“ ‘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.
TEN
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 singlemindedness, 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 spacial 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 remotedly 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.
That had satisfied them. And now—
“It wasn’t a programming,” the fold-fleshed dyed-haired older woman insisted, blasting the air of the room with the shivering, ear-crushing shrill of her near-hysterical voice. “It was a lack of programming.”
“She’s right,” the thin, severe man with gold-rimmed glasses said in a squeaky, emotion-drenched falsetto; he waved, flapped his arms in excitement, trying to make himself heard. “We were all supposed to be falsely programmed so we’d see a paradise, as they promised. But somehow it didn’t take with us, the few of us here in the room; we’re the exceptions, and now those bastard ’wash psychiatrists come in and do the job right.”
In vitriolic weariness Miss de Rungs said, to no one in particular, “The hell with it. Leave it up to our control; let the control worry.” She leaned toward Rachmael, unlit cigarillo between her dark lips. “A match, Mr. ben Applebaum?”
“Who’s our control?” he asked as he got out a folder of matches.
Miss de Rungs, with contempt and rasping animosity, jerked her head at Sheila Quam. “Her. This week. And she likes it. Don’t you, Sheila? You just love to make everybody jump. Squirm, squirm, when you come into the room.” She continued to eye Sheila Quam with hateful vindictiveness, then turned away, sinking into a voiceless interior brooding, cut off from everyone and all verbal interaction in the room with deliberate and hostile aversion; her dark eyes filmed with loathing.
“What I saw,” Rachmael said to Sheila Quam. “Under the LSD—that cephalopod. That you called—Hank Szantho called— the Aquatic Horror-shape. Was that psychedelic? Under the condition of expanded consciousness did I pick up an actual essence and penetrate a hypnoidal screening-field of some kind? And if that—”
“Oh yes; it was real,” Sheila Quam said levelly; her tone was as matter-of-fact as if this was a technical, professional discussion, something of academic interest only. “The cephalops of that sort seem to be, or anyhow it’s conjectured by anthropologists in the area to be—anyhow it’s the most reasonable working hypothesis, which they’ll probably have to go on whether they like it or not—is that the cephalopodan life-form experienced as what we refer to as Paraworld Blue, its dominant species, is the indigenous race that dwelt here before THL showed up with—” She paused, now no longer composed; her face was hardened and when she again spoke her voice was brisk and sharp. “Good big a-thought-for-this week advance weapons. Old papa von Einem’s clever monstrosities. The output of Krupp and Söhne and N.E.D. filth like that.” She abruptly smashed into a repellent chaos the remains of her cigarillo. “During the Telpor transfer to Whale’s Mouth you were fed the routine mandatory crap, but as with the rest of us weevils it failed to take. So as soon as the LSD dart got you you started intuiting within your new environment, the illusory outer husk rigged up became transparent and you saw within, and of course when you got a good clear dose of that—”
“What about the other paraworlds?” he said.
“Well? What about them? They’re real, too. Just as real. The Clock; that’s a common one. Paraworld Silver; that comes up again and again.” She added, “I’ve been here a long time; I’ve seen that one again and again . . . I guess it’s not so hard to take as Paraworld Blue. Yours is the worst. Everybody seems to agree with that. Whether they’ve seen it or not. When you’ve gone through Computer Day and fed your experience into the fniggling thing’s banks so that everybody in the class can—”
Rachmael said carefully, “Why different psychedelic worlds? Why not the same one, again and again?”
Sheila Quam raised a thin, expertly drawn eyebrow. “For everyone? The whole class, as long as it exists?”
“Yes.”
After a pause she said, “I don’t really know. I’ve wondered a whole lot of times. So have plenty of other people who know about it. The ’wash psychiatrists, for instance. Dr. Lupov himself; I heard a lecture he gave on the subject. He’s as no-darn-place as anybody else, and that’s what—”
“Why did Miss de Rungs say everyone squirms when you come into the room?” He waited for her answer; he did not let her off the hook.
Smoking a newly lit cigarillo placidly, Sheila Quam said, “A control, whoever he is—it varies from one month to the next; we take turns—has the power to order the euth-x of someone he thinks a menace to Newcolonizedland. There’s no board of appeal, any more; that didn’t work. It’s a very simple form, now; I fill it out, get the person’s signature, and that’s it. Is that cruel?” She eyed him searchingly; evidently the query was sincere. “Next month, in fact sixteen days from now, it’ll be someone else’s turn and I’ll be squirming.”
