“Perhaps,” the curly-haired youth said acidly, “Gretch might be less entranced with Paraworld Blue if she had undergone a period stuck in it, like you did, Mr. ben Applebaum; what do you say to that?” He watched Rachmael closely, scrutinizing him in anticipation of his response; he obviously expected to see it, rather than hear it uttered. “Or could she have already done that, Mr. ben Applebaum? Do you think you could tell if she had? By that I mean, would there be any indication, a permanent—” He searched for the words he wanted, his face working.
“Alteration,” Hank Szantho said.
Gretchen Borbman said, “I’m quite satisfactorily anchored in reality, Szantho; take my word for it. Are you? Every person in this room is just as involved in an involuntary subjective psychotic fantasy-superimposition over the normal frame of reference as I am; some of you possibly even more so. I don’t know. Who knows what takes place in other people’s minds? I frankly don’t care to judge; I don’t think I can.” She deliberately and with superbly controlled unflinching dispassion returned the remorseless animosity of the ring of persons around her. “Maybe,” she said, “you ought to re-examine the structure of the ‘reality’ you think’s in jeopardy. Yes, the TV set.” Her voice, now, was harsh, overwhelming in its caustic vigor. “Go in there, look at it; look at that dreadful parody of a president—is that what you prefer to—”
“At least,” Hank Szantho said, “it’s real.”
Eying him, Gretchen said, “Is it?” Sardonically, she smiled; it was a totally inhumane smile, and it was directed to all of them; he saw it sweep the room, withering into dryness the accusing circle of her group-members—he saw them palpably retreat. It did not include him, however; conspicuously, Gretchen exempted him, and he felt the potency, the meaning of her decision to leave him out: he was not like the others and she knew it and so did he, and it meant something, a great deal. And he thought, I know what it means. She does, too.
Just the two of us, he thought; Gretchen Borbman and I—and for a good reason. Alteration, he thought. Hank Szantho is right.
Tilting Gretchen Borbman’s face he contemplated her eyes, the expression in them; he studied her for an unmeasured time, during which she did not stir: she returned, silently, without blinking, his steady, probing, analytical penetration of her interior universe . . . neither of them stirred, and it began to appear to him, gradually, as if a melting, opening entrance had replaced the unyielding and opaque coloration of her pupils; all at once the variegated luminous matrices within which her substance seemed to lodge expanded to receive him—dizzy, he half-fell, caught himself, then blinked and righted himself; no words had passed between them, and yet he understood, now; he had been right. It was true.
He rose, walked unsteadily away; he found himself entering the living room with its untended blaring TV set—the thing dominated the room with its howls and shrieks, warping the window drapes, walls and carpets, the once-attractive ceramic lamps . . . he sensed and witnessed the deformity imposed by the crushing din of the TV set with its compulsively hypomanic dwarfed and stunted figure, now gesticulating in a speeded-up frenzy, as if the video technicians had allowed—or induced—the tape to seek its maximum velocity.
At sight of him the image, the Omar Jones thing, stopped. Warily, as if surprised, it regarded him—at least seemed to; impossibly, the TV replica of the colony president fixed its attention as rigidly on him as he in return found himself doing. Both of them, caught in an instinctive, fully alert vigil, neither able to look away even for a fraction of an instant . . . as if, Rachmael thought, our lives, the physical preservation of both of us, has cataclysmically and without warning become jeopardized.
And neither of us, he realized as he stared unwinkingly at the TV image of Omar Jones, can escape; we’re both snared. Until or unless one of us can—can do what?
Blurred, now, as he felt himself sink into numbed fatigue, the two remorseless eyes of the TV figure began to blend. The eyes shifted, came together, superimposed until all at once, locked, they became a clearly defined single eye the intensity of which appalled him; a wet, smoldering greatness that attracted light from every source, drew illumination and authority from every
direction and dimension, confronted him, and any possibility of looking away now was gone.
