The Lighter Side (18 page)

"What offer?"

"To accompany her, of course! Let's hurry along, now! There's just time to pump the canned hypno-briefing into you before you go!"

"Comfort yourself, T'son," S'lunt said in a tone of easy assurance as he and the half dozen other launch technicians studied their instrument readings. "The perceptor circuits indicate that you have correctly absorbed your briefing and are now as aware as necessary of the parameters within which you will function. Everything is in readiness for your departure. Q'nell has the null-engine tucked away in her pocket, armed and ready. No point in waiting."

Glumly, Roger allowed himself to be escorted across the wide milk-glass floor to the spot where Q'nell waited beside a vast coil of thick white-painted tubing. R'heet emitted a terse
blap!
as he came up.

"I don't savvy the local Speedspeak," Roger said, noting the girl's pert features, short-clipped jet-black hair, and appealingly pink lips, slightly parted to show perfect teeth. "What was that all about?"

Q'nell gave him a glance which had receded several degrees toward the impersonal.

"He was just mentioning that your fear index was rising steadily. If it ascends another point or two, you'll be rigid with terror."

"Oh, I will, will I?" Roger said hotly. "Well, go check your dials, buster! Sure, I'm a little nervous! Who wouldn't be? For all I know, when I step into that thing I may wind up on an ice floe with a polar bear—or in the midst of a dinosaur's lunch—or swimming in the middle of the Indian Ocean—or—" His voice rose higher as a succession of images presented themselves, none of them pleasant.

"Oh, no danger of that," S'lunt said encouragingly. "Once launched along the Channel proper, you'll be outside the Museum entirely, moving in a physical context regarding the exact nature of which we can make only the vaguest conjectures."

"I remember you saying something like that, but I didn't know what it meant," Roger said. "By the way, what
does
it mean?"

"It means," the girl put in, "that if your control should fail, we'll be ejected from the Channel into a nonspatial context."

"I've been thinking it over," Roger said promptly, "and I've decided this is too dangerous for a girl. Too bad; we might have solved everything—and of course I'd have loved going—but it means risking the life of a fragile little creature like you—"

"You're right, R'heet," Q'nell said, nodding. "I can sense the terror from here."

"Terror?" Roger came back hotly. "I was just . . . " He swallowed. "Scared," he finished. "But I've been scared before, and it never did me any good." He straightened his back. "Let's get going before I examine that statement too closely." He gripped the girl's hand and advanced to the opening in the coil. As he stepped through, the familiar gray mist folded in about him.

"Now—we pause here!" Q'nell said. "Remember S'lunt's instructions!"

Roger closed his eyes and attempted to rotate his self-concept ninety degrees. Imagining his eyes to be peering out from the approximate position of his right ear was a difficult trick; a lifetime of orientation toward an arbitrarily designated "front" was not easy to overcome. But after all, he reminded himself, there was no reason the mind, an intangible field produced by the flow of current in a neural circuit, should be bound by such mundane restrictions . . . 

Suddenly he succeeded, was aware of the nose on the side of his head, of the sideburn growing down between his imaginary eyes, of his arms, one on the front, one on the back . . . 

And then he was falling through some medium that was not space . . . 

For a while Roger fell with his eyes screwed shut, gripping the warm little hand of his partner—the sole material object in the universe. She appeared, he noted, to be about the size of the
Queen Mary
, floating majestically a mile away, linked to him by a fantastically long arm which dwindled as it approached, joining with a hand of normal size. Then he realized he had been mistaken. She was actually microscopically small, and floated on the surface of his eyeball . . . 

"Not too bad so far," she said. There were no audible words; the thought formed in Roger's mind with crystal clarity, in the girl's voice, complete with overtones of a passionate nature rigidly concealed beneath a calm exterior.

"How do you do that?" Roger inquired, and noted with surprise that his lips failed to move. Neither was he breathing. In sudden alarm, he tried to draw in air, but nothing happened.

"Don't struggle," Q'nell's mental voice spoke sharply. "We're in a null-time state, where events like heartbeats and respiration can't take place. Don't let it distract you, or we'll find ourselves expelled from the Channel."

"How long is this going to take?" Roger asked nervously. He felt no physical distress from lack of air, but a conviction of suffocation was rising in him.

"No time at all—other than subjectively," Q'nell said.

