” ‘The Clock,’ ” Gretchen Borbman murmured, nodding somberly. “That one really isn’t there; I don’t believe that ever existed, and anyhow it’d just be like encountering a simulacrum, only hypnagogic in origin. A balanced person ought to recover from that without having to go through the class.” She added, obviously to herself, “The goddam class. The goddam unending pointless disgusting class; jesus, I hate it.” She glared swiftly, furiously, around the room. “Who’s the Control, today? You, Sheila? I’ll bet it’s you.” Her tone was withering, and, in Rachmael’s auditory percept-system, the ferocity of it created for a moment a visual hellscape, mercifully fitful in stability; it hovered, superimposed across the surface of the plastic kitchen table, involving the syn-cof cups, the shaker of sweetex and small simulated silver pitcher of reconstituted organic butter fat in suspension—he witnessed impotently the fusion of the harmless panorama of conventional artifacts into a tabular scene of dwarfed obscenity, of shriveled and deranged indecent entanglement among the various innocent things. And then it passed. And he relaxed, his heart under a load of nausea-like difficulty; what he had, in that fragment of time, been forced to observe appalled his biochemical substructure. Even though the drug still clung to his mind and perverted it, his body remained free—and outraged. Already it had had enough.
“Our control,” Hank Szantho said, with sardonic sentimentality, then a wink to Rachmael. “Yes, we have that, too. Let’s see, Applebaum; your paraworld, the one the Mazdasts—if they exist—allegedly programmed you for—all this, of course, took place during teleportation while you were demolecularized—is listed code-wise by the authorities here as the Aquatic Horror-shape version. Damn rare. Reserved, I suppose, for people who cut up their maternal grandmothers in a former life and fed them to the family cat.” He beamed at Rachmael, showing huge gold-capped teeth, which, in the churning froth of excitation induced by the lysergic acid in his brain metabolism, Rachmael experienced as a display of revolting enormity, a disfigurement that made him clutch his cup of syn-cof and shut his eyes; the gold-capped teeth triggered off spasm after spasm within him, motion sickness to a degree that he had never considered possible: it was a recognizable but enlarged to the magnitude of a terminal convulsion. He hung onto the table, hunched over, waited for the waves of hyperperistalsis to abate. No one spoke. In the darkness of his unlit private hellscape he writhed and fought, coped as best he could with random somatic abominations, unable even to begin to speculate on the meaning of what had been said.
“The stuff hitting you bad?” a girl’s voice sounded, gently, close to his ear. Sheila Quam, he knew. He nodded.
Her hand, on the upper part of his neck, rubbing lightly with empathic concern, soothed the demented fluctuations within control of his malfunctioning, panic-dominated autonomic nervous system; he underwent a soothing, infinitely longed-for diminution of muscular contraction; her touch had started the process, the prolonged recovery-period of someone making his way out of the drug-state back to normal somatic-sensation and time. He opened his eyes, gratefully exchanged a silent glance with her. She smiled, and the rubbing, regular contact of her hand increased in sureness; seated close to him, the smell of her hair and skin enveloping him, she steadily increased the vital tactile bridge between them alive; she made it more profound, more convincing. And, gradually, the remoteness of the reality around him shifted in degree; once again the people and objects compressed in the small yellow-lit kitchen became solid. He ceased being afraid even as insight into just how fragmenting this new onrush of the drug-oscillation had been reached the again-functioning higher centers of his brain.
” ‘The Aquatic Horror-shape version,’ ” he said shakily; he took hold of Sheila Quam’s obliging hand, stopped its motion—it had done its task—and enfolded it in his own. She did not draw away; the cool, small hand, capable of such restorative powers, such love-inspired healing, was by a frightening irony almost unbelievably fragile. It was vulnerable, he realized, to almost everything; without his immediate protection it seemed totally at the mercy of whatever malign, distorted into ominous and unnatural shape destructive entity that blossomed.
He wondered what, within that category, would manifest itself next. For himself—and the rest of them.
And—had this happened to Freya, too? He hoped to god not. But intuitively he knew that it had. And was still confronting her . . . perhaps even more so than it did him.
