“Roger!” a voice called in an unmistakably maternal tone. “If I have to call you again . . . ” The unuttered threat hung in the air.
Roger made a squeaking sound, staring down at his own body. He saw a narrow, ribby chest, rumpled pajama bottoms covering knobby knees, the spindly shanks of a thirteen-year-old boy. “But . . . but . . . ” he mumbled. “I’m thirty-one years old, and a grown-up failure! I was in the Channel with Q’nell, headed for the terminal coordinates . . . ” He paused, frowning. “Terminal what?” he said aloud. “Wow, did I dream some big words!”
Suddenly the room faded, the walls swirled away into formless mist. Q’nell’s face appeared, floating toward him.
“Where did you go?” she demanded. “You disappeared!”
“I was a boy again,” Roger stuttered. “I was back home, in my own bed. It was just as real as this—realer! I could feel the bed under me, and smell bacon cooking, and feel the breeze coming through the windows! I thought all this was a dream!”
“But—you couldn’t. It’s impossible! I’m the dominant member of this linkage! You can’t do anything I don’t order you to do! At least that’s the theory . . . ”
“That’s ridiculous,” Roger said. “You’re only a girl, remember?”
“Look here, T’son! Don’t go wrecking the mission with your irresponsible male chauvinism! For some reason—probably having to do with a temporal precession effect induced by the reduplication of the Reinforcer circuitry—you seem to have taken over control of our joint conceptualizing capacities. You’ll have to exercise extreme care not to do anything impulsive! Unless we keep all our faculties attuned to the mission, you and I and a few million other captives will spend the rest of Eternity reliving the same day—or worse!”
A faint nebulosity had appeared nearby, at the edge of Roger’s vision. It grew, took on form and color.
“Q’nell!” Roger shouted soundlessly. “Look!”
“Now, T’son, if you’re going to go on panicking every twenty-one subjective seconds, our mission is doomed. Try to relax.”
“Behind you!” He stared at the knotted blanket slowly drifting into view. Under the brown folds, something was stirring, like a cat in a croker-sack.
“It’s revived!” Roger blurted. “The monster!”
“Now, T’son, you know we studied your statements back in Culture One and decided that the monster concept was merely a subconscious projection—”
“Projection or not, we’ve got to get out!” Roger gritted his mental teeth, concentrating on the image of the homey bedroom, the flowered wallpaper . . .
A vague pathway seemed to open through the surrounding gray. Roger yearned toward it, felt himself slipping into it . . .
“T’son! What are you doing?” Q’nell’s mental voice had assumed an odd, echoing quality. The tunnel was closing in, condensing into deep gloom that bulked around Roger. Sharp things poked at his back; the smell of hay was thick in his nostrils. He was, he saw, lying in a stack of the stuff, itching furiously. Overhead the lofty ceiling of a barn loomed.
“Now you’ve done it!” a familiar voice sounded, somewhere to the rear of his left eye. “I warned you about this sort of thing!”
“Where are we?” Roger sat up, scratched at a center of irritation on his right elbow, another on the left side of his neck, reached for a spot on his shoulder.
“Get the one on our left knee,” Q’nell commanded. “Then get us out of here!”
“My God!” Roger mumbled. “Are you in the same skin with me?”
“Where else would I be, you dolt?” Q’nell retorted. “We’re linked; where you go, I go, unfortunately for me. S’lunt was mad to entrust this mission to you! I might have known you’d panic and spoil it all!”
“Who’s panicked! And you can scratch your own knee!” Promptly his left arm, as if possessed of a vitality all its own, did just that. Startled, Roger rose to his feet, and promptly fell on his face, since his left leg had failed to join in the effort to support him.
“I’ll take the left half,” Q’nell’s voice stated firmly. “You’ll take the right. Now reattune and get us back into the Channel!”
Roger tried to protest, but the left half of his face was wooden. “I’m paralyzed,” he yelped incoherently. Threshing, he rolled from the hay onto a packed dirt floor. Across the room a wide door swung open. A tall, lean man in overalls, pitchfork in hand, stood outlined against a pale early-morning sky.