From behind him Gretchen Borbman’s voice sounded. “You see, don’t you? Some of the paraworlds are—” She hesitated, perhaps wanting to tell him in such a manner as to spare him; she wanted him to know, but with the least pain possible. “—hard to detect at first,” she finished, gently. Her hand, soothing, comforting, rested on his shoulder; she was drawing him away from the image on the TV screen, the oozing cyclopean entity that had ceased its speeded-up harangue and, in silence, emanated in his direction its diseased malevolence.
“This one,” Rachmael managed to say hoarsely, “has a description, too? A code-identification?”
“This,” Gretchen said, “is reality.”
“Paraworld Blue—”
Turning him around by physical force to face her, Gretchen said, stricken, ” ‘Paraworld Blue’? Is that what you see? On the TV screen? I don’t believe it—the aquatic cephalopod with one working eye? No; I just don’t believe it.”
Incredulous, Rachmael said, “I . . . thought you saw it. Too.”
“No!” She shook her head violently, her face now hardened, masklike; the change in her features came to him initially, in the first particle of a second, as a mere idea—and then the actual jagged carving of old, shredding wood replaced the traditional, expected flesh, wood burned, carbonized as if seared both to injure it and to create fright in him, the beholder: an exaggerated travesty of organic physiognomy that grimaced in a fluidity, a mercury-like flux so that the irreal emotions revealed within the mask altered without cease, sometimes, as he watched, several manifesting themselves at once and merging into a configuration of affect which could not exist in any human—nor could it be read.
Her actual—or rather her normally perceived—features, by a slow process, gradually re-emerged. The mask sank down, hidden, behind. It remained, of course, still there, but at least no longer directly confronting him. He was glad of that; relief passed through him, but then it, too, like the sight of the scorched-wood mask, sank out of range and he could no longer recall it.
“Whatever gave you the idea,” Gretchen was saying, “that I saw anything like that? No, not in the slightest.” Her hand, withdrawn from his shoulder, convulsed; she moved away from him, as if retreating down a narrowing tube, farther and fatally, syphoned off from his presence like a drained insect, back toward the kitchen and the dense pack of others.
“Type-basics,” he said to her, appealing to her, trying to catch onto her and hold her. But she continued to shrink away anyhow. “Isn’t it still possible that only a projection from the unconscious—”
“But your projection,” Gretchen said, in a voice raptor-like, sawing, “is unacceptable. To me and to everybody else.”
“What do you see?” he asked, finally. There was almost no sight of her now.
Gretchen said, “I’m scarcely likely to tell you, Mr. ben Applebaum; you can’t actually expect that, now, after what you’ve said.”
There was silence. And then, by labored, unnaturally retarded degrees, a groaning noise came from the speaker of the television set; the noise at last became intelligible speech, at the proper pitch and rate: his categories of perception had again achieved a functioning parallel with the space-time axis of the image of Omar Jones. Or had the progression of the image resumed as before? Time had stopped or the image had stopped, or perhaps both . . . or was there such a thing as time at all? He tried to remember, but found himself unable to; the falling off of his capacity for abstract thought—was—what—was—
He did not know.
Something looked at him. With its mouth.
It had eaten most of its own eyes.
12
People who are out of phase in time, Sepp von Einem thought caustically to himself, ought to be dead. Not preserved like bugs in amber. He glanced up from the encoded intel-repo and watched with distaste his mysteriously—and rather repellently—gifted proleptic co-worker, Gregory Gloch, in his clanking, whirring anti-prolepsis chamber; at the moment, the thin, tall, improperly hunched youth talked silently into the audio receptor of his sealed chamber, his mouth twisting as if composed of some obsolete plastic, not convincingly flesh-like. The mouth-motions, too, lacked authenticity; far too slow, von Einem observed, even for Gloch. The fool was slowing down. However, the memory spools of the chamber would still collect everything said by Gloch, at whatever rate. And the transmission subsequently would of course be at proper time . . . although, of course, the frequency would be abysmal, probably doubled. At the thought of the screeching which lay ahead, von Einem groaned.