Seth Morley, trembling, said, “Are we aboard Persus 9?”

“You are back on the ship,” Belsnor informed him. “Back aboard Persus 9. Do you remember how you died, Morley?”

“Something awful happened to me,” Seth Morley managed to say.

“Well,” Belsnor pointed out, “you had that shoulder wound.”

“I mean later. After the tench. I remember flying a squib … it lost power and split up—disintegrated in the atmosphere. I was either torn or knocked into pieces; I was all over the squib, by the time it had finished plowing up the landscape.”

Belsnor said, “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.” After all, he himself, in the polyencephalic fusion, had been electrocuted.

Sue Smart, her long hair tangled, her right breast peeping slyly from between the buttons of her blouse, gingerly touched the back of her head and winced.

“They got you with a rock,” Belsnor told her.

“But why?” Sue asked. She seemed dazed, still. “What did I do wrong?”

Belsnor said, “It wasn’t your fault. This one turned out to be a hostile one; we were venting our long-term, pent-up aggressiveness. Evidently.” He could remember, but only with effort, how he had shot Tony Dunkelwelt, the youngest member of the crew. I hope he won’t be too angry, Captain Belsnor said to himself. He shouldn’t be. After all, in venting his own hostility, Dunkelwelt had killed Bert Kosler, the cook of Persus 9.

We snuffed ourselves virtually out of existence, Captain Belsnor noted to himself. I hope—I pray!—the next one is different. It should be; as in previous times we probably managed to get rid of the bulk of our hostilities in that one fusion, that (what was it?) Delmak-O episode.

To Babble, who stood unsteadily fooling with his disarranged clothing, Belsnor said, “Get moving, doctor. See who needs what. Painkiller, tranquilizers, stimulants… they need you. But—” He leaned close to Babble. “Don’t give them anything we’re low on, as I’ve told you before, and as you ignore.”

Leaning over Betty Jo Berm, Babble said, “Do you need some chemical-therapy help, Miss Berm?”

“I—I think I’ll be okay,” Betty Jo Berm said as she sat painstakingly up. “If I can just sit here and rest…” She managed a brief, cheerless smile. “I drowned,” she said. “Ugh.” She made a weary, but now somewhat relieved, face.

Speaking to all of them, Belsnor said quietly but with firm insistence, “I’m reluctantly writing off that particular construct as too unpleasant to try for again.”

“But,” Frazer pointed out, lighting his pipe with shaking fingers, “it’s highly therapeutic. From a psychiatric standpoint.”

“It got out of hand,” Sue Smart said.

“It was supposed to,” Babble said as he worked with the others, rousing them, finding out what they wanted. “It was what we call a total catharsis. Now we’ll have less free-floating hostility surging back and forth between everyone here on the ship.”

Ben Tallchief said, “Babble, I hope your hostility toward me is over.” He added, “And for what you did to me—” He glared.

“‘The ship,’” Seth Morley murmured.

“Yes,” Captain Belsnor said, slightly, sardonically, amused. “And what else have you forgotten this time? Do you want to be briefed?” He waited, but Seth Morley said nothing. Morley seemed still to be entranced. “Give him some kind of amphetamine,” Belsnor said to Dr. Babble. “To get him into a lucid state.” It usually came to this with Seth Morley; his ability to adapt to the abrupt transition between the ship and the polyencephalically-determined worlds was negligible.

“I’ll be okay,” Seth Morley said. And shut his weary eyes.

Clambering to her feet, Mary Morley came over to him, sank down beside him and put her lean hand on his shoulder. He started to slide away from her, remembering the injury to his shoulder … and then he discovered that, strangely, the pain had gone. Cautiously, he patted his shoulder. No injury. No blood-seeping wound. Weird, he thought. But—I guess it’s always this way. As I seem to recall.

“Can I get you anything?” his wife asked him.

“Are you okay?” he asked her. She nodded. “Why did you kill Sue Smart?” he said. “Never mind,” he said, seeing the strong, wild expression on her face. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but this one really bothered me. All the killing. We’ve never had so much of it before; it was dreadful. We should have been yanked out of this one by the psychocircuitbreaker as soon as the first murder took place.”

“You heard what Frazer said,” Mary said. “It was necessary; we were building too many tensions here on the ship.”

Morley thought, I see now why the tench exploded. When we asked it, What does Persus 9 mean? No wonder it blew up… and, with it, took the entire construct. Piece by piece.

The large, far-too-familiar cabin of the ship forced itself onto his attention. He felt a kind of dismal horror, seeing it again. To him the reality of the ship was far more unpleasant than—what had it been called?—Delmak-O, he recalled. That’s right. We arranged random letters, provided us by the ship’s computer… we made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up. An exciting adventure turned into gross murder. Of all of us, by the time it had finished.

He examined his calendar wristwatch. Twelve days had passed. In real time, twelve whole, overly long days; in polyencephalic time, only a little over twenty-four hours. Unless he counted the “eight years” at Tekel Upharsin, which he could not really do: it had been a manufactured recall-datum, implanted in his mind during fusion, to add the semblance of authenticity in the polyencephalic venture.

What did we make up? he asked himself blearily. The entire theology, he realized. They had fed into the ship’s computer all the data they had in their possession concerning advanced religions. Into T.E.N.C.H. 889B had gone elaborated information dealing with Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Zoroastrianism, Tibetan Buddhism… a complex mass, out of which T.E.N.C.H. 889B was to distill a composite religion, a synthesis of every factor involved. We made it up, Seth Morley thought, bewildered; memory of Specktowsky’s Book still filled his mind. The Intercessor, the Mentufacturer, the Walker-on-Earth—even the ferocity of the Form Destroyer. Distillate of man’s total experience with God—a tremendous logical system, a comforting web deduced by the computer from the postulates given it—in particular the postulate that God existed.

And Specktowsky… he shut his eyes, remembering.

Egon Specktowsky had been the original captain of the ship. He had died during the accident which had disabled them. A nice touch by T.E.N.C.H. 889B, to make their dear former captain the author of the galaxy-wide worship which had acted as the base of this, their latest world. The awe and near-worship which they all felt for Egon Specktowsky had been neatly carried over to their episode on Delmak-O because for them, in a sense, he was a god—functioned, in their lives, as a god would. This touch had given the created world a more plausible air; it fitted in perfectly with their preconceptions.

The polyencephalic mind, he thought. Originally an escape toy to amuse us during our twenty-year voyage. But the voyage had not lasted twenty years; it would continue until they died, one by one, in some indefinably remote epoch, which none of them could imagine. And for good reason: everything, especially the infinitude of the voyage, had become an endless nightmare to them.

We could have survived the twenty years, Seth Morley said to himself, Knowing it would end; that would have kept us sane and alive. But the accident had come and now they circled, forever, a dead star. Their transmitter, because of the accident, functioned no longer, and so an escape toy, typical of those generally used in long, interstellar flights, had become the support for their sanity.

That’s what really worries us, Morley realized. The dread that one by one we will slip into psychosis, leaving the others even more alone. More isolated from man and everything associated with man.