They were making final preparations for departure, running a countdown together with awkward formality, when Aybee hurried in.
“Good. Thought mebbe I’d missed you.”
“Four minutes more, you would have.” Sylvia did a poor job of hiding her relief. “Are you coming with us?”
“No way.” Aybee looked around the little cabin in disgust. “I need space, room to shine. You’d have to fold me double to get me in here. It’ll be cozy enough with just you and the Wolfman.”
The tense atmosphere went right by him. He was swinging a square satchel up from his side and opening the clasps. “Talked to old Leo again, and this time we got the problem right. First time, he asked me, How can you track down an input video signal that nobody else can see? I said, Hey, I’ll tell you five ways to do that, but I can’t tell you which one’s being used without more information.”
“Three minutes,” Bey said. “Or we’ll have to start over with a new countdown.”
“Loads of time.” Aybee pulled from the satchel a thin rectangular box, a head-covering helmet, and a whole snake’s nest of wires and electrodes. “Today, the Leo-man tells me we had the problem wrong. He don’t care how the signal gets in your head, he just wants to see it, know what it is drives you crazy. Different deal, right? Lot easier, because who cares if the signal came from outside or if you made up the whole thing? The memory of it’s tucked away somewhere in there.” He gestured at Bey’s head. “So this gadget can pull it out for us.”
Bey eyed the device without enthusiasm. It had a random and unfinished look. “You want me to put that thing over my head? How am I supposed to breathe?”
“Same as usual, in an’ then out. There’s air passages for that. Hey, loosen up. If I wanted to kill you, there’s easier ways.”
“Two minutes,” Sylvia Fernald cut in. “Aybee, we should be in our chairs. You have to leave.”
“Lots of time. Wolfman, don’t you want to know how this works? It’s dead good. See, you start thinking about what you saw—little red bogeymen, whatever. Those memories are stored away somewhere inside your head, scene-perfect. You never forget anything you experience, no one does, you just can’t get at it, not in detail. So this takes your first-cut memory output, feeds it back to you, and asks if it’s a perfect match. If not, it iterates the presentation until there is a match. My algorithm guarantees convergence. And all the time we’re recording what we get. So at the end of a session, we’ve caught whatever you saw—even what you thought you saw, provided there’s detail to it.” He glared at Wolf, who was packing the flexible helmet away into its case. “Hey, what kind of ungrateful bozo are you? I put a lot of work in that. Aren’t you going to try it?”
“Are you saying it may not work?”
“Sure it’ll work, sure as my name’s Apollo Belvedere Smith.”
“Then I’ll use it when we’re on the way to the farm.” Bey pointed at the countdown indicator. “See that? You can look at the results of your work in real time if you don’t get out of here in the next forty seconds. The hatch secures automatically thirty seconds before the drive comes on. You coming with us?”
“No way!” Aybee was jumping for the cabin exit. “Call back and tell us what you get. Leo Manx is itchy, too.” He was gone, but as the other two were moving to the bunks he poked his head back in. “Hey, Wolfman. Did you really rough up those three people last night before you ran into me?”
Bey was strapped in, clutching Aybee’s satchel to his chest. “Just the opposite. I didn’t touch them, but one had a go at my ribs; another trod on my foot. I could show you the bruise.”
“Don’t bother. Yon see one hairy leg, you’ve seen ’em all. But take a look at the news. They say you attacked them, without any warning. You’re getting out of here just in time.”
And so was Aybee. The two passengers heard the outer hatch close no more than two seconds before the siren announced that the drive was being engaged.
Aybee’s last-minute delivery proved a blessing. Bey had attempted conversation with Sylvia again once they were on the way, but she was so obviously upset about something that after a few minutes he took out the flexible helmet, attached the electrodes, and placed the set over his head.
Aybee had not bothered with such details as operating instructions. Bey sat in darkness for a while, wondering if he had omitted to switch it on. He was ready to remove the helmet, but he did not want to confront Sylvia’s anxious face. If the device operated as advertised, he should be concentrating on the clearest memory he had of the Dancing Man. It was easy to bring into mind that tiny figure, coming into view from the left of the screen…
It was like form-change, but with one difference. The compulsion came from outside, not from within his own will. Bey was still conscious, but he had no control over anything. In his mind, the Dancing Man moved across the screen, paused, and moved again. Dance, pause, adjust, reset, dance. Dance, pause, reset, dance. On it went, again and again, each time so little different from the last that Bey could detect no change. Dance, pause, adjust, reset. He tried to count while the act repeated forever, scores of times, hundreds of times, thousands of times. But he could not hold the number in his head. Dance, pause, adjust, reset. An endless, invariant procession of dancing men capering one by one across his field of view, twisting, turning, shuffling backward out of view. They sawed deeper and deeper into his skull, through the protective meningeal sheath, carving into the tender folds of his brain while he was screaming silently for release.
At last it came. The cycle was broken—with stunning abruptness—and the helmet was removed. Bey shuddered back to consciousness and found himself staring up at the frightened eyes of Sylvia Fernald.
“I’m sorry.” She reached out to touch his forehead, then instantly jerked her hand back. “I felt sure you were in trouble. You lay there for so long, and then you started to groan. I was afraid you might be in pain. Were things going wrong?”
Bey put up his hands to cover his eyes. The light had become much too bright, and he had a terrible headache. “I’d say they were, but Aybee might not agree. I think he set the tolerances for convergence of his program too tight. I might have been days trying to reconstruct what I saw. Maybe I never would have gotten there. I could have been in that damned loop forever. Anyway, I’m all right now.” He reached out and took her left hand in his, holding it tightly enough that her reflexive jerk did not free it. “I appreciate what you did, Sylvia. I could never have broken out of that on my own.”
It was done on impulse, but suddenly it became an experiment. How would she react?
She allowed the contact for maybe half a second. Then she firmly pulled away and with her right hand reached across to press a switch on the side of the instrument. There was a click, and a brief buzz of sound. She waited a moment, then touched the front panel.
Bey stared at her. “You know how it works!”
“I looked at it long enough, while you were lying there. And I knew Aybee would keep it simple—he says he wants his work to be like the Cloudland Navy, designed by a genius to be run by idiots. I know which buttons to press, if that makes me an expert.” She paused, her hand still before the flat front panel. “Would you like to see if you got anything? There’s a playback feature; we could put it up on the display screen.”
It was Bey’s turn for anxiety. He wanted to know, didn’t he? Surely he did, after all those months of worry. But he also felt uneasy, the same subliminal discomfort he had experienced when he learned that Mary was sending him a message from beyond the Moon.