Robert Silverberg - The Second Trip

“They’d know who I really was.”

“Would they? The Rehab process is supposed to be foolproof. Suppose this is all a clever hoax? Suppose you are Paul Macy, and somebody’s coached you on how to sound like Nat Hamlin, and you’re just trying to sweat some quick cash out of me?”

“Test me. Ask me anything about Hamlin’s life.” Macy sensed Hamlin’s distress now. Adrenalin flooding. Pores opening: Genitals contracting.

“I don’t play guessing games,” said Gargan. Idly he punched a button; the room tilted the other way. Hamlin’s intestines lolled. The dealer said, “You’ve got no leverage, friend. No reputable dealer would trust a Rehab reconstruct who says he’s still got the skills of his old self. So the take-it-or-leave-it is on my side. I’ll sign you, Paul, because I’m sentimental and I love you, loved you in the old days, anyway, and I’ll even give you some money to start you up again. But I won’t be blackjacked. Twenty-five percent and nothing lower.”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty-five.” A gargantuan yawn. “You’re starting to bore me, Paul.”

“Don’t get snotty. Remember who you’re talking to, what kind of talent you’ve got sitting next to you here. A year from now you’ll regret having muscled me. Twenty percent, Gargantua.”

“Twenty-five.”

Now Hamlin was plainly upset. The swagger was gone; his ductless glands were working overtime. Macy, who had not ceased to probe avenues of neural connections, thought he had found a good one and that this might be a suitable moment for making a try at retaking the body. He pressed hard. Lunged. Claws outstretched, attacking the cerebral switchboard. But no go. Hamlin brushed him away as though he were a mosquito and said aloud, “Let’s split the difference. Twenty-two and a half and I’m yours.”

An hour’s smooth drive in a rented car brought Hamlin to his old Connecticut estate. The car did its best to cope with Hamlin’s surprising ineptness as a driver. He handled the steering-stick crudely, overpushing it, frequently trying to override the car’s gyroscopic mind, constantly messing up the delicate homeostasis that kept the vehicle in its proper lane. Macy, from his vantage-point within, monitored Hamlin’s performance with mixed feelings. Obviously Hamlin, four or five years away from driving, had lost whatever skill at it he once had had, and that was worrying him, for it had occurred to him that in his absence he might have lost other skills also. Therefore he was working himself into a singleminded frenzy of concentration, gripping the stick in sweaty palm and trying to psych himself into complete mastery over the car. Macy knew he could play on Hamlin’s fears, intensifying his distress. You think you’ve come back to life, Nat, but nothing came back except your ego and your dirty mouth. You’ve lost your manual skills. You couldn’t cut paper dolls now, let alone turn out museum masterpieces. And so on. Undermining Hamlin’s self-confidence, attacking his main justification for having expelled his reconstruct. Weakening his grip on the body’s central nervous system, setting him up for a push. You think you’re still a great artist? Jesus, you don’t even know how to drivel The Rehab Center smashed you to bits, Nat, and you won’t ever be whole again. And then, getting Hamlin fuddled and panicky, he could make a try for a takeover.

The process was already well under way. The fumes of Hamlin’s tensions drifted through Macy’s interior holdfast. The oily smell of fear and doubt. Go on, give him a shove, he’s vulnerable now. But the scheme was futile, Macy knew. He hadn’t yet found the handles with which he could flip Hamlin out of his dominant position. Even if he had, he wouldn’t dare attempt a takeover at 120 miles an hour; no matter how good this car’s homeostasis was supposed to be, it wasn’t programmed for self-drive, and while he and Hamlin struggled for control, the auto might go over the edge of the embankment, or up a wall, or into the oncoming flow, in some wild uncorrected orgy of positive feedback.

So Macy sat passive while Hamlin shakily negotiated the highway and more capably guided the car up the winding leafy country lanes to the place where he once had lived. Parking the car perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Leaving the road, walking cautiously through the woods. Heartbreaking summeriness here. The foliage so green and new. Bright yellow and white flowers. Chipmunks and squirrels. Clumps of frondy ferns. They had held back the urban tide here, the surging sea of concrete and pollution, the onslaught of extinctions. An outpost of natural life, maintained for the very rich.

And there, beyond that blinding white stand of stunning birches, the house. Lofty walls of high-piled gray-brown boulders set in ancient gray mortar. Leaded-glass windows agleam in the noonlight. Hamlin’s heart leaping and bouncing. Old memories in an agitated dance. Look, look there. The pond, the creek, the pool. Exactly as Lissa had described it, exactly as Macy had seen it through the lens of Hamlin’s reminiscing mind. And the studio annex. Where so many miracles were worked.

—Why did you come here?

A pilgrimage. A sentimental journey.

—It’s somebody else’s house now.

Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Macy?

—I have your welfare at heart. You can’t just prowl around here. It may be patrolled by dogs. Scanners everywhere. You know what’ll happen to you if you’re caught?

Hamlin didn’t reply. He edged toward the studio, and Macy picked up an inchoate scheme for forcing a window and getting inside. Hamlin seemed to expect to find his workship intact, all the elaborate psychosculpting apparatus still sitting where he had left it Folly. The studio was probably some blithery suburbanite matron’s greenhouse now. Hamlin continued to slink through the copse bordering the creek. Let him try, let him just try. The alarm will go off and the place will be full of cops in ten minutes. A frantic chase through the woods. Snubnosed shiny cyberhounds snuffling on silent treads over last year’s fallen leaves, homing in on the fleeing man’s telltale thermals. The fugitive encircled, entrapped, seized. Identified as Paul Macy, Rehab reconstruct, but the police, checking with Gomez & Co., would swiftly discover that Macy had been plagued by a resurgence of his prior identity. And then. Swift action. Wham! Needles in his arm. Hamlin reamed out a second time.

What about his threat to destroy their shared body in case of trouble? No, Macy thought, he can’t do it, not while he’s up there running the conscious brain. A man can’t simply shut off his own heartbeat by willing it. He could when he was down here where I am, plugged into all the neural connections, but he can’t do it now. So Hamlin will die a second time, and the body will survive. For me to have. Go on, Nat, creep and creep and creep, bust into your studio, trip the alarm, summon the hounds, start me on the road back to independent life. Yes. I’ll be so very grateful.

What’s this rising from the pool, though? Blithery suburban matron herself! Venus on the half shell. Woman in her middle forties, tall, not exactly plump but well endowed, dark hair, long arching waist, thickish thighs, amiable vacuous face. Her snatch chastely shielded by a skimpy cache-sexe; breasts bare, full, probably not as high as they used to be. Staring in surprise at Hamlin advancing toward her.

Quick adrenal response from Hamlin, too. Pupils dilated, heartbeat accelerated, prick stiffening. No wonder he’s excited. The quintessential rape situation. Daytime, suburbs, woman alone, scantily clad, man emerges out of woods. Fling her down, hand over mouth, spread the thighs, give her the ram. Ooom. Load the box and prance away. Another notch carved in your cock.