“I wondered the same thing.” Cullen eased himself down onto one of the lab stools and rubbed his chin. “Unless…” He looked over at Hunt. “It depends who the ‘they’ you’re talking about are. The Ichena run the couplers. They’re the ones who’d stand to lose if the traffic was shut down. But suppose Baumer was also working for a political group tied up with the cults. They’re not the same people. See my point? Letting Baumer come across like just another junkie blabbing about where he gets his fixes would be a good way of obscuring his political connection.”
Hunt took out a cigarette and thought while he lit it. “I think I see what you’re saying. A bit of a dirty trick, but it’s the other guys who’ll catch any comeback. But in the meantime it covers any tracks back to them.” He sat back and stared at the notes he had made. “Do you think it could be Eubeleus and the Axis?” he asked.
“I guess it could be-although he seems more interested in collecting his wagon train together at Geerbaine so they can go out and found the new world. And his main sidekick’s there with him. You know something, Vic, I’m even starting to think this Uttan stunt of theirs might be genuine.” Cullen clasped his hands behind his head and swiveled the stool with a foot until he was looking at Hunt. “But one thing’s sure: Baumer isn’t gonna tell us.”
“I guess not,” Hunt agreed with a sigh, pocketing his lighter.
In a suite in the residential part of PAC, Gina dried herself off with the warm-air blower in the shower, combed out her hair, and tottered back into the bedroom to slide gratefully between smooth, clean-smelling sheets. It had been a lot more exhausting than her experiment with VISAR. Or maybe things in general were just catching up with her.
After turning off the light, she went over the things that General Shaw had said in the room in another part of Shiban where she had been taken by the contact who had been waiting when she left the booths. She had said nothing to Hunt and Cullen that she shouldn’t have. Shaw must have come secretly aboard the Vishnu, too, she reflected. She hadn’t expected to see him again until her return to Earth-if at all-after meeting him in the briefing with Caldwell, when she had accepted the assignment. She remembered that quite vividly for some reason-as if it had happened yesterday.
It seemed unnecessarily cautious that she should not be allowed to bring people like Hunt and Garuth into the picture about the Jevlenese having a well-placed spy somewhere inside PAC; but the general had been adamant. She wondered if Baumer had been planted on Jevlen as an insider by whatever agency General Shaw was a part of. Very likely the part of the total picture that Baumer possessed was no larger than her own.
But certainly there was a lot more going on than she knew about, and it had interplanetary significance. The only wise thing was simply to forget the questions and follow orders.
As for Baumer, there was no conclusion to be drawn other than that he was completely mad. His faculty for recognizing even the most basic of familiar things seemed to be completely gone. The walls and doors, fittings and furnishings of the room in the medical facility where he was being confined, all of which were unexceptional, seemed to confound him with awe. He spent hours exploring the surfaces with his fingers and mumbling to himself as he fiddled with such simple devices as the catch on a drawer, or a pen lying on a desktop. He showed no understanding of anything more advanced, such as the touchpad controls of a COM panel unit, and made no attempt at operating them in the ways they were designed to function. And any kind of mechanism, however simple, seemed to bring on a mixture of wonder and terror. On one occasion he sat on the floor for almost an hour with a wastepaper bin that had a lid operated by a foot-pedal, working the lever over and over again. And it was nearly as long before he would even approach a set of scales standing on one side of the room.
He did not seem so much to have forgotten what things were for; it was more as if he had lost the references to relate them to. His entire conceptual framework seemed to have changed-or been replaced by another.
He could still speak, but nothing he said made any sense. The little that he did say was a disjointed tirade about being robbed of his “powers,” and he was constantly making signs and gestures as if he expected to cast spells. When others addressed him, he seemed able to understand the words, but he was too disoriented by fear and confusion to respond coherently. The Terran medics and Ganymean psychologists had no explanation.
But Nixie did.
“This is what the Jevlenese mean when they talk of somebody awakening,” she said. “This is how the ayatollahs arrive. The person who exists inside his body isn’t the same anymore. It’s another who has been transported here from the Otherworld. As I was.”
And what she said seemed indeed to be true. For apart from his faculty of speech, his voluntary motor reflexes-and even those were erratic, though Nixie said that would pass-and the unconscious regulatory functions that his brain supported, everything in his nervous system that had once contributed to the identity of Hans Baumer had apparently been completely obliterated.
“And you say this only happens to somebody who is coupled into JEVEX?” Shiohin asked Nixie in one of the medical offices, where they had retired with Hunt and Danchekker to review Baumer’s condition after observing him.
“Always.”
“Was it true in your case?” Danchekker asked. “Were you-or should I say, the person whose identity you assumed-in a coupler when it happened?”
“I don’t remember,” Nixie replied. “I was too confused for a long time afterward to know what had happened. But that is what I was told by others.”
Danchekker looked from one to another of those present with an I-told-you-so expression that was superficially reluctant, while at the same time the glint behind his spectacles said that he was loving every minute. Finally he said, “Which does rather tend to corroborate my hypothesis, I think. The condition is a profound mental disruption brought about by the interaction between deep-seated processes in the human nervous system and an inappropriate alien technology that was adapted from something never designed to couple to it.” He took of his spectacles and produced a handkerchief to wipe them. “I’m sorry, Vic, but you really have to discard this Phantasmagoria that you’ve grown so fond of.”
“No, it’s real,” Nixie insisted.
“I’m sure it’s utterly convincing,” Danchekker conceded, giving her a lofty smile. He turned back to Hunt and Shilohin. “The whole thing is a JEVEX fabrication.”
“As internally consistent as the physics that VISAR read from Nixie’s memories?” Hunt shook his head. “The people we’re talking about don’t have the conceptual foundations. They could never have generated anything like that.”
Danchekker showed his teeth. “No. But JEVEX could!”
Shilohin looked from Danchekker to Hunt and back again. Hunt got the feeling that she was coming around to the professor’s line. “You’re saying that JEVEX created the same artificial reality for all of them?”
“I’ve said it from the beginning.”
“Why should it do that?”
“Ah, that’s another question, the answer to which will doubtless be forthcoming now that we seem to be heading the right way,” Danchekker said.
“It would account for the consistency,” Shilohin said. “If these are fantasies created in response to unconscious directions, thousands of individuals could never all have produced the same thing. But if they all originated in JEVEX…”
“Precisely.”
Hunt stared at Nixie’s face. And for some reason, which he would have been the first to admit as being totally unscientific, the calm, unwavering certainty that he saw written there persuaded him more, in a way that he could never have justified to Danchekker and Shilohin.