The Two Worlds Page 9

  He couldn't tell whether he was inside one of the domes and looking out over the scene as he had been at the time, or whether he was somehow floating disembodied at some other viewpoint. Again his immediate surroundings were indistinct. He swung around, moving in a dreamlike way in which his body had lost its substance, and found that he was alone. Even surrounded by ice and endless empty space he felt clammy and claustrophobic. The terror that had gripped him when he first stepped out of the alien vessel was still there, gnawing insistently and stripping away his powers of reason. "What is this?" he demanded in a voice that choked somewhere at the back of his throat. "I don't understand. What does this mean?"

  "You don't remember?" the voice boomed deafeningly from nowhere and everywhere.

  Hunt looked wildly in every direction, but there was nobody. "Remember what?" he whispered. "I remember none of this."

  "You do not remember these events?" the voice challenged. "You were there."

  An anger surged up inside him suddenly—a delayed-action reflex to protect him from the merciless assault on his mind and senses. "No!" he shouted. "Not like that! They never happened like that. What kind of lunacy is this?"

  "How, then, did they happen?"

  "They were our friends. They were welcomed. We gave gifts." His anger boiled over into a quivering rage. "Who are you? Are you mad? Show yourself."

  Ganymede vanished, and a series of confused impressions poured by in front of his eyes, which inexplicably his mind assembled together into coherent meaning. There was a vision of the Ganymeans being taken into captivity by a stern and uncompromising American military . . . being allowed to repair their ship only after agreeing to divulge details of their technology . . . being taken to Earth to keep their side of the bargain . . . being dispatched ignominiously back into the depths of space.

  "Was it not so?" the voice demanded.

  "For Christ's sake, NO! Whoever you are, you're insane!"

  "What parts are untrue?"

  "All of it. What is the—"

  A Soviet newscaster was talking hysterically. Although it was in Russian, Hunt somehow understood. The war had to start now, before the West could turn its advantage into something tangible . . . speeches from a balcony; crowds chanting and cheering . . . launchings of U.S. MIRV satellites . . . propaganda from Washington . . . tanks, missile transporters, marching lines of Chinese infantry . . . high-power radiation weapons hidden in deep space across the solar system. A race that had gone insane was marching off to doomsday with bands playing and flags waving.

  "NO-O-O-O!" He heard his own voice rise to a shriek that seemed to come from all sides to engulf him, and then die somewhere far off in the distance. His strength evaporated abruptly, and he felt himself collapsing.

  "He speaks the truth," a voice said from somewhere. It was calm and decisive, and sounded like a lone rock of sanity amid the maelstrom of chaos that had swept him out of the universe.

  Collapsing . . . falling . . . blackness . . . nothing.

  Chapter Nine

  Hunt was dozing in what felt like a soft and very comfortable armchair. He was relaxed and refreshed, as if he had been there for some time. The memory of his experience was still vivid, but it lingered only as something that he regarded in a detached, almost academically curious, kind of way. The terror had gone. The air around him smelled fresh and slightly scented, and subdued music was playing in the background. After a few seconds it registered as a Mozart string quartet. What kind of insanity was he part of now?

  He opened his eyes, straightened up, and looked around. He was in an armchair, and the chair was part of an ordinary-looking room, furnished in contemporary style with another, similar chair, reading desk, a large wooden table in the center, a side table near the door set with an ornate vase of roses, and a thick carpet of dark brown pile that blended fairly well with the predominantly orange and brown decor. There was a single window behind him, covered by heavy drapes that were closed and billowing gently in the breeze coming through from the outside. He looked down at himself and found that he was wearing a dark blue, open-necked shirt and light gray slacks. There was nobody else in the room.

  After a few seconds he got up, found that he felt fine, and strolled across the room to part the drapes curiously. Outside was a pleasant, summery scene that could have been part of any major city on Earth. Tall buildings gleamed clean and white in the sun, familiar trees and open green spaces beckoned, and Hunt could see the curve of a wide river immediately below, an older-style bridge with a railed parapet and rounded arches, familiar models of groundcars moving along the roadways, and processions of airmobiles in the sky. He let the drapes fall back as they had been and glanced at his watch, which seemed to be working normally. Less than twenty minutes had passed since the "Boeing" touched down at McClusky. Nothing made sense.

  He turned his back to the window and thrust his hands into his pockets while he thought back and tried to remember something that had been puzzling him even before he stepped out of the spacecraft. It had been something trivial, something that had barely registered in the few moments that had elapsed between Calazar's brief appearance inside the craft and Hunt's first glimpse of the stupefying scene that had greeted him outside just before everything went crazy. It had been something to do with Calazar.

