Faint friction sounds and scuffles, and then Kathleen Doughty’s voice: “Roger, this shithead forgot one important thing. Sensory deprivation’s dangerous, you know that.”

“I’ve heard it,” Roger admitted.

“According to the experts the worst part of it is feeling impotent to end it. So any time you begin to feel bad, just talk; one of us will always be here, and we’ll answer. It’ll be Brad, or me, or Sulie Carpenter, or Clara.”

“Are you all there right now?”

“Christ, yes — plus Don Kayman and General Scanyon and, cripes, half the staff. You won’t lack for company, Roger. I promise you that. Now. What about my voice, is that giving you any trouble?”

He thought. “Not that I notice. You do sound a little bit like a creaking door,” he evaluated.

“That’s bad.”

“I don’t think so. You sound kind of that way all the time, Kathleen.”

She giggled. “Well, I’m going to stop talking in a minute anyway. What about Brad’s voice?”

“I didn’t notice anything. Or anyway, I’m not sure. I was sort of dreaming and for a minute I thought he was singing “Aura Lee” along with his guitar.”

Brad cut in. “That’s interesting, Roger! What about now?”

“No. You sound like yourself.”

“Well, your readouts look good. All right. We’ll go into that later. Now, what we’re going to do is give you pure, simple visual inputs to deal with. As Kathleen says, you can speak to us any time and we’ll answer if you want us to. But we won’t speak much for a while. Let the visual circuits work themselves in before we confuse things with simultaneous sight and sound, got it?”

“Go ahead,” said Roger.

There was no answer, but in a moment a pale point of light appeared against the far wall.

It was not bright. With the eyes he had been born with, Roger suspected, he would not have been able to see it at all; as it was, he could make it out clearly, and even in the filtered air of his hospital room, he could see the faint path of light from projector to wall over his head.

Nothing else happened for a long time.

Roger waited as patiently as he could.

More time passed.

Finally he said, “All right, I see it. It’s a dot. I’ve been watching it all along, and it’s still just a dot. I do observe,” he said, turning his head about, “that there’s enough reflected light from it that I can see the rest of the room a little bit, but that’s all.”

When Brad’s voice came, it sounded like thunder: “Okay, Roger, hold on and we’ll give you something else.”

“Wow!” Roger said. “Not so loud, okay?”

“I wasn’t any louder than before,” Brad objected. And in fact his voice had reduced itself to normal proportions.

“Okay, okay,” Roger muttered. He was getting bored. After a moment another point of light appeared, a few inches from the first one. Both held for another long time, and then a line of light leaped into being between them.

“This is pretty dull,” he complained.

“It’s meant to be.” It was Clara Bly’s voice this time.

“Hi,” Roger greeted her. “Listen. I can see pretty well now, in all this light you’re giving me. What are all these wires sticking into me?”

Brad cut in: “They’re your telemetry, Roger. That’s why we had to tie you down, so you wouldn’t roll over and mess up the leads. Everything’s on remote now, you know. We had to take almost everything out of your room.”

“So I noticed. All right, go ahead.”

But it was tedious and remained tedious. These were not the kinds of things that were calculated to keep one’s mind busy. They might be important, but they were also dull. After an interminable stretch of simple geometric figures of light, the intensity reduced so that there was less and less spill of reflection to illuminate the rest of the room, they began feeding him sounds: clicks, oscillator beeps, a chime, a hiss of white noise.

In the room outside the shifts kept changing. They stopped only when the telemetry indicated Roger needed sleep or food or a bedpan. None of those needs were frequent. Roger began to be able to tell who was on duty from the tiniest of signs: the faintly mocking note in Brad’s voice that was only there when Kathleen Doughty was in the room, the slower, somehow more affectionate chirping of the sound tapes when Sulie Carpenter was monitoring the responses. He discovered that his time sense was not the same as that of those outside, or of “reality,” whatever that was. “That’s to be expected, Rog,” said the weary voice of Brad when he reported it. “If you work at it, you’ll find you can exercise volitional control over that. You can count out seconds like a metronome if you want to. Or move faster or slower, depending on what’s needed.”

“How do I do that?” Roger demanded.

“Hell, man!” Brad flared. “It’s your body, learn to use it.” Then, apologetically, “The same way you learned to block off vision. Experiment till you figure it out. Now pay attention; I’m going to play you a Bach partita.”

Somehow the time passed.

But not easily and not quickly. There were long periods when Roger’s altered time sense contrarily dragged his tedium out, times when, against his will, he found himself thinking again about Dorrie. The lift that Dash’s visit had given him, the pleasant concern and affection from Sulie Carpenter — these were good things; but they did not last forever. Dorrie was a reality of his reverie, and when his mind was empty enough to wander it was to Dorrie that it wandered. Dorrie and their joyous early years together. Dorrie, and the terrible knowledge that he was no longer enough of a man to gratify her sexual needs. Dorrie and Brad…

Kathleen Doughty’s voice snapped, “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, Roger, but it’s screwing up your vital signs! Cut it out.”

“All right,” he grumbled. He put Dorrie out of his mind. He thought of Kathleen’s rancorous, affectionate voice, of what the President had said, of Sulie Carpenter. He made himself tranquil.

As a reward they showed him a slide of a bunch of violets, in full color.

Ten

The Batman’s Entrechats

Suddenly, amazingly, there were only nine days left.

Outside the clerical condominium Father Kayman shivered in the cold, waiting for his ride to the project. The fuel shortage had worsened a great deal in the past two weeks, with the fighting in the Middle East and the Scottish Freedom Fighters blowing up the North Sea pipelines. The project itself had overriding priorities for whatever it needed, even though some of the missile silos had not enough fuel for topping off their birds; but all the staff had been urged to turn off lights, share rides, turn down their home thermostats, watch less TV. An early snowstorm had dusted the Oklahoma prairies, and outside the condominium a seminary student was sleepily pushing the snow off the walks. There was not much of it, and, Kayman thought, it was not particularly nice-looking. Was it his imagination, or was it tattletale gray? Could the ash from the blazing California and Oregon forests have soiled the snow fifteen hundred miles away?

Brad beeped his horn, and Kayman jumped. “Sorry,” Kayman said, getting in and closing the door. “Say, shouldn’t we take my car next time? Uses a lot less fuel than this thing of yours.”

Brad shrugged morosely and peered into his rear-view mirror. Another hovercar, this one a light, fast sports job, was swinging around the corner after them. “I drive for two anyway,” he said. “That’s the same one that was tailing me on Tuesday. They’re getting sloppy. Or else they want to make sure I know I’m being followed.”

Kayman looked over his shoulder. The following car was certainly taking no pains to be inconspicuous. “Do you know who it is, Brad?”

“Is there any doubt?”

Kayman didn’t answer. Actually, there wasn’t. The President had made clear to Brad that he was not under any circumstances to fool around with the monster’s wife, in a half-hour interview of which Brad vividly recalled every painful second. The shadowing had begun immediately thereafter, to make sure Brad didn’t forget.