by Robert P. Holdstock
Weinshenk was apparently in two places at the same time. Both were prisons and in both he was dying. The trouble with alien planets will be their alienness.
* * * *
Weinshenk, behind closed eyes, began to marvel that he was still a living, thinking, rational being. Because by all the odds he should have been dead.
He should have died on a far-away planet (what was it called...? Aurigae Sam II—affectionately named after Weinshenk himself). He should have died beneath an alien sun, a tiny, intensely white sun, nourishing that tiny, intensely dead (or so they had thought) planet. Aurigae Sam II. After Sam Weinshenk, the bravest man in the Universe. The only man who would venture on to the surface. If you please, the most foolish man in the world!
He remembered the voices of his friends. Don’t panic, Sam. We’ll get you back. Chin up, kid. You look great and if you feel rough ... well, it’ll pass. Earthfall in a matter of days. Stick with it Sam, boy. Don’t give up now.
False reassurances for a man who looked like a wizened monkey. And all the while that godawful, soul-destroying feeling ... there’s something inside, there’s something under my skin, something crawling through my bones.
And all they could find in the samples of planet matter they analysed was one tiny, ineffectual looking virus-type crystal. A little dodecahedron with spikes. The natives!
Weinshenk recalled all this with a feeling of warmth towards his crew mates. He knew he was alive. He could feel he was alive. And they had said he would live. They had assured him. And if he had doubted, well, they could forgive him that, for he had been a very sick man.
Now he felt well. Everything was well. He had survived contact with Aurigae Sam II. And if he never went back to his planet it would be too soon. Aurigae Sam II would have to do without him.
He opened his eyes and blinked—the sun was very-bright. He smiled. From a long way away someone shouted his name. Then his smile faded. He looked about him and an uneasiness stirred within him. He sat up and surveyed the room.
Something was very wrong.
* * * *
Sam Weinshenk opened his eyes. Or rather, the eyes that were already opened now began to see. But they didn’t move.
Weinshenk was suddenly very afraid. For some moments he had been aware of where he was, what he was doing, who was with him; it had been like rousing from a very dark and featureless dream. Thrust into the world of the living his first impulse had been to smile and sit up.
That was when he found he could do neither. Now he found he could move no part of his body, not his eyelids, not his eyeballs. Nothing. He wasn’t even breathing. His heart was not beating. The familiar sound of blood being pumped through his temples just was not there.
‘I’m paralysed! he thought. My God, I’m completely and utterly paralysed.
A sudden panic filled him and built up and overflowed and he screamed within himself, and screamed and screamed.
While outwardly the man lay absolutely motionless and only a flicker on an oscilloscope told of any change in his condition.
What’s that?’ asked the man in dark glasses who had just walked into Weinshenk’s field of view. His voice was flat.
Andrew! screamed Weinshenk. But there was no sound. Andrew Slater! My God; Andrew Slater! Andrew, and he can’t hear me, doesn’t even know that I’m alive. Andrew! For God’s sake, Andrew ... my buddy, Andrew. Can’t you hear me ?
‘Adrenalin level,’ murmured a technician. He was robed in white. His face was sallow and his eyes dull. A moron, thought Weinshenk. ‘That’s the patient’s adrenalin level in the blood—and it just rose a little.’
‘Significantly?’ asked a woman’s voice.
Who’s that? wondered Weinshenk. I can’t see her. That voice ... where have I heard that voice ? Not ... not, Angela, surely!
The thought of Angela filled him with sorrow. Where is she?
‘In an ordinary person,’ said the technician, ‘that sort of fluctuation would be encountered, say, when crossing a road or when a sudden noise breaks a period of silence. But with the patient—it is highly significant.’
‘How?’ said the woman.
‘It means he’s alive,’ said Slater. ‘It means he’s thinking, he’s aware. Ye gods ... imagine it,’ he turned to look at Weinshenk. ‘That guy’s entombed in his own body.’
‘Horrible,’ said the woman. Weinshenk was conscious of movement from the direction of the voice. A shadow at the edge of vision but he could discern nothing.
‘Not necessarily entombed,’ said the technician. ‘We have no reason to suppose the patient is conscious—it is possible to respond to stimuli while unconscious.’
