“Why not?” The girl regarded him keenly. Now two others from the living room, having left the TV set with its booming image of never-failing President Omar Jones, appeared, the thin, severe man with gold-rimmed glasses and an elderly woman with collapsed, corrugated flesh which hung in dismal wattles, with obviously dyed black, lusterless hair and far too ornate bracelets on her flabby wrists. Both seemed aware of the direction of conversation which had come before; they listened silently, almost raptly, and now a third person joined them, a dramatically colored, heavy-lidded woman in evidently her early thirties, wearing a blue-cotton Mexican-style shirt tied at the waist and open to expose effectively shaded smooth bare skin; her richly dyed, extremely tight jeans, plus the unbuttoned top of her blouse beneath the Mexican shirt, caused to be manifest a stunning, supple body—Rachmael found himself fixedly contemplating her, no longer aware of the conversation in progress.
“This is Miss de Rungs,” the thin, severe-featured man with the gold-rimmed glasses said, nodding at the impressive, deeply hued woman in the Mexican shirt. “And this is Sheila Quam.” He indicated the white-oak-haired girl who had prepared hot syn-cof for Rachmael.
The stout man, still poking at his mouth with his toothpick, appeared at the door of the kitchen, smiled a warped but friendly smile composed of jagged and irregular teeth and said, “I’m Hank Szantho.” He held out his hand and Rachmael shook. “We’re all weevils,” he explained to Rachmael. “Like you. You’re a weevil; didn’t you know it? What paraworld did you tie into? Not a really bad one; huh?” He eyed Rachmael searchingly, his jaw working, his face coarse with shrewd but in no way malicious interest.
“We’re all in the class together,” the curly-haired youth said in a bellicose but oddly agitated voice, speaking directly to Rachmael as if challenging him, as if some hidden dispute, beyond Rachmael’s perception, somehow had become involved. “We all have the illness; we all have to get well.” He physically propelled a slender, short-haired, smartly dressed girl with sharply delineated delicate features; she gazed at Rachmael with a wild, vague anxiety which was almost an appeal—he did not know in regard to what, since the curly-haired youth—whose shoulders and musculature Rachmael noticed for the first time, appeared unusually escalated in use-value—had released her. “Right, Gretch?” the youth demanded.
To Rachmael, in a low but entirely controlled voice, the girl said, “I’m Gretchen Borbman.” She held out her hand; reflexively, he shook, and found her skin smooth and lightly cool. “Welcome to our little revolutionary organization, Mr.—” She paused politely.
He gave his name.
“Arab-Israeli?” Gretchen Borbman said. “From the Federation of Semitic Peoples? Or from that drayage firm that used to be so big and now’s disappeared . . . Applebaum Enterprise, wasn’t it called? Any relation? What ever happened to it and to that lovely new liner, that Omphalos . . . wasn’t that your flagship?”
It was beyond belief that she did not know; the news media had made a cause célèbre of such magnitude out of the Omphalos’ flight to the Fomalhaut system that no one could fail to know, at least no one on Terra. But this was not Terra; already, the agreeable, normal milieu of humans in proximity to him, here, had washed into paleness the grotesque apparition of gummy seaweed slime that, caked to the steaming, drying cyclops-face, had stunk so acridly, rinsed in foulness: the degeneration into hydrokinetically-maintained organic tissue of what had once been—or convincingly appeared to be—a human being, even if it was a killer-commando mercenary of Trails of Hoffman Limited.
“Yes,” he said cautiously, and, deep within the appropriate section of his mentational apparatus, a conduit carried a warning signal; some sensitized mechanism woke and became thoroughly alert. And did not cease its picket-duty; it would remain in go-position until otherwise instructed; his control over it was virtually nil. “That was—still is—the sole valid asset of our firm. With the Omphalos we’re something; without her we’re not.” With utmost caution he surveyed the group of people, the weevils, as they called themselves, to see if any appeared aware of the achingly recent abortive flight to Fomalhaut. None of them showed any indication; none of them spoke up or even registered a meaningful facial expression. Their joint lack of response, second by second, plunged him into alarmed, accelerated confusion. And he experienced, weirdly and as frighteningly as each time before, an unannounced oscillation of the drug-state; he felt his time-sense fluctuate radically, and everything, all objects and persons in the room, become changed. The LSD, at least briefly, had returned; this did not surprise him, but it was the wrong time; this, of all possibilities, he could do without at this palpably crucial moment.
