That made everyone quiet down. Jimmy handed her the helmet without a word. Rosaleen carefully settled it around her head and fumbled with the opaque goggles until they locked in position.
She was silent for a moment, while everyone waited. Then she removed the helmet again. "Yes," she said in a colorless, conversational tone, "there is nothing there but blackness for me." She handed the helmet to the person standing beside her, who happened to be Martin, and added, "I can think of only one explanation. There is no copy of me on Earth."
"But we saw you being sent there in the Horch message!" Pat said worriedly.
Rosaleen did not respond to that, except to say, "I think I would like to rest for a while."
Then a most surprising thing happened. Martin took the helmet from Rosaleen's hand, but he didn't put it back on. He laid it on the floor and, instead, took Rosaleen Artzybachova's arm and helped her over to a position by one wall. He settled blankets around her until he was sure she was comfortable.
Patsy stared. Could this be Martin? For a moment she almost toyed with the thought that when they weren't looking Dopey had somehow slipped a doppelganger general in among them in Delasquez's place. Well, that was fantasy, sure; but to find General Delasquez caring for somebody else was almost as fantastic.
By the time he came back the others were gathered around the cooker-all but Jimmy Lin, who had seized the chance to get back in the helmet. Martin didn't speak. He stood over the pile of rations, staring down at it, but making no move to take anything for himself.
Impulsively, Patsy spoke to him, keeping her voice low so that the others might not hear. "That was nice of you, Martin."
For a moment she thought he wasn't going to answer. He reached down and selected a ration packet at random. Then he said, "My mother was like that. Quite old, but active, alert, in fact a very brilliant woman… until her sister died."
"Her sister died?" Patsy repeated. The man was being even more difficult than usual.
He studied the packet for a moment, then slit it open with a thumbnail. "They were quite close," he said. "Then afterward it was quite different for my mother. Her condition deteriorated very fast."
He looked up at Patsy for the first time. "I see you don't understand," he commented.
"No. You're right. I don't."
"But this must be very similar for Rosaleen. You see, there is no copy of Rosaleen on Earth, although we saw her being sent there. How can that be? Because, of course, the Rosaleen who returned to Earth has died."
Died.
Patsy stole a look at Rosaleen, lying with her eyes closed and only a part of her face visible among the blankets. What could that feel like, losing one of yourself? Patsy tried to imagine how she would feel if Pat died, or Patrice, but she didn't try for long. The thought hurt, with kinds of pain Patsy had never felt before.
Something else was troubling her, too. It felt like guilt. Rosaleen's exposed face was gray. Although she had stood as erect as ever while they were talking, Patsy remembered that Rosaleen had been biting her lip, and when she turned away she had limped worse than ever.
That was where the guilt lived. It was her fault, after all-that is, it was Dr. Patrice Adcock's fault-that the old woman was here in this place, a place that certainly was not a good environment for an ailing woman in her-what were they?-at least her nineties. Maybe more. Rosaleen had been comfortably retired to the leisure of her Ukrainian dacha, as at her age she had every right to be, until Pat called her in for this mad venture, with its even madder consequences. If she died as a result of all this-
Patsy finished her meal and lay down to sleep, hoping to blot out some of the things that were on her mind. She did not want to think of Rosaleen's dying, and she was glad when at last she seemed to be drifting off to sleep.
The sleep didn't last long; what woke her was another ground-shake-not big, but enough to rouse her. She opened her eyes in time to see the wall doing its magic trick. The bright mirror was streaked with glowing pink and red, the colors shimmering over the surface like oil on a pool of water. The display lasted for a dozen seconds; then the swirls of color disappeared. It didn't turn transparent this time, and a moment later the wall was a bright and unflawed mirror again, and nothing had changed.
The others were all awake, Martin and Rosaleen standing by the cooker; Patsy covertly studied Rosaleen's face, but it showed nothing but fatigue. Jimmy Lin was holding the helmet in his hand, his expression thunderous. "What a time to lose contact!" he cried; and, as soon as things had settled down again, hastily jammed the thing back on his head.
