Hunt was dozing in what felt like a soft and very comfortable armchair. He was relaxed and refreshed, as if he had been there for some time. The memory of his experience was still vivid, but it lingered only as something that he regarded in a detached, almost academically curious, kind of way. The terror had gone. The air around him smelt fresh and slightly scented, and subdued music was playing in the background. After a few seconds it registered as a Mozart string quartet. What kind of insanity was he part of now?
He opened his eyes, straightened up, and looked around. He was in an armchair, and the chair was part of an ordinary-looking room, furnished in contemporary style with another, similar chair, reading desk, a large wooden table in the center, a side-table near the door set with an ornate vase of roses, and a thick carpet of dark brown pile that blended fairly well with the predominantly orange and brown decor. There was a single window behind him, covered by heavy drapes that were closed and billowing gently in the breeze coming through from the outside. He looked down at himself and found that he was wearing a dark blue, open-necked shirt and light gray slacks. There was nobody else in the room.
After a few seconds he got up, found that he felt fine, and strolled across the room to part the drapes curiously. Outside was a pleasant, summery scene that could have been part of any major city on Earth. Tail buildings gleamed clean and white in the sun, familiar trees and open green spaces beckoned, and Hunt could see the curve of a wide river immediately below, an older-style bridge with a railed parapet and rounded arches, familiar models of groundcars moving along the roadways, and processions of airmobiles in the sky. He let the drapes fall back as they had been and glanced at his watch, which seemed to be working normally. Less than twenty minutes had passed since the "Boeing" touched down at McClusky. Nothing made sense.
He turned his back to the window and thrust his hands into his pockets while he thought back and tried to remember something that had been puzzling him even before he stepped out of the spacecraft. It had been something trivial, something that had barely registered in the few moments that had elapsed between Calazar’s brief appearance inside the craft and Hunt’s first glimpse of the stupefying scene that had greeted him outside just before everything went crazy. It had been something to do with Calazar.
And then it came to him. In the Shapieron, ZORAC had interpreted between Ganymeans and humans by means of earpiece and throat-mike devices that provided normal-sounding synthesized voices, but which did not synchronize with the facial movements of the original speakers. But Calazar had spoken without any such aids, and apparently quite effortlessly. What made it all the more peculiar was that the Ganymean larynx produced a low, guttural articulation and was utterly incapable of reproducing a human pitch even approximately. So how had Calazar done it, and without looking like a badly dubbed movie at that?
Well, he wasn’t going to get nearer any answers by standing here, he decided. The door looked normal enough, and there was only one way to find out whether it was locked or not. He was halfway toward it when it opened and Lyn walked in, looking cool and comfortable in a short-sleeved pullover top and slacks. He stopped dead and stared at her while part of him braced itself instinctively for her to hurl herself across the room and throw her arms around his neck while sobbing in true heroine tradition. Instead she stopped just inside the door and stood casually inspecting the room.
"Not bad," she commented. "The carpet’s too dark, though. It should be a more red rust." The carpet promptly changed to a more red rust.
Hunt stared at it for a few seconds, blinked, and then looked up numbly. "How the hell did you do that?" he asked, looking down again to make sure that he hadn’t imagined it. He hadn’t.
She looked surprised. "It’s VISAR. It can do anything. Haven’t you been talking to it?" Hunt shook his head. Lyn’s face became puzzled. "If you didn’t know, how come you’re wearing different clothes? What happened to your Nanook outfit?"
Hunt could only shake his head. "I don’t know. I don’t know how I got here, either." He stared down at the red rust carpet again. "Amazing. . . . I think I could use a drink."
"VISAR," Lyn said in a slightly raised voice. "How about a Scotch, straight, no ice?" A glass half filled with an amber liquid materialized from nowhere on the table beside Hunt. Lyn picked it up and offered it to him nonchalantly. He reached out hesitantly to touch it with a fingertip, at the same time half hoping that it wouldn’t be there. It was. He took the glass unsteadily from her hand and tested it with a sip, then downed a third of the remainder in one gulp. The warmth percolated smoothly down through his chest and after a few moments had worked a small miracle of its own. Hunt drew a long breath, held it for a few seconds, then exhaled it slowly but still shakily.