  And then it came to him. In the Shapieron, zorac had interpreted between Ganymeans and humans by means of earpiece and throat-mike devices that provided normal-sounding synthesized voices, but which did not synchronize with the facial movements of the original speakers. But Calazar had spoken without any such aids, and apparently quite effortlessly. What made it all the more peculiar was that the Ganymean larynx produced a low, guttural articulation and was utterly incapable of reproducing a human pitch even approximately. So how had Calazar done it, and without looking like a badly dubbed movie at that?

  Well, he wasn't going to get nearer any answers by standing here, he decided. The door looked normal enough, and there was only one way to find out whether it was locked or not. He was halfway toward it when it opened and Lyn walked in, looking cool and comfortable in a short-sleeved pullover top and slacks. He stopped dead and stared at her while part of him braced itself instinctively for her to hurl herself across the room and throw her arms around his neck while sobbing in true heroine tradition. Instead she stopped just inside the door and stood casually inspecting the room.

  "Not bad," she commented. "The carpet's too dark, though. It should be a more red rust." The carpet promptly changed to a more red rust.

  Hunt stared at it for a few seconds, blinked, and then looked up numbly. "How the hell did you do that?" he asked, looking down again to make sure that he hadn't imagined it. He hadn't.

  She looked surprised. "It's visar. It can do anything. Haven't you been talking to it?" Hunt shook his head. Lyn's face became puzzled. "If you didn't know, how come you're wearing different clothes? What happened to your Nanook outfit?"

  Hunt could only shake his head. "I don't know. I don't know how I got here, either." He stared down at the red rust carpet again. "Amazing . . . I think I could use a drink."

  "visar," Lyn said in a slightly raised voice. "How about a scotch, straight, no ice?" A glass half filled with an amber liquid materialized from nowhere on the table beside Hunt. Lyn picked it up and offered it to him nonchalantly. He reached out hesitantly to touch with it a fingertip, at the same time half hoping that it wouldn't be there. It was. He took the glass unsteadily from her hand and tested it with a sip, then downed a third of the remainder in one gulp. The warmth percolated smoothly down through his chest and after a few moments had worked a small miracle of its own. Hunt drew a long breath, held it for a few seconds, then exhaled it slowly but still shakily.

  "Cigarette?" Lyn inquired. Hunt nodded without thinking. A cigarette, already lit, appeared between his fingers. Don't even ask about it, he told himself.

  It all had to be some kind of elaborate hallucination. How, when, why, or where he didn't know,
but it seemed that he had little choice for the moment but to go along with it. Perhaps this whole preliminary interlude had been staged by the Thuriens to provide a period of adjustment and familiarization or something like that. If so, he could see their point. This was like dumping an alchemist from the Middle Ages into the middle of a computerized chemical plant. Thurien, or wherever this was, was going to take some getting used to, he realized. Having decided that much, he felt that probably he was over the biggest hurdle already. But how had Lyn managed to adapt so quickly? Maybe there were disadvantages to being a scientist that he hadn't thought about before.

  When he looked up and studied her face, he could see now that her superficial calm was being forced in order to control an underlying bemusement not far short of his own. Her mind was temporarily blocking itself off from the full impact of what it all meant. He could detect no sign of her having been through anything as traumatic as he had. At least that was something to be thankful for.

  He moved over to one of the chairs and turned to perch himself on an arm. "So . . . how did you get here?" he asked.

  "Well, I was right behind you on the gravity conveyor, or whatever you'd call it, from that crazy place that we all walked out into from the planet, and then . . ." She broke off as she caught the perplexed expression creeping across Hunt's face. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"

  He shook his head. "What gravity conveyor?"

  Lyn frowned at him uncertainly. "We all walked out of the plane? . . . There was this big bright place with everything upside down and sideways? . . . Something like whatever lifted us up the stairs picked us all up and took us off along one of the tubes—a big yellow-and-white one? . . ." She was listing the items slowly and intoning them as questions, all the while watching his face intently as if trying to help him identify the point at which he had lost the thread, but it was obvious already that she had experienced something quite different right from the beginning.

  He waved a hand in front of his face. "Okay, skip the details. How did you get separated from the others?"

  Lyn started to reply and then stopped suddenly and frowned, as if realizing for the first time that her own recollections were by no means as complete as she had thought. "I'm not sure . . ." She hesitated. "Somehow I ended up . . . I don't know where it was. . . . There was this big organization chart—colored boxes with names in them, and lines of who reports to who—that had to do with some crazy kind of United States Space Force." Her face grew more confused as she replayed the memory in her mind. "There were lots of UNSA names on it that I knew, but with ranks and things that didn't make any sense. Gregg's name was there as a general, and mine was right underneath as a major." She shook her head in a way that told Hunt not to bother asking her to explain it.

  Hunt remembered the transcripts he had read of the Thurien messages received at Farside, which had been baffling in their suggestion of a militarized Earth divided in an East-West lineup that was strangely reminiscent of the reconstructions of how Minerva had been—just before the final, cataclysmic Cerian-Lambian war. And the grilling that he had just gone through, if that was the right word for it, had echoed the same theme. There had to be a connection. "What happened then?" he asked.