"How can we be sure we're actually going anywhere? Maybe we're just going to hang here in space forever, swelling and shrinking."

"That's just your parameters trying to adjust to the absence of physical stimuli," Q'nell pointed out. "Don't let it bother you. And stop asking questions. If we knew the answers, we wouldn't be here."

"Hey!" Roger said suddenly. "My eyes are still shut; I can feel them! How is it I can see you?"

"You are not seeing me, you're apprehending me directly."

"This gray stuff," Roger said. "It's just like what you always see when you close your eyes. You know, I'm beginning to wonder—"

"Don't!" Q'nell said sharply. "Whatever you do, don't start to wonder!"

"I can't help it!" Roger retorted. "This is all too ridiculous to be true! Any second now I'm going to wake up—in my own bed, back in Elm Bluffs, with my mother calling me," he added, prompted by a sudden, vivid sense of homesickness.

The gray mist was changing, forming up into walls that simultaneously receded and closed in on him. Splotches appeared, congealed into large, pastel-colored floral patterns. There was a tear in the wallpaper, with white plaster showing behind it. He sat up, stared dumbly around a big, airy room with a ceiling that slanted down at one side, open windows, a shelf stacked with dog-eared Tom Swift books and untrimmed pulp magazines with B. Paul covers. Several inaccurately aligned model planes dangled from the ceiling on strings; a framed butterfly collection hung on the wall beside a row of arrowheads wired to a board and a felt pennant lettered elm bluffs sr. high.

"Roger!" a voice called in an unmistakably maternal tone. "If I have to call you again . . . " The unuttered threat hung in the air.

Roger made a squeaking sound, staring down at his own body. He saw a narrow, ribby chest, rumpled pajama bottoms covering knobby knees, the spindly shanks of a thirteen-year-old boy. "But . . . but . . . " he mumbled. "I'm thirty-one years old, and a grown-up failure! I was in the Channel with Q'nell, headed for the terminal coordinates . . . " He paused, frowning. "Terminal what?" he said aloud. "Wow, did I dream some big words!"

Suddenly the room faded, the walls swirled away into formless mist. Q'nell's face appeared, floating toward him.

"Where did you go?" she demanded. "You disappeared!"

"I was a boy again," Roger stuttered. "I was back home, in my own bed. It was just as real as this—realer! I could feel the bed under me, and smell bacon cooking, and feel the breeze coming through the windows! I thought all
this
was a dream!"

"But—you couldn't. It's impossible!
I'm
the dominant member of this linkage! You can't do anything I don't order you to do! At least that's the theory . . . "

"That's ridiculous," Roger said. "You're only a girl, remember?"

"Look here, T'son! Don't go wrecking the mission with your irresponsible male chauvinism! For some reason—probably having to do with a temporal precession effect induced by the reduplication of the Reinforcer circuitry—you seem to have taken over control of our joint conceptualizing capacities. You'll have to exercise extreme care not to do anything impulsive! Unless we keep all our faculties attuned to the mission, you and I and a few million other captives will spend the rest of Eternity reliving the same day—or worse!"

A faint nebulosity had appeared nearby, at the edge of Roger's vision. It grew, took on form and color.

"Q'nell!" Roger shouted soundlessly. "Look!"

"Now, T'son, if you're going to go on panicking every twenty-one subjective seconds, our mission is doomed. Try to relax."

"Behind you!" He stared at the knotted blanket slowly drifting into view. Under the brown folds, something was stirring, like a cat in a croker-sack.

"It's revived!" Roger blurted. "The monster!"

"Now, T'son, you know we studied your statements back in Culture One and decided that the monster concept was merely a subconscious projection—"

"Projection or not, we've got to get out!" Roger gritted his mental teeth, concentrating on the image of the homey bedroom, the flowered wallpaper . . . 

A vague pathway seemed to open through the surrounding gray. Roger yearned toward it, felt himself slipping into it . . . 

"T'son! What are you doing?" Q'nell's mental voice had assumed an odd, echoing quality. The tunnel was closing in, condensing into deep gloom that bulked around Roger. Sharp things poked at his back; the smell of hay was thick in his nostrils. He was, he saw, lying in a stack of the stuff, itching furiously. Overhead the lofty ceiling of a barn loomed.

"Now you've done it!"
a familiar voice sounded, somewhere to the rear of his left eye.
"I warned you about this sort of thing!"
 

