Robert Sheckley - Immortality, Inc

“Berserker!” a woman screamed, and someone else took up the cry. Blaine caught sight of a blue uniform shoving through the crowd toward him.

A flat-hat! Blaine ducked into the crowd. He turned a corner quickly, then another, slowed to a walk and looked back. The policeman was not in sight. Blaine started walking again to his hotel.

It had been Melhill's body; but Ray no longer occupied it. There had been no last-minute reprieve for him, no final chance. His body had been taken from him and sold to the old man whose querulous mind wore the jaunty body like a suit of ill-fitting, too-youthful clothes.

Now he knew his friend was really dead. Blaine drank silently to him in a neighborhood bar before returning to his hotel.

The clerk stopped him as he passed the desk. “Blaine? Got a message for you. Just a minute.” He went into the office.

Blaine waited, wondering who it could be from. Marie? But he hadn't called Marie yet, and wasn't planning to until he found work.

The clerk came back and handed him a slip of paper. The message read: “There is a Communication awaiting Thomas Blaine at the Spiritual Switchboard, 23rd Street Branch. Hours, nine to five.”

“I wonder how anybody knew where I was?” Blaine asked.

“Spirits got their ways,” the clerk told him. “Man I know, his dead mother-in-law tracked him down through three aliases, a Transplant and a complete skin job. He was hiding from her in Abyssinia.”

“I don't have any dead mother-in-law,” Blaine said.

“No? Who you figure's trying to reach you?” the clerk asked.

“I'll find out tomorrow and let you know,” Blaine said. But his sarcasm was wasted. The clerk had already turned back to his correspondence course on Atomic Engine Maintenance. Blaine went up to his room.

The 23rd Street Branch of the Spiritual Switchboard was a large graystone building near Third Avenue. Engraved above the door was the statement: “Dedicated to Free Communication Between Those on Earth and Those Beyond.”

Blaine entered the building and studied the directory. It gave floor and room numbers for Messages Incoming, Messages Outgoing, Translations, Abjurations, Exorcisms, Offerings, Pleas, and Exhortations. He wasn't sure which classification he fell under, or what the classifications signified, or even the purpose of the Spiritual Switchboard. He took his slip of paper to the information booth.

“That's Messages Incoming,” a pleasant, grey-haired, receptionist told him. “Straight down the hall to room 32A.”

“Thank you.” Blaine hesitated, then said, “Could you explain something to me?”

“Certainly,” the woman said. “What do you wish to know?”

“Well — I hope this doesn't sound too foolish — what is all this?”

The grey-haired woman smiled. “That's a difficult question to answer. In a philosophical sense I suppose you might call the Spiritual Switchboard a move toward greater oneness, an attempt to discard the dualism of mind and body and substitute —”

“No,” Blaine said. “I mean literally.”

“Literally? Why, the Spiritual Switchboard is a privately endowed, tax-free organization, chartered to act as a clearing house and center for communications to and from the Threshold plane of the Hereafter. In some cases, of course, people don't need our aid and can communicate directly with their departed ones. But more often, there is a need for amplification. This center possesses the proper equipment to make the deceased audible to our ears. And we perform other services, such as abjurations, exorcisms, exhortations and the like, which become necessary from time to time when flesh interacts with spirit.”

She smiled warmly at him. “Does that make it any clearer?”

“Thank you very much,” Blaine said, and went down the hall to room 32A.

It was a small grey room with several armchairs and a loudspeaker set in the wall. Blaine sat down, wondering what was going to happen.

“Tom Blaine!” cried a disembodied voice from the loudspeaker.

“Huh? What?” Blaine asked, jumping to his feet and moving toward the door.

“Tom! How are you, boy?”

Blaine, his hand on the doorknob, suddenly recognized the voice. “Ray Melhill?”

“Right! I'm up there where the rich folks go when they die! Pretty good, huh?”

“That's the understatement of the age,” Blaine said. ‘“But Ray, how ? I thought you didn't have any hereafter insurance.”

“I didn't. Let me tell you the whole story. They came for me maybe an hour after they took you. I was so damned angry I thought I'd go out of my mind. I stayed angry right through the chloroforming, right through the wiping. I was still angry when I died.”

“What was dying like?” Blaine asked.

“It was like exploding. I could feel myself scattering all over the place, growing big as the galaxy, bursting into fragments, and the fragments bursting into smaller fragments, and all of them were me .”

“And what happened?”

“I don't know. Maybe being so angry helped. I was stretched as far as I could go — any further and it wouldn't be me — and then I just simply came back together again. Some people do. Like I told you, a few out of every million have always survived without hereafter training. I was one of the lucky ones.”

“I guess you know about me,” Blaine said. “I tried to do something for you, but you'd already been sold.”

“I know,” Melhill said. “Thanks anyhow, Tom. And say, thanks for popping that slob. The one wearing my body.”

“You saw that?”

“I been keeping my eyes open,” Melhill said. “By the way, I like that Marie. Nice looking kid.”

“Thanks. Ray, what's the hereafter like?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't?”

“I'm not in the hereafter yet, Tom. I'm in the Threshold. It's a preparatory stage, a sort of bridge between Earth and the hereafter. It's hard to describe. A sort of greyness, with Earth on one side and the hereafter on the other.”

“Why don't you cross over?” Blaine asked.

“Not yet,” Melhill said. “It's a one-way street into the hereafter. Once you cross over, you can't come back. There's no more contact with Earth.”

Blaine thought about that for a moment, then asked, “When are you going to cross over, Ray?”

“I don't rightly know. I thought I'd stay in Threshold for a while and keep an eye on things.”

“Keep an eye on me, you mean.”

“Well…”

“Thanks a lot, Ray, but don't do it. Go into the hereafter. I can take care of myself.”

“Sure you can,” Melhill said. “But I think I'll stick around for a while anyhow. You'd do it for me, wouldn't you? So don't argue. Now look, I suppose you know you’re in trouble?”

Blaine nodded, “You mean the zombie?”

“I don't know who he is or what he wants from you, Tom, but it can't be good. You'd better be a long way off when he finds out. But that wasn't the trouble I meant.”

“You mean I have more?”

“Afraid so. You’re going to be haunted, Tom.”

In spite of himself, Blaine laughed.

“What's so funny?” Melhill asked indignantly. “You think it's a joke to be haunted?”

“I suppose not. But is it really so serious?”

“Lord, you’re ignorant,” Melhill said. “Do you know anything about ghosts? How they’re made and what they want?”

“Tell me.”

“Well, there are three possibilities when a man dies. First, his mind can just explode, scatter, dissipate; and that's the end of him. Second, his mind can hold together through the death trauma; and he finds himself in the Threshold, a spirit. I guess you know about those two.”