Collected Short Fiction, page 76
It was George, who had given Horner his weekly massage every week for the past five years—except tonight.
“Why, you’re here!” blurted Horner.
“Sure am, sir. Wondered why you were late. Go ahead and undress, now. I’ll reserve your usual table . . .”
“But I just had my massage.”
“Oh?” said George, trying to make his voice sound indifferent. “Trying one of the other masseurs?”
“Not at all,” snapped Horner. “You weren’t here. Well, were you?”
“Never even stepped out. Been here all night,” George said.
“But the other man, the new man—”
“No new man, Mr. Horner, sir. Haven’t put on a new man in six-seven months. I’d know, wouldn’t I?”
“You’d know,” said Horner slowly, after a silence.
“Something the matter, sir?”
“It’s nothing. Nothing.”
Horner got out of there very quickly. He took a cab home, which was unusual for him. If George and his nameless friend had been playing an elaborate practical joke, they had also been playing hob with Horner’s digestion. For now a hot sensation flooded his middle—his damned ulcer acting up. Ulcers, he thought with a sudden wry smile, ulcers and what else? You’re forty-seven, Horner. A mildly successful life, a good marriage, a middling business, no children, no outstanding debts—any regrets?
Yes, Horner thought. Regrets. His ulcer was a regret. He had to be careful what he ate, couldn’t drink much. His rising blood pressure would one day be a regret, even if it wasn’t yet. And generally, vaguely, his insignificance was a regret. He was not a meek man, but he was no Tarzan of the Apes. He was not a small man, but he was no Goliath. He was not a lowbrow, but he was no Einstein. He was not without an eye and some appeal for women, but he was no Don Juan. He sighed, knowing you could extend the list indefinitely. Hugh Horner, small businessman. Hugh Horner, small man.
“Here’s your address, Mac,” the cab driver said.
Horner got up with a start. He realized he had been sitting there for some time with the cab perfectly still. He somehow sensed that time had passed, more time than the thirty-odd minutes it would take a cab to deliver him to his home on the other side of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
“Where—where are we?” he asked the cabbie. For some reason, he fingered the business card in his pocket. The one the new masseur, the masseur who apparently did not exist, had given him.
The cabbie, shrugging, told him an address which was not immediately familiar. Then, with a sudden quickening of his heart, Horner realized it was the address on the business card in his pocket.
“You mean,” Horner demanded, “we’re on Long Island? I don’t remember telling you to take me here.”
“Well, I didn’t dream it up myself, Mac,” the cabbie said. “Look, I don’t care if you get out or you don’t get out. The flag is still down and I’m still making money. So, what’ll it be?”
“I ought to call my wife,” Horner said.
The driver shrugged. “You getting off here?”
Slowly, Horner nodded. He looked outside. He saw night darkness, a dimly lit driveway, a hemlock hedge twelve feet high.
“Sign said ‘Positively no vehicles,’ ” the cabbie told him. “So I guess you walk from here.”
“I guess I walk,” Horner said. He consulted the taxi meter, took four dollar bills from his money clip and a half dollar in change from his pocket. Then he got out.
The cab door closed. The driver put the clutch down, then up, and the cab rolled away into the darkness. Horner lit a cigarette. It tasted harsh and bitter, stale. The darkness engulfed him and a pulse hammered, of all places, in his right leg. He felt all at once old—or at least aging. He sighed and it was not a sound a young man would make. In the darkness on the unknown road, he longed for his youth, his lost youth. Then he walked resolutely up the dimly lit driveway flanked by the high hemlock hedge.
The door-knocker was brass, and Horner let it fall. It made a resounding noise and the door opened within a second, as if someone were standing half a foot away on the other side with no job but to admit Hugh Horner the instant he knocked.
“Come in, Mr. Horner,” the girl said. “Naturally, we were expecting you.”
She was tall and she wore a cashmere sweater, loose but not so loose that it failed to reveal high, maidenly breasts. She wore a skirt not provocatively tight, but tight enough to suggest the good thighs that she had. Her hair fell almost to her shoulders in abundant auburn waves. She had a lovely face and Horner thought she was about twenty years old.