Slater came over and peered more closely at Weinshenk. He was right in focus. ‘Hi, Sam. If you can hear me, and I reckon you can since you seem to be reacting...’ he chuckled, bent closer. ‘By reacting I mean a few flickers on a damn green screen—remember the screens in the ship? Those darn traces used to drive us nuts. Remember?’
And how! thought Weinshenk.
‘Anyway, Sam, if you can hear me, you’re a puzzle...there’s something up with you. God knows what. I don’t want to get you worried but nobody’s got a clue.’ He grinned. ‘That’s where our chance lies. The doctors are so puzzled by you they’re working themselves to shadows— somebody’ll come up with something. I suppose you’re wondering about Mr. Virus. Remember Virus ? Almost one of the family, that little fellah is. They’re trying to find it in you. So far no luck and it begins to look as if he’s innocent after all.’ He paused and glanced out of Weinshenk’s view. Somebody had come into the room. ‘I’m talking to him, OK?’
‘All right,’ replied somebody from a few feet away.
Like an animal in a zoo. Like an oddity, be nice to him, humour him. Weinshenk was sour. But there was something sincere about Slater. As the senses became heightened so Weinshenk became aware of the screen between him and everybody. It must have been extremely thin and perfectly transparent, sound conducting, light conducting, he had not even noticed it before. But it was there, between him and the rest of them. A protective screen, a guard against bugs.
Slater, went on. ‘We’re trying to figure a way of talking to you—so’s you can reply, I mean. I just know you’re conscious, Sam. Remember how we talked about empathy and telepathy? What I’d give for that particular power, eh? But remember the feeling I got when you were in trouble on the planet’s surface? Remember? I told you how I’d felt I was being overrun with something nasty, a horrible sort of skin crawling sensation, seeping in through the pores, almost. And I had a feeling it was you that was experiencing it. And it turned out I was right. Well, I’ve got that sort of deep and solid feeling now, Sam—that you’re awake and listening. And soon, my boy, we shall be able to talk, if only by one of them damn screens.’
The encephalograph, thought Weinshenk. What in hell does the encephalograph register ? For heaven’s sake—if I’m thinking it ought to show up.
‘We’re working on it, Sam,’ concluded Slater. He drew away, walked round the bed and moved out of view. All Weinshenk could see was the ceiling, a piece of window, a cord dangling from a socket at the ceiling edge, the limb of a climbing plant and about three inches of panelling. He was aware of three green lines, straight and unkinked. Screens.
The technician’s voice murmured, ‘You still think he’s conscious, Mr. Slater?’
‘Why not ? asked Slater.
The deep voice (doctor?) said, ‘If he were conscious, Mr. Slater, I assure you it would show on the e.e.g.’
So, thought Weinshenk. I don’t show up. But why not?
‘Have you considered the possibility that something might be vetting the output of his neural signals?’ It was Slater.
‘Pardon?’
‘You think in electrical signals, right ? Well, more or less, OK? Right. Now supposing something doesn’t want those electrical signals to be manifest outside the body.’
‘What something are you referring to, Mr. Slater ?’ It was the deep voice.
Slater didn’t answer for a moment. Then, ‘There were three others besides Sam on the ship. We all felt as if some existence had come aboard with him when he returned from the planet. It was a sort of sixth sense.’ He hesitated. ‘I know the idea of, what, invasion by some alien existence sounds fantastic—but we were on a fantastic planet, Doctor, Don’t discredit our idea as a whim. That man is dead, yet he is alive. Something is keeping him alive but in an effectively dead state. Have you asked yourselves why he hasn’t started to rot? Because he ought to have done. And those bursts on the e.e.g. Microseconds I know, but maybe a guarded mind needs a brief outlet every so often. Maybe something is putting a blockade over Weinshenk the human and keeping him as Weinshenk the host.’
Good man, thought Weinshenk. Keep at it. Help me ...
There was a movement. The woman came into view.
Angela! he screamed. It was you! God, how beautiful you still are. But your voice. What’s happened to your voice ?
She seemed uncertain, unsure as she bent over him. As if ... Weinshenk let the thought come through. As if she didn’t really believe he was still alive.
‘Goodbye, Sam. For the moment,’ she bent low and Weinshenk saw the marks of a brace on her neck. Sometime in the last four years her neck had been broken. ‘Sam, don’t forget that I love you. Don’t forget that, Sam. Ever.’
No, no, I shan’t. Oh God!