“Aha, it’s you, is it, Andy Butts!” an irate voice grated. “I told you for the last time about sneaking into my barn and upsetting George and Elsie! By hokey, you’ll work off your night’s lodging! You can start by forking out those stalls! Now come out of there and set to!”
Roger struggled to balance himself on all fours, but fell on his face instead.
“Drunk, too!” the man with the pitchfork barked, advancing with the weapon poised. “You’d better sober up in one gosh-blasted hurry, or by Jupiter I’ll give you a taste of what the hereafter’ll be like! Get up!” He jabbed with the gleaming tines. Roger made inarticulate sounds and scrabbled one-armed and one-legged, describing a circle in the dust. The owner of the barn stared at him blankly.
“Goldang, Andy!” he blurted. “You all right?”
“Help!” Roger shouted. The sound emerged as a gargle. He fell on his face again.
“Andy! You’ve had a stroke!” the pitchforker yelled, tossing the implement aside. “Rest easy, Andy! I’ll go for Doc Whackerby!”
With a supreme effort, Roger assumed sufficient control to cause the body of Andy Butts to spring wildly to its feet and topple, arms windmilling, against the barn owner, sending him spinning before crashing, jaw first, to the ground.
“He’s went insane!” the man yelled, staggering to his feet. He dashed away shouting.
“What are you trying to do?” Q’nell demanded subvocally. “That maniac almost murdered us!”
“Give me back my leg!” Roger countered. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Transfer us back to the Channel!” Q’nell commanded. “Until you do, I’m not letting go!”
“Are you crazy? You’ll feel that pitchfork just as much as I will!”
“Oh, no I won’t! I’m leaving the sensory nervous system entirely to you, thanks!”
“But I don’t know how!” Roger yelled silently.
“Try!”
“Well . . . ” Lying on the floor, Roger closed his eye. He stared into the formless gray, swimming with pulsating points and lines of pale-colored light, searching for some clue—any clue to escape. Instead, he was aware of the weight of fat on the body he now occupied, the rasp of stubble on his jowls, the pains shooting from his empty stomach, a clammy, shivering feeling of early-morning hangover.
“Ugh!” Q’nell exclaimed. “How revolting!”
“Quiet! How can I concentrate?”
“Hurry up! That barbarian’s coming back!”
“I’m trying!” Roger gritted his teeth, realized with a dull shock that he was grinding toothless gums together, became aware simultaneously of the coating on his tongue, a gluey feeling about the eyes, small creatures exploring his scalp, dirty socks—and an unreasoning dread of Doc Whackerby.
“He’s trying to take over!” Roger shouted soundlessly. “The owner of this miserable body!” With an effort, he forced his attention away from the reactions of Andy Butts, blanking his mind to allow his hypnotic training to come to the fore. The grayness thinned, receding. Two foci of relative brightness swam into his ken, radiating calmness.
“I think I’ve located our bodies!” he communicated. “I’ll try to bring them in . . . ” He willed himself toward the objectives, which floated, vague and formless, in the remote distance—or millimeters away. He was faintly aware of excited voices approaching, of pounding feet, of a renewed pang of Buttsian fear. With a final desperate effort, he lunged mentally for the nearest brightness, felt a wrench as Q’nell was torn from his side—
He was in a tiny space that compressed him like a straitjacket. Sounds crackled and boomed around him; sharp odors assailed his nostrils. Blurry gray and white forms moved vaguely before him. He tried to move, to call out, felt the shift of cumbersome members, the play of remote, impersonal muscles stretching under insensitive hide. His field of view swung, came to rest on a massive bulk beside him. He blinked, made out the shape of a vast draft horse in the next stall.
“Q’nell!” he tried to shout, instead uttered a bleating whinny. He recoiled, felt an obstruction behind him. At once, in instinctive reaction, his rear legs shot out in a frantic kick. Boards shattered and split. A surge of equine panic sent him blundering through the side of the stall.
Small, excited figures scattered before him. He longed for open space, charged toward it, burst into the open, shied as something tall and dark loomed before him, leaped a fence, and galloped for the safety of the open plains . . .