The nurse said impatiently, “Golly, whatever you want, I guess. They’ve got a big call for miners operating the deep gas generators right now, if you want that. It’s pretty hot, is all. They burn the coal into gas, and of course you’re right in the middle of it. But I don’t think you feel much. Not too much. I don’t know about sailing or rocketing, because you have to have some experience for that. There might be something with the taxi company, but I ought to tell you usually the renters don’t want that, because the live drivers don’t like seeing the machines running cabs. Sometimes if they see a machine-cab they tip it over. Naturally, if there’s any damage to the host machine it’s risky for you.”
Pulcher said faintly, “I’ll try mining.”
He went out of the room in a daze, a small bleached towel around his middle his only garment and hardly aware of that. His own clothes had been whisked away and checked long ago. The tourist who would shortly wear his body would pick his own clothes; the haberdashery was one of the more profitable subsidiaries of the Tourist Agency.
Then he snapped out of his daze as he discovered what was meant by “the squeeze.”
A pair of husky experts lifted him onto a slab, whisked away the towel, unlocked and tossed away the handcuffs. While one pinned him down firmly at the shoulders, the other began to turn viselike wheels that moved molded forms down upon him. It was like a sectional sarcophagus closing in on him. Pulcher had an instant childhood recollection of some story or other-the walls closing in, the victim inexorably squeezed to death. He yelled, “Hey, hold it! What are you doing?”
The man at his head, bored, said, “Oh, don’t worry. This your first time? We got to keep you still, you know. Scanning’s close work.”
“But-”
“Now shut up and relax,” the man said reasonably. “If you wiggle when the tracer’s scanning you you could get your whole personality messed up. Not only that, we might damage the body an’ then the Agency’d have a suit on its hands, see? Tourists don’t like damaged bodies. . . - Come on, Vince. Get the legs lined up so I can do the head.”
“But-” said Pulcher again, and then, with effort, relaxed. It was only for twenty-four hours, after all. He could stand anything for twenty-four hours, and he had been careful to sign up for only that long. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s only for twenty-four hours.”
“What? Oh, sure, friend. Lights out, now; have a pleasant dream.”
And something soft but quite firm came down over his face.
He heard a muffled sound of voices. Then there was a quick ripping feeling, as though he had been plucked out of some sticky surrounding medium.
Then it hurt.
Pulcher screamed. It didn’t accomplish anything, he no longer had a voice to scream with.
Funny, he had always thought of mining as something that was carried on underground. He was under water. There wasn’t any doubt of it. He could see vagrant eddies of sand moving in a current; he could see real fish, not the hydrogen Zeppelins of the air; he could see bubbles, arising from some source of the sand at his feet- No! Not at his feet. He didn’t have feet. He had tracks.
A great steel bug swam up in front of him and said raspingly, “All right, you there, let’s go.” Funny again. He didn’t hear the voice with ears-he didn’t have ears, and there was no stereophonic sense-but he did, somehow, hear. It seemed to be speaking inside his brain. Radio? Sonar? “Come on!” growled the bug.
Experimentally Pulcher tried to talk. “Watch it!” squeaked a thin little voice, and a tiny, many-treaded steel beetle squirmed out from under his tracks. It paused to rear back and look at him. “Dope!” it chattered scathingly. A bright flame erupted from its snout as it squirmed away.
The big bug rasped, “Go on, follow the burner, Mac.” Pulcher thought of walking, rather desperately. Yes. Something was happening. He lurched and moved. “Oh, God,” sighed the steel bug, hanging beside him, watching with critical attention. “This your first time? I figured. They always give me the new ones to break in. Look, that burner-the little thing that just went down the mine, Mac! That’s a burner. It’s going to burn the hard rock out of a new shaft. You follow it and pull the sludge out. With your buckets, Mac.”
Pulcher gamely started his treads and lurchingly followed the little burner. All around him, visible through the churned, silty water, he caught glimpses of other machines working. There were big ones and little ones, some with great elephantine flexible steel trunks that sucked silt and mud away, some with wasp’s stingers that planted charges of explosive, some like himself with buckets for hauling and scooping out pits. The mine, whatever sort of mine it was to be, was only a bare scratched-out beginning on the sea floor as yet. It took him-an hour? a minute? he had no means of telling time-to learn the rudiments of operating his new steel body.
Then it became boring.
Also it became painful. The first few scoops of sandy grime he carried out of the new pit made his buckets tingle. The tingle became a pain, the pain an ache, the ache a blazing agony. He stopped. Something was wrong. They couldn’t expect him to go on like this! “Hey, Mac. Get busy, will you?”
“But it hurts.”
“Goddamighty, Mac, it’s supposed to hurt. How else would you be able to feel when you hit something hard? You want to break your buckets on me, Mac?” Pulcher gritted his-not-teeth, squared his- not-shoulders, and went back to digging. Ultimately the pain became, through habit, bearable. It didn’t become less. It just became bearable.
It was boring, except when once he did strike a harder rock than his phospher-bronze buckets could handle, and had to slither back out of the way while the burner chopped it up for him. But that was the only break in the monotony. Otherwise the work was strictly routine. It gave him plenty of time to think.
This was not altogether a boon.
I wonder, he thought with a drowned clash of buckets, I wonder what my body is doing now.
Perhaps the tenant who now occupied his body was a businessman, Pulcher thought prayerfully. A man who had had to come to Altair Nine quickly, on urgent business-get a contract signed, make a trading deal, arrange an interstellar loan. That wouldn’t be so bad! A businessman would not damage a rented property. No. At the worst, a businessman might drink one or two cocktails too many, perhaps eat an indigestible lunch. All right. So when-in surely only a few hours now-Pulcher resumed his body, the worst he could expect would be a hangover or dyspepsia. Well, what of that? An aspirin. A dash of bicarb.
But maybe the tourist would not be a businessman.
Pulcher flailed the coarse sand with his buckets and thought apprehensively: He might be a sportsman. Still, even that wouldn’t be so bad. The tourist might walk his body up and down a few dozen mountains, perhaps even sleep it out in the open overnight. There might be a cold, possibly even pneumonia. Of course, there might also be an accident-tourists did fall off the Dismal Hills; there could be a broken leg. But that was not too bad, it was only a matter of a few days rest, a little medical attention.
But maybe, Pulcher thought grayly, ignoring the teeming agony of his buckets, maybe the tenant will be something worse.
He had heard queer, smutty stories about female tenants who rented male bodies. It was against the law. But you kept hearing the stories. He had heard of men who wanted to experiment with drugs, with drink, with-with a thousand secret, sordid lusts of the flesh. All of them were unpleasant. And yet in a rented body, where the ultimate price of dissipation would be borne by someone else, who might not try one of them? For there was no physical consequence to the practitioner. If Mrs. Lasser was right, perhaps there was not even a consequence in the hereafter.