“We get damn near no news from Terra,” the stout man with the toothpick, Hank Szantho, said to him . . . the voice sounded close by, but the man’s shape: it had warped into a lurid color collage, the textures of his flesh and clothes exaggerated, now rapidly becoming grotesque as the light factor doubled and then doubled again until Rachmael looked into a formless blur of heated metal, red so molten and ominous that he moved his chair back, away from the sliding slag-like sheet which had replaced the man; behind it Hank Szantho bobbed, the balloon-head capriciously located, as if by whim, in the vicinity of the collage of torch-shaped fire which had a moment ago been the body and clothing and flesh of the man.
And yet the man’s face, diminished in vigor and solidity as it now was, had undergone no physiognomic disfiguration; it remained the balanced countenance of a somewhat crude but amiable, tolerant, heavy-set human.
Astutely, the white-oak-haired girl Sheila Quam said to him, “I see apprehension in your eyes, Mr. ben Applebaum. Is it the hallucinogen?” To the others she said, “I think it’s rephasing within his brain-metabolism once more; obviously it hasn’t as yet been excreted. Give it time. Drink your cup of syn-cof.” Sympathetically, she held it up, between his line of vision and Hank Szantho’s nimbus of radiant color; he managed to fix his attention, make out the cup, accept it and sip. “Just wait; it’ll go away. It always does, and we’re very familiar with the illness, both subjectively in ourselves and objectively in each other. We help each other.” She moved her chair closer, to sit beside him; even in his condition he made note of that, and in addition the fact that this superficially slight maneuver effectively placed her between him and the dramatic, dark-complexioned woman, Miss de Rungs, and the willowy, attractive Gretchen Borbman with her springy, near-bobbed chic hair. At this loss he felt sad; a dismal awareness of his powerlessness burgeoned within him, realization that, in the drug-state, he could not fashion in any manner whatsoever a change in the flow of sense-data flowing in on him; the authority of the data, their absoluteness and degree, again reduced him to a passive device which merely registered the stimuli without responding.
Sheila Quam patted, then took gentle hold of his right hand.
“The illness,” Gretchen Borbman said, “is called the Telpor Syndrome. Disjunction of the percept-system and substitution of a delusional world. It manifests itself—when it does at all—shortly after teleportation. No one knows why. Only a few get it, a very few. Ourselves, at this present time. We get cured one by one, get released . . . but there always are new ones, such as yourself, showing up. Don’t be worried, Mr. ben Applebaum; it is generally reversible. Time, rest, and of course therapy.”
“Sorcerer’s apprentice therapy,” Hank Szantho said, from some vector of space not within Rachmael’s range of sight. “S.A.T., they call it. The cephalic ‘wash head-benders; they’re in and out of here, even Dr. Lupov—the big man from Bergholzlei in Switzerland. God, I hate those fnidgwizers; poking and messing around like we’re a bunch of animals.”
” ‘Paraworld,’ ” Rachmael said, after what seemed to him an almost unendurably protracted interval, due to the drug. “What is that?”
“That’s what a weevil sees,” the older woman with the dough-like folded face-rolls said in a cross, nagging, fretful voice, as if discussing the subject made her suffer the reoccurrence of some hated osteogenetic twinge. “Some are just dreadful; it’s a terrible, terrible crime that they’re allowed to get away with it, programming us with that as we’re on our way over here. And of course we were assured by those Telpor technicians that nothing, absolutely nothing of this sort could possibly happen.” Her voice, shrill and accusing, tormented Rachmael’s brain, amplified by the drug; the auditory pain became a fire-sheet, white, brittle, cutting, whirling like a circular saw and he put his hands up to shield his ears.
“For chrissakes,” Hank Szantho said angrily, and his voice, also, reverberated hideously, but at a low pitch, like the shifting of the earth below during a major H-head excavation detonation catastrophically close. “Don’t blame the Telpor people; blame the fruggin’ Mazdasts—it’s their fault. Right?” He glowered around at all of them, no longer amiable and easy-going but instead harsh, threatening them with his suspicious, wrathful attention. “Go cut the eye-lense out of a Mazdast. If you can find one. If you can get close enough.” His gaze, rotating from person to person, fell on Rachmael, stopped; for an interval he contemplated him, with a mixture of scorn, outrage, and—compassion. By degrees his indignation ebbed, then was entirely gone. “It’s tough, isn’t it, Applebaum? It’s no joke. Tell all these people; you saw it, didn’t you? I heard you telling Sheila. Yeah.” He sighed noisily, the wind escaping from him as if the knot of life which regulated the retention of vital oxygen had all at once unraveled itself out of existence. “Some get a mechanical-construct mysticomimetism; we call that The Clock.”