“Do not tell, then,” Martin said savagely.
“Yes, but honestly-“
“Shut up,” Pat ordered.
“Ah,” said Jimmy, understanding at last. “I’d just be rubbing salt in the wounds, eh? Well, I can see how you feel, but I have to say-no,” he corrected himself, catching Pat’s glare at him. “I guess I don’t have to say. But you know what I’m thinking.”
And he turned and headed for the cooker. Over his shoulder he called, “The dinner was great, too. Gave me an appetite.”
“Son of a bitch,” Patrice said moodily, and changed the subject. “Patsy? Did you hear about Dan-Dan?”
“What about Dan-Dan?”-looking at him.
Dannerman said reluctantly, “I guess it’s important enough to tell. All right. About half an hour ago I took a turn in the helmet. I was awake, all right. I was getting dressed. And I had a hell of a hangover.”
“What were you celebrating, do you know?” Patsy asked curiously.
“I don’t think I was celebrating anything at all. I think my duplicate is in the deep shit. I was wearing a collar, you see.”
“Collar?”
“The tracker kind,” he said impatiently. “The kind they put on you so they always know where you are. So they can hear everything you say, and everything anybody says to you.”
“Oh, hell,” Patsy said, suddenly sympathetic. She wanted to put her arm around him, checked the impulse with Pat standing right there. “So you’re in trouble, too?”
“House arrest, I guess. Pretty much the same as Martin and you.”
Pat turned to Patsy. “Any ideas? Can you figure out why we’re all in trouble back home-all but Jimmy, anyway?”
“Maybe,” Dannerman offered, “it has something to do with what Martin is saying about lying to them.”
“But why would we all be lying?” Patrice asked reasonably. “I mean, all but Jimmy, I guess. What reason could we have?”
Dannerman shrugged. No one said anything for a while, and Patsy looked around the cell. Martin and Rosaleen were talking quietly over by the cooker. Jimmy Lin was sitting with his back to the wall, hands locked behind his head, a broad, reminiscent gring on his face.
Pat was looking at him, too. “Bastard,” she said. “But, hey, think about it. Suppose we could get this little piece of technology back to Earth! Suppose we put these bugs into, I don’t know, maybe a couple of vid stars, boy and girl-or boy and boy, or whatever; listen, any kind of preference anybody had. And then we could rent out helmets while they were getting it on. Can you imagine what kind of money people would pay? Mad sex, any kind of sex, without all that trouble of actually having to find Mr. Right and then getting a motel room and all… and no worry about catching something or getting pregnant or- Well,” she said hastily, aware of Dannerman’s eyes on her, “I mean, simply as a commercial venture.”
“I know what you mean,” he said kindly. Then he added, “I was thinking of something, too. I was thinking, what if the Bureau had this technology? Then they wouldn’t have to get people like me to infiltrate terrorist groups or criminal gangs or whatever. Just catch one of the gang, stick a bug into him, set him loose. From that moment on everything he saw or did would go right to the Bureau.”
“Oh, Dan!” Patrice said in dismay. “Do you know what you’re saying? It wouldn’t have to be just criminals! What if some government used that to keep track of everybody, all the time? Talk about your police states!”
And Pat said meditatively, “Maybe that isn’t a kind of technology we would want to bring back, after all.”
Silence for a moment, and then Dan said, “I wonder if we have a choice. I wonder if that might not be some of this wonderful stuff that the Beloved Leaders are going to give the human race if they’re let in.”
Then there was more silence, a lot of it, as everybody thought about that. Until Patsy sighed and shook herself. “Maybe I should take another turn in the helmet,” she said, and accepted the device as Dannerman handed it to her.
As soon as she was locked in the pictures flashed before her, just as before-the same doubled images: herself in the helmet as seen through Patrice’s eyes, and at the same time the bare cell on Earth. There, she discovered, she seemed to be eating breakfast. Some machine-scrambled eggs, far overcooked for her taste, some dry toast, a cup of weak coffee. She didn’t much like the taste of the food. Even less liked the dizzying duplication of images, which threatened to give her a headache. She closed her eyes to shut them out for a moment, and discovered that made no difference; she could feel that her eyelids were clamped shut, but she was still seeing both scenes.
Maybe, she thought, there was a way to ease that particular problem, at least. If Patrice were simply to keep her eyes closed and sit as still as possible while she herself was in the helmet, wouldn’t that cut down on the “spillover”? It might be worth a try, she thought. And was on the point of taking the helmet off to tell her so, when the floor shook again under her feet. She staggered. The helmet images blurred and distorted, but through Patrice’s eyes she could see that the wall was flaring again.
By the time she got the helmet off it was a kaleidoscope of color and the ground was still shaking, slow, remorseless swings back and forth. Patsy sat down abruptly to keep from falling- as everyone else was doing-and they watched the light show on the wall in fascination and fear. It flickered through the spectrum, settling on a dull red that felt as though it were actually radiating heat. …
Then-it disappeared.
There was no color at all where the wall had been. The smooth, resilient floor had turned into a pattern of closely woven metal strands. The ceiling, too, had changed; the even white glow was gone. Where it had been there was now a mesh that looked like bleached burlap, through which a pale light filtered from somewhere else. The same light illuminated the scene beyond the walls: Rosaleen’s “file cabinets,” the broad corridor along which Dopey had brought them to the cell, the two-domed metal object and all sorts of other things, too many and too strange to take in at once. Nothing obstructed her view.
Everybody was up and staring now. And Jimmy Lin, standing at the urinal, reached out with one hand to where the wall had been. He pulled his arm back slowly and turned, blinking, to the others. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “There isn’t any wall at all anymore.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Patsy
There was a story Patsy remembered about a lion in a zoo. For ten years that lion had paced restlessly back and forth in his cage, snarling at the bars. Then, one day, the keeper was careless. He went away and left the door open. When the keeper was gone, the lion padded over to the door, and sniffed at the air of freedom for a moment . . . and then turned and lay down in the farthest corner of his cage, his head on his paws, his eyes squeezed shut, until at last the keeper came back and closed the door.
That’s you, Dr. Pat-known-as-Patsy Adcock, she told herself. You’ve been pissing and moaning about wanting to get out of here ever since you arrived. Now you’ve got your big chance. There’s nothing to stop you walking out of here whenever you like. Well?
But she hesitated.
So did everyone else, all of them staring apprehensively at the vista around them, strange machines and distant gleams of light and, from somewhere, a pall of smoke drifting over them. No one moved . . . until Jimmy Lin, glancing wildly back at the rest of them, took a deep breath, then carefully stepped over the little puddle of his own recent urine and walked through the space where the wall had been. Not far. Just a step or two, actually, before he stopped to stare around. But he was definitely outside.
That did it for Patsy Adcock. If Jimmy Lin could do it she certainly could. She turned and marched resolutely out into the space she had never seen before. Behind her Pat called worriedly, “Hey, watch it, hon! What’re you going to do if the power comes back on and you’re stuck out there?”
That stopped Patsy, frozen on one foot, until she remembered. “No, it isn’t like that,” she called back. What she remembered was how it had been when Dopey brought them to the cell. It was a one-way wall. They hadn’t even seen the thing as they approached from outside, had simply walked into the space where the others were clustered, and had then been astonished to see the wall of mirrors bright and impenetrable behind them.