“You were expecting me?” Horner said.
“Of course. You see, Bodies, Inc. carefully screens its applicants . . .”
“But I didn’t apply!”
“Ah, but we knew you were going to. We have to be sure of our clients. Because if a single client decided to talk, we’d be out of business.”
“The authorities?”
“Certainly. But since you’re here, we can get down to business at once. You have the three thousand dollars with you?”
“Why, no. No, I don’t.”
“Bankbook?”
“Yes, I have that.”
“It’s good enough. Tomorrow we can take your identification papers, driving license and so forth, and get the money ourselves. That is, unless they know you personally at the bank?”
Horner said that he did his banking by mail. He supposed they were going to forge his signature, but made no comment because he had decided, all at once, to call the whole thing off.
“See here,” he said. “This is a little awkward. But you can trust me not to talk.”
“What’s a little awkward?”
“I—I’ve decided not to go through with it,” Homer said lamely. “My wife, my friends . . .”
The girl said nothing. She took two steps forward, placed her arms around Horner, and kissed him. She wore a subtle perfume. She was beautiful. Her lips were soft and warm, inviting. Her lips were hot. Her lips burned . . .
Horner broke away breathlessly. His heart was pounding. He knew his face was flushed, he could feel it. His legs were unsteady. He wanted to respond, but his energies were dissipating in the hard-pumping heart, the trembling limbs, the flushed face. It was a middle-aged response. It lacked the drive and direction of youth.
“Did you like that?” the girl asked, taking one of Horner’s hands and holding it.
“Yes,” came his breathless reply. “Oh, yes! I liked it.”
“But you didn’t . . .”
“Respond? I have a wife.”
“That wasn’t the reason.”
“We’re happily married!”
“And I like this sweater I’m wearing very much, but I have others and will wear others.”
“The mores of our society . . .”
“Mores baloney! You were just plain scared. Middle-aged scared. Look at you. You’re soft and you’re getting wrinkles. Do you think I was really attracted to you? Do you think that’s why I kissed you? No, you fool. That wasn’t the reason.”
“Then you . . .”
“Wanted to make this point. Wanted to show you you’re old, too old to enjoy the most obvious pleasures of a younger man’s life. Twenty-five, Mr. Homer! That’s the age! The age not of boyishness but of mature youth! Twenty-five! The perfect age for you, and you know it.” She smiled at him. It was a deliberately sexy smile, a come-on, an invitation which Homer, under the circumstances, had to decline. “Are you convinced?” she said.
“That I’m not as young as I used to be? Of course.”
She gave him a deliberately daughterly kiss, pecking at his temple with her soft warm lips. “Then you’re ready to go to the observation room.”
The observation room, thought Horner. Did he do the observing, or was he observed? He sighed. It was not a young man’s way of expressing what Hugh Horner felt. He knew it was not. He said slowly, bleakly, “I’m ready for the observation room.”
The girl did not even nod. She had known he would be ready all along.
It was a small, utterly bare room with three walls of dull gray metal and the fourth of dazzling floor-to-ceiling glass. On the other side of the glass was a similar room—except that it was furnished with a single bench running across its length.
Men were seated on the bench. Young men, apparently staring at Horner and his lovely companion.
“They can’t see us,” the girl explained. “One way glass.”
“But do they, er, know why they are here?”
“Naturally. Everything’s on the up-and-up with Bodies, Inc., morally if not legally.”
“And they are . . .”
“Your choice, Mr. Horner. As you can see, there are eight young men in there, each twenty-five years old, each guaranteed in good health, each perfectly willing to switch identities with you. I must tell you in advance, however, that the switch is quite permanent. There is no recourse. You understand?”
“Yes, but . . .” Horner looked at the eight men who could not see him, and lapsed into silence. The eight all looked like sound specimens, all right. All seemed healthy and alert, even cheerful. Horner said, somewhat suspiciously, “My reason for wanting to switch places is obvious. And theirs?”
