CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Hunt stood with his back to one of the benches in the UNSA labs, his hands loosely gripping the edge on either side of him. Gina sat at the worktable in the middle of the room, chewing a chicken sandwich from the store of good, tasty, Earth-style food that Duncan had accumulated. The one visible effect on Gina after her disappearance was that she was hungry. Sandy was sitting across from her, listening and saying strangely little.

“Okay, let’s go over the main points again,” Hunt said. “You set out from PAC and saw some of the surrounding parts of Shiban center.”

Gina nodded. “A kind of introductory tourist walkaround.”

“You didn’t have any set agenda?”

“No. It was just to help me get my bearings… and to get to know each other a little better, I guess.”

Hunt threw a doubtful glance at Del Cullen, who was leaning with his shoulder against an equipment cabinet, his arms folded. “Weren’t you supposed to be meeting some people from these Jevlenese historical societies, or something like that?” Cullen queried.

Gina shook her head firmly. “That was going to be the day after.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. You must have got the dates mixed.”

Hunt frowned as he listened. That was not the way he remembered it, either. “Do you remember the names of any of these people?” Cullen asked, obviously with a view to checking it out. “Or the organizations they were with, maybe?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Baumer had it all in his head. There didn’t seem any reason for me to go writing it all down at the time.”

Cullen nodded, letting it go at that. They weren’t going to get anything out of Baumer now.

“Okay,” Hunt said. “Then what?”

“We went through a kind of street market, underneath some huge, curving shapes going up into the sky-as if they were part of something from way back that never got finished. It was full of junk, old clothes, secondhand stuff, that kind of thing. Seemed to be a freakout place for the local dropout culture.”

“Kinchabira. I know the place,” Cullen interjected, nodding.

“Baumer blamed it all on Thurien lack of discipline and control. He seemed to think a good dose of Nazism would work wonders.” Gina nibbled another piece of her sandwich and took a sip of coffee-real. “Then there was a deposit company that seemed to be turning itself into a bank. He didn’t approve of that, either.”

“And we’re quite sure that his motivation wasn’t simply the obvious?” Hunt asked. “I mean, here’s this guy, stuck out here on his own for a long time. Pretty girl from home shows up…”

Gina shook her head. “That was the first thing I thought, too. But there was never a hint of it. Anyhow, that isn’t how he gets off.”

“Okay. Then you looked in some luxury-good stores…”

“Right,” Gina said. “And he didn’t agree with that, because it doesn’t force everyone to be equal. I got a speech on why society ought to protect people like him from having to face up to why the world isn’t listening to them. Then we sat on a wall and watched some weirdos with eyeshadow and icicles for haircuts while we ate some Jevlenese pita-burgers.” Gina paused to recollect what they had talked about. “He seemed interested when I asked him if he’d gotten to know any other people here who thought the way he did. He was curious to know more about what you UNSA scientists were doing here.”

“That’s his real reason coming out,” Cullen murmured.

“The punks weren’t any trouble?” Hunt asked. There had been a report of some trouble in that area at around the same time, involving a group who sounded like the people Gina had described. But she shook her head again.

“No. They went away,” Gina continued slowly, reciting the items one by one, as if anxious to be sure that she had everything straight. “We carried on to some kind of a bar somewhere. Baumer started talking about drugs and highs. He asked me what kind of things I use. He said it in a kind of… suggestive way. It was like a hint that there could be something more to it, but he wanted to see my reaction first.”

Hunt nodded. Conceivably Baumer had been acting from purely personal motivations when he approached her. Maybe not. Nothing that Gina was saying clinched it either way. “Go on,” he said.

“He told me there were places where you can still get a total connection into the residual core of JEVEX. He said it’s a trip that beats everything: the ultimate. Only Jevlenese really understood it.” Gina made an open-handed gesture in the air. “That was interesting. It was the first definite proof I’d heard about JEVEX still being available. But when I tried to get more, he said there was no way you could describe it. You had to experience it for yourself. Obviously it was an invitation.”

“Which you accepted,” Cullen said-needlessly, since they had been through the gist of her story once already.

“Well, you know I’m the curious kind.”

Sandy looked across the table at her oddly. “You, ah… you were curious to find out what this was all about?”

“Yes,” Gina said. Her voice was light and matter-of-fact. She frowned, as if momentarily puzzled about something, then nodded. “Yes,” she said again.

“You hadn’t seen enough with VISAR, on the Vishnu?” Sandy spoke with pronounced skepticism, as if she found the answer hard to believe and wanted Gina to reconsider. Hunt was scribbling a note just at that moment, and Cullen missed the implication.

“We didn’t know if JEVEX was the same,” Gina said. She frowned to herself again. Then, as if not quite satisfied with that, added, “It was important to know what Baumer was up to, right?”

Sandy stared for a moment longer; then, when no support was forthcoming from Hunt or Cullen, she let it go at that with a doubtful nod. “Okay.”

Gina went on. “We went to a place that you entered down a passage off an alley. It was all dark, with everything done furtively-the way you imagine speakeasies to have been. Inside was a sort of lounge and bar. And then out back, there were all these neurocoupling cubicles…”

Hunt and the others had decided not to complicate the issue by saying anything about Nixie’s story. Gina went on to describe accurately what was almost certainly the Gondola, where they had found Baumer; and just as almost-certainly, there would be no point in trying to get confirmation since nobody there would know anything. As Hunt had seen for himself, the whole operation was set up to preserve anonymity. Not seeing things was part of the business.

“And he was right,” Gina concluded. “There’s no way I could describe it. That machine can create total realities in your head, indistinguishable from the real thing, that are actually your own creations, except you don’t know it. It’s uncanny-totally compelling. I can see how it could become addictive. I guess I just got carried away and lost all track of time. I eventually came to, left, and came back here. The rest you know.”

“Was Baumer still there when you left?” Cullen asked.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t get anything across to the management. I don’t think they’d have told me anyway.”

They all looked at each other. That seemed to be it. “Well, you probably need more rest than you realize,” Cullen said to Gina. “Don’t bother going back to Best West. We’ll find you a suite in the residential section here at PAC to freshen up and get your head down in. We’ll see you again later.”

“I think you’re right,” Gina agreed. “My head feels as if it’s been through a blender.”

She described some of JEVEX’s capabilities while she finished her sandwich, reiterated the line they had already heard from Danchekker that this seemed to her a more than likely explanation of what had sent the Jevlenese off the rails. Then she departed for the residential sector. Sandy went with her.

“What I don’t understand,” Hunt said to Cullen when they were alone, “is why they’d let Baumer reveal this JEVEX business to her when they must have known she was associating with us and the Ganymeans. If it’s such a big secret, with what sounds like big money involved, why show her it?”