The Unteleported Man Page 12

  "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."

  " '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 orig
in. 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 hy
poth­esis, 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 — "

  "What about the other paraworlds?" he said.

  "Well? What about them? They're real, too. Just as real. The Clock; that's a common one. Paraworld Sil­ver; that comes up again and again." She added, "I've been here a long time; I've seen that one again and again... I guess it's not so hard to take as Paraworld Blue. Yours is the worst. Everybody seems to agree with that. Whether they've seen it or not. When you've gone through Computer Day and fed your experience into the fniggling thing's banks so that everybody in the class can — "

  Rachmael said carefully, "Why different psychedelic worlds? Why not the same one, again and again?"

  Sheila Quam raised a thin, expertly drawn eyebrow. "For everyone? The whole class, as long as it exists?"

  "Yes."

  After a pause she said, "I don't really know. I've wondered a whole lot of times. So have plenty of other people who know about it. The 'wash psychiatrists, for instance. Dr. Lupov himself; I heard a lecture he gave on the subject. He's as no-darn-place as anybody else, and that's what — "