The girl licked her lips before she spoke. They were very nice lips. They were delicious lips. Homer had tasted them. He was suddenly reminded of a magician who makes diverting passes with one hand while performing his magic with the other. “Money,” the girl said laconically.
“Money? But I’m only paying three thousand dollars. Surely a man wouldn’t surrender his youth for such a sum!”
“Our regulations call for a man’s total savings. In your case, three thousand dollars. But most of our clients are extremely wealthy, Mr. Horner. Now, since half of the fee goes to the youth who will become Hugh Horner while we keep the other half.
“But fifteen hundred dollars only!”
“I should have said it goes into a pool. A yearly pool, you see. The average last year was four-hundred sixty-five thousand dollars, Mr. Horner. Don’t you think some young men would be willing to surrender twenty years of their lives for half a million dollars?”
“I wouldn’t if I were young,” Horner said at once.
“Between you and me, that’s because you aren’t. But it’s their choice to make, and it’s a free choice. Now, have you made a selection?” Horner looked at the eight men again, and shrugged.
“I see,” the girl said. “And I agree. They’re all choice specimens, is that what you’re thinking? All strong, all healthy, and all will probably be in better shape than you are, twenty years from now.”
“Do I get some kind of a guarantee on their health? I mean, what if . . . if I should pick one of them with an incurable disease or something?” Although he asked this very practical question, Horner still hardly expected to go through with anything as incredible as switching bodies with one of the young men on the other side of the glass partition. After all, he told himself for the tenth time, such things just weren’t possible. This was either an elaborate joke or an elaborate dream. He decided—hopefully—that it was the latter. He recalled that the doctor had given him reserprine to calm his nerves recently, and the doctor had told him that one of the side effects of reserprine was an abundance of nightmare.
“That’s it,” he said.
“Reserprine.”
“What did you say?” the girl asked him, an amused look on her face.
“Er, I said, that one’s fine,” Horner blurted, pointing at random at one of the men on the other side of the glass partition.
“Good,” the girl said.
“Then everything is ready.” She touched a section of the wall and the dazzling glass sheet abruptly went opaque. This lasted for some five seconds, then the wall became transparent again.
All but one of the men had disappeared. Horner assumed it was the individual he had singled at quite at random.
“Now really . . .” he began.
“Look at me,” the girl said.
That was easy. She was beautiful.
Her eyes grew very large. Incredibly large. They filled her entire head. They filled the room. They were two enormous blue pits. Horner jumped into both of them just before he fell into a deep hypnotic sleep.
His hands were raw and bleeding. His first thought was that the guards would know something was wrong when they saw his hands. He was down on his knees in foul-smelling dirt, but his head scraped the low ceiling. He was digging mechanically with his bare hands. He had had a shovel, but it had been lost in a slight cave-in.
“Hey, Lonnie!” a harsh whispering voice called. “Stop dreaming, for cryin’ out loud. If we don’t do it tonight, we’ll never get another chance. Forbish is out.”
“What do you mean he’s out?” called back Horner, whose name now seemed to be Lonnie.
“You know what I mean. Out. Another cell block. Forbish got a mouth like the Holland Tunnel. What I mean, if he ain’t here to cash in on the deal, he’s gonna spill it. And fast. How you comin’ ?”
“I’m digging,” Horner responded. “I’m digging . . . and digging.” He was doing that, all right. The work should have been tremendously tiring, should have exhausted Hugh Horner in his run-down forty-seven-year-old body. But he found it almost exhilarating. He looked at his hands. Dirty hands, and bloody. But large—larger than they should have been. Horner had had small hands, almost delicate hands. He dug and dug, thinking.
Either it was another reserprine dream—or he wasn’t Hugh Horner.
Then was he the man whom he’d selected—more or less at random? But that wasn’t possible, for the man in question had been in the Bodies, Inc. establishment on Long Island—unless, somehow, that had merely been a projected image of the man, like three-dimensional television. Then . . . where was he?