Patrice gave him an unfriendly look, then turned to Patsy. "I think the son of a bitch is getting laid in China," she muttered. "Did you get enough sleep? I took another turn while you were out and I was-we were-still in that jail, and nothing was happening. Except that I was dressed and sitting in the chair. Just sitting there, with, I guess, nothing to do. Martin did a little better, though."
"I will tell her," Martin said. He fished a ration packet out of the cooker, juggled it a moment in his hands before passing it on to Rosaleen and made sure that the old lady was able to handle it before he told Patsy what he had observed. He had been standing at a lectern at the front of a briefing room, while some other astronaut at another lectern was going over a 3-D virtual of the interior of Starlab. "It didn't look the way we saw it when we were there. It was, I imagine, the way it had been before Dopey's people rearranged it. And every once in a while someone would ask me if that was how I remembered it, and I said yes." He hesitated. "That isn't the truth, of course. I must have been lying to them. But I didn't^/like I was lying. And that guard with the gun was sitting right behind me."
That was interesting, but Patsy had nearer concerns. She drew some water from the tank and rubbed it over her face, then used the space they had set aside as the latrine, leaving the others to argue with Martin as to how he could tell whether or not his copy was lying. She didn't listen. She was thinking about Rosaleen-and thinking, too, at the same time, that splashing a few drops of water on her face was all well enough, but, God, what she would give for a real bath. Not to mention some clean clothes. Not to mention-well, everything that made civilization worth having.
By the time she was as presentable as she had any way of getting Jimmy Lin was out of the helmet and his face wore a broad grin. "That," he announced, "was great. Listen, I'm not one to kiss and tell, but-"
"Do not tell, then," Martin said savagely.
"Yes, but honestly-"
"Shut up," Pat ordered.
"Ah," said Jimmy, understanding at last. "I'd just be rubbing salt in the wounds, eh? Well, I can see how you feel, but I have to say-no," he corrected himself, catching Pat's glare at him. "I guess I don't have to say. But you know what I'm thinking."
And he turned and headed for the cooker. Over his shoulder he called, "The dinner was great, too. Gave me an appetite."
"Son of a bitch," Patrice said moodily, and changed the subject. "Patsy? Did you hear about Dan-Dan?"
"What about Dan-Dan?"-looking at him.
Dannerman said reluctantly, "I guess it's important enough to tell. All right. About half an hour ago I took a turn in the helmet. I was awake, all right. I was getting dressed. And I had a hell of a hangover."
"What were you celebrating, do you know?" Patsy asked curiously.
"I don't think I was celebrating anything at all. I think my duplicate is in the deep shit. I was wearing a collar, you see."
"Collar?"
"The tracker kind," he said impatiently. "The kind they put on you so they always know where you are. So they can hear everything you say, and everything anybody says to you."
"Oh, hell," Patsy said, suddenly sympathetic. She wanted to put her arm around him, checked the impulse with Pat standing right there. "So you're in trouble, too?"
"House arrest, I guess. Pretty much the same as Martin and you."
Pat turned to Patsy. "Any ideas? Can you figure out why we're all in trouble bac
k home-all but Jimmy, anyway?"
"Maybe," Dannerman offered, "it has something to do with what Martin is saying about lying to them."
"But why would we all be lying?" Patrice asked reasonably. "I mean, all but Jimmy, I guess. What reason could we have?"
Dannerman shrugged. No one said anything for a while, and Patsy looked around the cell. Martin and Rosaleen were talking quietly over by the cooker. Jimmy Lin was sitting with his back to the wall, hands locked behind his head, a broad, reminiscent gring on his face.
Pat was looking at him, too. "Bastard," she said. "But, hey, think about it. Suppose we could get this little piece of technology back to Earth! Suppose we put these bugs into, I don't know, maybe a couple of vid stars, boy and girl-or boy and boy, or whatever; listen, any kind of preference anybody had. And then we could rent out helmets while they were getting it on. Can you imagine what kind of money people would pay? Mad sex, any kind of sex, without all that trouble of actually having to find Mr. Right and then getting a motel room and all… and no worry about catching something or getting pregnant or- Well," she said hastily, aware of Dannerman's eyes on her, "I mean, simply as a commercial venture."
