"It was just a rhetorical question," he said. "Well, well! Do you know, for some reason, I have a feelimig, a hunch, that I'll see her again."
"That seems to make you happy," the psychicist said, "though I don't know why. You must know that there is not the remotest possibility that you'll ever see her again. Hunches sheer superstition."
"Perhaps hunches are the output of a sort of biological computer inside a person," Caird said. "The computer calculates all future probabilities and their chances of happening. And it comes up with a high probability for an event that a humanmade computer would rate as low. But the flesh-and-blood computer has more data than the human-made one."
"The human-made doesn't have hope in its circuitry," the psychicist said. "Hope isn't data. It's an irrelevant electromagnetic field."
"Irrelevant? Nothing is irrelevant in this tightly interconnected universe. However ..
He was silent for a few seconds, then said, "I heard, don't ask me from whom, your efforts to keep me incommunicado have not been completely successful ... I heard that the news shows said nothing about the age-slowing bacteria when they reported the trials."
The psychicist betrayed nothing on her face, but she paled slightly. She said, "How could you have heard anything? And what bacteria are you talking about? Is this some more of your nonsense?"
He smiled and said, "No one told me. I just made that up about hearing it from someone. I wanted to see your reaction. I wanted to find out if what I've suspected is true. You might as well tell me the truth. I can't pass it on to anybody. I know that every immer who was questioned told all about the elixir. That revelation would have to be passed on to the higher-ups. But I believe that it got no further than the interrogators and their superiors, and, of course, the world council. The news about it was suppressed."
The psychicist, who had become even paler, told the monitoring strip to back up the display. Having stopped it at the point where he had asked her about the bacteria, she erased all of the recording from that point forward. Then she turned the strip off.
"You think you're so clever!" she said. "You fool! You're asking to be stoned immediately!"
"What's the difference?" he said. "I've known all along that I will never be released as cured. None of us immers will be. The government will go through the legal procedures, keep us long enough to fulfill the law, then announce that we're incurable, and stone us. We'll be put away where we'll never be found.
"The government has to do that. It can't release us when it knows that we know all about the elixir. At the end of the minimum period for us 'mentally unbalanced' to be 'cured,' we go into the stoners. I've got two more submonths to live, if you can call this near-solitary confinement living. Two more months, unless the government gets uneasy and decides to stone us at once. It could do that. It could easily cover up its illegal action."
"You don't know what you're talking about!"
"Sure, I do. You know I do. You must also know, if you've any intelligence, that you're in almost as much danger as I am. The best way for the government officials who know about this to keep you silent is to offer you the elixir, too. But they must be wondering if you can keep it to yourself. Won't you want your husband, your children, all whom you love to age as slowly as you will? Won't you be strongly tempted to get it for them? Won't you ask for it for them? And what will you do if you're refused?
"They can't afford to take a chance with you. They want the elixir for themselves, a very select group, I imagine. They haven't told the public, and they won't. The social and political and you-name-it consequences would be too great. No, they're keeping it a secret, making the same mistake that Immerman did. And you and all those others who interrogated the immers and are now their keepers are dangerous to the elite, the new immers!
"The main difference between the old and the new was that my people, at least, wanted to change the government for the better!"
The psychicist sat down and looked past Caird as if she were trying to see the future. Caird felt sorry for her, but he had had to test her to determine if his suspicions were valid. That they 'were was evident.
"Maybe we'd better talk about both of us getting out of here," he said.
The psychicist stood up. Her voice shaking slightly, she said, "I don't deal with traitors." She called to a strip, and the door opened at once. Two huge male attendants entered.
"Take him to his room," she said. "And make sure that he doesn't talk to anybody on the way. Make sure!"
"I'll go quietly," Caird said. "But think about what I've said. You may not have much time to do that."
When he returned to his small but comfortably furnished room, Caird sat down. He stared at the blank wall strips as if he was trying to conjure displays of the future on them. Probably, the psychicist was doing the same in her office. But he could not depend upon her to do anything that might help him. She would be thinking of her own self-survival. Meanwhile, she would be going through the routine of therapy sessions with him. He would be going through the same mechanical business until she disappeared, having been taken away by the organics or having broken day in a frenzied effort to escape.
Next Tuesday, if events went as on many Tuesdays, he would breathe the truth mist. And he would be asked if he had thought of any way to escape.
He would reply that he had. He was hoping that he could get the psychicist to help him. That was all. He had no other plan, and that one was almost hopeless.
He sighed. Why hadn't he thought of many ways to get out of here? Any prisoner would have concocted a score of plans for escape. Any prisoner. But he had thought of only one and that had been this morning before he went to the psychicist and he had expected nothing from it. It had seemed to him more of an amusement than anything.
The psychicist had said that his lack of escape plans was puzzling her.
He was also puzzled.
Chapter 35
There was a place where there was no illumination but there was light. Yet it could be said that there was no light but that there was illumination.
There was no time there unless a clock with one hand could be said to mark time. That hand did not move. It was waiting for time to strike it. Not just time. The time.
There was in that place which was many places a creature that had no shape. Yet it looked exactly like Jeff Caird and exactly like the others.
It had no name. It was waiting for the right time to choose one.
It could be said that it had no parts yet was a sum.
Formed on Tuesday, it had lived its short life in Tuesday only. Yet it looked forward to moving through seven weekdays in a row again.
It had all the thoughts about escape that Caird should have had. It knew how to break out from the escape-proof institution and how it would get to the forests across the Hudson River.
Yet Caird had grown it and had encysted it except for one channel. Through this channel, it had siphoned off thoughts of escape as swiftly as they had come to Caird. It cut off the channel when Caird was subjected to the truth drug, and it switched the channel back on when the drug had worn off.
It had also siphoned off, neurally speaking, all the thoughts that Caird had had when, long ago, he was planning this thing of no time, no shape, and no name.
The government would sound the alarm and notify all relevant authorities when it discovered that he had escaped. But its identification of the fugitive would be wrong. The thing, which had become a man, would not be the prisoner known as Jefferson Cervantes Caird.