Corrigan was looking undisguisedly skeptical. “How could that be, now?” he demanded.
Hans refused to be put on the defensive. “How do we know that we all see the same world anyway?” he challenged. “Oh, sure, we agree on the same broad descriptions—I’m not disputing that. But how do we know . . .” he paused, looking first at one, then the other, to emphasize his point, “that what we’re seeing is identical? We don’t. You’d be surprised how much in ordinary day-to-day living, people habitually see what they expect to see, not what’s there. Our tests show measures of agreement that are comparable. So the differences that we get are no worse than happen every day in the real world anyway.” He shrugged and turned up his hands to make one final point. “And in any case, we all tend to dream about similar things. That says there’s common circuitry at work somewhere.”
“But surely the degree by which different people disagree can’t be the same for all of them,” Evelyn said.
“That’s right—it varies as a Gaussian spectrum,” Hans said. “Ninety percent more-or-less agree what it’s like out there, and they define the `norm.’ But the fringe groups differ increasingly, until in the extreme cases they live in a different world entirely.”
“And we call them insane,” Corrigan said, getting the point.
Hans grinned at him jestingly. “Maybe you’re tackling VR the wrong way, Joe. Instead of trying to shovel a whole world into people’s heads, perhaps you should try inducing the right dreams, and let the machinery that’s already there inside do the work. That is what it evolved for, after all. Just as the best cures use the body’s own defenses.”
* * *
Ivy arrived late in the afternoon. She was looking good, had found herself a place in San Jose, and was heading up a space-imaging program at NASA, Ames. She asked about Tom Hatcher, Eric, and the others back at CLC, but—not so surprisingly, Corrigan supposed—did not show a great deal of curiosity about the progress of the project itself. Corrigan took the hint and didn’t push it on her. Evelyn got the same message.
From the university they went to eat at a place in Palo Alto that was a popular nightspot as well as a restaurant. Afterward, they stayed for a couple more drinks, and to dance. Late into the evening, while Evelyn was on the floor with Hans and the other two were taking a break, Ivy looked across at Corrigan over the rim of her glass and asked, “Are you going to marry her?”
Corrigan was used to Ivy’s direct way of saying exactly what was on her mind. He had found it disconcerting at first; later it became refreshing. He grinned forbearingly. “Now, why would I want to go and be doing a thing like that?”
“You two go so well together.”
“Exactly. Why go and spoil a good relationship?”
Ivy sipped her drink unblinkingly. “I think you should risk it. She wants to, you know. Women have this kind of radar. We can tell.”
“There’s an old Irish saying,” Corrigan told her. “If you want praise, die; if you want blame, marry. People change when they feel owned. They start blaming each other for not coming up to expectations that were never realistic in the first place.”
“If you’re smart enough to think that, you can’t be dumb enough to believe it, Joe,” Ivy said.
Corrigan took a mouthful of drink, thought for a moment, and set his glass down. “Ah, enough of this heavy stuff,” he said. “Have you got your breath back? This is a great one that they’re starting now. Let’s go back and show Hans and Evelyn a thing or two.”
But Ivy’s comment about he and Evelyn going so well together had struck a sympathetic chord in him somewhere. Some of the women back at CLC had said the same. For some reason, it was always the women who noticed such things—or at least, who mentioned them. And socially, it was one area where his life felt incomplete.
He was unusually quiet and thoughtful all the way through the drive back up to San Francisco.