"I know what you mean," he said kindly. Then he added, "I was thinking of something, too. I was thinking, what if the Bureau had this technology? Then they wouldn't have to get people like me to infiltrate terrorist groups or criminal gangs or whatever. Just catch one of the gang, stick a bug into him, set him loose. From that moment on everything he saw or did would go right to the Bureau."
"Oh, Dan!" Patrice said in dismay. "Do you know what you're saying? It wouldn't have to be just criminals! What if some government used that to keep track of everybody, all the time? Talk about your police states!"
And Pat said meditatively, "Maybe that isn't a kind of technology we would want to bring back, after all."
Silence for a moment, and then Dan said, "I wonder if we have a choice. I wonder if that might not be some of this wonderful stuff that the Beloved Leaders are going to give the human race if they're let in."
Then there was more silence, a lot of it, as everybody thought about that. Until Patsy sighed and shook herself. "Maybe I should take another turn in the helmet," she said, and accepted the device as Dannerman handed it to her.
As soon as she was locked in the pictures flashed before her, just as before-the same doubled images: herself in the helmet as seen through Patrice's eyes, and at the same time the bare cell on Earth. There, she discovered, she seemed to be eating breakfast. Some machine-scrambled eggs, far overcooked for her taste, some dry toast, a cup of weak coffee. She didn't much like the taste of the food. Even less liked the dizzying duplication of images, which threatened to give her a headache. She closed her eyes to shut them out for a moment, and discovered that made no difference; she could feel that her eyelids were clamped shut, but she was still seeing both scenes.
Maybe, she thought, there was a way to ease that particular problem, at least. If Patrice were simply to keep her eyes closed and sit as still as possible while she herself was in the helmet, wouldn't that cut down on the "spillover"? It might be worth a try, she thought. And was on the point of taking the helmet off to tell her so, when the floor shook again under her feet. She staggered. The helmet images blurred and distorted, but through Patrice's eyes she could see that the wall was flaring again.
By the time she got the helmet off it was a kaleidoscope of color and the ground was still shaking, slow, remorseless swings back and forth. Patsy sat down abruptly to keep from falling- as everyone else was doing-and they watched the light show on the wall in fascination and fear. It flickered through the spectrum, settling on a dull red that felt as though it were actually radiating heat…
Then-it disappeared.
There was no color at all where the wall had been. The smooth, resilient floor had turned into a pattern of closely woven metal strands. The ceiling, too, had changed; the even white glow was gone. Where it had been there was now a mesh that looked like bleached burlap, through which a pale light filtered from somewhere else. The same light illuminated the scene beyond the walls: Rosaleen's "file cabinets," the broad corridor along which Dopey had brought them to the cell, the two-domed metal object and all sorts of other things, too many and too strange to take in at once. Nothing obstructed her view.
Everybody was up and staring now. And Jimmy Lin, standing at the urinal, reached out with one hand to where the wall had been. He pulled his arm back slowly and turned, blinking, to the others. "There's nothing there," he said. "There isn't any wall at all anymore."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Patsy
There was a story Patsy remembered about a lion in a zoo. For ten years that lion had paced restlessly back and forth in his cage, snarling at the bars. Then, one day, the keeper was careless. He went away and left the door open. When the keeper was gone, the lion padded over to the door, and sniffed at the air of freedom for a moment… and then turned and lay down in the farthest corner of his cage, his head on his paws, his eyes squeezed shut, until at last the keeper came back and closed the door.
That's you, Dr. Pat-known-as-Patsy Adcock, she told herself. You've been pissing and moaning about wanting to get out of here ever since you arrived. Now you've got your big chance. There's nothing to stop you walking out of here whenever you like. Well?
But she hesitated.
So did everyone else, all of them staring apprehensively at the vista around them, strange machines and distant gleams of light and, from somewhere, a pall of smoke drifting over them. No one moved… until Jimmy Lin, glancing wildly back at the rest of them, took a deep breath, then carefully stepped over the little puddle of his own recent urine and walked through the space where the wall had been. Not far. Just a step or two, actually, before he stopped to stare around. But he was definitely outside.