11
Around him in the room the faces of the people became, as he listened to the emphatic, virtually strident pitch of the discussion, suddenly flat and lurid. Like cartoon colors, he thought, and that struck him wrenchingly, as very sobering and very chilling; he sat stiffly, unwilling to move, because even the slightest body motion augmented the oppressive garishness of the crudely painted only quasi-human faces surrounding him.
The discussion had become a vicious, ear-splitting dispute.
Two opposing explanations of the paraworlds, he realized at last, were competing like live things; the proponents of each were more and more with each passing instant becoming manic and bitter, and abruptly he had a complete understanding of the inordinate, murderous tenacity of each person in the room, in fact all of them . . . now no one, even those who had decided to remain in the living room to admire the jerky, twitching image of President Omar Jones drone out his harangue, had managed to avoid being sucked in.
Their faces, as Rachmael glanced about, stunned him. Terrible in their animation, their mechanical, horrifyingly relentless single-mindedness, the people around him battled with one another in a meaningless, formless muck of words; he listened with dread, felt terror at what he perceived; he cringed—and felt himself cringe—from them, and the desire to hop up and run without destination or the most vague spatial orientation that might help him locate himself, learn where he was, who these envenomed antagonists were . . . men and women who, a few intervals ago—seconds, days; under the LSD it was impossible to be even remotely accurate—had lounged idly before the TV set, listening to a man who he knew was synthetic, who did not exist, except in the professional brains of THL’s sim-elec designs technicians, probably working out of von Einem’s Schweinfort labs.
That had satisfied them. And now—
“It wasn’t a programming,” the fold-fleshed dyed-haired older woman insisted, blasting the air of the room with the shivering, ear-crushing shrill of her near-hysterical voice. “It was a lack of programming.”
“She’s right,” the thin, severe man with gold-rimmed glasses said in a squeaky, emotion-drenched falsetto; he waved, flapped his arms in excitement, trying to make himself heard. “We were all supposed to be falsely programmed so we’d see a paradise, as they promised. But somehow it didn’t take with us, the few of us here in the room; we’re the exceptions, and now those bastard ‘wash psychiatrists come in and do the job right.”
In vitriolic weariness Miss de Rungs said, to no one in particular, “The hell with it. Leave it up to our control; let the control worry.” She leaned toward Rachmael, unlit cigarillo between her dark lips, “A match, Mr. ben Applebaum?”
“Who’s our control?” he asked as he got out a folder of matches.
Miss de Rungs, with contempt and rasping animosity, jerked her head at Sheila Quam. “Her. This week. And she likes it. Don’t you, Sheila? You just love to make everybody jump. Squirm, squirm, when you come into the room.” She continued to eye Sheila Quam with hateful vindictiveness, then turned away, sinking into a voiceless interior brooding, cut off from everyone and all verbal interaction in the room with deliberate and hostile aversion; her dark eyes filmed with loathing.
“What I saw,” Rachmael said to Sheila Quam. “Under the LSD—that cephalopod. That you called—Hank Szantho called—the Aquatic Horror-shape. Was that psychedelic? Under the condition of expanded consciousness did I pick up an actual essence and penetrate a hypnoidal screening-field of some kind? And if that—”
“Oh yes; it was real,” Sheila Quam said levelly; her tone was as matter-of-fact as if this was a technical, professional discussion, something of academic interest only. “The cephalops of that sort seem to be, or anyhow it’s conjectured by anthropologists in the area to be—anyhow it’s the most reasonable working hypothesis, which they’ll probably have to go on whether they like it or not—is that the cephalopodan life form experienced as what we refer to as Paraworld Blue, its dominant species, is the indigenous race that dwelt here before THL showed up with—” She paused, now no longer composed; her face was hardened and when she again spoke her voice was brisk and sharp. “Good big a-thought-for-this-week advance weapons. Old papa von Einem’s clever monstrosities. The output of Krupp and Sohnen and N.E.D. filth like that.” She abruptly smashed into a repellent chaos the remains of her cigarillo. “During the Telpor transfer to Whale’s Mouth you were fed the routine mandatory crap, but as with the rest of us weevils it failed to take. So as soon as the LSD dart got you started intuiting within your new environment, the illusory outer husk rigged up became transparent and you saw within, and of course when you got a good clear dose of that—”