The Second Trip Read online

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. Voice like corroded copper.

  “You sounded so weird just then—and your face was so twisted up—”

  “I said I’d be all right.” Normal tone returning.

  No one must know. No one.

  The platform monitor, Smith, Jones, some name like that, coming up to him. “We got a nearly perfect take, Macy. If you’d like to rest a while, and then you can do the finale for us—no problem to splice it—”

  “Well do it now,” said Macy.

  No one must know.

  The camera crew returning to places. Confusion defused. Macy, alone under the lights, swaying a little, searched his mind for Hamlin, could not find him, decided that he really had succeeded once again in thwarting a takeover. Nevertheless, he would keep on guard. If it happened again under the cameras he’d be in trouble. No room in this organization for newsmen who throw fits at unpredictable moments.

  “Roll it,” said Jones or Smith.

  “This morning in London,” Macy said smoothly, “we spoke with the celebrated British brain expert Varnum Skillings, who gave us this assessment of the situation.”

  “Cut,” said Smith or Jones.

  Macy smiled. Almost home free, now. The platform monitor gave the signal. Macy delivered the final line. Done. Sighs of relief. People trooping out. Low whispers, everyone no doubt talking about his creepy paroxysm.

  Let them talk. I beat him down again, didn’t I? He loses every time.

  For once Macy thought it might be almost tolerable to have Hamlin alive within him. Hamlin was the perpetual challenge that defined him. Every man needs a nemesis. He arises, I smite him. He arises again, I smite again. And so we go on together through the busy, happy days. He gives me texture and density. With him, I am a man with a unique affliction; I carry tragic angst. Without him I would be a shadow. And so we are comfortable with one another. Until the time when the pattern of testing, of thrust and parry, is broken. Until he conquers me. Or I him. When it comes, it will come with one quick sudden triumphant thrust, and one of us will succumb. He? I? We’ll see. Home, now. A long wearying day.

  NINE

  LISSA wasn’t there. He looked through the apartment with great care, methodically passing several times from one room to the other and quickly doubling back, as though she might be slipping invisibly through the door just ahead of him; but no, she wasn’t anywhere around. He checked the bathroom and the closets. Her things were still hanging helter-skelter among his. Not gone permanently, then. A note from her? No, nothing. Might have gone out to take a walk. Or to buy some groceries for dinner. At this hour, though? Knowing he always came home punctually? Briefly alarmed, he searched the place once again, looking now for traces of violence. No. A mystery, then.

  She had her own key, and he had reprogrammed the thumbplate safety latch to accept her fingerprint; she could come and go as she pleased. But she should have been on hand when he arrived. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t. What now? Notify the police? There was this girl, officer, she’s been living with me since Tuesday night, she wasn’t home when I returned from work, I wonder if you—No. Hardly. Ask the neighbors if they had seen her? No. Go out and look for her in the local shops? No. Search for her at her own apartment? Maybe. Do nothing, stay here, wait for her to show up? Maybe. For the time being, yes. Give her an hour, two hours. She has her moods. Maybe she went to a show. Feeling tense, just went off by herself. Odd that there’s no note, anyway.

  He showered, put on his worn dressing gown, poured himself a little cream sherry to blunt the edge of his appetite. Getting later all the time. Half past six, no Lissa. Worry mounting in him. They had not, in the course of constructing him at the Rehab Center, prepared him to handle this sort of situation. He reviewed the possible options. Police. Local shops. Her apartment. Neighbors. Sit and wait. No tactic seemed adequate.

  Out of the silence, the voice of the serpent:

  —Don’t worry about her.

  Right now, in his jangled state, even the presence of Hamlin was a comfort. His other self had spoken in a casual, easy way; no challenge, at the moment, merely conversation. Macy was grateful for the muted approach. He wondered how to be properly hospitable. Offer Hamlin some sherry? A gold? Sit down, Nat, make yourself at home. An impulse of lunatic sociability.

  I can’t help worrying, Macy said.

  —She can look after herself.

  Can she, though?

