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 His entire conceptual framework seemed to have changed—or been replaced by another.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 Shiloh~xi. “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.
It was too early to commit to any conclusion. He needed more time to let his mind chew its way through the complexities in its own, unhurried way. More to keep things open than for any other reason, he suggested that it would be interesting to find out if a “possessed” Terran also claimed to have come from the same Otherworld that the Jevlenese described. He liked the word Danchekker had used, and referred to it as “Phantasmagoria.” Danchekker and Shilohin agreed that it would be a worthwhile thing to try and find out.