Robert Silverberg: Second Start

“I’ll go as high as a million.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m a Rehab. That means I’ve been through the Center, analyzed, monkeyed-with, headshrunk, rearranged. There isn’t a criminal molecule left in me. I can’t do it even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.”

He smiled pityingly. “Don’t give me that crap, Nat. If you wanted to bad enough, you could break your conditioning. It’s been done before.”

“Maybe it has. But I don’t want to. Not even for a billion a year.”

“Nat—”

“The name is Macy. And I’m not interested.” I looked at my watch. It was getting late. I didn’t want to talk to Helgerson any more. Ellen was expecting me. I reached out and yanked the shutoff lever, and the privacy field died away with a faint whuffling sound. Helgerson was glaring at me and I glared back. “The answer is no. Finally and absolutely. And don’t bother me any more, Helgerson. I’ll run you in for violating the Rehab Code if you do.”

I got up and strode toward the door. Helgerson yelled something after me, but I was too angry to listen.

It was quarter of seven when I got to Ellen’s, which meant I was fifteen minutes late, and I hadn’t had time for that shower and shave, either. But Ellen didn’t make any acid remarks. That was how she differed from most of the women I knew; she could forgive and forget, and without making a fuss about it.

She was wearing a sprayed-on strylon dress that covered her body with a layer of plastic two molecules thick—enough to keep her within the bounds of maidenly decency, but also revealing enough to make her quite an eyeful. I held her against me for a minute or two, as if her nearness could drain away the inner tension Helgerson had provoked in me. It didn’t, but it was pleasant anyway.

Then she broke away, with the excuse that dinner would be spoiled. She had made roast seafowl with a garnishment of starflower sprouts, and cool white wine from Mellibor to wash it all down. We ate quietly; I was troubled over the Helgerson business. If a bunch of my old pals set up the trade on Palmyra, it was going to make life very hard for me here. Bitterly I asked myself why they had had to come here; I had had eight months of peace, but now it was to be shattered.

We dumped the dishes into the autowash. Ellen nuzzled against me playfully and said, “You’re quiet tonight, Paul. Worried. What’s bothering you?”

I tried to wear a cheerful grin. “Nothing much.”

I shrugged. “Plant business,” I lied. Telling even a small lie like that gave me a twinge of remorse, thanks to the built-in conscience the Rehab Center had given me. My conditioning didn’t prevent me from telling lies, but it made sure that I felt the effects of even a small one. “We had some trouble come up today. Nothing serious.”

“Shake it off, then! Let’s go for a drive, yes?”

We rode to the roof, where I had parked my aircar, and for the next two hours we soared through the Palmyran night. I drove out over the ocean, glittering with the reflection of a million stars and a quartet of bright moons, and then swooped down over the coastal plains, still mostly untouched by man’s hand. We said little, satisfied just to have each other near. When I was with Ellen I was glad I had been Rehabbed; Nat Hamlin had never trusted another human being, and so Nat Hamlin had never been in love. I had not only a different name but a different set of emotions, and that made all the difference in the universe.

It was nearly eleven when I brought the aircar lightly to rest on the roof of Ellen’s building. Our goodnights took half an hour, but they weren’t the sort of goodnights Nat Hamlin would have appreciated, because Paul Macy didn’t play the game as close as his predecessor in our body did. Ellen was passionate within bounds; she wanted to be my wife, not my mistress, and she knew the best way of achieving that goal. Which was all right with me. I could be patient a while longer.

I left her at half past eleven and drove home in a pleasantly euphoric state, having nearly forgotten about the ominous popping-up of Dan Helgerson. But when I entered my place, a little after midnight, I saw the red light on my autosec lit up.

I nudged the acknowledger to let the machine know I was home, and it said, “Mr. Helgerson called while you were out, sir. He left his number. Shall I call him back?”

“No. I’m tired and I don’t want to speak to him.”

“He said it was urgent, sir,” the autosec protested gently. “He said, quote, it would be too bad for you if you didn’t call him.”

There was a sour taste in my mouth and a knot of tension formed in my chest. I sighed. “All right. Call him back.”

Helgerson’s fleshy face formed in the depths of the screen. He wore an ugly smile. “Glad you decided to call back, Nat. You ran out on me so fast before that I didn’t have time to tell you all I wanted to tell you.”

“Well, spill it out now. Quick. It’s late and I don’t want to waste any more time on you than I have to.”

“I’ll come right to the point,” Helgerson said. “We want you to join our syndicate. You’re the key man; the whole thing revolves around your coming in. And if—”

“I told you I’m playing it straight. I’m not Nat Hamlin any more.”

“And if you turn down the offer,” Helgerson went on, ignoring the interruption, “we’re going to have to take steps to make you join us.”

I was quiet for a moment. “What sort of steps?”

“You have a girlfriend, Hamlin. I hear you’re pretty high on her. Plan to marry her, maybe. I’ve checked up a lot about you. How would your girlfriend react if she found out you were a Rehab?”

“She—I—” I closed my mouth and felt black anger ripple up through me. And with it came the sick feeling my conditioning supplied, to keep me from doing anything violent. I wanted to do something violent right then. I said instead, “People don’t discriminate against Rehabs. The Code says they’re to be treated as completely new individuals. Paul Macy didn’t commit Nat Hamlin’s crimes.”

“That’s what the Code says, yeah. But nobody really trusts a Rehab, deep down. There’s always the lingering suspicion that he might backslide.”

“Ellen would trust me even if she knew.”

“Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t. How about the people you work with? They don’t know, either—only the top bosses. And your friends. What’s going to happen if they suddenly find out you’ve been holding out on them, that you’re really a Rehab?”

I knew what would happen, and I felt bitter-tasting fear. Legally a Rehab is an innocent man and should be subject to no prejudice—but in practice there’s a certain coldness between most people and Rehabs, a lack of trust that goes deeper than the legal codes. My nice neat life on Palmyra would be smashed if Helgerson spread the word about.

But I couldn’t go in with him on the deal.

I said, “You wouldn’t pull a thing like that.”

“Not if you wised up and let me go back into business with you, Nat. You can overcome your conditioning if you fight it hard enough. Think it over, Nat. I’ll phone you tomorrow night. If the answer’s still no, the whole planet will know about you the next morning.”

The screen went blank.

I paced up and down my room for three hours, cursing Helgerson out and getting my blood pressure up. I realized I was boxed in.

Sure, I could break my conditioning and go back to Helgerson. It probably would mean a total nervous breakdown inside of a month and a permanent case of the shakes, but I could do it. I didn’t want to do it, though. They had fixed me so I liked being honest. Besides, a backsliding Rehab doesn’t get a third chance. If I got caught, it would mean total personality demolition—the death sentence for Macy-Hamlin. They would wipe out my mind and build a wholly new identity into my body, one that would have to be taught how to read and write and tie his shoelaces all over again.