Robert Silverberg - The Second Trip

—Ahaha! Still at it. Your old tricks.

Don’t bother me, Hamlin snapped. Making an effort, recovering his sexual equilibrium, his social poise. Giving her a sexosocial smile and a little genteel nod. Everything under control. “I hope I didn’t startle you, ma’am.” The voice unctuous.

“Not fatally.” Her eyes fluttering from his face to the Rehab badge and back to face. A little confused but not alarmed. She didn’t try to cover her breasts despite the potential provocativeness of the situation. The cheerful poise of the upper crust “Forgive me if I’m making a terrible mistake, but aren’t you—weren’t you—”

“Nat Hamlin, yes. Who used to live here. But my name is Paul Macy now.”

—Liar!

“I recognized you at once. How pleasant of you to visit us!” Obviously unaware of the impropriety of a reconstruct’s visiting his earlier self’s old haunts. Or not caring “Lynn Bryson, by the way. We’ve been here two years now. My husband is a helix surgeon. Shall I get you a drink, Mr. ah Macy? Or something to smoke?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Bryson. You bought the place from Hamlin’s ah widow?”

“From Mrs. Hamlin, yes. Such a fascinating woman! Naturally she didn’t care to stay here any longer, with such terrible memories on all sides. We struck up a wonderful friendship during the time when the house was changing hands.”

“I’ve heard many fine things about her,” Hamlin said. “Of course I have no recollection of her. You understand.”

“Of course.”

“Hamlin’s past is a closed book to me. But you understand I have a certain natural curiosity about the people and places of his life. As if he were, in a sense, a famous ancestor of mine, and I felt I should know more about him.”

“Of course.”

“Does Mrs. Hamlin still live in this area?”

“Oh, no, she’s in Westchester now. Bedford City, I believe.”

“Remarried?”

“Yes, of course.”

The knife turning in Hamlin’s gut.

“You happen to know her new husband’s name?” Very carefully, concealing all traces of tension.

“I could find it,” the woman said. “A Jewish name. Klein, Schmidt, Kate, something like that, a short word, Germanic. A person in the theater, a producer maybe, a very fine man.” Her smile grew broader. Her eyes appraised Hamlin’s body with complacent sensuality. As if she wouldn’t mind some pronging. Her vicarious way of attaining intimacy with the departed great artist. She should only know. Off with that bit of plastic about her waist, down on the grass, the white fleshy thighs parting. Ooom. “Won’t you come with me?” she said airily. “I have it in the house. And you’ll want to see the house, anyway. The studio. Do you know, we’ve kept Mr. Hamlin’s studio exactly as it was when he—before he—when his troubles started—”

“You have?” A wild interior leap. Excited. “Everything still intact?”

“Mrs. Hamlin didn’t want any of his things, so they came to us with the house. And we thought, well, the way they have Rembrandt’s house on display in Amsterdam, or the house of Rubens in what is it Antwerp, so we would keep Nathaniel Hamlin’s studio intact here, not for public display of course, but simply as a kind of shrine, a memorial, and in case some scholar wished to see it, some great admirer of Hamlin, well, we would make it accessible. And then of course future generations. Won’t you come with me?” Smiling, turning, striding across the barbered lawn. Meaty buttocks waggle waggle waggle. Hamlin, sweating, adrenalized, following. The familiar old stone house. The squat spacious annex. A cheery wave of her hand. “There’s an entrance to the studio on the far side of—” Hamlin was already on his way around there. “Oh, I see you know that.” But how is it that he knows it? No indication that she suspects anything. “I’ll look for Mrs. Hamlin’s new name, and her address too, I suppose, and I’ll meet you in a couple of minutes in the—”

Studio. Exactly as he had left it. To the left of the door, the big rectangular window. Floods of light. Facing the window, the posing dais with the microphones and scanners and sensors still in place and even his last chalk-marks still on the floor. On the right-hand wall his command console, levers and knobs and studs and dials that would surely have perplexed Rembrandt or Rubens or for that matter Leonardo da Vinci. The headphones. The ionization controller. The unjacked connectors. The data-screen. The light-pen. The sonic generator. Such a tangle of apparatus. In back, the other little room, the annex of the annex, more things visible, coils of wire, metal struts, mounds of modeling clay, the big electropantograph, the photomultiplier, the image intensifier, and other things which Hamlin did not seem to recognize. Hamlin wandered numbly among it all. Macy picked up his somber thoughts. The artist was frightened, even appalled, by the complexity of the studio. Trying to adjust to the idea that he had once used all this stuff by second nature. What was this thing for? And this? And this? Shit, how does it all work? I can’t remember a thing.

—Rehab wrecked you, Nat, more than you realize.

Shut your hole. I could pick all this up again in three hours. A note of false bravado, though. Powerful currents of uncertainty coming from him. Hamlin broke off a chunk of modeling clay and began to knead it. Stiff, after all this time. The clay. And he was too. The fingers unresponsive. Let’s sculpt Mrs. Bryson. Here, we roll a long tube of clay like so, and we. No. Instantly the proportions were awry. Hamlin nibbled his lip. Correcting his intuitive beginning. She’s tall, yes, and wide through the hips, and we’ll need some clay here for the boobs.

—Give up, Nat, you don’t have it any more.

Piss off, Macy. What do you know?

Yet Hamlin was unable to conceal the extent of his uneasiness from his passenger. He was fumbling with the clay, mangling it, blundering at this elementary task of modeling, straining to get the image in his mind transferred to the lump in his hands. In that tense moment Macy made new connections and for the first time gained some control over Hamlin’s central nervous system. Plink. Strumming the neurons. Hamlin’s elbow jerked. The tube of clay bent double at the sudden accidental convulsion. Plink. Another twitch. Hamlin shouting silently at him now, bellowing in rage. Macy was enjoying this. He continued to tug at Hamlin’s synapses while the artist trembled and shivered in mounting wrath and frustration. The half-shaped model of Mrs. Bryson a ruin. Hamlin glancing around nervously at his own equipment, so alien to him, so terrifying. Telling himself that in four, four and a half years it was possible for a person to forget all sorts of superficial mechanical things, but that you never lost the real talent, the basic underlying inborn gift, the set of perceptions and insights that is the real material to which the artist applies his learned craftsmanship.

—Go on, Nat, keep saying it, you may even start to believe it soon.

Let me alone. Let me alone. I could learn all this machinery again in half a day!

—Sure you could, sweetheart. Who ever doubted it?

Giving Hamlin another twong in the medulla, a blork in the autonomic, a whonk in the limbic. Yes! Really learning my way around in here, now! Just as he did in me. The shoe on the other cortex, though. I’ll get him. I’ll get him good. Hamlin was doing a manic dance, twitching around the room as Macy toyed with him. He couldn’t seem to get himself together enough to deliver a retaliatory shot; it was as if the vibrations emanated by all the psychosculpting apparatus kept him dizzy and off balance. Keep hammering away, Macy told himself. This may be your chance to get back on top. Twong and twong and twong! Arms whipping about wildly. Knees jerking. I think I could make him crap in his undies now. A nice psychological point to score, but why shit things up for myself in case I take over?