"Where are we?" Roger sat up, scratched at a center of irritation on his right elbow, another on the left side of his neck, reached for a spot on his shoulder.

"Get the one on our left knee," Q'nell commanded. "Then get us out of here!" 

"My God!" Roger mumbled. "Are you in the same skin with me?"

"Where else would I be, you dolt?" Q'nell retorted. "We're linked; where you go, I go, unfortunately for me. S'lunt was mad to entrust this mission to you! I might have known you'd panic and spoil it all!" 

"Who's panicked! And you can scratch your own knee!" Promptly his left arm, as if possessed of a vitality all its own, did just that. Startled, Roger rose to his feet, and promptly fell on his face, since his left leg had failed to join in the effort to support him.

"I'll take the left half," Q'nell's voice stated firmly. "You'll take the right. Now reattune and get us back into the Channel!" 

Roger tried to protest, but the left half of his face was wooden. "I'm paralyzed," he yelped incoherently. Threshing, he rolled from the hay onto a packed dirt floor. Across the room a wide door swung open. A tall, lean man in overalls, pitchfork in hand, stood outlined against a pale early-morning sky.

"Aha, it's you, is it, Andy Butts!" an irate voice grated. "I told you for the last time about sneaking into my barn and upsetting George and Elsie! By hokey, you'll work off your night's lodging! You can start by forking out those stalls! Now come out of there and set to!"

Roger struggled to balance himself on all fours, but fell on his face instead.

"Drunk, too!" the man with the pitchfork barked, advancing with the weapon poised. "You'd better sober up in one gosh-blasted hurry, or by Jupiter I'll give you a taste of what the hereafter'll be like! Get up!" He jabbed with the gleaming tines. Roger made inarticulate sounds and scrabbled one-armed and one-legged, describing a circle in the dust. The owner of the barn stared at him blankly.

"Goldang, Andy!" he blurted. "You all right?"

"Help!" Roger shouted. The sound emerged as a gargle. He fell on his face again.

"Andy! You've had a stroke!" the pitchforker yelled, tossing the implement aside. "Rest easy, Andy! I'll go for Doc Whackerby!"

With a supreme effort, Roger assumed sufficient control to cause the body of Andy Butts to spring wildly to its feet and topple, arms windmilling, against the barn owner, sending him spinning before crashing, jaw first, to the ground.

"He's went insane!" the man yelled, staggering to his feet. He dashed away shouting.

"What are you trying to do?" Q'nell demanded subvocally. "That maniac almost murdered us!" 

"Give me back my leg!" Roger countered. "We've got to get out of here!"

"Transfer us back to the Channel!" Q'nell commanded. "Until you do, I'm not letting go!" 

"Are you crazy? You'll feel that pitchfork just as much as I will!"

"Oh, no I won't! I'm leaving the sensory nervous system entirely to you, thanks!" 

"But I don't know how!" Roger yelled silently.

"Try!" 

"Well . . . " Lying on the floor, Roger closed his eye. He stared into the formless gray, swimming with pulsating points and lines of pale-colored light, searching for some clue—any clue to escape. Instead, he was aware of the weight of fat on the body he now occupied, the rasp of stubble on his jowls, the pains shooting from his empty stomach, a clammy, shivering feeling of early-morning hangover.

"Ugh!" Q'nell exclaimed. "How revolting!" 

"Quiet! How can I concentrate?"

"Hurry up! That barbarian's coming back!" 

"I'm trying!" Roger gritted his teeth, realized with a dull shock that he was grinding toothless gums together, became aware simultaneously of the coating on his tongue, a gluey feeling about the eyes, small creatures exploring his scalp, dirty socks—and an unreasoning dread of Doc Whackerby.

"He's trying to take over!" Roger shouted soundlessly. "The owner of this miserable body!" With an effort, he forced his attention away from the reactions of Andy Butts, blanking his mind to allow his hypnotic training to come to the fore. The grayness thinned, receding. Two foci of relative brightness swam into his ken, radiating calmness.

"I think I've located our bodies!" he communicated. "I'll try to bring them in . . . " He willed himself toward the objectives, which floated, vague and formless, in the remote distance—or millimeters away. He was faintly aware of excited voices approaching, of pounding feet, of a renewed pang of Buttsian fear. With a final desperate effort, he lunged mentally for the nearest brightness, felt a wrench as Q'nell was torn from his side—