She leant over and kissed him through the screen. It was a lingering kiss. Her lips were warm and he realised how cold his must have been. But she didn’t flinch. Kissing the corpse before it’s lowered into the ground. He put the morbid thought from his mind and remembered that kiss.
His first kiss for over four years.
* * * *
It was the ghostly kiss that did it.
It frightened Weinshenk so much that he swung off the bed and stood, eyes wide, fingers touching his lips where, seconds before, he had felt the impression of a woman’s mouth, kissing him as if through a sheet of cellophane. Instinctively he knew it had been Angela.
In the deserted, crumbling room, Sam Weinshenk stood alone and afraid. And with each second that passed his fear grew greater. At the back of his mind he Could hear that strange, haunting voice, calling his name.
The room was small. The bed on which he had lain was rickety and dust covered. It was surrounded by rusted machinery. The floorboards of the room were rotten and they creaked as he walked. The plaster was crumbling off the walls and with every footfall a cloud of cement seemed to fall from the ceiling. His hair was filthy with dust and bits of plaster coating. A plaque hung on the wall. Instinctively he knew it said ‘The Good Earth’ because there was a picture of the earth above it and he had seen many such plaques with that sentiment, voiced many hundreds of years ago by some long-forgotten pioneer of space. But his eyes refused to read the words. He could make no sense of the shapes that were the letters. They were a meaningless pattern of lines.
He crouched and tried to write in the dust. And he couldn’t. He had forgotten how.
* * * *
‘Where the hell am I?’ he shouted to the crumbling walls. His voice sounded hollow in the silence. Dust cascaded from the cracked ceiling. He became aware of the utter silence. There were no birds, no cars. His heart hammered. It was the only relief from the noiseless world. A man needs noise, he thought to himself. Not too much, but some. Just to let him know the world is still alive around him. He had hit upon it almost without thinking. The world was dead around him. He was the only living thing.
But that voice ...
Weinshenk leaned out the window. He was five storeys high, facing on to what had once been a main street. The buildings that surrounded him were half ruined. The streets and pavements below were littered with piles of rubble. There was hardly a window anywhere that was not broken. The air was heavy with dust and no breeze seemed to blow.
In the distance he could see a cracked and useless bridge spanning a sluggish river. There were no ships and no people to be seen. Cars stood here and there, mostly half buried beneath brick and mortar. The sky was blue, the sun, almost at zenith, bright and hot.
Yet it was not a natural heat. The sun could be looked at without discomfort. There were none of the usual manifestations of an intensely hot body, atmospheric distortion, visual deception. It was, decided Weinshenk, weird. And frightening, but now his fear was past. It was puzzlement that filled him. Where and what was this place ? And where were the builders of these ruins? And why were familiar things like lettering so incomprehensible? It didn’t make any kind of sense.
He moved back into the room and sat down in the corner, watching the dust settle, watching the rotting bed, the shaft of sunlight illuminating a quarter of the floor space. Everything was still. Everything was quiet.
Slowly, Weinshenk drifted into sleep.
Even in sleep there was no escape from mystery. It was as he slumbered that he became aware of the voice within him. It was not a voice so much as an awareness. He felt what the entity felt, he tasted the comfort, the disappointment, the frustration, the loneliness of the thing that was in his body.
He moved through a hot fluid, everywhere dark, everywhere in motion, great moving objects, packing factories, arms reaching out to capture and destroy. Floating globules and small objects spinning madly and growing as they spun. He moved through the melee of activity, into a region of relative calm, and then he was clinging to a huge, apparently endless wall. Moving over the wall he came to a chasm, through which particles and fluid were moving fast, monitored by tiny spheres at the entrance, modified by a crystalline latticework spanning the gap.
He slipped through and emerged into the living and thinking centre of things and already he was approached by arrow-shaped objects that threatened him with death unless he did something drastic. And slowly, carefully, he changed and hid, hid among the chattering chemicals, the busy columns of complex molecules. Here he was safe and began to act.
It was the strangest feeling of being imprisoned within the very cells of a body. Weinshenk awake, petrified, still seeing the darkness, the spinning, darting objects, still feeling the panic of the chase. He touched his chest and looked down.
