“Thanks,” he managed, finally.
The girl said, “What did you experience?”
Haltingly, with painstaking care, he answered, “I—got an LSD dart in me. Can’t tell how long I was under.” Thousands of years, he thought. From the days of Rome to present. Evolution through centuries, and each hour a year. But there was no point in communicating that; he would not be telling the girl something new. Undoubtedly, when she had lived on Terra, she had been exposed— like everyone else at one time or another—to at least a residual dose of the chemical lingering in one of the major population centers’ water supply: the still-lethal legacy inherited from the war of ’92, so taken for granted that it had become a part of nature, not desired but silently endured.
“I asked,” the girl repeated, with quiet, almost professional persuasiveness, fixing the focus of his attention on her and what she was asking, “what you experienced. What did you see? Better to tell someone now, before it gets dim; later it’s very difficult to recall.”
“The garrison state,” he said hoarsely. “Barracks. I was there. Not long; they got to me fairly fast. But I did see it.”
“Anything else?” The girl did not seem perturbed. But she listened tensely, obviously determined to miss nothing. “What about the soldier who fired the dart at you? Was there anything about him? Anything odd? Weird or unexplainable?”
He hesitated. “Christ,” he said, “the hallucinations; you know lysergic acid—you’re familiar with what it does. My god—I was inundated by every kind of perception. You want to hear about the Day of Judgment again, in addition to having gone through it yourself? Or the—”
“The soldier,” the white-oak-haired girl said patiently.
With a ragged, sharp-pained exhalation, Rachmael said, “Okay. I hallucinated a cyclops, of the cephalopodan variety.” For an interval he became silent; the effort of putting his recollection into words exhausted his precariously limited strength. “Is that enough?” he said, then, feeling anger.
“Aquatic?” Her luminous, intelligent eyes bored steadily at him; she did not let him evade her. “Requiring, or evidently requiring—”
“A saline envelope. I could see—” He made himself breathe with regularity, halting his sentence midway. “Signs of dehydration, cracking, of the dermatoid folds. From the effluvium I’d assumed a rapid evaporation of epithelial moisture. Probably indicates a homeostatic breakdown.” He looked away, at that point, no longer able to meet her steady, critical gaze; the strain was too much for his vitiated powers, his ability to collect and maintain his attention. Five years old, he said to himself. The abreaction of the drug period; regression to the space-time axis of early childhood, along with the limited range of consciousness, the minute faculties of a preschool-age kid, and this is the topic that has to be dealt with; this is just too much. And it would be, he thought, even if I could pull out and function as an adult again, with an adult’s ability to reason. He rubbed his forehead, feeling the ache, the constriction; like a deep, chronic sinusitis which had flared to its most malignant stage. A pain-threshold alteration, he speculated dully. Due to the drug. Routine common discomfort, ordinary somatic promptings, everything enlarged to the point of unbearability, and signifying nothing, nothing at all.
Conscious of his grim, introverted silence, the girl said, “Under LSD before, did you ever experience a physiognomic alteration of this sort? Think back to the initial mandatory episode during your grammar-school days. Can you remember back that far?”
“That was under a control,” Rachmael said. “One of those Wes-Dem Board of Education psychologists, those middle-age do-gooding ladies in blue smocks who—what the hell did they use to call themselves?—something like psycheleticians. Or psychedelictrix; I forget which. I guess both groups got to me at one time or another. And then of course under the McLean Mental Health Act I took it again at sixteen and again at twenty-three.” But the control, he thought; that made all the difference. Someone there all the time, trained, able to do and say the right thing: able to maintain contact with the stable objective koinos kosmos so that I never forgot that what I was seeing emanated from my own psyche, type-basics, or as Jung once called them, archetypes rising out of the unconscious and swamping the personal conscious. Out of the collective, suprapersonal inner space, the great sea of non-individual life.
The sea, he thought. And that physiognomic transformation of the THL soldier; my perception of him became transmuted along those lines. So I did see a type-basic, as in the previous times; not the same one, of course, because each episode under the drug is unique.
