To Live Again and The Second Trip Read Online Free PDF Page B

their place of repose. He put his hands to his forehead. I’m sorry, friends, he told the three captive souls beneath his scalp. We’ll all relax on Saturday. I’m genuinely sorry about this.
    Damn Roditis!
    Kaufmann turned back to the ticker. The market was rallying, but now the utilities were weak. He scanned the tape, made a quick velocity projection of Pacific Coast Power, and went five thousand shares short at 43. Moments later it came across the tape on high volume at 45%. Not my day, Kaufmann thought, and covered his sale for a rapid loss. Not my day at all.

3
    C HARLES NOYES AWOKE SLOWLY , reluctantly, fighting the return to the waking world. He lay alone in a bed that was just barely long enough for his lanky body. His arms twitched; his eyelids fluttered. Morning was here. Time to rise, time to toil. He fought it.
    —Come on, you cowardly bastard, said James Kravchenko within his mind. Wake up!
    Noyes moaned. He jammed his eyelids together. “Let me alone.”
    —Up, up, up! Greet the morning’s glow.
    “You aren’t supposed to talk to me, Kravchenko. You’re just supposed to be there.”
    —Look, I didn’t ask to be pushed into your brain. Anytime you’d like to let me out, you know where to go.
    “You don’t mean that. You’re only bluffing. You want to stay right where you are, Kravchenko. Until you can take me over entirely, and run me like a puppet.”
    Kravchenko did not reply. Several minutes passed, and the persona remained silent. Once again Noyes considered getting out of bed, but waited, convinced that Kravchenko would nag him again, and willing to arise only when nagged. But in the continued silence he knew the onus was on him to get their shared body up. He pushed back the covers and disconnected the night monitor.
    Beside his bed lay the deadly flask of carniphage. Noyes eyed it tenderly. His first thought upon arising, like his last at night, was of suicide. No. Duicide. When he went, he would take Kravchenko with him. He picked up the flask and cradled it in his hand, stroking it with affection.
    Within the fragile container lay a lethal quantity of beta-13 viral DNA, a replicative molecule whose action it was to persuade the cells of the body to release autolytic enzymes, certain acid hydrolases, from the lysosomes or “suicide bags” within themselves. Moments after ingestion, the carniphage created such a cascading wave of autolysis that the body literally fell apart; cell death was general and consecutive, and as each cell in turn succumbed to the flow of fatality, the carniphage devoured it. It was a swift but unusually agonizing way to die, since the body turned to slime from the digestive tract outward, and as much as eight or ten minutes might pass before the nerve centers were no longer able to register the pain of dissolution. But the splendor of the poison lay in its total irreversibility. There was no known antidote, nor even a conceivable one; neither could a stomach pump or any sort of similar device halt the process once it had begun to affect even a few cells. Let that cascade of destruction begin, and the victim was irrevocably doomed. Noyes sometimes thought of it as the Humpty Dumpty effect.
    He set the carniphage down.
    —Go on, gulp it, why don’t you!
    “Very funny, Kravchenko.”
    —I mean it. Do you think you frighten me, waving that suicide juice around? I’ll get a new body soon enough, once you’re gone. Maybe you’ll be right in there with me, when I’m transplanted the second time.
    Noyes reached for the flask.
    —Just put it to your lips and go crunch. It’s easy.
    “No, damn you! I’ll do it when I want to. Not to amuse you!”
    It seemed to him that he heard Kravchenko’s ghostly laughter. Putting the flask aside again, Noyes shed his nightclothes and began his morning rituals.
    Religious observance. He reached for the Bardo. Untold generations of Episcopalian ancestors whirred like turbines in their New England tombs as the last and least