Baumer, too, talked about a hermit-teacher who ran a school for mystics up in a wilderness somewhere, although Nixie was unable to locate it from his ramblings. He feared retribution, however, because he said he had emerged from Phantasmagoria in another’s rightful place. Hunt had adopted the practice of calling him “Thomas,” because of his religious origin and the fact that he doubted everything that anyone told him. After what had happened, Hunt felt, it wouldn’t have been decent, somehow, to have continued using Baumer’s name to address the shell that was all that was left of him.

“Look, I’m not a demon for the god of darkness, and I don’t care what you did to his flying angel,” Hunt said. “In fact I’m not much into any gods at all. What makes it so difficult for you to believe us?”

Thomas turned away in his chair and stared into the top of a lab centrifuge that was standing open. After a few seconds he reached out to move the lid to and fro several times on its horizontal swivel, then traced the contours of the drive shaft and gearing, all the time muttering unintelligibly. He was still amazed by machines and the products of machines. Regularity of any kind, such as the repeating architectural features or the mosaic patterns in the corridors of PAC, or the nested arrays of optronics chips and subassemblies in some of the equipment cabinets, fascinated him. The scientists had by now accepted VISAR’s interpretation that the instabilities of form that occurred in Phantasmagoria were due to the elongation of objects in their direction of motion, and that the daily cycles and changes with orientation followed from planetary rotation. Where or how such conditions could come about, however, were anybody’s guess.

“Do I sound like a demon?” Hunt asked after a pause. “Do I look like one?”

Thomas mumbled something, then went quiet and seemed to think it over. “Transformed!” he exclaimed suddenly. “They transform their agents to deceive us. We were warned.”

“Who warned you?”

“Take on forms, any forms… Beware appearances.”

“Who-”

“Spiral! Seek the spiral… Safe from external forms.”

“Have you ever seen a demon?”

“Mighty is the power of-” Thomas stopped and looked at Hunt oddly. “Seen many demons. They come from the gods. Bring signs. Punish those who disobey.”

“Describe one, then.”

“You… don’t believe? Will be punished. Burned, broken, torn in pieces. Smothered in serpents; crawling in worms; poisoned by scorpions; feast of maggots. Slashed by fangs, crushed by coils, blistered, bleeding, oozing, screaming…”

“I’ll risk it.”

“The demon of the sun god’s wrath comes from the sky. Head of eagle, body of lion, with dragon’s wings..

Nixie, who was sitting on Hunt’s other side, nodded. “I know that one, too,” she said.

“He’s not crazy, then?” Hunt checked. “It does exist, the way he says?”

“Oh, yes.”

The strange thing was that, monstrous as these Phantasmagorian creatures were, he should describe them as composites of familiar forms-Thomas was using the closest-fitting terms from his Baumer-bequeathed vocabulary, which was German but converted to English by VISAR. For, if they had indeed evolved elsewhere, under such very different conditions, how could they have any similarities to the products of a completely independent line, which the principles of evolution said would never happen, even if the conditions had been the same? Even more remarkably, the form that Nixie remembered herself having in Phantasmagoria was human!-like the inhabitants in the other pictures that VISAR had extracted from her memories.

Interestingly, Thomas saw elements of familiar Terran animal forms, whereas Jevlenese saw elements of Jevlenese ones. It seemed that, since the full neural apparatus of the possessed person was taken over, the newly established alien entity could only express itself by triggering the conceptual elements that were already there-similar to the way in which a bell could be hit by different hammers, but would still produce the same tone. That would also explain the retention of language abilities, possibly. The explanation was compatible with both Danchekker’s theory and Hunt’s, and the issue between them remained unresolved.

“Suppose I told you that the gods don’t run this place that you’ve arrived in,” Hunt suggested. “They can’t touch you here. We’re under a different management. Would that-”

“Excuse me?” ZORAC interrupted.

“Yes, chief?”

“Sandy’s outside the lab, asking to come in.”

“Oh, sure.”

ZORAC disengaged the lock of the outer door, which was kept closed for security reasons, and Sandy entered a moment later.

“Hi,” Hunt greeted, leaning back in his seat and relaxing. “I thought you were helping Duncan count bootleg headworid shops.”

“He’s with Rodgar’s crew, counting computer throughputs. That’s not my line. I wanted to talk to you about something else.”

“As long as it’s not insurance, saving the environment, or talking to Jesus.”

“No. It’s about Gina.”

“I thought she went to Geerbaine with King and Kong to collect her things.”

“That’s why I wanted to catch you now-while she isn’t around.” Sandy glanced uncertainly at Nixie. “It’s, er, kind of private.”

She seemed serious, Hunt could see. He looked back at Nixie. “Would you mind taking over with Tom for a while? You seem to get through better on your own sometimes, anyhow.”

“Sure. Go ahead,” Nixie said.

Hunt walked with Sandy back through the outer room, then through a darkened area where a couple of Ganymeans were studying patterns in a glowing, changing, holographic image eight feet high. They went on out the far door, through the central hall of the medical facility, and emerged into one of the main corridors of PAC. Hunt stopped and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“They’ve got to her,” Sandy said without preliminaries.

“Who have?”

“I don’t know. Whoever the Jevlenese are who were really controlling Baumer. They’ve done something to Gina.”

“How do you know?”

“That story she told about the headworld trip she went on. It didn’t happen that way-not the way she says. In fact I don’t think it happened at all.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She wouldn’t have been curious. She’d already found out enough about it. We both had-back on the Vishnu. And I know that he couldn’t have dragged her into a place like that again.”

Hunt scanned Sandy’s face with a quick, interrogative motion of his eyes. “Let’s find somewhere more private to talk,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

They found a small lounge that wasn’t being used, opening off from a library. There were some easy chairs, of both human and Ganymean scale, reading tables, and several workstations with panels and displays.

“Her story simply isn’t credible, Vic,” Sandy said after the door had closed itself behind them. “You don’t understand what that machine can do once it gets inside your head.”

Hunt shrugged in a way that asked what more there was to know. “It creates dream worlds to order. What’s so terrible about that?”

“Have you experimented with it-even since Gina and I went to Chris about it?”

Hunt realized, even to his own surprise, that he hadn’t. “No, as a matter of fact. I suppose I’ve been busy with other things.”

“You see. You’re a scientist. You only see it as a piece of technology. As a tool. I said the same thing to Chris.”

“Okay, so it’s a recreation, as well-even a reality substitute that people can get hooked on. I don’t use drugs, either. Some people tell me it’s because I’m high all the time and don’t need them. But if this lets you do even better without messing up your chemistry, maybe it could be quite fun.”

Sandy shook her head. “You don’t always have control over it. It can work on things that it pulls out of your subconscious that you didn’t even know were there. Or maybe things that you preferred not to think about. Maybe you find out you’re not who you’ve thought you were all your life. Most of the walls that people build inside their heads are to defend their prejudices about themselves from assault by facts. Then, suddenly those walls aren’t there anymore…”