“I don’t suppose we could remove the Reinforcer?” a man in puce vestments said doubtfully.
“You know better than that, D’olt. The filamentary system is inextricably intermingled with T’son’s neural circuitry. Tampering with it would instantly prove fatal, as it did when T’son here removed it from Q’nell.”
“You mean—I killed her?” Tyson blurted. “Good night, Miss Q’nell—excuse me!”
“It’s nothing. If I ordered you to do so, I doubtless had my reasons.”
“You’re certainly being a sport about it,” Roger said admiringly.
“We citizens of Culture One seldom descend to the level of purely emotional reactions,” the girl stated calmly.
“Oh, really?” Roger raised an eyebrow. “I seem to recall seeing you blush just a few minutes ago.”
“My physiological reactions system bears no relationship to my intellectually determined course of action,” Q’nell snapped.
“Ah-ah! Anger, anger!” Roger said playfully. “Actually you’re not a bad-looking girl at all, you know. Why don’t you and I—”
“May I remind you, T’son,” R’heet put in, “that I have offered Q’nell a cohabitation contract. Your attentions are therefore unwelcome.”
“Well, let’s just see what she says about that . . . ”
“I say that it’s only twelve minutes until jump-off,” Q’nell said flatly. “I’d better be getting into position.”
“Don’t let her do it! She’ll be killed!” Roger protested.
“Possibly not,” R’heet said calmly. “The change in the nature of her mission from exploratory probe to a bombing run introduces a new factor into the equation.”
“You’re a cold-blooded one!” Roger said. “At least delay the launch! Give me time to try to remember the rest of what she said!”
“No delay is possible,” S’lunt put in. “The cyclical nature of the phenomenon requires that the attempt be within six hours, or never—at least not for another hundred and twelve years, by which time the deterioration of the temporal matrix will have progressed to the point where the entire space-time continuum will collapse on itself, with disastrous results!”
“Then wait six hours! There’s no use going before the last second!”
“Turnover is in fifteen minutes. At that time, of course, the Reinforcer, if still in this temporal matrix, will revert to its constituent parts. Thus, let us make haste.”
“But—but you can’t send a girl like that out alone with a bomb!”
S’lunt made a burping sound at R’heet, who belched a reply. S’lunt turned to Roger with outstretched hand.
“Capital!” he said. “R’heet and I have discussed the matter in depth, and we agree there’s no reason to refuse your courageous offer!”
“What offer?”
“To accompany her, of course! Let’s hurry along, now! There’s just time to pump the canned hypno-briefing into you before you go!”
3
“Comfort yourself, T’son,” S’lunt said in a tone of easy assurance as he and the half dozen other launch technicians studied their instrument readings. “The perceptor circuits indicate that you have correctly absorbed your briefing and are now as aware as necessary of the parameters within which you will function. Everything is in readiness for your departure. Q’nell has the null-engine tucked away in her pocket, armed and ready. No point in waiting.”
Glumly, Roger allowed himself to be escorted across the wide milk-glass floor to the spot where Q’nell waited beside a vast coil of thick white-painted tubing. R’heet emitted a terse blap! as he came up.
“I don’t savvy the local Speedspeak,” Roger said, noting the girl’s pert features, short-clipped jet-black hair, and appealingly pink lips, slightly parted to show perfect teeth. “What was that all about?”
Q’nell gave him a glance which had receded several degrees toward the impersonal.
“He was just mentioning that your fear index was rising steadily. If it ascends another point or two, you’ll be rigid with terror.”
“Oh, I will, will I?” Roger said hotly. “Well, go check your dials, buster! Sure, I’m a little nervous! Who wouldn’t be? For all I know, when I step into that thing I may wind up on an ice floe with a polar bear—or in the midst of a dinosaur’s lunch—or swimming in the middle of the Indian Ocean—or—” His voice rose higher as a succession of images presented themselves, none of them pleasant.
“Oh, no danger of that,” S’lunt said encouragingly. “Once launched along the Channel proper, you’ll be outside the Museum entirely, moving in a physical context regarding the exact nature of which we can make only the vaguest conjectures.”