Rachmael said, “What’s the purpose of the killing? Why has the control been given such power? Such drastic authority to arbitrarily—”
“There are eleven paraworlds.” Sheila said. She had lowered her voice; in the crowded kitchen the infuriated, hip-and-thigh argument had terminated by dwindling swiftly away and everyone was mutely listening to Sheila Quam. Even the de Rungs girl was listening. And her expression of malice had one; only a stricken, anticipatory dread showed. The same expression that pervaded the features of each person in the room. “Twelve,” Sheila continued; the presence of the stony, voiceless audience did not seem either to nonplus her nor to goad her; she continued in the same detached, reasonable fashion. “If you count this.” She gestured, taking in the kitchen and its people and then she toss
ed her head, indicating the booming TV set in the living room with the we-bring-you-live-on-tape voice of President of Newcolonizedland, Omar Jones. “I do,” she said. “In some ways it’s the most bug-built of all of them.”
“But the legal, sanctioned murders,” Rachmael said, staring at the girl with her glorious white-shiny hair, her immense guileless blue eyes, and, beneath her turtle-neck sweater, her small, articulated breasts. It did not seem congruent with her, this capacity, this office; it was impossible to imagine her signing death decrees. “What’s the basis? Or is there a basis?” He heard his voice rise and become almost a snarl. “I guess there doesn’t have to be, not if everyone is locked in.” Without consultation with anyone in the class he had come to that self-evident conclusion; the huddled, resigned air about all of them showed that. He felt it in himself already, and it was a noxious, almost physically poisonous sensation, to find himself drawn gradually into this demoralized milieu. Waiting for the control to act, and for whatever reason served. “You consider these people enemies of that state?” He gestured convulsively toward the yammering TV set in the living room, then turned, set down his syn-cof cup with a sharp clatter; across from him Sheila Quam jumped, blinked—he seized her by the shoulders and half-lifted her to her feet. Wide-eyed, startled, she returned his gaze fixedly, peering into him, penetrating him back as he focussed with compassionless, ruthless harshness; she was not afraid, but his grip hurt her; she set her jaw in an effort to keep still, but he saw, in her eyes, the wince of physical suffering. Suffering and surprise; she had not expected this, and he could guess why: this was not what one did to the pro tem control. Pragmatically it was suicidal if not insane.
Sheila, gratingly, said, “All right; possibly someday we’ll have to admit—classify—Omar Jones and the colony we’ve built up here as just one more paraworld. I admit it. But until then this remains the reference point. Are you satisfied? And until then any alternate distorted subreality perceived by anyone arriving is judged prima facie evidence that he’s in need of a ’wash. And if psychiatric help doesn’t bring him around to the point that you’re at now, sharing this reality instead of—”
Hank Szantho said brusquely, “Tell him what the paraworlds are.”
The room, then, was silent.
“Good question,” the middle-aged, bony, hard-eyed man said presently.
To Rachmael, Szantho said, “It’s von Einem’s doing.”
“You don’t know that,” Sheila said quietly.
“He’s got some razzle-dazzle gadget he’s been playing around with at the Schweinfort labs,” Szantho continued. “Undoubtedly stolen from the UN, from where it tests its new top-secret weapons. Okay, I don’t know that, not like I saw it in action or a schematic or something. But I know that’s what’s behind all this damn paraworld stuff; the UN invented that time-warping device recently and then Gregory Floch—”
“Ploch,” Miss de Rungs corrected.
“Gloch,” Sheila said bitingly. “Gregory Arnold Gloch. Anyhow, Gloch, Floch, Ploch; what does it matter?” To Rachmael she said, “That freak who switched sides. Possibly you remember, although all the news media because of really incredible UN pressure more or less squelched it, right down the line.”
“Yes,” he said, remembering. “Five or six years ago.” Greg Gloch, the peculiar UN progeny prodigy, at that time beyond doubt the sole genuinely promising new wep-x designer at the Advance-weapons Archives, had, obviously for financial reasons, defected to a private industrial concern which could pay considerably better: Trails of Hoffman. And from there had beyond question passed directly to Schweinfort and its mammoth research facilities.
“From that time-warpage wingding,” Hank Szantho continued, appealing to each of them with jerky, rapid gesticulations. “What else could it be? I guess nobody can say because there isn’t nothing; it has to be that.” He tapped his forehead, nodding profoundly.