“What would you say,” the girl said, “if I told you that what you saw was not mysticomimetic at all?”
“What I saw,” Rachmael said, “could not have been psycheletic; it wasn’t an expansion of consciousness or a rise in the sensitivity of my percept-system.”
“Why not?” The girl regarded him keenly. Now two others from the living room, having left the TV set with its booming image of never-failing President Omar Jones, appeared, the thin, severe man with gold-rimmed glasses and an elderly woman with collapsed, corrugated flesh which hung in dismal wattles, with obviously dyed black, lusterless hair and far too ornate bracelets on her flabby wrists. Both seemed aware of the direction of conversation which had come before; they listened silently, almost raptly, and now a third person joined them, a dramatically colored, heavy-lidded woman in evidently her early thirties, wearing a blue-cotton Mexican-style shirt tied at the waist and open to expose effectively shaded smooth bare skin; her richly dyed, extremely tight jeans, plus the unbuttoned top of her blouse beneath the Mexican shirt, caused to be manifest a stunning, supple body—Rachmael found himself fixedly contemplating her, no longer aware of the conversation in progress.
“This is Miss de Rungs,” the thin, severe-featured man with the gold-rimmed glasses said, nodding at the impressive, deeply hued woman in the Mexican shirt. “And this is Sheila Quam.” He indicated the white-oak-haired girl who had prepared hot syn-cof for Rachmael.
The stout man, still poking at his mouth with his toothpick, appeared at the door of the kitchen, smiled a warped but friendly smile composed of jagged and irregular teeth and said, “I’m Hank Szantho.” He held out his hand and Rachmael shook. “We’re all weevils,” he explained to Rachmael. “Like you. You’re a weevil; didn’t you know it? What paraworld did you tie into? Not a really bad one; huh?” He eyed Rachmael searchingly, his jaw working, his face coarse with shrewd but in no way malicious interest.
“We’re all in the class together,” the curly-haired youth said in a bellicose but oddly agitated voice, speaking directly to Rachmael as if challenging him, as if some hidden dispute, beyond Rachmael’s perception, somehow had become involved. “We all have the illness; we all have to get well.” He physically propelled a slender, short-haired, smartly dressed girl with sharply delineated delicate features; she gazed at Rachmael with a wild, vague anxiety which was almost an appeal—he did not know in regard to what, since the curly-haired youth—whose shoulders and musculature Rachmael noticed for the first time, appeared unusually escalated in use-value—had released her. “Right, Gretch?” the youth demanded.
To Rachmael, in a low but entirely controlled voice, the girl said, “I’m Gretchen Borbman.” She held out her hand; reflexively, he shook, and found her skin smooth and lightly cool. “Welcome to our little revolutionary organization, Mr.—” She paused politely.
He gave his name.
“Arab-Israeli?” Gretchen Borbman said. “From the Federation of Semitic Peoples? Or from that drayage firm that used to be so big and now’s disappeared . . . Applebaum Enterprise, wasn’t it called? Any relation? What ever happened to it and to that lovely new liner, that Omphalos . . . wasn’t that your flagship?”
It was beyond belief that she did not know; the news media had made a cause célèbre of such magnitude out of the Omphalos’ flight to the Fomalhaut system that no one could fail to know, at least no one on Terra.
But this was not Terra; already, the agreeable, normal milieu of humans in proximity to him, here, had washed into paleness the grotesque apparition of gummy seaweed slime that, caked to the steaming, drying cyclops-face, had stunk so acridly, rinsed in foulness: the degeneration into hydrokinetically maintained organic tissue of what had once been—or convincingly appeared to be—a human being, even if it was a killer-commando mercenary of Trails of Hoffman Limited.
