“I take it that you won’t be one of these surrogates,” Sylvine said.
Corrigan shook his head. “They’re on a full-time commitment. I’ll be going in and out of the simulation to keep an eye on how it’s going, sure—but my place is really on the outside, watching the whole thing.”
“What kind of risk is there in all this connecting into people’s heads?” another woman asked. “It sounds horribly spooky to me.”
“Naturally we wouldn’t be proceeding without testing as thorough as it’s possible to make it,” Corrigan replied. “But I’d be less than frank if I told you that we know everything. Of course there are uncertainties. That’s how you learn. Life and progress toward better things couldn’t exist otherwise.”
“Well, what we’ve been hearing today sure makes a change from all the PR bull,” Meechum said. “Now I’ll be frank with you, Joe. Listening to you talking today has been the first stuff about this whole project that I’ve really believed for months.”
“It’s about time, then,” Corrigan said.
Sylvine was vague about when he would be returning to Washington. He asked Corrigan a series of technical questions about the basis of Oz and what it might lead to. The surrogates seemed of particular interest to him. He wanted to know what kind of world they would perceive from the inside. Also, he raised the possibility of memory suppression and was intrigued by Corrigan’s account of how the possibility had been considered and rejected by the Oz designers. It occurred to Corrigan that perhaps this constantly recurring issue was of more concern to him unconsciously than he realized, and maybe that was what had caused him to cast himself as a subject of it in the dream.
The person that Sylvine reminded him of, Corrigan realized as he watched him, was Dr. Zehl—Sarah Bewley’s supervisor in the dreamed simworld. He wasn’t quite sure why, although it certainly had nothing to do with physical similarity. Perhaps it was that Zehl, too, had been from Washington; or maybe his tendency to appear suddenly, without warning.
The woman who had inquired about risk was still watching Corrigan and thinking to herself. When a lull presented itself, she asked him, “Do you really think that we do progress toward better things, Mr. Corrigan?”
Corrigan wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Certainly we do,” he answered. “Evolution is a self-improving process. Hence change is for the better, by definition.”
“I’d have to think about that,” the woman said dubiously.
“I never realized before that you were so much of a philosopher,” Pinder said to Corrigan. He had been watching Corrigan and saying little throughout, still showing much of the interest and curiosity that had been evident earlier.
“That was one of the things I learned as a bartender,” Corrigan replied unthinkingly.
Pinder looked surprised. “Really? I never knew you had been a bartender. When was that?”
For a second or two Corrigan was flummoxed. “Oh . . . that was way back, when I was earning my way as a student in Ireland,” he said finally.
He looked around, grinning. Everyone smiled back. He could become anything he wanted, he realized. He was a young man again, free to relive a crucial part of his life—and as far as he could see, with the benefit of all the accumulated experience of having lived the next twelve years before.
Maybe this was a dream, and maybe it wasn’t; he had all but given up trying to tell. But either way, it seemed he had no way of breaking out of it if it was, or of changing the situation if it wasn’t. So he might as well make the best of it. This time around, then, he decided, it would be a great ride.
* * *
He tried calling around to locate Evelyn when he got back later that night, but nobody he talked to could give him a lead. It seemed that everybody he’d known in Boston had either moved or was out of town. None of the few that he did manage to get through to had heard from her.
Chapter Thirty-four
“I just thought you’d like to know, Borth called Ken Endelmyer at home last night,” Pinder said from the screen of the comm unit on Corrigan’s desk. The NBC interview had been aired as part of a current-affairs documentary following the six-o’clock news the previous evening. “I’m assuming that he wasn’t very happy.”