‘Inside me! Goddam!’ He looked up. ‘That bastard’s right inside me. Hiding. In one of my cells.’ He looked down again. ‘Goddam virus! Hiding somewhere in my body.’ And he started to laugh. Abruptly he stopped. Touching his chest he looked vacant for a moment. ‘You were no more a native of Aurigae Sam II than I was. Were you?’ He felt that loneliness again, a sense of distance that he could not conceive. ‘Not even from our Universe. I wonder what you were doing on Aurigae.’ He looked down. ‘Did you fly there?’ He laughed. The laugh died and his face grew serious. He looked out through the window from where he squatted. ‘What comes next, I wonder?’
* * * *
A tall man with a thin moustache and very sad eyes stood over Weinshenk and regarded him steadily. He shook his head. A woman joined him, a nurse, a very good looking nurse. A pang of desire shot through him; He observed both people glance towards a screen.
‘His adrenalin level just increased,’ said the woman.
‘When you came into view,’ murmured the man. It was the deep voice that Weinshenk had listened to earlier.
‘It’s little things like that,’ went on the doctor, ‘that make it so hard to decide whether he’s alive or not. It’s almost as if ...’
‘As if?’ prompted the nurse.
‘As if he can see and hear and think.’ He stooped closer to Weinshenk. ‘I wonder if that man Slater is right after all.’
Weinshenk watched and listened, but mostly he was aware of the nurse.
She said, smiling, ‘What if I stripped off—that might cause an unmistakable reaction.’
The doctor grinned. ‘Why bother to strip,’ he said coolly, ‘Look...’ She looked at the screen and then down at Weinshenk.
‘Doctor, he’s alive. He has to be.’
‘And somewhere inside him, something...something that invaded him on Aurigae II, a little crystalloid that’s hiding somewhere in his body.’
‘We think,’ said the nurse.
Strip, damn you, willed Weinshenk, aware of only the woman. Go on ... see what happens.
‘That’s the trouble,’ said the doctor. ‘There are so many different attitudes. Slater is convinced he’s alive. Miss ... what’s her name ... Angela ... is convinced he isn’t.’
The nurse glanced sourly at the doctor. ‘That’s because she fancies that awful spaceman, Slater ...’ She broke off, horrified and looked at Weinshenk, at the screen. ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry, Sam,’ she said softly.
Weinshenk’s mind was reeling. It took a long time for the shock to wear off. Then his thoughts, his mind, crystallised again and he realised how inevitable that turn of events had been. He felt a desperation, then anger, then hatred. I’m a mixed up kid, he thought. Forget the bitch.
Distantly a door opened and closed loudly. The doctor looked over his shoulder, then back at Weinshenk. ‘Hello, Stuart. Anything ?’
A voice, high pitched but male, said, ‘I think we’ve got it!’
The doctor jerked round, the nurse turned also. ‘You’ve got it?’
‘Show me,’ said the doctor.
‘Right here.’
Frustratingly the three of them stood on the edge of Weinshenk’s vision, talking in low voices. Then they moved closer. The nurse held up a photograph. The three of them watched Weinshenk closely. ‘Can you see it, Sam?’ Weinshenk saw a lot of blurred lines, most of them comprised a lot of bumps.
‘Chromosomes, Sam. Your chromosomes.’ The deep voiced doctor smiled. ‘There ought to be forty-six, Sam. There are forty-seven. That doesn’t check with your record card.’
‘I don’t know how we came to miss it first time through,’ murmured the other man, watching Weinshenk uncertainly. T guess it just never occurred to us to count chromosomes. They seemed about the right number, not halved or doubled as has been known to happen. The forty-seventh is right here,’ he pointed to the tiniest line of all. ‘See how small it is? It’s probably only a few hundred genes long. We reckon it’s a chromosome unit formed from the DNA of the virus. Hiding, Sam. Hiding in the only place it knew it could go unnoticed. Not unnoticed by us, but by the body.’
‘That’s a real cunning little virus you’re harbouring, Spaceman,’ said the deep voiced doctor. ‘It also poses a question for the evolutionists—we have to assume either DNA is a universal development, or your virus disguised himself right from basics. See what I mean?’
‘Now we’ve found him,’ said the other man, ‘we’ll get the better of him, Trouble is. Well, never mind ...’