  —I know her better than you.

  You haven’t had anything to do with her for almost five years. She’s unstable, Hamlin. I don’t like the idea of her wandering off by herself this way.

  —She probably felt she needed some fresh air. Bad telepathic vibrations bouncing off the walls in here, isn’t that what she told you? Getting her down. So she went out.

  Without leaving a note?

  —Lissa doesn’t leave notes much. Lissa’s not awfully big on responsibility. Relax, Macy.

  That’s easy enough to say.

  —You know, maybe she walked out for good. Sick of us both, maybe. All the tension and brawling.

  Her things are still here, though, Macy pointed out Grasping at straws. Lissa! Lissa!

  —That wouldn’t matter to her. Abandoned possessions fall from her like dandruff. Hey, cheer up, will you? The worst that can happen is that you won’t ever see her again. Which maybe would be not such a terrible thing.

  You’d like it a lot, wouldn’t you?

  —What’s it to me?

  You don’t want me to have anything to do with her. You’re jealous because I’m alive and you’re not. Because I have her and you don’t.

  Robust interior chuckles bubbling in the brain. Derisive guffaws echoing through the involuted corridors.

  —You’re such a prick, Macy.

  Can you deny what I said?

  —What you said had more nonsense per square inch than is allowed under present brain-pollution laws.

  For example?

  —Where you say you “have” Lissa. Nobody “has” Lissa, ever. Lissa floats. Lissa drifts in a private orbit. Lissa lives inside a sealed airtight glass cage. She doesn’t involve herself with other people. She spends time with them, yes, she talks with them, she fucks them sometimes, but she doesn’t surrender anything that’s real to her.

  She involved herself with you.

  —That was different. She loved me. The great exception in her life. But she doesn’t love you or anybody else, herself included. You’re fooling yourself if you think you mean anything to her.

  How can you claim to know so much about her when you haven’t seen her in five years?

  —I’ve had all this week to watch her too, haven’t I? That girl is very sick. This ESP thing is pulling her apart. She thinks she has to be alone in order to keep the voices out of her head. She can’t give herself to anybody for long; she has to retreat, pull back, sink into herself. Otherwise she hurts too much. So you mustn’t be surprised that she’s walked out. It was inevitable. Believe me, Macy, I’m telling the truth.

  A strange note of sincerity in Hamlin’s tone. As if he’s trying to protect me from a troublesome entanglement, Macy thought. As if he’s got my welfare at heart. Curious.

  Seven o’clock, now. No Lissa. Another sherry. Feet up on the hassock. Feeling almost relaxed, despite everything. Hardly even hungry. A slight headache. Where is she? She can look after herself. She can look after herself.

  —Have you done any further thinking about the proposal I made?

  What proposal?

  —On Tuesday, in the museum. That you go away and let me have my body back.

  You know the answer to that one.

  —You’re being unreasonable, Macy. I mean, look at it objectively. You may think you exist, but you actually don’t. You’re a construct. You don’t have any more genuine reality as a person, as a human being, than that wall over there.

  So you keep telling me. If I don’t exist, though, why do I worry about Lissa? Why do I
enjoy sipping this sherry? Why do I work so hard at the network?

  —Because you’ve been programmed to. Crap, Macy, can’t you see that you’re only a clever machine that’s been slipped into a vacant human body? Which turned out to be not quite vacant, which still had some bits of its former owner hiding in it. If you were capable of facing your own situation decently and honestly, you’d recognize that—

  Right, Macy cut in. I’d recognize that I’m a nothing and you’re a genius, and I’d get the hell out of your head.

  —Yes.

  Sorry, Hamlin. You’re wasting our time asking me to. Why should I commit suicide just to give you a second chance to mess up your life?

  —Suicide! Suicide! You’ve got to be alive before you can commit suicide!

  I’m alive.

  —Only in the most narrow technical sense.

  Fuck you, Hamlin.

  —Let’s try to keep the conversation on a friendly basis, okay?

