The Air of Castor Oil, Jim Harmon [ebook reader color screen .txt] 📗

forward a step.

It brought me halfway through the screen, halfway through the wall at the base of the building. The other side of the screen. The solid side, I found, stepping through, bracing a hand on the image.

Looking up fourteen floors, I saw an unbroken line of peacefully closed panes.

I remembered riding up in the elevator, the moments inside, the faint feeling of vertigo. Of course, who was to say the elevator really moved? Maybe they had only switched scenery on me while I was caught inside, listening to the phony hum, seeing the flashing lights. Either cut down or increase the oxygen supply inside the cubicle suddenly and that would contribute a sensation of change, of movement. They had it all worked out.

My fingers rubbed my head briskly, both hands working, trying to get some circulation in my brain.

I guessed I had to run. There didn't seem much else to do.

I ran.

Get help?

Not this old lady and her daughter. Not this Neanderthal sailor on his way to a bar and a blonde. Not the bookkeeper. Maybe the car salesman, ex-Army, Lions Club member, beefy, respectable, well-intentioned, not a complete fool. The guy on the corner reading a newspaper by the bus stop.

"I need help," I panted to him. "Somebody's trying to kidnap me."

"Really makes you sick to hear about something like that, doesn't it?" he said. "I'm in favor of the Lindbergh Law myself."

"I'm not sure whether—"

"This heat is murder, isn't it? Especially here in these concrete canyons. Sometimes I wish I was back in Springfield. Cool, shaded streets...."

"Listen to me! These people, they're conspiring against me, trying to drive me insane! Two men, a girl—"

"For my money, Marilyn Monroe is the doll of the world. I just don't understand these guys who say she hasn't got class. She gets class by satirizing girls without any...."

He was like anybody you might talk to on the street. I knew what he would say if I cued him with "baseball" or "Russia" instead of the key words I had used.

I should have known better, but I wanted to touch him in some way, make him know I was alive. I grabbed him and shook him by the shoulders, and there was a whoosh and as I might have expected he collapsed like the insubstantiality he was.

There was a stick figure of a man left before me, an economical skeleton supporting the shell of a human being and two-thirds of a two-trouser suit.

Hide.

I went into the first shop I came to—Milady's Personals.

Appropriately, it was a false front.

A neutral-colored gray surface, too smooth for concrete, stretched away into some shadows. The area was littered with trash.

Cartons, bottles, what looked like the skin of a dehydrated human being—obviously, on second thought, only the discarded skin of one of the things like the one I had deflated.

And a moldering pile of letters and papers.

Something caught my eye and I kicked through them. Yes, the letter I had written to my brother in Sioux Falls, unopened. And which he had answered.

My work.

The work I had done at the agency, important, creative work. There was my layout, the rough of the people with short, slim glasses, the parents, children, grandparents, the caption: Vodka is a Part of the American Tradition.

All of it lying here to rot.

Something made me look away from that terrible trash.

Sergeant stood in the entrance of Milady's, something bright in his hand.

Something happened.

I had been wrong.

The shining instrument had not been a hypodermic needle.

"You're tough," Sergeant said as I eased back into focus.

"You aren't, not without help," I told him in disgust.

"Spunky, aren't you? I meant mental toughness. That's the one thing we can never judge. I think you could have taken the shock right from the start. Of course, you would still have needed the conditioning to integrate properly."

"Conditioning? Conditioning?" It came out of me, vortexing up, outside of my piloting. "What have you done to my mind?"

"We've been trying to get it to grow back up," Sergeant said reasonably. "Think of this. Fountain of Youth. Immortality. Rejuvenation. This is it. Never mind how it works. Most minds can't stand being young and knowing they will have to go through the same damned thing all over again. We use synapse-shift to switch your upper conscious memories to your id and super-ego, leaving room for new memories. You remember only those things out of the past you have to, to retain your identity."

"Identity," I repeated. "I have no identity. My identity is a dream. I have two identities—one of them years beyond the other."

Sergeant tilted his head and his eyes at me and slapped me across the face. "Don't go back on me now. We gave you the best we could. The Rejuvenation Service couldn't help it if you were too old for a beta. You shouldn't have waited until you were so old, so very old. We used the very oldest sets and mock-ups we had for betas, but you, you had to keep wandering onto alpha territory, while they were striking sets, even. Beta or not, we gave you good service. Don't slip now."

I heard the voice and I heard another voice, and it said "What could you expect of a beta?" and they were only some of the voices I was hearing, and I wondered what you could expect from a beta, and I didn't know, or think that I would ever know.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Air of Castor Oil, by Jim Harmon