‘Tell him,’ said the doctor sternly. ‘I don’t want Sam to think we’re keeping anything from him.’-
‘Nothing particularly staggering,’ went on the other man. ‘Just... well, it’s in every cell we look at and we’ve looked at every tissue, virtually. Every single nucleus we’ve looked at, and we’ve examined thousands ... we have a computer eye to do the work for us. Every one, every nucleus, has a forty-seventh chromosome. It’s widespread, Sam,’ he smiled, briefly. Then moved out of view. The other doctor went and just the nurse remained staring at Weinshenk thoughtfully. Then she leaned over and placed her lips on his, kissing him through the sheet. She looked at the screen that showed his adrenalin level. Looked back at Weinshenk and smiled.
* * * *
It was when he realised that the sun had not moved from its near-zenith position for the last few hours that Weinshenk began to understand the situation.
‘Caught,’ he explained to himself. ‘Caught in one moment of time. That has to be it. Somehow, incredible though it seems, Sam, you have got yourself lodged in an instant of time.’
He looked up at the sun, that motionless orb—it was so unreal—it was like a painting, a frozen portrayal of the sun at the hour of eleven.
Weinshenk walked, dejectedly, along the cracked remains of a tarmac road. Distantly he heard a brick clatter as it was dislodged and fell to earth. This whole place is decaying visibly, he thought to himself. I guess I must have created it when I came here; it exists for me alone, but being so far from its parent time stream, it can only exist for a little while. It’s decaying. And presumably I’ll decay with it.
‘A limited existence at least,’ he said to the streets.
I haven’t eaten or drunk for a long time, he thought. And he didn’t feel hungry or thirsty. Everything was in stasis, including him. There was just one hunger he felt and with the passing hours it grew worse. It was a hunger he would never satiate.
On the banks of the river he sat down. Across the other side of the sluggishly moving water there was a land of broken buildings and decaying docks. The bridge that spanned from side to side was incomplete, the middle section having fallen into the muddy depths. Thus, to cross meant to swim. And Weinshenk could not swim with confidence.
That land was not his land. His land lay behind him, the crumbling white ruins of a city that, somewhere in time, was buzzing with activity.
As he sat there it came again—a woman’s voice calling. Calling his name. He froze, intently alert. But there was only the silence. Gradually he hunched over his knees and watched the water. Imagination, he told himself. It must have been.
When he tried to rise, later, he became aware that his body was failing him. His skin was beginning to wrinkle and his joints ached. He smiled grimly. I’m decaying, he told the entity within. What are you going to do about it?
Back to the rotting streets, places full of festering memories. Weinshenk, a man alone, the remnants of a soul, walking painfully through the remnants of a city.
Weinshenk, a player all important, and yet a puppet, the strings worked from within.
He slid down in the corner of the room where he had awakened. As he sat there, thinking, his skin started to tingle and itch. A rash was spreading from his chest down his arms and legs. He scratched it, absently, then stopped appalled.
I’m rotting faster than the world, he thought. At this rate the flesh will start to peel off me before too long.
As if to illustrate his point he noticed that the left thumb nail was torn loose. He felt no pain. Gritting his teeth he pushed it back into position.
‘Oh, my God,’ he moaned.
As he sat, slouched and unhappy, facing the bed, two things happened to unnerve him even more. He imagined he saw a figure lying there—its blind, staring eyes fixed upon the ceiling, the whole apparition pale and dead. It had lain there hideously for a few seconds while Weinshenk, mouth agape, had cringed back into the corner and felt the scream rising within him. Gradually he had found his calm and then he tore his eyes away. When he looked back the apparition was gone.
He was glad, for there is nothing more unnerving than to regard one’s own dead body, a mirage or real. It is a frightening and soul destroying sight.
He sat in the room for a long time, watching the bed, willing the corpse to return in moments of morbid curiosity. But it didn’t. He was just climbing, stiffly, agonisingly, to his feet when a hand touched his wrist.,
He gasped and sank down on to his haunches. The touch lingered, pressing gently into his wrist. Then it went and came again, this time on his throat, strong, gentle fingers pressing and searching. They went; he waited. A hand rested upon his thigh and its nerve-tingling touch moved to his knee. He felt the nerve there stimulated and felt the reflex jerk his limb. But his limb remained motionless. After a few seconds the invisible hand was removed. Weinshenk, trembling, waited and after a minute had passed he felt what he had almost known would come. A kiss, long, soft and so very intimate.
