But the feeling had passed. The pain had blotted out the need to vomit.
I looked at Dinnie. She grinned back. And in that moment, I resented her all over again. For her presumption of such familiarity. And then I felt guilty for resenting her when I owed her so much. And then I resented her for making me feel guilty.
"How are you feeling now?"
I took inventory. "I feel like shit."
"Right. You look like it too." She got up then and went to the door and whistled. "Hey, Fido-!"
A ROVER unit trundled in then and wheeled up to the bed. She plucked a handful of sensors out of the basket on top-they looked like poker chips-and started sticking them to various points on my chest and forehead, neck and arms. "Three for EKG, three for EEG, two for pressure and pulse, two for the pathologist, one for accounting and an extra one for luck," she said, reciting the nurse's mnemonic.
"Accounting?" I asked.
"Sure. It automatically checks your credit rating while you're lying there, so we know how much to charge."
"Uh, yeah."
She turned to the ROVER unit and studied its screen. "Well, bad news for your enemies. You'll live. But a word of advice: next time you try to make love to a Chtorran, you be the boy. You're a lot safer on top."
She peeled off the sensors then and dropped them back into the basket. "I'll leave you now. Can you fall asleep by yourself, or do you want a buzz-box?"
I shook my head.
"Terrif. I'll be back with your breakfast."
And then I was alone again. With my thoughts. I had a lot to think about. But I fell asleep before I could sort things out.
THIRTY-SIX
I WAS back in Whitlaw's classroom.
I felt panicky. I hadn't studied for the test-I didn't even know there was to be one. And this was the final exam!
I looked around. There were people here I didn't know, but as I looked at them, their faces solidified into familiarity. Shorty, Duke, Ted, Lizard, Marcie, Colonel Wallachstein, the Japanese lady, the dark fellow, Dinnie, Dr. Fromkin, Paul Jastrow, Maggie, Tim, Mark-and Dad. And then a lot of other people I didn't recognize. A little too many.
Whitlaw was in front of the room, making sounds. They didn't make sense. I stood up and said so. He looked at me. They all looked at me. I was in the front of the classroom and Whitlaw was in my seat.
A little girl in a brown dress was sitting in the front row. Next to her, just sliding up, a gigantic orange and red Chtorran. He turned his blackeyed gaze to me and seemed to settle down to listen.
"C'mon, Jim!" Whitlaw hollered. "We're waiting!"
I was angry. I didn't know why. "All right," I said. "Listen, I know I'm a screwup and an asshole. That part is obvious. But, see, what I've been doing is assuming that the rest of you aren't. I mean, here I am listening to you people making noises like you know what you're doing, and I've been believing you! What an asshole I am! The truth is, you people don't know what you're doing either-not any more than I do-so what I'm telling you is that my experience is just as valid, or just as invalid, as yours. But whatever it is, it's my experience, and I'm the one who's going to be responsible for it."
They applauded. Whitlaw raised his hand. I pointed at him. He stood up. "It's about time," he said. He sat down.
"You're the worst, Whitlaw!" I said. "You're so good at pouring your bullshit into other people's heads that it keeps floating to the top for years afterward. I mean, you gave us all these great belief systems about how to live our lives and then when we tried to plug into them, they didn't work. All they did was create inappropriate behavior."
Whitlaw said, "You know better than that. I never gave you a belief system. What I gave you was the ability to be independent of a belief system, so you could deal with the facts as they happened to you."
"Yeah? So how come every time I try to do that, you come in and give me another lecture?"
Whitlaw said, "If you've been inviting me into your head and letting me run my lectures on you, that's your fault. It isn't me who's doing that. It's you. You're the one running those lectures. I'm dead, Jim. I've been dead for two years. You know that. So quit asking me for advice. You're living in a world I know nothing about. Quit asking me for advice and you'll be a helluva lot better off. Or ask me for advice, if it's advice you want-and if it isn't appropriate, then ignore it. Get this, asshole: advice isn't the same as orders; it's only another option for a person to consider. All it's supposed to do is widen your perspective on the thing you're looking at. Use it that way. But don't blame me if you don't know how to listen."
"Must you always be right?" I asked. "Sometimes it gets awfully annoying."
Whitlaw shrugged. "Sorry, son. But that's the way you keep creating me."
He was right. Again. He always would be. Because that was how I would always create him.
There were no other hands. "Then we're clear? I'm running this life from now on? Right."
I looked at the little girl in the brown dress. She didn't have a face. And then she did. It was Marcie's face ... and Jillanna's face ... and Lizard's face....
I turned to the Chtorran. "I have some questions for you," I said.
It nodded its eyes, and then looked into my face again. "Who are you?" I asked.
The Chtorran spoke in a voice like a whisper. "I don't know," it said. "Yet."
"What are you? Are you intelligent? Or what? Are you the invaders? Or the shock troops?"
Again the Chtorran said, "I don't know."
"What about the dome? Why was there a fourth Chtorran inside?"
The Chtorran waved its eyes from side to side, the Chtorran equivalent of a headshake. "I don't know," it said, and its voice was louder. Like the wind.
"How did you get here? Where are your spaceships?" "I don't know!" it said. And it was roaring now. "How can we talk to you-?"
"I DON'T KNOW!" And it was raising up in front of me as if to attack
"I AM IN CHARGE HERE!" I bellowed right back at him. "AND I WANT SOME ANSWERS!"
"I DON'T KNOW!!" the Chtorran shrieked-and exploded into a thousand flaming pieces, destroying himself, destroying me, destroying the little girl sitting next to him, the classroom, Whitlaw, Shorty, all the people, everything-dropping it all into darkness....
THIRTY-SEVEN
TED WAS sitting in the chair, looking at me. His head was bandaged.
"Did it get you too?" I asked.
"Did what get me?"
"The Chtorran. Your head is bandaged-did the Chtorran get you too?"
He grinned. "Jim, it's Wednesday. I just had my surgery this morning. They wouldn't let me in to see you before this."
"What surgery?" And then I remembered-"Oh!"-and came awake. "Wednesday?" I started to sit up, found I couldn't, and fell back into the bed. "Wednesday? Really?"
"Yup."
"Have I been unconscious for three days?"
"No more than usual," Ted said. "You know, with you it's hard to tell sometimes." Then, seeing my expression, he added, "You've been floating in and out. You've also been heavily drugged. So's most everybody else. They've had so many casualties to treat that they just plugged everybody into their beds and kept them on maintenance. You're one of the first to wake up. I had to pull a few strings to do that. I wanted to have a chance to see you-to say goodbye."
"Goodbye?"
He touched the bandage around his head. "See? I had my surgery. They did the implant. I'm in the Telepathy Corps now. My transfer became official when the implant went in."
"Is it working? Are you receiving?"
Ted shook his head. "Not yet. Not for a while. First I have to go through a two-week training to learn how to experience myself more intensely. But I'm already sending. They're continually recording me, calibrating my connections and storing my sense of self so I won't lose touch with who I really am, all that kind of stuff. It gets very complex. The training is designed to rehabilitate your ability to experience. Do you know we spend most of our lives being unconscious, Jim? Before you can be a telepath, you have to wake up-it's like having a bucket of ice water thrown in your face. But it's incredible!"