"That's what a weevil sees," the older woman with the dough-like folded face-rolls said in a cross, nagging, fretful voice, as if discussing the subject made her suffer the reoccurrence of some hated osteogenetic twinge. "Some are just dreadful; it's a terrible, terrible crime that they're allowed to get away with it, programming us with that as we're on our way over here. And of course we were assured by those Telpor technicians that nothing, absolutely nothing of this sort could possibly happen." Her voice, shrill and accusing, tormented Rachmael's brain, amplified by the drug; the auditory pain became a fire-sheet, white, brittle, cutting, whirling like a circular saw and he put his hands up to shield his ears.
"For chrissakes," Hank Szantho said angrily, and his voice, also, reverberated hideously, but at a low pitch, like the shifting of the earth below during a major H-head excavation detonation catastrophically close. "Don't blame the Telpor people; blame the fruggin' Mazdasts — it's their fault. Right?" He glowered around at all of them, no longer amiable and easy-going but instead harsh, threatening them with his suspicious, wrathful attention. "Go cut the eye-lense out of a Mazdast. If you can find one. If you can get close enough." His gaze, rotating from person to person, fell on Rachmael, stopped; for an interval he contemplated him, with a mixture of scorn, outrage, and — compassion. By degrees his indignation ebbed, then was entirely gone. "It's tough, isn't it, Applebaum? It's no joke. Tell all these people; you saw it, didn't you? I heard you telling Sheila. Yeah." He sighed noisily, the wind escaping from him as if the knot of life which regulated the retention of vital oxygen had all at once unraveled itself out of existence. "Some get a mechanical-construct mysticomimetism; we call that The Clock."
" 'The Clock,' " Gretchen Borbman murmured, nodding somberly. "That one really isn't there; I don't believe that ever existed, and anyhow it'd just be like encountering a simulacrum, only hypnagogic in origin. A balanced person ought to recover from that without having to go through the class." She added, obviously to herself, "The goddam class. The goddam unending pointless disgusting class; jesus, I hate it." She glared swiftly, furiously, around the room. "Who's the Control, today? You, Sheila? I'll bet it's you." Her tone was withering, and, in Rachmael's auditory percept-system, the ferocity of it created for a moment a visual hellscape, mercifully fitful in stability; it hovered, superimposed across the surface of the plastic kitchen table, involving the syn-cof cups, the shaker of sweetex and small simulated silver pitcher of reconstituted organic butter fat in suspension — he witnessed impotently the fusion of the harmless panorama of conventional artifacts into a tabular scene of dwarfed obscenity, of shriveled and deranged indecent entanglement among the various innocent things. And then it passed. And he relaxed, his heart under a load of nausea-like difficulty; what he had, in that fragment of time, been forced to observe appalled his biochemical substructure. Even though the drug still clung to his mind and perverted it, his body remained free — and outraged. Already it had had enough.
"Our control," Hank Szantho said, with sardonic sentimentality, then a wink to Rachmael. "Yes, we have that, too. Let's see, Applebaum; your paraworld, the one the Mazdasts — if they exist — allegedly programmed you for — all this, of course, took place during teleportation while you were demolecularized — is listed code-wise by the authorities here as the Aquatic Horror-shape version. Damn rare. Reserved, I suppose, for people who cut up their maternal grandmothers in a former life and fed them to the family cat." He beamed at Rachmael, showing huge gold-capped teeth, which, in the churning froth of excitation induced by the lysergic acid in his brain metabolism, Rachmael experienced as a display of revolting enormity, a disfigurement that made him clutch his cup of syn-cof and shut his eyes; the gold-capped teeth triggered off spasm after spasm within him, motion sickness to a degree that he had never considered possible: it was a recognizable but enlarged to the magnitude of a terminal convulsion. He hung onto the table, hunched over, waited for the waves of hyperperistalsis to abate. No one spoke. In the darkness of his unlit private hellscape he writhed and fought, coped as best he could with random somatic abominations, unable even to begin to speculate on the meaning of what had been said.
"The stuff hitting you bad?" a girl's voice sounded, gently, close to his ear. Sheila Quam, he knew. He nodded.
Her hand, on the upper part of his neck, rubbing lightly with empathic concern, soothed the demented fluctuations within control of his malfunctioning, panic-dominated autonomic nervous system; he underwent a soothing, infinitely longed-for diminution of muscular contraction; her touch had started the process, the prolonged recovery-period of someone making his way out of the drug-state back to normal somatic-sensation and time. He opened his eyes, gratefully exchanged a silent glance with her. She smiled, and the rubbing, regular contact of her hand increased in sureness; seated close to him, the smell of her hair and skin enveloping him, she steadily increased the vital tactile bridge between them alive; she made it more profound, more convincing. And, gradually, the remoteness of the reality around him shifted in degree; once again the people and objects compressed in the small yellow-lit kitchen became solid. He ceased being afraid even as insight into just how fragmenting this new onrush of the drug-oscillation had been reached the again-functioning higher centers of his brain.
" 'The Aquatic Horror-shape version,' " he said shakily; he took hold of Sheila Quam's obliging hand, stopped its motion — it had done its task — and enfolded it in his own. She did not draw away; the cool, small hand, capable of such restorative powers, such love-inspired healing, was by a frightening irony almost unbelievably fragile. It was vulnerable, he realized, to almost everything; without his immediate protection it seemed totally at the mercy of whatever malign, distorted into ominous and unnatural shape destructive entity that blossomed.
He wondered what, within that category, would manifest itself next. For himself — and the rest of them.
And — had this happened to Freya, too? He hoped to god not. But intuitively he knew that it had. And was still confronting her... perhaps even more so than it did him.
11
Around him in the room the faces of the people became, as he listened to the emphatic, virtually strident pitch of the discussion, suddenly flat and lurid. Like cartoon colors, he thought, and that struck him wrenchingly, as very sobering and very chilling; he sat stiffly, unwilling to move, because even the slightest body motion augmented the oppressive garishness of the crudely painted only quasi-human faces surrounding him.
The discussion had become a vicious, ear-splitting dispute.
Two opposing explanations of the paraworlds, he realized at last, were competing like live things; the proponents of each were more and more with each passing instant becoming manic and bitter, and abruptly he had a complete understanding of the inordinate, murderous tenacity of each person in the room, in fact all of them... now no one, even those who had decided to remain in the living room to admire the jerky, twitching image of President Omar Jones drone out his harangue, had managed to avoid being sucked in.
Their faces, as Rachmael glanced about, stunned him. Terrible in their animation, their mechanical, horrifyingly relentless single-mindedness, the people around him battled with one another in a meaningless, formless muck of words; he listened with dread, felt terror at what he perceived; he cringed — and felt himself cringe — from them, and the desire to hop up and run without destination or the most vague spatial orientation that might help him locate himself, learn where he was, who these envenomed antagonists were... men and women who, a few intervals ago — seconds, days; under the LSD it was impossible to be even remotely accurate — had lounged idly before the TV set, listening to a man who he knew was synthetic, who did not exist, except in the professional brains of THL's sim-elec designs technicians, probably working out of von Einem's Schweinfort labs.