“I remember you saying something like that, but I didn’t know what it meant,” Roger said. “By the way, what does it mean?”
“It means,” the girl put in, “that if your control should fail, we’ll be ejected from the Channel into a nonspatial context.”
“I’ve been thinking it over,” Roger said promptly, “and I’ve decided this is too dangerous for a girl. Too bad; we might have solved everything—and of course I’d have loved going—but it means risking the life of a fragile little creature like you—”
“You’re right, R’heet,” Q’nell said, nodding. “I can sense the terror from here.”
“Terror?” Roger came back hotly. “I was just . . . ” He swallowed. “Scared,” he finished. “But I’ve been scared before, and it never did me any good.” He straightened his back. “Let’s get going before I examine that statement too closely.” He gripped the girl’s hand and advanced to the opening in the coil. As he stepped through, the familiar gray mist folded in about him.
“Now—we pause here!” Q’nell said. “Remember S’lunt’s instructions!”
Roger closed his eyes and attempted to rotate his self-concept ninety degrees. Imagining his eyes to be peering out from the approximate position of his right ear was a difficult trick; a lifetime of orientation toward an arbitrarily designated “front” was not easy to overcome. But after all, he reminded himself, there was no reason the mind, an intangible field produced by the flow of current in a neural circuit, should be bound by such mundane restrictions . . .
Suddenly he succeeded, was aware of the nose on the side of his head, of the sideburn growing down between his imaginary eyes, of his arms, one on the front, one on the back . . .
And then he was falling through some medium that was not space . . .
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
For a while Roger fell with his eyes screwed shut, gripping the warm little hand of his partner—the sole material object in the universe. She appeared, he noted, to be about the size of the Queen Mary, floating majestically a mile away, linked to him by a fantastically long arm which dwindled as it approached, joining with a hand of normal size. Then he realized he had been mistaken. She was actually microscopically small, and floated on the surface of his eyeball . . .
“Not too bad so far,” she said. There were no audible words; the thought formed in Roger’s mind with crystal clarity, in the girl’s voice, complete with overtones of a passionate nature rigidly concealed beneath a calm exterior.
“How do you do that?” Roger inquired, and noted with surprise that his lips failed to move. Neither was he breathing. In sudden alarm, he tried to draw in air, but nothing happened.
“Don’t struggle,” Q’nell’s mental voice spoke sharply. “We’re in a null-time state, where events like heartbeats and respiration can’t take place. Don’t let it distract you, or we’ll find ourselves expelled from the Channel.”
“How long is this going to take?” Roger asked nervously. He felt no physical distress from lack of air, but a conviction of suffocation was rising in him.
“No time at all—other than subjectively,” Q’nell said.
“How can we be sure we’re actually going anywhere? Maybe we’re just going to hang here in space forever, swelling and shrinking.”
“That’s just your parameters trying to adjust to the absence of physical stimuli,” Q’nell pointed out. “Don’t let it bother you. And stop asking questions. If we knew the answers, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Hey!” Roger said suddenly. “My eyes are still shut; I can feel them! How is it I can see you?”
“You are not seeing me, you’re apprehending me directly.”
“This gray stuff,” Roger said. “It’s just like what you always see when you close your eyes. You know, I’m beginning to wonder—”
“Don’t!” Q’nell said sharply. “Whatever you do, don’t start to wonder!”
“I can’t help it!” Roger retorted. “This is all too ridiculous to be true! Any second now I’m going to wake up—in my own bed, back in Elm Bluffs, with my mother calling me,” he added, prompted by a sudden, vivid sense of homesickness.
The gray mist was changing, forming up into walls that simultaneously receded and closed in on him. Splotches appeared, congealed into large, pastel-colored floral patterns. There was a tear in the wallpaper, with white plaster showing behind it. He sat up, stared dumbly around a big, airy room with a ceiling that slanted down at one side, open windows, a shelf stacked with dog-eared Tom Swift books and untrimmed pulp magazines with B. Paul covers. Several inaccurately aligned model planes dangled from the ceiling on strings; a framed butterfly collection hung on the wall beside a row of arrowheads wired to a board and a felt pennant lettered elm bluffs sr. high.