“Want me to take over, Lonnie?” demanded the harsh whisper. For the first time, Horner realized that it was not close by. It was a loud whisper and it came from a considerable ways off. Wanting time to think, Horner said, “Yes. All right.”
He backed out of the tunnel slowly, awkwardly, his body stiff. Stiff, but not painful. Hugh Horner’s limbs would have ached terribly in this cramped position, but Lonnie’s did not. Lonnie scurried more rapidly now—backwards and not minding it at all—out of the tunnel. The walls of the tunnel, Horner observed, were of bare soft earth. If his elbows or knees struck them, some of the earth sifted down, and sometimes a rock. He had the sudden impression that the tunnel had been dug over a considerable period of time with crude implements or by hand.
Finally, Horner emerged into a small square room. There were two bunks, one over the other, he observed as he stood up. The walls were bare plaster. There was a sink and a lidless toilet. There was a small mirror. Only three of the walls were plaster. The fourth consisted of a grim row of vertical bars.
He was in a prison cell.
He gazed about wildly. He wanted to scream. He didn’t understand how this could be, but understanding was decidedly secondary. He looked at his bloody hands. It was his own blood—Lonnie’s, that is—but it was symbolic to him. A man was sitting on the edge of one of the bunks, smoking. He was watching Horner. He was a short man with immense shoulders. He wore gray denim and Horner did not have to be told it was a prison uniform or that his clothing was identical.
Somehow, Horner had traded places—identities!—with a convict.
“ ‘Samatter, Lonnie? What you staring at?”
“Nothing. Nothing, I guess.” Horner went on staring. The other man’s name was Jake, he knew that all at once. He knew other things. Other memories came flooding back . . . not his memories. Lonnie’s. Because he was Lonnie now. His mind was numb. Numb. He was Lonnie—Lionel Overman—and he was in jail on a twenty-to-life rap. His behavior, the river of memory told him, had not been exemplary. It would not be twenty years. It would be life.
“What—what am I in for?” he demanded in a soft voice, for that particular memory would not come.
“You’re kidding,” the man named Jake said.
Horner went over to him and grabbed his denim shirt with dirt-and-blood-caked hands. “I asked, what am I in for?”
“Hey, take it easy,” Jake growled. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar. We got other things to think about.”
“Tell me,” Horner said grimly.
Jake looked at him. Jake had the widest shoulders Horner had ever seen. Probably, Jake was incredibly strong. But his shoulders shrugged and he said, “When you get like that, Lonnie, I guess you got to have your way.” He added one word. He added, “Murder.”
“Murder,” Horner said slowly.
“Hell, yeah, murder. Now snap out of it, will you?”
“Murder. Why didn’t they electrocute me?”
“You was young at the time. Twenty, I think. Hey, what’s the matter with you? Will you leave go the shirt so I can go down there?”
“Yes,” Horner said. “Yes, of course.” There was more on the river of memory now. There was Jake. And Lonnie Overman—Horner. And a man named Forbish, another convict. For eighteen months they had been digging.
Digging.
The entrance of their tunnel was concealed behind the toilet. For eighteen months they had kept a model cell and inspections had been only cursory. Eighteen long months.
And tonight, according to the missing Forbish’s calculations, they were ready to strike paydirt. Which, naturally, would make Forbish very bitter. Because now he wasn’t with them. Forbish had been transferred to another cell-block when the three-man cells had been converted to two-man cells. Forbish was a bitter, brooding fellow to begin with. Forbish might be bitter enough to spill everything.
“. . . Don’t forget,” Jake was saying. “We’re close enough now. Forbish knew what he was talking about. I hope to hell you can swim, Lonnie.”
“I can swim.”
“On account of the tunnel lets out near the river, remember? So, don’t forget. The guards come now, it’ll probably be on account of Forbish told them. The guards come now, don’t bother giving me the signal. Just come crawling in and we’ll try to bust through. It got to be no more than inches now. Ain’t that right?”