He sat there remembering the pressure of those lips. He knew, now, that they had been Angela’s. The memory came back as a knife wound to the heart. How beautiful she had been when he had left, long years ago. And she would still be beautiful because her face had that construction of bones that would never age.
He would have married her, he remembered. He would have married her and right now they would be just finishing their honeymoon.
Strange, he mused. I never thought at all about her during the last two years, never sentimentally, anyway. A message spool every month, played over subspace radio. Earphones and strained ears every six months, trying to discern something of the voice that spoke to him. It was so distorted, so unhuman that it had ceased to be Angela. He had pushed her from his mind until the day he returned to earth.
Now he remembered her and remembrance was sad.
Outside the building a brick was kicked. It was an unnatural sound and Weinshenk crawled over to the window, peered out. He was in time to see a leg vanishing into a nearby building.
Heart pounding, mind racing, an excitement welling up inside him such as he had never known before, Sam Weinshenk loped to the door and ran, stumbling, down the stairs. As he ran the stairs creaked and crumbled and he felt heavily. He was substantially unhurt as he lay dazedly on the ground floor, but he noticed how black were his arms. When he put a hand to his head some of the hair fell from his scalp. It was white and dry and not only with the dust. He clenched his teeth and his teeth were loose. He was decaying.
For a moment he thought it might be best to avoid going across the street to investigate the other person. Then he changed his mind.
The street was deserted. The sun its usual hot self, unwinking, unchanging. Weinshenk walked across to the open door of what had once been a store. He looked in through the huge, glassless window and saw...
‘A woman! Goddam!’
He staggered away from the window and leaned against the wall. Now he was very conscious of his decrepit state. He was on the point of running away when her voice came to his ears.
‘Hello, Sam
He hesitated, face reflecting the indecision he felt. Then: ‘How do you know who I am?’ As he spoke he edged to the window again and looked in. She was squatting in the corner and looked very unsure. But very pretty. Almost familiarly so ... She wore the pale blue slacks and shirt of a spacer.
‘Hello, Sam. I thought it must be you.’ She had blonde hair, her eyes were dark and looked as if they had been rubbed violently. She looked muscular.
Heart hammering, mind trying to fit her face to that which he already suspected, Weinshenk walked into the shop and crouched in the opposite corner to her.
‘Angela...’ he breathed. ‘My God, Angela ... you’re Angela.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘My name is Toriq.’
‘But... but you look like Angela. The eyes, the face ... oh, my God! You look just like her.’
She smiled simply, ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But my name is Toriq Slater, This,’ she looked about her, ‘was once my city. I lived here.’ Smiling she looked at Weinshenk. She had wrapped her arms around her knees and was peering at him. ‘Until I went into space, that is. That was my big mistake
‘I went to Aurigae with a Slater. Andrew Slater.’ Weinshenk looked up at her. ‘Any relation?’
She nodded. ‘Brace yourself,’ she said. ‘He was my Great grandfather.’
Weinshenk was stunned. ‘Your GREAT GRANDfather! But...’
Toriq shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me, Sam. I was born a hundred and twenty years after you died.’
‘After I died?’
‘Well, yes. You died after about six months. A living corpse, they said. I’ve read much about it. Aurigae Sam II was put out of bounds. But there are always those who will go against the rules. Me included. My grandfather once told me that his father, your friend, thought the solution to your illness would only be found on Aurigae Sam II. That’s why I went there, not that it would have done you any good at that time, of course. But I was curious.’
‘And...?’
‘Was the answer there?’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was caught by the virus before I knew it. I thought I was protected enough, but I wasn’t.’
Weinshenk was having difficulty keeping up. His mind threatened to blow at any moment. ‘But wait a minute ... listen ... you said that I died after six months. Where ? Where did I die?’
‘In hospital.’
‘But I’m here. Do you mean I’m going to get back?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, Sam. As far as we can figure it out there has to be two of each of us. Weird, isn’t it.’
Weinshenk was trying to imagine it and although it was too strange for immediate acceptance, it made sense of the apparition and it made sense of the ghostly hands, the invisible lips. Someone had been kissing his ... other self.
‘How did you know me?’ he asked after a while. My God, he thought. She is like Angela. Before his mind could take the question further Toriq spoke.