  How can I be friendly when you invite me to kill myself? Where’s the advantage for me in accepting your deal? What do you have to offer that makes it worth my while to give you this body back?

  —Nothing. I can only appeal to your sense of equity. I’m more talented than you. I’m more valuable to society. I deserve to live more than you do.

  I’m not so sure of that. Society’s verdict was that you had no value at all, in fact that you were dangerous and had to be destroyed. Not even rehabilitated, in the old pre-Rehab sense of the word. Destroyed.

  —A miscarriage of justice. I could have been salvaged. I went insane, I don’t deny it, I did a lot of harm to a bunch of innocent women. But that’s all over. If I came back now, I’d be beyond all that crap. I’d keep to myself and practice my art.

  Sure you would. Sure. Look, Hamlin, if you want this body back, take it away from me—if you can. But I’m not giving it to you just for the asking. I don’t think as little of myself as you do. Forget it.

  —I wish I could make you see my point of view.

  Half past seven. Still no Lissa. Macy switched from sherry to bourbon. Also lit the first gold of the evening. A deep drag; instant response, lightheadedness, a loss of contact with his feet. Just a touch of pot-paranoia, too: suppose Hamlin made a grab for his brain while he was fuddled with liquor and fumes? Could he fight back properly? His skullmate had been quiet for ten or fifteen minutes now. Gathering strength for an assault, maybe. Keep your guard up.

  But no assault came. The intoxicants that lulled Macy seemed to lull Hamlin as well.

  Eight o’clock.

  Hamlin? You still there?

  —You rang, milord?

  Talk to me.

  —Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and—

  No, be serious. Tell me something. What’s it like for you, inside there?

  —Crowded and nasty.

  How do you visualize yourself?

  —As an octopus. A very small octopus, Macy, maybe a millionth of an inch in diameter, sitting smack in the middle of the left side of your head. With long skinny tentacles reaching out to various parts of your brain.

  Can you see the outside world?

  —When I want to. It uses some energy, but it isn’t really hard. I hook into your optic input, is all, and then I see whatever you’re seeing.

  What about hearing?

  —A different kind of hookup. I keep that one patched in nearly all the time.

  Sense of touch? Smell? Taste?

  —The same. It’s no great trick to cut into your sensory receptors and find out what’s going on outside.

  What about reading my thoughts?

  —Easy. A tentacle into the cerebral cortex. I monitor you constantly there, Macy. You think it, I pick it up instantly. And I can sort out your consciously directed mental impulses from the mush of mental noise that you put out steadily, too.

  How did you learn these things?

  —Trial and error. I woke up, see, not knowing where I was, what had happened to me. Lissa gave me a telepathic nudge, not even realizing she was doing it, and there I was. Locked in a dark room, a coffin, for all I knew. So I started groping around in your head. Accidentally touched something and made a connection. Hey, I can see! Touched something else. I can hear! What’s this? Somebody else is wearing my body! But if I make contact here, I can pick up his thoughts. And so on. It took a few days.

  And you keep learning things all the time, eh, Hamlin?

  —Frankly, I haven’t been making much progress lately. I’m finding it hard to override your conscious control, your motor centers, your speech center. To make you walk where I want you to walk, to make you say what I want you to say. I can do a little of that, but it costs me a terrific load of energy, and sooner or later you pull me loose. Maybe there’s a secret to overriding you that I haven’t found yet.

  You manage to mess with my heartbeat pretty easily, though.

  —Oh, yes. I’ve got decent control over most of your autonomic system. I could turn your heart off in five seconds. But what’s the use? You die, I’d die too. I could play with your digestive juices and give you an ulcer by morning. Only this is my body as much as yours: I don’t gain anything by damaging it.

  Nevertheless you can cause me plenty of pain.

  —Indeed I can. I could harass you most miserably, Macy. How would you like the sensation of a toothache, twenty-five hours a day? Not the toothache itself, nothing a dentist could fix, just the sensation of it. How would you like a premature ejaculation, every time? How would you like a feedback loop in your auditory system so that you heard everything twice with a half-second delay? I could make your life hell. But I’m not really a sadist. I don’t have any hard feelings toward you. I simply want my body back I still hope we can work things out in an amiable way, without the need for me to apply real pressure.

