“I’m not even certain about that,” the middle-aged man said, half to himself. “Do we know them that thoroughly? We’re so traumatized about them. Maybe there’s one that’s better, to be preferred.” He gestured in the direction of the living room with its logorrheic flow of TV noise, the pompous, unending, empty spouting-forth of jejune trash by the nonreal president of what Rachmael—as well as everyone else on Terra—knew to be a nonreal, deliberately contrived and touted hoax-colony.
“But this world can’t be para,” Gretchen Borbman said, “because we all share it, and that’s still our sole criterion, the one point we can hang onto.” To Rachmael she said, “That’s so important. Because what no one has laid on you yet, mercifully, is the fact that if two of us ever agree at the same time—” She lapsed into abrupt silence, then. And regarded Sheila with a mixture of aversion and fear. “Then out come the proper forms,” she went on, at last, with labored difficulty. “Form 47-B in particular.”
“Good old 47-B,” the curly-haired youth said gratingly, and instantly grimaced, his face contorted. “Yes, we just love it when that’s trotted out, when they run their routine check of us.”
“The control,” Gretchen continued, “signs 47-B after he or she—she, right now—feeds someone’s para-world gestalt in on Computer Day, which is generally late Wednesday. So after that it becomes public property; it isn’t simply a subjective delusional realm or a subjective anything; it’s like an exhibit of antique potsherds under glass in a museum; the entire damn public can file past and inspect it, right down to the last detail. So there would hardly be any doubt if ever two individual paraworlds agreed simultaneously.”
“That’s what we dread,” the fold-fleshed older woman with lifeless dyed hair said in a toneless, mechanical voice, to no one in particular.
“That’s the one thing,” Gretchen said, “that really does scare us, Mr. ben Applebaum; it really does.” She smiled, emptily, the expression of acute, unvarying apprehension calcified into sterile hopelessness over all her features, a mask of utter despair closing up into immobility her petite, clear-hewn face—clear-hewn, and frozen with the specter of total defeat, as if what she and the rest of them dreaded had crept recently close by, far too close; it was no longer theoretical.
“I don’t see why a bi-personal view of the same paraworld would—”Rachmael began, then hesitated, appraising Sheila. He could not, however, for the life of him fathom her contrived, cool poise; he made out nothing at all and at last gave up. “Why is this regarded as so—injurious?”
“Injurious,” Hank Szantho said, “not to us; hell no—not to us weevils. On the contrary; we’d be better able to communicate among each other. But who gives a gruff about that . . . yeah, who cares about a little miniscule paltry matter like that—a validation that might keep us sane.”
Sheila said, remotely, ” ‘Sane.’ ”
“Yes, sane,” Hank Szantho snarled at her.
“Folie à deux,” Sheila said mildly. To Rachmael she said, “No, not injurious to us, of course. To them.” She once more indicated the empty living room—empty except for the din of Omar Jones’ recorded unending monolog. “But you see,” she explained to Rachmael, raising her head and confronting him tranquilly, “it wouldn’t just be real; that is, real in the experiential sense, the way all LSD and similar psycheletic drug-experiences are . . . they’re real, but if one of the experiences is common to more than a single individual the implications are quite great; being able to talk about it and be completely understood is—” She gestured faintly, as if her meaning at this point was obvious, scarcely worth articulating.
“It would be coming true,” Miss de Rungs said in a stifled, unsteady voice. “Replacing this.” She ejected the end word violently, then swiftly once again sank into her withdrawn brooding.
The room, now, was tomb-like still.
“I wonder which one,” Hank Szantho said, half-idly, to himself but audibly. “The Blue, ben Applebaum? Yours? Or Paraworld Green, or White, or god knows which. Blue,” he added, “is about the worst. Yeah, no doubt of that; it’s been established for some time. Blue is the pit.”
No one spoke. They all, wordlessly, looked toward Rachmael. Waiting.
Rachmael said, “Has any of the rest of you—”
“None of us, obviously,” Miss de Rungs said, with rigid, clipped firmness, “has undergone Paraworld Blue. But before us—several, I believe, and fairly recently. Or so the ‘wash psychiatrists say, anyhow, if you can believe them.”