‘Sam,’ she cocked her head and looked down at the floor. ‘When I came here there were already two others. We figured out the situation as best we could. The first to arrive was the man who was last to visit Aurigae Sam II. Sam, his name was Togor and he lived two thousand years in the future. He was the last to go there because he blew the planet up. That was his job.’ Her brow wrinkled as she thought about that. ‘Funny job, eh ? But you see how things are reversed somehow. Don’t ask me why or how. But it was obvious that the last to arrive here would be the first to have contacted Aurigae Sam II—Sam himself.’ She looked at him long and hard. ‘Togor and Will have disappeared. I think they went over that river. There are things over there, Sam. I don’t know what. Sirens, I think. I think the others were lured to their deaths,’ she added a dramatic intonation to her voice. ‘I don’t really care. Togor had some funny-ideas on certain things,’ she grinned. ‘And Will was too old anyway. I’m glad you came, Sam, because it was getting very lonely here.’
Weinshenk wanted to scratch his crawling, itching skin, but he didn’t dare. His whole body was racked with discomfort and he knew he could not get up without considerable effort. He felt as if, should he stand, he would leave his legs behind on the grounds He ached. ‘Where are we, Toriq? Did you and ... Togor, ever figure out where we are?’
‘In a moment of time, I guess. A timeless moment, Sam, else how could we all get here from such different ages? That virus—if only we could understand It more. But not even Togor knew of any advance in understanding. I guess whatever the thing is it needs a few hosts and this microcosm. We figured it needed the microcosm to exist, as well as needing us, our bodies.’
‘But the bodies,’ said Weinshenk loudly, ‘they’re decaying—look at me. I’m falling apart. Maybe the virus needs us, needs this ... this MICROCosm, but it didn’t figure on our bodies being unable to survive here. It’s doomed and so are we...’ He trailed off, looking at her. ‘You’re not ... I mean, you haven’t rotted?’
Toriq was laughing. ‘I did at first, Sam.’ She crawled over to him. ‘Touch me, Sam, feel me.’
Hesitantly Weinshenk touched her face. It was ice cold. Her skin was like cold steel. He touched her hair. Wire. It was springy but wiry.
‘You’re moulting, Sam,’ she laughed, ‘and when you’ve shed your soft outer covering and much of your soft insides, you’ll be perfectly adapted to this weird place.’ She sat back on her haunches, looking at him. ‘Get used to it, Sam. It’s all life can offer you now. There seems no need to eat or drink. Get used to icy, metallic skin and you’ll find this place not so bad after all. All I’ve got is you, Sam. And all you’ve got is me.’ She smiled, watching him carefully. ‘Call me Angela, if you want. Anything...’ she leaned forward, close, ‘but hurry up and moult, Sam ... I’m ... starving.’
* * * *
‘Come in, Mr. Slater.’
Slater walked into the doctor’s office and sat down next to Angela. He reached over and gave her hand an affectionate squeeze.
The doctor looked at him. ‘As far as we can determine this illness is not contagious.’
Slater nodded. ‘That’s a relief.’
‘His germ cells are no longer potent—no test tube progeny, I’m afraid.’
Slater said nothing.
‘Weinshenk’s condition does not improve. He has ceased to respond with fluctuating adrenalin levels to such things as being kissed, for example. The periodic neural output has ceased.’
‘Has he started to rot?’ asked Slater softly.
‘No. And I don’t suppose he ever will.’
Slater settled back in his chair. ‘Hmm. You know ... mystics believe that the soul does not leave the body until forty days after death—or rather, the soul is still in a transitory plane between body and heaven. It is still capable of returning to the body. In the New Testament Christ, after his crucifixion; appeared to the disciples for forty days. Then he was gone for ever.’
The doctor turned to his notepad. He began to count backwards through the sheets.
‘How many days since that day he stopped breathing, Doctor?’ asked Slater very softly.
‘Forty days,’ replied the doctor, placing the notebook on the table. ‘Exactly forty days.’
They sat in silence for a long, long time.
‘Bury him,’ said Angela. ‘But don’t tell anybody what has happened. Don’t let anybody know. Let them think he died naturally after a few months.’
The doctor nodded. Slater looked at Angela and smiled. ‘I’ll take you home.’
Afterwards, as they drove home, Slater caught Angela looking at him with a strange expression on her face. He recognised the expression and had to fight to keep his concentration on the road.