That did it for Patsy Adcock. If Jimmy Lin could do it she certainly could. She turned and marched resolutely out into the space she had never seen before. Behind her Pat called worriedly, "Hey, watch it, hon! What're you going to do if the power comes back on and you're stuck out there?"
That stopped Patsy, frozen on one foot, until she remembered. "No, it isn't like that," she called back. What she remembered was how it had been when Dopey brought them to the cell. It was a one-way wall. They hadn't even seen the thing as they approached from outside, had simply walked into the space where the others were clustered, and had then been astonished to see the wall of mirrors bright and impenetrable behind them.
Everyone was staring after her. She saw Rosaleen, her face still gray, crossing herself, and Martin standing with his mouth open, and Dannerman experimentally poking his own arm through the space where the wall had been. And she took a deep breath, looking at the bizarre structures around her, and said to herself, Okay, sweetie, now you've got your freedom. Use it!
Or (the echo sounded in her mind) lose it.
Things were happening in that outside world, now revealed to them. Patsy sniffed acrid smoke, heard distant, and sometimes not so very distant at all, crashes and pops from whatever it was that was going on just out of sight. Jimmy Lin, greatly daring, had ventured, a step at a time, five or six meters down the broadest of the passages, Patrice close behind him and Martin and Rosaleen peering after them. Dannerman and Pat were on their knees at the margin of their cell, poking at something on the floor. When Patsy drew close she saw that where the base of the mirror wall had been there was now only a shiny line of alternating coppery and colorless segments, each less than a centimeter long. "It wasn't real," Pat marveled, looking up at Patsy. "The wall, I mean. It wasn't solid. It was just some kind of projection, and when the power went off it just disappeared."
"And so did the floor," Dannerman added. "Not just our floor. Look outside here." The floor on the other side of the boundary was the same metal mesh as inside, or most of it was. But a few meters away there was a section that looked as though it had been repaired with ordinary cement-not recently
, either; the patch was stained and potholed. Actually, everything looked pretty helter-skelter to Patsy. Some of the machines looked naked, as though they had been meant to have some sort of case or cover. (The mirror walls they'd seen on the way in? Maybe so, Patsy thought, because she could see the same buried hexagonal lines as surrounded their cell.) Some looked very old, corroded with time.
"It's a mess," Jimmy Lin reported, returning. "There's a machine out there that looks as though it ran itself to destruction- bearings scorched, housing popped off-like a car engine that ran out of oil."
"I don't think they used oil," Patrice said.
Rosaleen said thoughtfully, "I wouldn't be surprised if they used some kind of energy to reduce friction-like maglev, you know? Or something like the balls the cooker moved on, and when the power went off-"
"The cooker!" Jimmy Lin interrupted, looking stricken. And when they put it to the test it was what they had feared. The packet of chili Pat dropped in sat there at the bottom of the well, unwarmed.
"Oh, hell," Jimmy said, contemplating another period of uncooked food. And of worse; at a sudden thought he picked up the helmet and tried it on, then morosely set it down again. "No power there, either," he said. "What do we do now?"
Dannerman had a prompt answer. "I think," he said, "that somebody ought to go out and see what's going on."
"Are you volunteering?" Pat asked. "Because if you are, I'll go along."
Dannerman looked pleased, then frowned. "Better not," he said reluctantly. "I won't go far, and it's easier if I do it alone."
"Don't you want to eat something first?" Rosaleen asked.
"Put some in to soak," he ordered. "I'll eat it when I get back." And turned and left without looking at Pat again.
When Dannerman was out of sight Pat stared after him for a moment, then sulkily took over the job of opening packets and filling them with cold water to soften. Patsy looked at her with compassion. She was pretty sure that exploration hadn't been the only thing on Pat's mind, or on Dannerman's, either; if ever she had seen two people with a strong compulsion to get off by themselves it was they. But Dannerman, Patsy thought, had been right; he had the skills of his Bureau training and Dr. Pat Adcock did not. Score one for responsibility in the face of temptation.
Eschaton 01 The Other End of Time Page 22
