Martin looked at her contemptuously and, without replying, jammed the helmet down on his own head.
“Damn the man,” Pat snapped in Patsy’s general direction. Patsy didn’t answer. All these things that were happening were coming a lot too fast for her comfort-yes, and a hell of a lot too weird, too. She couldn’t sort them out. Beloved Leaders killing planets: all right, she was perfectly willing to believe that that was what the Beloved Leaders did. It wasn’t good news, but at least it was comprehensible; they were being warned. But what was the meaning of sending copies of themselves to Earth! That was scary.
Then everybody fell silent as Martin Delasquez slowly lifted the helmet off his head. He stared at them blankly until Jimmy Lin snapped, “Well?”
“Yes,” Delasquez said, organizing his thoughts. Then he took a deep breath and delivered his report. “What I was seeing-it was, I think, the VIP dining area at Kourou.”
“Kourou? in South America?”
“The European launch center,” Delasquez confirmed. “That’s what it looked like, anyway-I did a six-month exchange mission there once. But what is astonishing-I was seeing it out of my own eyes.”
Rosaleen was the first to react. “Your own eyes? But how do you know it was you?”
“It was. I saw my Academy ring on my hand-and I know my own hand. And there were all kinds of European Space Agency people there too-at other tables-I think I even saw Colonel duValier-but I wasn’t with them. I was at a table by myself, except for one other man. He was in uniform, and he carried a sidearm, and he wasn’t eating. Didn’t even have a plate in front of him. He was just watching me. It was-“ He hesitated, trying to think of the right word. “It was-It was very unpleasant.”
“Let me have that,” snarled Jimmy Lin, reaching for the helmet. Pat was ahead of him. She snatched the thing from Martin’s slack grip.
“My turn!” she snapped, and put it on.
Martin was paying no attention. “I could taste the food,” he said wonderingly. “I was eating an omelette, one of the kind with vegetables in it? And there was the shell of a papaya on the table-I could still taste it-and a brioche. Quite good coffee, too. And hot; it almost burned my tongue.”
Rosaleen was listening intently. “You could taste and feel? So it wasn’t just a television picture?”
“It was just as though I were there,” Martin insisted. But by then Patsy wasn’t listening anymore, because Pat had claimed her attention. She was making sounds of distress, and Patrice was standing anxiously beside her, begging to know what was wrong.
Then Pat moaned, gasped and pulled the helmet off as though it burned her. “It was all woogly!” she cried, suddenly white-faced and shaking. Patrice put her arm around her; if Patrice hadn’t, Patsy would have, because she had never seen Pat look so shaken. “I guess I was on Earth, all right-partly, anyway. But I was in jail!”
And of course there were about a million questions about that, but Patsy didn’t wait to hear the answers, didn’t even wait to find out what Pat meant by being “partly” on Earth. She went right to the source. Snatched the helmet out of Pat’s hand, pulled it over her head, snapped the goggles into place-
It was a good thing that Pat’s complaints had prepared her, at least a little bit. Even so, the shock was almost paralyzing as she found out what Pat had meant by “woogly.”
She wasn’t seeing one scene. She was seeing two of them- no, not merely seeing; she was present in two different places. Feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling; all the senses were involved. And everything was doubled. In one scene she was seeing herself with the helmet over her head, saw Pat-right up close, as though she were holding her in her arms; no, she was holding Pat in her arms, because she could feel Pat’s body shaking. And at the same time, in the other scene, she was looking at a bare room with bright lights, a small table with nothing on it, a straight-backed plastic chair, dun-painted walls without any pictures or ornamentation of any kind. She saw all this second scene from a recumbent position, because she was lying on a hard, narrow cot, curled up on her side with her open hand under her cheek, but wide awake. She was staring into space. And she could see the door to the room, all right, and, yes, Pat had been perfectly right.
There were steel bars on the door. She was definitely in some kind of a jail.
When Patrice took her turn-no argument about who was next this time, not even from Jimmy Lin; everyone wanted to know what the “woogliness” was all about-she reported seeing the same thing. Two separate scenes. Both wholly real, in every sensory way. The only difference was that in the scene that corresponded to their cell, she saw Patsy there instead of herself.
“Dopey said they were monitoring our copies,” Rosaleen said meditatively.
“But like this? Seeing with our eyes?” Pat was still shaken. “It gave me a damn migraine! Only-“ She hesitated, remembering. “Only what I saw was three different scenes, not two. Two of them were here, from different angles; it was the other one that looked like a jail.”
“Damn well was a jail,” Patrice said feelingly.
Rosaleen sighed. “Yes,” she said, following out some private thought process of her own. “It must be so.”
“What must be so?” Patsy demanded, and Rosaleen looked at her with compassion.
“It explains much,” she said. “These copies of us that the Horch showed us, the ones the Beloved Leaders made and returned to Earth? They were fitted with some sort of transmitters to pass on everything they saw and felt-“
“How?” Jimmy Lin asked.
“Oh, Jimmy, what foolish questions you ask. How do I know how? With a magical incantation, perhaps, or perhaps they implanted a tiny broadcasting station in the left nostril-who knows what kind of technology is here?”
“Damn,” Dannerman said feelingly. “I see what you mean, Rosaleen. That’s how Dopey knew the name of my boss, Colonel Morrisey.”
“Yes. And much more,” Rosaleen said. She turned back to Patsy and Patrice. “And when, in kindness, Dopey provided us with you two, he first turned you into observing devices-“
“Hey!” both of them said at once.
“Yes. And so now, at least, we know just how Dopey was able to read all our little secret messages that we passed around with such care. You two read them for him. Whatever you saw he saw too.”
In these last two days Patsy’s life had been violated in more ways than she could count-the violation of the nudity taboo when she was first brought in, the endless privacy violations that came with everyone being huddled together in the one common pen for everything-for sleeping, for eating, even for going to the damn toilet.
But this latest violation was something new. Until now she had had the illusion that at least her private central self was intact. Now that illusion was destroyed. Some weird creature somewhere-not just Dopey; who knew what other bizarre beasts were eavesdropping as well?-somebody was seeing and feeling everything she did.
And beyond doubt was still doing it. It was, she told herself, an intolerable situation . . . except, of course, that she had no choice but to go right on tolerating it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Patsy
If the others had taken the news as hard as Patsy, they didn’t show it. They were all clustered around whoever was wearing the helmet at that moment, every one of them demanding another turn. It was like Christmas at Uncle Cubby’s, with every child demanding the one best toy at once. Even Dannerman and Rosaleen, though Dannerman had reported resentfully that his turn had been a washout, since as far as he could tell he was simply in bed asleep. (Which, Patsy thought, supported her own feeling that it was the middle of the night-assuming they were in the same time zone.) And Rosaleen had seen nothing at all, didn’t even share Dannerman’s conviction that the reason was that she had been asleep.
But then there was Jimmy Lin.
His turn lasted longer than any of the others were willing to tolerate. He clung to the helmet, trying to wave them off with his arms; and when at last he took it off he was beaming. “You guys had me worried,” he said. “You know, armed guards, and jail cells, and all that? But I was just fine. I’m pretty sure I was in Jiuquan-the Chinese space center? And I was in my old Fiat electric? Driving somewhere from the base? I know that road; it hadn’t changed much since the last time I was there. I could see the launchpads way off by the hills-oh, there’s no doubt about it; that’s where I was. And I was in uniform; I could see the sleeve of my tunic. It looks like I got a promotion, too, because I was wearing full commander’s stripes.”