  "visar started talking and asked me if that was an accurate representation of the outfit I worked for," Lyn replied. "I told it that most of the names were right, but the rest was garbage. It asked some questions about a couple of weapons programs that Gregg was supposed to be mixed up with. Then it showed me some pictures of a surface-bombardment satellite that this U.S.S.F. was supposed to have put in orbit, and a big radiation projector on the Moon that never existed. I told visar it was out of its mind. We talked about it for a bit, and in the end we got quite friendly."

  All that hadn't happened in ten minutes, Hunt thought. There must have been some kind of time-compression process involved. "There wasn't anything . . . `high-pressure' about all this?" he inquired.

  Lyn looked at him, surprised. "No way. It was all very civilized and nice. That was when I mentioned that I felt strange wearing those clothes indoors, and suddenly—zap!" She gestured down at herself. "Instant outfit. Then I found out more about visar's tricks. How long do you think it'll be before IBM gets one on the market?"

  Hunt stood up and began pacing across the room, noting absently as he moved that his cigarette didn't seem to be accumulating any ash to be disposed of. It was some kind of interrogation procedure, he decided. The Thuriens had obviously gotten confused over the situation on today's Earth, and for some reason it was important to them to have the correct story. If that was the case, they certainly hadn't wasted any time over it. Perhaps Hunt's experience had been a shock tactic designed to guarantee straight answers at the optimum moment when he had been totally unprepared and too disoriented to have fabricated anything. If so, it had certainly worked, he reflected grimly.

  "After that I asked where you were. visar directed me out through a door and along a corridor, and here I am," Lyn completed.

  Hunt was about to say something more when the phone rang. He looked around and noticed it for the first time. It was a standard domestic datagrid terminal and went so naturally with the surroundings that it hadn't registered previously. The call-tone sounded again.

  "Better answer it," Lyn suggested.

  Hunt walked over to the corner, pulled up a chair, sat down, and touched a key on the terminal to accept. His jaw dropped open in disbelief as he found himself staring at the features of the operations controller at McClusky.

  "Dr. Hunt," the controller said, sounding relieved. "Just a routine check to see if everything's okay. You people have been in there for a while now. Any problems?"

  For what seemed a long time, Hunt could only stare back blankly. He'd never heard of phone calls from the real world intruding into hallucinations before. It had to be part of the hallucination too. What was somebody supposed to say to hallucinatory operations controllers? "How are you talking to us?" he managed at last, succeeding with some effort in making his voice almost normal.

  "We got a transmission from the plane a while ago saying it would be okay for us to use a low-power, narrow beam aimed straight at it," the controller replied. "We set it up and waited, but when nothing came through we thought we'd better try calling you."

  Hunt closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and glanced sideways at Lyn. She didn't understand it, either. "Are you saying that plane is still out there?" he asked, looking back at the screen.

  The controller looked puzzled. "Why . . . sure . . . I'm looking right at it out the window." Pause. "Are you sure everything's okay in there?"

  Hunt sat back woodenly, and his mind jammed up. Lyn stepped past him and stooped in front of the screen. "Everything's okay," she said. "Look, we're a bit busy right now. Call you back in a few minutes, okay?"

  "Just as long as we know. Okay, talk to you later." The controller vanished from the screen.

  Lyn's composure evaporated with the picture. She looked down at Hunt, visibly worried and frightened for the first time since entering the room. "It's still out there. . . ." Her voice was coming unevenly as she struggled to keep it under control. "Vic—what's happening?"

  Hunt scowled around the room as the indignation that he had been suppressing at last came surging up inside. "visar," he called on impulse. "Can you hear me?"

  "I'm here," the familiar voice answered.

  "That plane that landed at McClusky—it's still there. We just talked to them on the phone."

  "I know," visar agreed. "I put the call through."

  "Isn't it about time you told us what the hell's going on?"

  "The Thuriens were intending to explain it when you meet them very shortly," visar replied. "You are due an apology, and they want to make it to you personally, not second-hand through me."

  "Then would you mind telling us where the hell we are?" Hunt said, not feeling very mollified by the statement.

  "Sure. You're in the per
ceptron, which as you've just told me is still on the apron at McClusky." Hunt caught Lyn's eye in a mute exchange of baffled looks. She shook her head weakly and sank down into one of the chairs. "You don't look very convinced," visar commented. "A small demonstration, perhaps?"

  Hunt felt his mouth opening and closing, and heard sounds coming out. But he wasn't making it happen. He was moving like a puppet to the pulls of invisible strings. "Excuse me," his mouth said as his head turned itself toward Lyn. "Don't worry about this—visar will explain. I'll be back in a few minutes."

  And then he was lying back on something yielding and soft.

  "Voila!" visar's voice pronounced from somewhere overhead.

  He opened his eyes and looked around, but a few seconds went by before he realized where he was.