"Cigarette?" Lyn inquired. Hunt nodded without thinking. A cigarette, already lit, appeared between his fingers. Don’t even ask about it, he told himself.
It all had to be some kind of an elaborate hallucination. How, when, why, or where he didn’t know, but it seemed that he had little choice for the moment but to go along with it. Perhaps this whole preliminary interlude had been staged by the Thuriens to provide a period of adjustment and familiarization or something like that. If so, he could see their point. This was like dumping an alchemist from the Middle Ages into the middle of a computerized chemical plant. Thurien, or wherever this was, was going to take some getting used to, he realized. Having decided that much, he felt that probably he was over the biggest hurdle already. But how had Lyn managed to adapt so quickly? Maybe there were disadvantages to being a scientist that he hadn’t thought about before.
When he looked up and studied her face, he could see now that her superficial calm was being forced in order to control an underlying bemusement not far short of his own. Her mind was temporarily blocking itself off from the full impact of what it all meant, probably in a way similar to the delayed shock that was a common reaction to exceptionally painful news such as the death of a close relative. He could detect no sign of her having been through anything as traumatic as he had. At least that was something to be thankful for.
He moved over to one of the chairs and turned to perch himself on an arm. "So. . . . how did you get here?" he asked.
"Well, I was right behind you on the gravity conveyor, or whatever you’d call it, from that crazy place that we all walked out into from the plane, and then. . ." She broke off as she caught the perplexed expression creeping across Hunt’s face. "You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?"
He shook his head. "What gravity conveyor?"
Lyn frowned at him uncertainly. "We all walked out of the plane?. . . . There was this big bright place with everything upside down and sideways?. . . Something like whatever lifted us up the stairs picked us all up and took us off along one of the tubes—a big yellow-and-white one?. . ." She was listing the items slowly and intoning them as questions, all the while watching his face intently as if trying to help him identify the point at which he had lost the thread, but it was obvious already that she had experienced something quite different right from the beginning.
He waved a hand in front of his face. "Okay, skip the details. How did you get separated from the others?"
Lyn started to reply and then stopped suddenly and frowned, as if realizing for the first time that her own recollections were by no means as complete as she had thought. "I’m not sure . . ." She hesitated. "Somehow I ended up . . . I don’t know where it was. . . . There was this big organization chart—colored boxes with names in them, and lines of who reports to who—that had to do with some crazy kind of United States Space Force." Her face grew more confused as she replayed the memory in her mind. "There were lots of UNSA names on it that I knew, but with ranks and things that didn’t make any sense. Gregg’s name was there as a general, and mine was right underneath as a major." She shook her head in a way that told Hunt not to bother asking her to explain it.
Hunt remembered the transcripts he had read of the Thurien messages received at Farside, which had been baffling in their suggestion of a militarized Earth divided in an East-West lineup that was strangely reminiscent of the reconstructions of how Minerva had been just before the final, cataclysmic Cerian-Lanibian war. And the grilling that he had just gone through, if that was the right word for it, had echoed the same theme. There had to be a connection. "What happened then?" he asked.
"VISAR started talking and asked me if that was an accurate representation of the outfit I worked for," Lyn replied. "I told it that most of the names were right, but the rest was garbage. It asked some questions about a couple of weapons programs that Gregg was supposed to be mixed up with. Then it showed me some pictures of a surface-bombardment satellite that this U.S.S.F. was supposed to have put in orbit, and of a big radiation projector on the Moon that never existed. I told VISAR it was out of its mind. We talked about it for a bit, and in the end we got quite friendly."
All that hadn’t happened in ten minutes, Hunt thought. There must have been some kind of time-compression process involved. "There wasn’t anything . . . ‘high-pressure’ about all this?" he inquired.
Lyn looked at him, surprised. "No way. It was all very civilized and nice. That was when I mentioned that I felt strange wearing those clothes indoors, and suddenly—zap!" She gestured down at herself. "Instant outfit. Then I found out more about VISAR’s tricks. How long do you think it’ll be before IBM gets one on the market?"