“But not all of us,” Gretchen Borbman said, “have been before the computer, yet. I haven’t, for instance. It takes time; the entire memory area of the cerebral cortex has to be tapped cell by cell, and most of the retention in stored form of the experience is subliminal. Repressed from consciousness, especially in the case of—less favorable paraworlds. In fact the episode in its entirety can be split off from the self-system within minutes after the person regains contact with reality, in which case he has absolutely no knowledge—available, conscious knowledge, that is—of what happened to him.”
“And a pseudo-memory,” Hank Szantho added, rubbing his massive jaw and scowling. “Substituted automatically. Also a function beyond conscious control. Paraworld Blue . . . who in his right mind, who wants to keep his frugging right mind, would recall it?”
Gretchen Borbman, impassive, drained and pale, went to pour herself a fresh cup of the still-warm syn-cof; the cup clattered as she maneuvered it clumsily. With iron-rigid fixity all of them maintained a state of contrived obliviousness toward her, pretended not to hear the tremor of her nervous hands as she carried her cup step by step back to the table, and, with painstaking caution, seated herself beside Rachmael. None of the other weevils showed any sign whatever of perceiving her existence in their midst, now; they fixedly kept their eyes averted from her halting movement across the small, densely occupied kitchen, as if she—and Rachmael—did not exist. And the emotion, he realized, was stricken terror. And not the same amorphous uneasiness of before; this was new, far more acute, and beyond dispute directed absolutely at her.
Because of what she had said? Obviously that; the ice-hard suspension of the normal sense of well-being had set in the moment Gretchen Borbman had said what seemed to him, on the surface, to be routine: that she, among others in this group, had not presented the contents of their minds, their delusional—or expanded-consciousness-derived—paraworld involvement. The fear had been there, but it had not focussed on Gretchen until she had admitted openly, called attention to the fact, that she in particular viewed a paraworld which might conform thoroughly to that of someone else in the group. And therefore would, as Miss de Rungs had said, would then be coming true; coming true and replacing the environment in which they now lived . . . an environment which enormously powerful agencies intended for extremely vital reasons to maintain.
—Agencies, Rachmael thought caustically, which I’ve already come up against head-on. Trails of Hoffman Limited, with Sepp von Einem and his Telpor device, and his Schweinfort labs. I wonder, he thought, what has come out of those labs lately. What has Gregory Gloch, the renegade UN wep-x sensation, thrashed together for his employers’ use? And is it already available to them? If it was, they had no need for it as yet; their mainstays, their conventional constructs, seemed to serve adequately; the necessity for some bizarre, quasi-genius, quasi-psychotic, if that fairly delineated Gloch, did not appear to be yet at hand . . . but, he realized somberly, it had to be presumed that Gloch’s contribution had long ago evolved to the stage of tactical utility: when needed, it would be available.
“It would seem to me,” Gretchen Borbman said to him, evidently more calm, now, more composed, “that this rather dubious ‘reality’ which we as a body share—I’m speaking in particular, of course, of that obnoxious Omar Jones creature, that caricature of a political leader—has damn little to recommend it. Do you feel loyalty to it, Mr. ben Applebaum?” She surveyed him critically, her eyes wise and searching. “If it did yield to a different framework—” Now she was speaking to all of them, the entire class crowded into the kitchen. “Would that be so bad? The paraworld you saw, Para-world Blue. Was that so much worse, really?”
“Yes,” Rachmael said. It was unnecessary to comment further; certainly no one else in the tense, over-packed room needed to be convinced—the expressions on their strained faces ratified his recognition. And he saw, now, why their unified apprehension and animosity toward Gretchen Borbman signified an overwhelming, ominous approaching entity: her exposure before the all-absorbing scanner of the computer in no sense represented one more repetition of the mind-analysis which had taken place routinely with the others in the past. Gretchen already knew the contents of her paraworld. Her reaction had come long ago, and in her manner now consisted, for the others in the group, a clear index of what that paraworld represented, which of the designated categories it fell into. Obviously, it was a decidedly familiar one—to her and to the group as a whole.