A man, distributing leaflets, approached him, held out a broadsheet; McElhatten reflexively accepted it. The Friends of a United People outfit, he saw. Glaring banner:
UN VERIFIES COLONY TYRANNY
He said, aloud, “They were right. The cranks. The lunatics, like that guy who wanted to make the eighteen-year trip by interstellar ship.” He carefully folded the broadsheet, put it into his pocket to read later; right now he felt too numbed. “I hope,” he said aloud, “that my boss will take me back.”
“They’re fighting,” Ruth said. “You could see on the TV screen; they showed UN soldiers and then others in funny uniforms I never saw before in all my—”
“You think,” Jack McElhatten asked his wife, “you could sit in the taxi with the kids while I find a bar and get one good stiff drink?”
She said, “Yes. I could.” Now a flapple taxi was swooping down, attracted; it headed for the curb, and the four of them and their mound of fat luggage enticing its tropism.
“Because,” Jack McElhatten said, “I can use for instance a bourbon and water. A double.” And then, he said to himself, I’m heading for UN recruiting headquarters and volunteer.
He did not know for what—not yet. But they would tell him.
His help was needed; he felt it in his blood. A war had to be won, and then, years from now but not eighteen as it had been for that nut written up in the ‘papes, they could do it, could emigrate. But before that—the fighting. The winning of Whale’s Mouth all over again. Actually, for the first time.
But even before that: the two drinks.
Acrid smoke billowed about him, stinging his nostrils; he halted, bent in a reflexive half-crouch. Then, here now on the far side, on the ninth planet of Fomalhaut, Rachmael ben Applebaum fingered relentlessly the meager flat tin, the container in his trousers pocket: this the wep-x at the Advance-weapons Archives had at last provided him—radically disguised as well as radically beyond anything in the standard arsenals of the UN. The camouflage of the hyper-miniaturized time-warping construct had seemed to him, when he first viewed it, the sine qua non of misleading packages: the weapon appeared to be bootlegged tin of prophoz from Yucatán, fully automated, helium-battery powered, guaranteed for five-year operation and gynetropic.
Briefly, he huddled in the safe shadow of a wall, the weapon out, now, visible in the palm of his hand; even the gaily painted halfwitted slogan of the Central American factory had been duplicated, and, at a time like this, on a stranger-planet in another system, he read the quixotic words familiar to him since adolescence:
MORE FUN
AFTER DONE!
And with this, he thought, I’m going to get Freya back. In its witless, gaily colored way the camouflage-package of the weapon seemed more of an insult, a quasi-obscene commentary on the situation confronting him. However, he returned it to his pocket; sliding upward to an erect position he once again viewed the nebulous rolls of particles in suspension, the cloud masses derived from the molecularization of the nearby buildings. He saw, too, dim human shapes that sped at ludicrously accelerated speed, each in its own direction, as if some central control usually in operation had, at this dangerous time, where so much was at stake, clicked off, leaving each of the sprinting figures on its own.
And yet they all seemed to understand what they were doing; their activities were not undirected, not random. To his right a cluster had gathered to assemble a complex weapon; with industrious, ant-busy fingers they snapped one component after another into position in expert progression: they knew their business, and he wondered—he could not, in the erratic light, make out their uniforms—which faction they represented. Probably, he decided, better to conclude they belonged to THL; safer, he realized. And he would have to assume this, until otherwise proved, about each and every person whom he encountered here on this side, this Newcolonizedland which was no—
Directly before him a soldier appeared whose eyes glowed huge and unwinking, owl eyes which fixed on him and would never, now that they had perceived him, again look away.
Diving to the ground, Rachmael fumbled numbly for the prophoz tin; it had happened too soon, too unexpectedly—he was not ready and the weapon which he had brought here to use for Freya was not even positioned to protect him, let alone her. His hand touched it, buried deep within his pocket . . . and at that moment a muffled pop burst near his face as, above him, the THL soldier twisted to re-aim and fire once more.
