“No,” she whispered.
“And if I had asked you, in the casual way that seems to have become a custom these past few years?”
“I don’t know. Probably no, Bard. I’m sorry.”
“Then let’s drop the subject, with no harm done. I’ll settle for a pink pill and an appointment in the morning.”
“And after you are tested, Bard, I am going to send you out into the hills with a scope rifle I can borrow from a friend of mine. You are going to spend a full day potting varmints and thinking of something beside this damnable project. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir!” he said, standing up and saluting.
“Please, Bard. You must understand that it was just weakness which made you feel that you had the symptoms Bill Kornal described. A weakness born of tension and strain. It was auto-hypnosis, pure and simple. It can happen to any of us.”
“Whatever it was, Sharan, I didn’t like it. Come on. I’ll walk you back.”
They went slowly down the road. There was no need for conversation between them. She had partially comforted him. After he was in bed, waiting for the mild drug to take effect, he wondered why he had been so reluctant to permit her to sacrifice her own integrity for the sake of the project. He thought of the slim clean look of her in the moonlight, of her young breasts against the fabric of her jacket. He smiled at his own reservations, at his reluctance to accept such a gift. They had both sensed that they were almost — but not quite — right for each other. And “not quite” was not enough for either of them.
Six
Raul Kinson realized that eight years had proved Fedra correct. One never forgets those first few dreams, those first three dreams — one for each alien world de-marked on the dial at the head of the dream case.
Fedra had borne his child during that first year of the dreams. Sometimes he watched the children at their games, and wondered which one was his. He looked in vain for any sign of resemblance. He wondered at this curiosity, which the others did not seem to share.
Yes, the first dreams could never be forgotten. Even after eight years he remembered every moment of the second dream.
In his second dream he had a new certainty of contact, a new assurance born of the practice during the first dream. He was eager to see this second world. In his initial eagerness he had grasped the first contact mind, had thrust with all the power of intellect, motivated by strong curiosity.
And at once he had found himself in an alien body which writhed in bright hot light on a hard surface. He could not control the muscles or the senses of the captive body. Vision was broken fragments. Muscle spasms could not be controlled. He tried to withdraw pressure, but the host mind would not take over the body again. The brain he touched was shattered, irrational, sending messages of spasm to uncontrolled muscles. At first he thought he had inhabited a mind already broken, and then he began to guess that perhaps the full, uncontrolled thrust of his own mind had broken the host mind. He gave up all efforts at control and slid out of the host, impelling himself very gently toward the nearest contact.
He slid with restraint into this new mind, never taking over control, merely waiting and watching and listening at a sufficiently high level so that the language became clear. The new host was a brawny man in a blue uniform. He was saying, “Move back there! You! Give the guy air! Give him a chance, folks.”
A second man in uniform came over. “What you got, Al?”
“Fella with a fit or something. I sent in an ambulance call. You there, did I hear you say you’re a doctor? Take a look at him, will you?”
A man in gray bent over and wedged a pencil between the teeth of the man who writhed on the sidewalk. He looked up at the policeman. “Epileptic, I think. Better send for an ambulance.”
“Thanks, Doc. I already did.”
Raul looked curiously through the eyes of the man who called himself Al, who thought of himself as a policeman, as the metal machine on four wheels came down the street, making shrill screamings. It backed up over the curbing. Men in white examined the figure on the sidewalk, lifted him onto a stretcher and put him in the vehicle. It screamed into the distance.
Al took a small box from his jacket pocket, pressed a button and spoke with it close to his lips. He made a report and finally said, “I don’t feel so great. Like maybe a headache. If it gets worse I’m going to call in and ask off.”
He put the speaker back into his pocket. Raul looked out through Al’s eyes at a broad street full of hurrying people and strange objects on wheels guided by other people. The people were similar in form and coloring to the people of the first world. But their clothing was different. He searched through Al’s mind for words of identification and found that this city was called Syracuse, in a bigger area called New York State. The street was South Salina.
Raul also learned that Al’s feet hurt, that he was thirsty, and that his “wife” had gone to visit in some faraway place. He sensed that the “wife” was a mating partner, but it was unexpectedly more than that. It was a sharing of lives as well as a mating, and a living together in a specific non-community structure called a “home.” Soon he found a familiar relationship in another one of Al’s random thoughts. He thought of “money,” and Raul was able to identify it as the same kind of mysterious and apparently useless pieces of metal which had been pressed into his hand when he had been a water vendor on the first world. He learned that Al was given money in return for his services as a policeman, and the money went to provide food, clothing and the “home.” He inserted into Al’s mind the thought that no one would ever again give him any money and he was shocked by the strength of the wave of fear which followed the suggestion.
He looked through Al’s eyes into the store windows, trying to guess the possible uses for objects he had never seen in any of his years in the rooms of learning. When Al looked at something of his own accord, Raul could interpret the thoughts, identify the object and learn what it was used for. A thin stick with a metal spool at one end was used to trick a creature that lived under water and was called “bass.” When the hook was in the flesh of “bass,” it was reeled in and lifted into the boat and later eaten. When he saw the mental picture of a bass in Al’s mind, the thought of eating it made him feel queasy. When he forced Al to look at something, the man’s shock and fear at finding himself doing something without awareness or purpose was so great that his mind would freeze and Raul would learn nothing.
He spent ten hours in the city, learning to more skilfully detach himself from one host and move on to the next, learning the gradations of control, from a total takeover down to that point where he could rest in a corner of the host mind and be carried about, watching and listening and comprehending, with the host unaware of his presence. He drank beer, watched part of a motion picture, drove a car and a truck and a motorbike, watched television, typed letters, washed windows, broke into a locked car and stole a camera, tried on a wedding gown in a fitting room, drilled teeth, mated, swept a sidewalk, cooked meat, played a game with a ball. He learned that one must move into a child’s mind slowly and carefully, as into a small room full of fragilities, and once there one would find magical things, bright dreams and wishings. He learned that the minds of the very old ones are blurred and misted, with only the oldest memories still sharp and clear. He discovered the knack of so delicately insinuating a thought into the host mind that much could be learned from the response. Inside the mind it became a communication much like an odd conversation wherein the host mind thought it was talking to itself. Many of their thoughts were a little like dreams, in that they were yearnings and wishes and pictures of those satisfactions they wanted and did not have. Satisfactions of money and flesh and power. These were a frightened, insecure, discontented people, for the most part. They had all the violent impulses of the people in the first world, but in all their mechanized orderliness they had no way of releasing that violence. It shimmered in their minds and tore at them. They were not devoured by lions, but by their own buildings and machines. And they lived under a tyranny of “money” which seemed to Raul as cruel an oppression as that of Arrud the Elder, and as pointless.