  Let’s not start that routine again. Macy reached for the bourbon. I want to know more about you. What it’s like for you in there. Can you actually see the interior of my brain?

  —See it? The neurons, the synapses, the brain cells? Not really. Only in a metaphorical sense. A visionary sense. I can set up one-to-one percept equivalents, such as my perception of myself as a miniature octopus, do you follow? But I don’t actually see. It’s hard to explain. I’m aware of things, structures, forms, but I simply can’t communicate that awareness to someone who hasn’t ever been on the inside himself. You have to remember that I don’t have an organic existence. I’m not a lump of something solid under your headbone, a kind of tumor. I’m just a web of electrochemical impulses, Macy, and I perceive things differently.

  But aren’t we all just webs of electrochemical impulses? What am I if not that?

  —True. Except that you’re linked with this brain at so many points that you don’t have any sense of yourself as something distinct from the bodily organ through which you perceive things. I do. I’m dissociated, disembodied. I sense my own existence as something quite separate from the existence of this brain, here, through which I get various sensory inputs when I ask for them, and through which I can force an output by working at it. It’s weird, Macy, and it’s lousy, and I don’t like it at all. But I can’t achieve a real hookup, because you’re in the way in so many places, entrenched too deeply for me to dislodge you.

  What are we going to do, then?

  —Continue annoying each other, I suppose.

  Quarter to nine. Really ought to check up on Lissa somehow, go down to her apartment, ask the cops to investigate. Not very ambitious right now, though. Maybe she’ll come in soon. A long long walk on a spring night, home after dark.

  —You’re in love with her, aren’t you, Macy?

  I don’t think so. A certain physical attraction, I don’t deny that. And a kind of solidarity of the crippled—she’s got troubles, I’ve got troubles, we really ought to stick together, that kind of feeling. But not love. I don’t know her that well. I don’t even know my
self that well. I have no illusions about that. I’m inexperienced, I’m emotionally immature, I’m brand new in the world.

  —And you’re in love with her.

  Define your terms.

  —Don’t hand me that sophomoric manure. You know what I mean. Let me tell you a few things about your Lissa, though, that somebody who is as you rightly say emotionally immature might not have noticed.

  Go ahead.

  —She’s completely selfish. She exists only for the benefit of Lissa Moore. A bitch, a witch, a cunt that walks, a life-force eater. She’ll try to suck the vitality out of you. She tried it with me, hoping she could drain some of my talent out of me and into her. I was fighting her all the way. I held her off pretty well. Although I think that ESP of hers infected me somehow and caused my breakdown. I didn’t realize that at the time it was happening, Macy, but it occurred to me later, that she was fastening onto me, messing up my mind, robbing me of strength, pushing me over some sort of brink. And after a year or so I fell in. She won’t need as long with you. She’ll bleed you dry in a month.

  You make her sound like a monster. She strikes me as being an awfully pathetic monster, Hamlin.

  —That’s because you’ve come to know her only when she’s in trouble. This ESP of hers, do you think it was an accident? Something that just sprouted in her, like the measles? It’s that hunger of hers. To use people, to devour people, to drain people, to engulf people. Which finally got out of hand, which ran away with her. Now she drains automatically, she pulls in impulses from all sides, more than her mind can stand, and it’s killing her. It’s burning her out. But she asked for it.

  How harsh you are.

  —Just realistic. I never knew a woman who wasn’t some kind of vampire, and Lissa’s the most dangerous one I knew. A cunt is a cunt. A little bundle of ambitions. I fell for it, for a while. And it ruined me, Macy, it used me up.

  I think your whole outlook on women is distorted.

  —Maybe yes, maybe no. But at least I came by it honestly. Through living. Through experiencing. Through drawing my own conclusions. I didn’t pick up my ideas vicariously. I didn’t have them pumped into me at a Rehab Center.