“Yes,” he said cautiously, and, deep within the appropriate section of his mentational apparatus, a conduit carried a warning signal; some sensitized mechanism woke and became thoroughly alert. And did not cease its picket-duty; it would remain in go-position until otherwise instructed; his control over it was virtually nil. “That was—still is—the sole valid asset of our firm. With the Omphalos we’re something; without her we’re not.” With utmost caution he surveyed the group of people, the weevils, as they called themselves, to see if any appeared aware of the achingly recent abortive flight to Fomalhaut. None of them showed any indication; none of them spoke up or even registered a meaningful facial expression. Their joint lack of response, second by second, plunged him into alarmed, accelerated confusion. And he experienced, weirdly and as frighteningly as each time before, an unannounced oscillation of the drug-state; he felt his time-sense fluctuate radically, and everything, all objects and persons in the room, became changed. The LSD, at least briefly, had returned; this did not surprise him, but it was the wrong time; this, of all possibilities, he could do without at this palpably crucial moment.
“We get damn near no news from Terra,” the stout man with the toothpick, Hank Szantho, said to him . . . the voice sounded close by, but the man’s shape: it had warped into a lurid color collage, the textures of his flesh and clothes exaggerated, now rapidly becoming grotesque as the light factor doubled and then doubled again until Rachmael looked into a formless blur of heated metal, red so molten and ominous that he moved his chair back, away from the sliding slag-like sheet which had replaced the man; behind it Hank Szantho bobbed, the balloon-head capriciously located, as if by whim, in the vicinity of the collage of torch-shaped fire which had a moment ago been the body and clothing and flesh of the man.
And yet the man’s face, diminished in vigor and solidity as it now was, had undergone no physiognomic disfiguration; it remained the balanced countenance of a somewhat crude but amiable, tolerant, heavy-set human.
Astutely, the white-oak-haired girl Sheila Quam said to him, “I see apprehension in your eyes, Mr. ben Applebaum. Is it the hallucinogen?” To the others she said, “I think it’s rephasing within his brain-metabolism once more; obviously it hasn’t as yet been excreted. Give it time. Drink your cup of syn-cof.” Sympathetically, she held it up, between his line of vision and Hank Szantho’s nimbus of radiant color; he managed to fix his attention, make out the cup, accept it and sip. “Just wait; it’ll go away. It always does, and we’re very familiar with the illness, both subjectively in ourselves and objectively in each other. We help each other.” She moved her chair closer, to sit beside him; even in his condition he made note of that, and in addition the fact that this superficially slight maneuver effectively placed her between him and the dramatic, dark-complexioned woman, Miss de Rungs, and the willowy, attractive Gretchen Borbman with her springy, near-bobbed chic hair. At this loss he felt sad; a dismal awareness of his powerlessness burgeoned within him, realization that, in the drug-state, he could not fashion in any manner whatsoever a change in the flow of sense-data flowing in on him; the authority of the data, their absoluteness and degree, again reduced him to a passive device which merely registered the stimuli without responding.
Sheila Quam patted, then took gentle hold of his right hand.
“The illness,” Gretchen Borbman said, “is called the Telpor Syndrome. Disjunction of the percept-system and substitution of a delusional world. It manifests itself—when it does at all—shortly after teleportation. No one knows why. Only a few get it, a very few. Ourselves, at this present time. We get cured one by one, get released . . . but there always are new ones, such as yourself, showing up. Don’t be worried, Mr. ben Applebaum; it is generally reversible. Time, rest, and of course therapy.”
“Sorcerer’s apprentice therapy,” Hank Szantho said, from some vector of space not within Rachmael’s range of sight. “S.A.T., they call it. The cephalic ’wash head-benders; they’re in and out of here, even Dr. Lupov—the big man from Bergholzlei in Switzerland. God, I hate those fnidgwizers; poking and messing around like we’re a bunch of animals.”
“ ‘Paraworld,’ ” Rachmael said, after what seemed to him an almost unendurably protracted interval, due to the drug. “What is that?”
“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 are 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-lens 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 goddamn class. The goddamn 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 whi
le 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 degree that he had never considered possible: it was 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.