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 re—creation, 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 . .
Hunt stared at her, realizing that his attempted flippancy had been a mistake. His manner became more serious. “There are still millions of Jevienese out there who presumably didn’t see it that way,” he pointed out. “If it’s really such a bad trip, how come Garuth had to shut the system down to tear them away from it?”
“You can have bad trips on molecules, too. Vic. . . I don’t know how it affects everybody else. But I do know how it affected me, and how it affected Gina. And I’m certain that she wouldn’t have gone near it again. At least, not the way she said—with Baumer. And not when she was out on an assignment for us. And definitely not if she knew she’d be walking into JEVEX, not VISAR.” Sandy paused, giving Hunt a long, sober look, inviting him to reflect on the implication. But the expression on his face told her that he had seen it already. She nodded. “But Gina isn’t giving us a line. She remembers it the way she says—and I think there’s only one way that could have happened.”
“Christ!” Hunt breathed.