Hunt stood up and began pacing across the room, noting absently as he moved that his cigarette didn’t seem to be accumulating any ash to be disposed of. It was some kind of interrogation procedure, he decided. The Thuriens had obviously gotten confused over the situation on today’s Earth, and for some reason it was important to them to have the correct story. If that was the case, they certainly hadn’t wasted any time over it. Perhaps Hunt’s experience had been a shock tactic designed to guarantee straight answers at the optimum moment when he had been totally unprepared and too disoriented to have fabricated anything. If so, it had certainly worked, he reflected grimly.
"After that I asked where you were. VISAR directed me out through a door and along a corridor, and here I am," Lyn completed.
Hunt was about to say something more when the phone rang. He looked around and noticed it for the first time. It was a standard domestic datagrid terminal and went so naturally with the surroundings that it hadn’t registered previously. The call-tone sounded again.
"Better answer it," Lyn suggested.
Hunt walked over to the corner, pulled up a chair, sat down, and touched a key on the terminal to accept. His jaw dropped open in disbelief as he found himself staring at the features of the operations controller at McClusky.
"Dr. Hunt," the controller said, sounding relieved. "Just a routine check to see if everything’s okay. You people have been in there for a while now. Any problems?"
For what seemed a long time, Hunt could only stare back blankly. He’d never heard of phone calls from the real world intruding into hallucinations before. It had to be part of the hallucination too. What was somebody supposed to say to hallucinatory operations controllers? "How are you talking to us?" he managed at last, succeeding with some effort in making his voice almost normal.
"We got a transmission from the plane a while ago saying it would be okay for us to use a low-power, narrow beam aimed straight at it," the controller replied. "We set it up and waited, but when nothing came through we thought we’d better try calling you."
Hunt closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and glanced sideways at Lyn. She didn’t understand it, either. "Are you saying that plane is still out there?" he asked, looking back at the screen.
The controller looked puzzled. "Why. . . sure. . . . I’m looking right at it out the window." Pause. "Are you sure everything’s okay in there?"
Hunt sat back woodenly, and his mind jammed up. Lyn stepped past him and stooped in front of the screen. "Everything’s okay," she said. "Look, we’re a bit busy right now. Call you back in a few minutes, okay?"
"Just as long as we know. Okay, talk to you later." The controller vanished from the screen.
Lyn’s composure evaporated with the picture. She looked down at Hunt, visibly worried and frightened for the first time since entering the room. "It’s still out there. . . ." Her voice was coming unevenly as she struggled to keep it under control. "Vic—what’s happening?"
Hunt scowled around the room as the indignation that he had been suppressing at last came surging up inside. "VISAR," he called on impulse. "Can you hear me?"
"I’m here," the familiar voice answered.
"That plane that landed at McClusky—it’s still there. We just talked to them on the phone."
"I know," VISAR agreed. "I put the call through."
"Isn’t it about time you told us what the hell’s going on?"
"The Thuriens were intending to explain it when you meet them very shortly," VISAR replied. "You are due an apology, and they want to make it personally, not secondhand through me."
"Then would you mind telling us where the hell we are?" Hunt said, not feeling very mollified by the statement.
"Sure. You’re in the perceptron, which as you’ve just told me is still on the apron at McClusky." Hunt caught Lyn’s eye in a mute exchange of baffled looks. She shook her head weakly and sank down into one of the chairs. "You don’t look very convinced," VISAR commented. "A small demonstration, perhaps?"
Hunt felt his mouth opening and closing, and heard sounds coming out. But he wasn’t making it happen. He was moving like a puppet to the pulls of invisible strings. "Excuse me," his mouth said as his head turned itself toward Lyn. "Don’t worry about this—VISAR will explain. I’ll be back in a few minutes."
And then he was lying back on something yielding and soft.
"Voilá!" VISAR’s voice pronounced from somewhere overhead. He opened his eyes and looked around, but a few seconds went by before he realized where he was.
He was back in the recliner inside one of the cubicles in the ship that had landed at McClusky.
Everything seemed very quiet and still. He rose to his feet and moved out into the corridor to peer into the adjacent cubicle. Lyn was still there, lying back in the recliner looking relaxed, her eyes closed and her face serene. He looked down and noticed for the first time that, like her, he was wearing UNSA arctic clothing again. He moved along to inspect the other cubicles and found all the others were there too, looking much the same.
"Take a walk outside and check it out," VISAR’s voice suggested. "We’ll still be here when you get back."