A high-velocity dart waggled its directing fins as it spun at him. It was, he realized as he watched it descend toward him, a LSD-tipped dart; the hallucinogenic ergotic alkaloid derivative constituted—had constituted ever since its introduction into the field of weapons of war—a unique instrument for reducing the enemy to a condition in which he was absolutely neutralized: instead of destroying him, the LSD, injected intravenously by the dart, destroyed his world.
Sharp, quick pain snuffed at his arm; the dart had plunged into him, had embedded itself successfully.
The LSD had entered his circulatory system. He had, now, only a few minutes ahead; that realization alone generally took the target out: to know, under conditions such as these, that very shortly the entire self-system, the structure of world-character which had developed stage by stage over the years from birth on—
His thoughts ceased. The LSD had reached the cortical tissue of his frontal lobe and all abstract mentational processes had instantly shut down. He still saw the world, saw the THL soldier leisurely reloading the dart-releasing gun, the rolling clouds of A-warhead-contaminated ash, the half-ruined buildings, the ant-like scampering figures here and there. He could recognize them and understand what each was. But beyond that—nothing.
Color, Rachmael thought as he saw the transformation in the THL soldier’s face; the color-transformation—it had already set in. Swiftly, the drug moved him to ruin; in his bloodstream it rushed him toward the end of his existence in the shared world. For me, he knew, this—but he could not even think it, carry out the steps of a logical thought. Awareness was there, knowledge of what was happening. He watched the lips of the THL soldier become bright, phosphorescent, shiny-pink pure luminosity; the lips, forming a perfect bow, then floated off, detached themselves from the soldier’s face, leaving behind the ordinary colorless lips: one hemisphere of Rachmael’s brain had received the LSD and succumbed, undoubtedly the right, he being righthanded, the hemisphere on that side therefore being the undifferentiated of the two. The left still held out, still saw the mundane world; even now, deprived of abstract reasoning, no longer capable of adult cerebral processes, the higher centers of the left hemisphere of his brain fought to stabilize the picture of the world as it knew it, fought knowing that within seconds, now, that picture would give way, would collapse and let in, like some endless flood, the entirety of raw percept-data, uncontrolled, unstructured, without meaning or order, each datum unrelated to the others: the portion of his brain which imposed the framework of space and time onto incoming data would not be able to carry out its task. And, with the ringing in of that instant, he would plunge back decades. Back to the initial interval after birth—entry into a world utterly unfamiliar, utterly incomprehensible.
He had lived through that once. Each human, at the moment of birth, had. But now. Now he possessed memory, retention of the disappearing usual world. That and language; that and realization of what ordinary and expected experience would presently become.
And how long, subjectively, it would last. How long it would be before he regained—if he did regain—his customary world once more.
The THL soldier, his weapon reloaded, started away, already searching for the next target; he did not bother to notice Rachmael, now. He, too, knew what lay ahead. Rachmael could be forgotten; even now he no longer lived in the shared world, no longer existed.
Without thought, prompted by a brain-area silent but still functioning, Rachmael raced after the THL soldier; with no lapse of time, without sense of having crossed intervening space, he clutched the soldier, dragged him aside and took possession of the long-bladed throwing knife holstered at the man’s waist. Choking him with his left arm Rachmael yanked the blade backward in an arc that reversed itself: the blade returned, and the THL soldier followed its reverse trajectory as it approached his stomach. He struggled; in Rachmael’s grip he strained, and his eyes dulled as if baked, dried out, without fluid and old, mummified by a thousand years. And, in Rachmael’s hand, the knife became something he did not know.
The thing which he held ceased its horizontal motion. It moved, but in another direction which was neither up nor forward; he had never seen this direction and its weirdness appalled him, because the thing in his hand moved without moving: it progressed and yet stayed where it was, so that he did not have to change the direction of his eye focus. His gaze fixed, he watched the shining, brittle, transparent thing elaborate itself, produce from its central column slender branches like glass stalagmites; in a series of lurches, of jumps forward into the non-spacial dimension of altered movement, the tree-thing developed until its complexity terrified him. It was all over the world, now; from his hand it had jerked out into stage after stage so that, he knew, it was everywhere, and nothing else had room to exist: the tree-thing had taken up all space and crowded reality-as-it-usually-was out.