was walking down the ramp to the lift, the Projects Super called after him. “Hey, Pareti?”

  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 Pareti returned, as he said goodbye to who he was 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 was 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—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. Pareti 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.

  Pareti 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 uncallused 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 served to heighten 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 parcel 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 Boulevard, 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 embroglio. 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 Temple 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 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 goddam 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, Pareti 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 amber 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…”

  Pareti 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.