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-Lanibian 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.
“wsiu~ 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 pic
tures of a surface-bombardment sateffite that this U.S.S.F. was supposed to have put in orbit, and of 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 oi1t through a door and along a corridor, and here I am,” Lyn completed.