“Nonsense,” Miss de Rungs retorted. “A variety of alternate explanations come to mind. Its resemblance to the UN’s time-warpage device may be merely—”
“To be fair about this,” the middle-aged, hard-eyed man said in a quiet but effective monotone, “we must acquaint this newcomer with each of the major logical alternatives to Mr. Szantho’s stoutly defended but only theoretically possible explanation. Most plausible of course—Szantho’s theory. Second—in my opinion, at least— the UN itself, since they are the primary utilizers of the device . . . and it is, as Mr. Szantho pointed out, their invention, merely pirated by Gloch and von Einem. Assuming it was obtained by von Einem at all, and proof of this either way is unfortunately not available to us. Third—”
“From here on,” Sheila said to Rachmael, “the plausibility swiftly diminishes. He will not recount the stale possibility that the Mazdasts are responsible, a frightening boogyman we’ve had to live with but which no one seriously believes, despite what’s said again and again. This particular possible explanation properly belongs in the category of the very neurotic, if not psychotic.”
“And in addition,” Miss de Rungs said, “it may be Ferry alone, with no help from anyone; from von Einem or Gloch. It may be that von Einem is absolutely unaware of paraworlds per se. But no theory can hold water if it assumes that Ferry is ignorant.”
“According to you,” Hank Szantho muttered.
“Well,” Sheila said, “we are here, Hank. This pathetic colony of weevils. Theo Ferry put us here and you know it. THL is the underlying principle governing the dynamics of this world, whatever category this world falls into: pseudo-para or real or full para.” She smiled grimacingly at Hank Szantho, who returned her brilliant, cold glare dully.
“But if the paraworlds are derived via the UN’s time-warpage gadget,” the hard-faced middle-aged man said, “then they would constitute a spectrum of equally real alternative presents, all of which split off at some disputed episode in the past, some antediluvian but critical juncture which someone—whoever it is—tinkered with through the damn gadget we’re discussing. And so in no sense are they merely ‘para.’ Let’s face that honestly; if the time-warpage gadget is involved then we might as well end all speculation as to which world is real and which are not, because the term becomes meaningless.”
“Meaningless theoretically,” Miss de Rungs answered, “but not to anyone here in this room. Or in fact anyone in the world.” She corrected herself, “Anyone in this world. We have a massive stake in seeing to it that the other worlds, para nor not, stay as they are, since all are so very much worse than this one.”
“I’m not even certain about that,” the middle-aged man said, half to himself. “Do we know them that thoroughly? We’re so traumatized about them. Maybe there’s one that’s better, to be preferred.” He gestured in the direction of the living room with its logorrheic flow of TV noise, the pompous, unending, empty spouting-forth of jejune trash by the nonreal president of what Rachmael—as well as everyone else on Terra—knew to be a nonreal, deliberately contrived and touted hoax-colony.
“But this world can’t be para,” Gretchen Borbman said, “because we all share it, and that’s still our sole criterion, the one point we can hang onto.” To Rachmael she said, “That’s so important. Because what no one has laid on you yet, mercifully, is the fact that if two of us ever agree at the same time—” She lapsed into abrupt silence, then. And regarded Sheila with a mixture of aversion and fear. “Then out come the proper forms,” she went on, at last, with labored difficulty. “Form 47-B in particular.”
“Good old 47-B,” the curly-haired youth said gratingly, and instantly grimaced, his face contorted. “Yes, we just love it when that’s trotted out, when they run their routine check of us.”
“The control,” Gretchen continued, “signs 47-B after he or she—she, right now—feeds someone’s paraworld gestalt in on Computer Day, which is generally late Wednesday. So after that it becomes public property; it isn’t simply a subjective delusional realm or a subjective anything; it’s like an exhibit of antique
potsherds under glass in a museum; the entire damn public can file past and inspect it, right down to the last detail. So there would hardly be any doubt if ever two individual paraworlds agreed simultaneously.”
“That’s what we dread,” the fold-fleshed older woman with lifeless dyed hair said in a toneless, mechanical voice, to no one in particular.
“That’s the one thing,” Gretchen said, “that really does scare us, Mr. ben Applebaum; it really does.” She smiled, emptily, the expression of acute, unvarying apprehension calcified into sterile hopelessness over all her features, a mask of utter despair closing up into immobility her petite, clear-hewn face—clear-hewn, and frozen with the specter of total defeat, as if what she and the rest of them dreaded had crept recently close by, far too close; it was no longer theoretical.
“I don’t see why a bi-personal view of the same paraworld would—” Rachmael began, then hesitated, appraising Sheila. He could not, however, for the life of him fathom her contrived, cool poise; he made out nothing at all and at last gave up. “Why is this regarded as so—injurious?”
“Injurious,” Hank Szantho said, “not to us; hell no—not to us weevils. On the contrary; we’d be better able to communicate among each other. But who gives a grufg about that . . . yeah, who cares about a little minuscule paltry matter like that—a validation that might keep us sane.”
Sheila said, remotely, “ ‘Sane.’ ”
“Yes, sane,” Hank Szantho snarled at her.