“I remember enough from college to know about Pavlovian reflexes. Standard stuff,” said Griffin.

“Well, the next part wasn’t standard. We tapped into the auditory nerve, and we could measure the actual signal going to the brain: ding-a-ling, thirty beats per second, we could read it on the oscilloscope.

“So then we changed the bell. We got one that rang at twenty-four beats a second. Care to guess what happened?” There was no response. Brad smiled. “The oscilloscope still showed thirty beats a second. The brain was hearing something that wasn’t really happening.

“So, you see, it isn’t just frogs that do this sort of mediation. Human beings perceive the world in predigested ways. The sensory inputs themselves edit and rearrange the information.

“So what I want to do with you, Roger,” he said genially, “is give you a little help in interpretation. We can’t do much with your brain. Good or bad, we’re stuck with it. It’s a mass of gray jelly with a capacity-limiting structure and we can’t keep pouring sensory information into it. The only place we have to work is at the interface — before it hits the brain.”

Griffin slapped his open palm on the table. “Can we make the window date?” he growled.

“I can but try, sir,” said Brad genially.

“You can but get your ass in a crack if we buy this and it doesn’t work, boy!”

The geniality faded from Brad’s face. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to tell me the odds!” Griffin barked.

Brad hesitated. “No worse than even money,” he said at last.

“Then,” said Griffin, smiling at last, “let it be so.”

Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes.

He slowed down to let Brad catch up with him. “Brad,” he said, “you’re pretty sure of what you were saying?”

Brad slapped him gently on the back. “More sure than I said, to tell you the truth. I just didn’t want to stick my neck out for old Griffin. And listen, Roger, thanks.”

“For what?”

“For trying to warn me today. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” said Roger. He stood there for a moment, watching Brad retreating back, and wondering how Brad knew about something he had told only to his wife.

We could have told him — as in fact we could have told him many, many things, including why the polls showed what they showed. But no one really needed to tell him. He could have told himself — if he had allowed himself to know.

Seven

Mortal Becoming Monster

Don Kayman was a complex man who never let go of a problem. It was why we wanted him on the project as areologist, but it extended to the religious part of his life too. A religious problem was bothering him, in the corner of his mind.

It did not keep him from whistling to himself as he shaved carefully around his Dizzy Gillespie beard and brushed his hair into a neat pageboy in front of his mirror. It bothered him, though. He stared into the mirror, trying to isolate what it was that was troubling him. After a moment he realized that one thing, at least, was his T-shirt. It was wrong. He took it off and replaced it with a double-knit four-colored turtleneck that had enough of the look of a clerical collar to appeal to his sense of humor.

The interhouse phone buzzed. “Donnie? Are you nearly ready?”

“Coming in a minute,” he said, looking around. What else? His sports jacket was over a chair by the door. His shoes were shined. His fly was zipped. “I’m getting absent-minded,” he told himself. What was bothering him was something about Roger Torraway, for whom, at that moment, he felt very sorry.

He shrugged, picked up his jacket, swung it over his shoulder, went down the hall and knocked on the door of Sister Clotilda’s nunnery.

“Morning, Father,” said the novice who let him in. “Take a seat. I’ll get her for you.”

“Thanks, Jess.” As she disappeared down the hall Kayman watched her appreciatively. The tight-fitting pants-suit habit did a lot for her figure, and Kayman let himself enjoy the faint, antique feeling of wickedness it gave him. It was a gentle enough vice, like eating roast beef on Friday. He remembered his parents doggedly chewing the frozen deep-fried scallops every Friday night, even after the dispensation had become general. It was not that they felt it was sinful to eat meat, it was simply that their digestive systems had become so geared to fish on Friday that they didn’t know how to change. Kayman’s feelings about sex were closely related to that. When the celibacy rule had been lifted, it had not taken away the genetic recollection of two thousand years of a priesthood that had pretended it didn’t know what its sexual equipment was for.

Sister Clotilda came briskly into the room, kissed his freshly shaved cheek and took his arm, “You smell good,” she said.

“Want to get a cup of coffee somewhere?” he asked, guiding her out the door.

“I don’t think so, Donnie. Let’s get it over with.”

The autumn sun was a blast, hot air up out of Texas. “Shall we put the top down?”

She shook her head. “Your hair will blow all over. Anyway, it’s too hot.” She twisted in the seat belt to look at him. “What’s the matter?”

He shrugged, starting the car and guiding it into the automatic lanes. “I — I’m not sure. I feel as if I have something I forgot to confess.”

Clotilda nodded appraisingly. “Me?”

“Oh, no, Tillie! It’s — I’m not sure what.” He took her hand absent-mindedly, staring out the side window. As they passed over a throughway he could see the great white cube of the project building off on the horizon.

It wasn’t his interest in Sister Clotilda that was bothering him, he was pretty sure of that. Although he liked the little tingle of mild wickedness, he was not in any sense willing to flout the laws of his Church and his God. Maybe, he thought, he might hire a good lawyer and fight, but not break a law. He considered his pursuit of Sister Clotilda daring enough, and what came of that would depend on what her order allowed when and if he ever got around to asking her to apply for a dispensation. He had no interest in the wilder splinter groups like the clerical communes or the revived Catharists.

“Roger Torraway?” she guessed.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “There’s something about tampering with his senses that bothers me. His perceptions of the world.”

Sister Clotilda squeezed his hand. As a psychiatric social worker, she was cleared to know what was happening at the project, and she knew Don Kayman. “The senses are liars, Donnie. That’s Scripture.”

“Oh, sure. But does Brad have any right to say how Roger’s senses lie?”

Clotilda lit a cigarette and let him think it out. It wasn’t until they were near the shopping mall that she said, “Next turnoff, isn’t it?”

“Right,” he said, taking the wheel and turning the car back to manual. He slid into a parking space, still preoccupied with Roger Torraway. There was the immediate problem of Roger’s wife. That was trouble enough. But beyond that there was the bigger problem: How could Roger deal with the greatest of personal questions — what is Right, and what is Wrong? — if the information he had to base a decision on was filtered through Brad’s mediation circuits?

The sign over the shop window said PRETTY FANCIES. It was a small shop by the standard of the mall, which had a Two Guys with a quarter of a million feet of floor space and a supermarket almost as big. But it was big enough to be expensive. With rent, utilities, insurance, payroll for three salespeople, two of them part-time, and a generous managerial salary for Dorrie, it meant a net loss every month of nearly two thousand dollars. Roger paid it gladly, although some of our accountancy functions had pointed out to him that it would have been cheaper to give Dorrie the two thousand a month as an allowance.