Hunt made his way dazedly to the door at the forward end of the corridor, stopped for a moment and braced himself for anything, and stepped through into the antechamber. McClusky and Alaska were back again. Through the open outer door he could see figures stirring and starting to move forward as they saw him. He moved toward the door, and seconds later was on his feet at the bottom of the access stairway. The figures converged around him, and excited questions assailed him from all sides as he began walking across the apron toward the mess hail.
"What’s happening in there?"
"Are there Ganymeans inside?"
"Are they coming out?"
"How many of them are there?"
"Just. . . . talking so far. What? Yes. . . . well, sort of. I’m not sure. Look, give me a few minutes. I need to check something."
Inside the mess hall he made straight for the control room, set up in one of the front rooms. The controller and his two operators had watched Hunt through the window that looked out across the apron and were waiting expectantly. "Vic, how’s it going?" the controller greeted as he came in the door.
"Fine," Hunt murmured absently. He stared hard at the consoles and screens set up around the room and forced his mind to go back over what had happened since they entered the craft. What he was seeing right now was real. Everything around him was real. The phone call had been part of something that hadn’t been real. Obviously it couldn’t have worked the other way around; reality couldn’t communicate into the realm of the hallucinatory via radio. Obviously?
"Have you had any contact from that plane since we went inside?" he asked, turning to glance at the control-room crew.
"Why. . . . yes." The controller looked suddenly worried. "You talked to us yourself a few minutes ago. You’re sure everything’s all right?"
Hunt brought a hand up to massage his brow and give the confusion boiling inside his head time to die down a little. "How did you get through?" he asked.
"We got a signal from it earlier telling us we could couple in via a low-power beam, like I told you. I just asked for you by name."
"Do it again," Hunt said.
The controller moved in front of the supervisory console, tapped a command into its touchboard array, and spoke toward the two-way audio grille above the main screen. "McClusky Control to alien. Alien vessel, come in please."
"Acknowledged," a voice answered.
"VISAR?" Hunt said, recognizing it.
"Hi again. Convinced now?"
Hunt’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he stared at the blank screen. At last the wheels of his brain felt as if they were sorting themselves out and lining themselves up on the right axles again.
There was one obvious thing for him to try. "Put me through to Lyn Garland," he said.
"One moment."
The screen came to life, and a second later Lyn was looking out at him, framed by the background of the room he had recently been in. It must have been equally clear that Hunt was calling from McClusky, but her face did not register undue surprise. VISAR must have been doing some explaining.
"You sure get around," she commented drily.
A shadow of a smile formed on Hunt’s face as the first glimmer of light began showing through it all. "Hi," he said. "Question: What happened after I last talked to you?"
"You vanished into thin air—just like that. It gave me a bit of a fright, but VISAR’S been straightening me out about a lot of things." She held up a hand and wriggled her fingers in front of her face, at the same time shaking her head wonderingly. "I can’t believe I’m not really doing this. It’s all happening inside my head? It’s incredible!"
Right at that moment she probably knew more about what was going on than he did, Hunt reflected. But he thought he had the general idea now. An instant communications link to Thurien. . .miracles worked to order. . . . Ganymeans talking in English. .
And what had VJSAR called that vessel—the perceptron? The pieces started dropping into place.
"Just keep talking to VISAR," he said. "I’ll be back in a few minutes." Lyn smiled the kind of smile that said she knew everything would work out okay; Hunt winked, then cut off the screen.
"Would you mind telling us what’s going on?" the controller asked. "I mean. . . . we’re only supposed to be running this operation."
"Just give me a second," Hunt said, entering the code to reactivate the channel. He turned his face toward the grille. "VISAR?"
"You rang?"
"That place we walked out of the perceptron into—does it exist, or did you invent it?"
"It exists. It’s part of a place called Vranix, which is an old city on Thurien."
"Did we see it the way it is right now?"
"Yes, you did."
"So you have to be relaying instantly between here and Thurien."
"You’re getting the idea."
Hunt thought for a second. "What about the room with the carpet?"
"I invented that. A special effect—faked. We thought that maybe some familiar-looking surroundings would help you get used to how we do things. Figured the rest out yet?"
