Although those centuries had sped by tracelessly for Forrester, they represented real time to the world of men: each century a hundred years, every year 365 days of twenty-four hours each.
Of all that had happened during those centuries, Forrester had managed to learn only the smallest smattering. He had not learned, even yet, what powers this century could pack into a wisp of gas. Playing with the studs of his joymaker or submitting to the whims of his friends, Forrester had tasted a variety of intoxicants and euphorics, wake-up jolts and sleepy jolts. But he had never before tasted the jolt that drugged no senses but sharpened them all. Now he stood in this room, Taiko on one side of him and Adne in the circle of his arm, surrounded by half a hundred other men and women; and he was fully awake and sensing for the first time in his life.
He turned to look at Adne. Her face was scrubbed bare, her eyes were looking at him unwinkingly. “You’re nasty inside,” she said.
What she said was the exact equivalent of a slap in the face, and Forrester accepted it as such. A cleansing anger filled his mind, He growled, “You’re a trollop. I think your children are illegitimate, too.” He had not intended to say anything of the sort.
Taiko said, “Shut up and crawl.”
Over his shoulder and without passion, Forrester said, “You’re a two-bit phony without an ounce of principle or a thought in your head. Butt out, will you?”
To his surprise, Adne was nodding in agreement; but she said, “Pure kamikaze, just like the trash you come from. Vulgar and a fool.” He hesitated, and she said impatiently, “Come on, kamikaze. Let it out. You’re jealous too, right?”
Theirs was not the only argument going on; there was a bitter rumble of insult and vituperation all around them. Forrester was only marginally aware of it; his whole attention was concentrated on Adne, on the girl he had thought he might be in love with, and his best efforts were devoted to trying to hurt her. He snapped, “I bet you’re not even pregnant!”
She looked startled. “What?”
“All that talk about picking a name! You probably just wanted to trick me into marrying you.”
She stared at him blankly, then with revulsion. “Sweat! I meant our reciprocal name. Charles, you talk like an idiot.”
Taiko shrilled, “You’re both idiots! Crawl.”
Forrester spared him a glance. Curiously, Taiko was down on his knees and for the first time Forrester realized that the floor was damp—not damp, muddy. A thin gruel of softly oozing mud was pouring in from apertures in the wall. Others were getting down into the mud, too; and, for possibly the thousandth time since being taken from the freezer, Forrester found himself torn between two choices of puzzles to try to solve. What was going on here, exactly? And what the devil did Adne mean by “our” name?
But she tugged at him impatiently, slipping down to wallow in the porridgy substance. “Come on,” she cried. “You’re not doing it right, but come on, you sweaty kamikaze.”
All the while the air was being recharged with the stimulant, if it was a stimulant, that had opened the gates of his senses for Forrester. It was like LSD, he thought, or a super-Benzedrine: he was seeing a whole new spectrum; hearing bat shrieks and subsonic roars; smelling, tasting, feeling things that had been out of his reach before. He perceived clearly that this was some sort of organized ritual he was in, understood that its purpose was to allow the release of tensions by saying whatever the inner mind had wanted to say and the outer censor in the brain had forbidden. Allow it? He could not stop it! He listened to the things he was saying to Adne and realized that, at a later time, in an undrugged moment, he would be appalled. But he said them.
And she nodded gravely and replied in kind. “Jealous!” she shrieked. “Typical manipulative ownership! Filthy inside, trashy!”
“Why shouldn’t I be jealous? I loved you.”
“Harem love!” sneered Taiko from beside him. The man was lying full length in the mud now—it had reached a depth of several inches and seemed to have stopped there. “She’s a brainless blot of passions, but she’s human, and how dare you try to own her?”
“Fake!” howled Forrester. “Go pretend you’re a man! Bust up some machines!” He was furious, but in one part of his mind he was alert enough and analytical enough to be surprised that he wasn’t impelled to hit Taiko. Or Adne, for that matter. What he was impelled to do was to say wounding things, as true and hurtful as he could make them. He looked around him and saw that he was the only one still on his feet. The others were all full-length in the mud, writhing and creeping. Forrester dropped to his knees. “What’s this damn foolishness all about?” he demanded.
“Shut up and crawl,” grunted Taiko. “Get some of the animal out of you.” And Adne chimed in, “You’re spoiling it for all of us if you don’t crawl! You have to crawl before you can walk.”
Forrester leaned down to her. “I don’t want to crawl!”
“Have to. Helps you get out the rot. The secrets that fester . . . Of course, you kamikazes like to decay.”
“But I don’t have—”
And Forrester paused, not because he had voluntarily chosen to stop talking just then, but because what he had been about to say was not true, and he simply could not say it. He had been about to say that he had no secrets.
He had, in fact, more secrets than he could count; and one very large one that appalled him, because his mouth wanted to blurt it out even while his brain screamed No!
If he stayed in this room one more moment, Forrester knew, he would shout at the top of his voice the fact that he had been the one to help the Sirian escape and thus had made it a good gambling bet that the whole world of men would be destroyed. Dripping mud, panting, mumbling to himself, Forrester climbed to his feet and forced himself to run—a staggering, broken-field run that dodged flailing limbs and leaped over writhing bodies, that carried him through the angry rumble of the crawlers and out into a dressing chamber, where he was sluiced down with fragrant spray, dried with warm blasts of air, and bathed in hot light. Fresh garments appeared before him, but he took no pleasure in them. He had forgotten for a moment, but now he remembered again.
He was the man who had destroyed Earth. At any moment he would be found out. . . . And what his punishment might be, he dared not think.
“Man Forrester,” cried the voice of a joymaker, “during the period of interrupted service, a number of messages accumulated for you, of which the following three priority calls are urgent.”
“Wait up,” said Forrester, startled. But there it was. Rummaging through the neatly folded heap of T-shirt and Turkish pants, he came upon the macelike shape of a joymaker. “Ho,” he said. “I’ve got you again, eh?”
“Yes, Man Forrester,” the joymaker agreed. “Will you receive your messages?”
“Um,” said Forrester. Then, cautiously, “Well, I will if any of them are of great urgency at this very moment. I mean, I don’t want somebody coming in here and blowing my brains out while I’m talking to you.”
“No such probability is evident,” said the joymaker primly. “Nevertheless, Man Forrester, there are a number of highly important messages.”
Forrester sat down on a warmed bench and sighed. He said meditatively, “The thing is this, joymaker. I never seem to get to the end of a question, because two new questions pop up while I’m still trying to find the answer to the first one. So what I would like to do right now, I would like you to get me a cup of black coffee and a pack of cigarettes, right here in this nice, warm, safe room, and then I would like to drink the coffee and smoke a cigarette and ask you some questions. Now, can I do that without dying for it?”