"I’ll try a long shot," Hunt said. "How about total sensory stimulation and monitoring, plus an instant communications link. We never went to Thurien; you brought Thurien here. And Lyn never answered any phone call. You pumped it straight into her nervous system along with everything else she thinks she’s doing, and you manufactured all the appropriate AV data to send through the local beam. How’s that?"
"Pretty good," VISAR replied, managing to inject a strong note of approval into its voice. "So are you ready to rejoin the party? You’re due to meet the Thuriens in a few minutes."
"I’ll talk to you later," Hunt said, and cut the connection.
"Now would you mind telling us what the hell this is all about?" the controller invited.
Hunt’s expression was distant, his voice slow and thoughtful. "That’s just a flying phone booth out there on the apron. It’s got equipment inside that somehow couples directly into the perceptual parts of the nervous system and transfers a total impression from a remote place. What you saw on the screen a minute ago was extracted straight out of Lyn’s mind. A computer translated it into audiovisual modulations on a signal beam and directed it into your antenna. It processed the transmission from here in the opposite direction."
Ten minutes later Hunt reentered the perceptron and sat down in the same recliner that he had occupied before. "What do I say— ‘Home, James’?" he asked aloud.
This time there were no preliminary sensory disturbances. He was instantly back in the room with Lyn, who seemed to have been expecting him to reappear; VISAR had evidently forewarned her. He looked around the room curiously to see if he could detect any hint of its being a creation manufactured by a computer, but there was nothing. Every detail was authentic. It was uncanny. As with VISAR’S command of English and the data needed to disguise the perceptron as a Boeing, all the information must have been extracted from Earth’s communications links; practically everything necessary had been communicated electronically from somewhere to somewhere at some time or another. No wonder the Thuriens had been particular about keeping everything connected with this business out of the network!
He reached out and ran a finger experimentally down Lyn’s arm. It felt warm and solid. The whole thing was exactly what he had said to VISAR—a total sensory stimulation process, probably acting on the brain centers directly and bypassing the neural inputs. It was astounding.
Lyn glanced down at his hand, then looked up and eyed him suspiciously. "I don’t know if it’s that authentic, either," she told him. "And right now I’m not that curious. Forget it."
Before Hunt could reply, the phone rang again. He answered it. It was Danchekker, looking ready to commit mayhem.
"This is monstrous! Outrageous!" The veins at his temples were throbbing visibly. "Have you any idea of the provocation to which I have been subjected? Where are you in this computerized lunatic asylum? What kind of—"
"Hold it, Chris. Calm down." Hunt held up a hand. "It’s not as bad as you think. All that’s—"
"Not as bad? Where in God’s name are we? How do we get out of it? Have you talked to the others? By what right do these alien creatures presume to—"
"You’re not anywhere, Chris. You’re still on the ground at McClusky. So am I. We all are. What’s happened is—"
"Don’t be preposterous! It’s quite evident that—"
"Have you talked to VISAR? It’ll explain it all far better than I can. Lyn’s with me and—"
"No I have not, and what’s more I have no intention of doing anything of the kind. If these Thuriens do not possess the common courtesy to—"
Hunt sighed. "VISAR, take the professor home and straighten him out, could you? I don’t think I’m up to dealing with him right now."
"I’ll handle it," VISAR replied, and Danchekker promptly vanished from the screen leaving an empty room in the frame.
"Amazing," Hunt murmured. There were times, he thought, when he would have liked to be able to pull that stunt with Danchekker himself.
A knock sounded lightly on the door. Hunt and Lyn’s heads jerked around to look at it, turned back to meet each other’s questioning looks, then stared at the door again. Lyn shrugged and moved across the room toward it. Hunt switched off the terminal and looked up to find the eight-foot-tall figure of a Ganymean straightening up after ducking through the doorway. Lyn stood speechless with surprise as she held the door open.
"Dr. Hunt and Miss Garland," the Ganymean said. "First, on behalf of all of us, I apologize for the somewhat bizarre welcome. It was necessary for some very important reasons, which will be explained when we all get together very shortly. I hope that our leaving you on your own like this hasn’t seemed too bad-mannered, but we thought that perhaps a short period of adjustment might be beneficial. I am Porthik Eesyan—one of those you were expecting to meet."