The Embedding

TWENTY-THREE

“We’ll walk from here on.”

“Sure?”

Sole nodded.

They got out of the lowslung blue Ford car with the legend USAF stencilled on its front doors. The toothy Negro sergeant who’d been driving them backed into a gateway then sped off back the way he’d come, negotiating the country lanes with a faint squeal of tyres.

“Over there, that’s Haddon.”

Sole pointed at the Unit half a mile away on top of the rise, backed up against its own dense mini-jungle of fir trees.

“My little Indians—” he shrugged.

He indicated the straggle of the village across the barren fields behind them.

“That’s my place—with the blue VW. You head on over there, Pierre. Eileen’ll be waiting. I—I’ll catch you up.”

His own home?

Containing a woman Eileen whom he happened to be married to—yet her voice over the comsat telephone link the other night had sounded like such a cleverly personalized answering service! Containing a boy, Peter, who more closely resembled the looks of this other bitter empty man he stood with on the country lane…

Sole pushed Pierre gently towards the stile leading on to the field path. It wasn’t an affectionate push, however—there couldn’t be any affection any more. But it was gentle.

Pierre gave Sole a puzzled look, but climbed the stile without asking any questions, and set off along the stiff mud track.

And Sole was alone.

The English countryside seemed as blank and stripped-bare as the face of the Moon, after the Amazon rainforests. The sky with all its empty dry air rubbed its nothingness over him coldly. He set off towards Haddon Unit, through the dead fields.

He had never felt quite so nervously aware, as he walked, under the clear empty eggshell sky, of being located on the surface of a gross statistical accident—as well as of being encompassed by the ghosts of billions of casualties who might have lived, but never had—of other Soles who might have been born, but weren’t—and whose exclusion bracketed his own existence about till it too seemed unreal—a life lived in brackets. He was filled with a haunting consciousness of every twig and stalk of grass crisp and clear in their total arbitrariness—bracketed into existence by the exclusion of so much more, infinitely more. Every clod of earth shaped itself into a grinning hunchback gargoyle as he walked. The blue of the sky behind barren branches became stained glass in some empty cathedral of the void—a fan of peacock plumes courting nothingness.

He swung a carrier bag stuffed with clothes, conscious of many other Soles carrying out different projects and making different choices in this dead random zone.

Beyond that peacock blue that Sole saw as a stained-glass window and a display of plumes, in the blackness which that blue had become by the height of a thousand miles, Major Pip Dennison floated in his michelin-man suit—veteran of five hundred South-East Asian combat sorties and a duty tour in Skylab, author cum laude of a PhD thesis on the math of orbital trajectories. His faceplate reflected the blue disc of Earth with its white whorling streaks of cream meringue—a soda fountain in space.

His umbilical tether snaked away, reflecting the harshest of sunlights, towards the hanging shuttle craft from which other gossamer lines also spun away to other rubber blobs of humans. Half a dozen spacemen had landed on different parts of this vast rent metal fruit whose segments had sprung apart through the rumpled rind, bursting deep black-shadowed canyons and crevasses down into it. Like wasps they had flown out to suck the juice from the spoilt fruit.

Flies to a hunk of rare venison hung up there to mature, in the icebox of space.

Pip consulted the Roentgen counter strapped to his wrist. The rate of rotting of this venison was subject to an inverse law: only when the radioactive rot had ceased would the whole carcass be ripe for the picking. What a feast in the sky it would be—this split orange, burst egg, hunk of venison.

First they would pick over this north side of the fruit. Later, they would head round it to the hole punched in the south side three hundred feet deep by five hundred wide—that million-degree axeblow that had split the enemy’s skull—watching their Roentgen counters as they worked.

Yet a thought daunted Major Dennison, as he looked down the steel crevasse. Could some alien beast have survived the axeblow and loss of air—and still be alive somewhere down there?

The pit yawned darkly. They said, didn’t they, that a spaceman was only a deepsea diver keeping the pressure in, instead of out? What octopus tentacles might reach for him out of the injured darkness? Pip shivered in his well-heated suit as he unclipped his tether and clamped it magnetically to the metal rind. Elsewhere on the ruptured surface, half a dozen Americans and Russians belayed their tethers too…

Pip angled his light down and snapped a holograph of the chasm with fat buckled tubing gleaming at the bottom of it. He let the camera hang loose and checked for a second time the handiness of the improvised weapon they had all been issued with—an explosive pellet thrower powered by compressed gas.

“Dennison about to descend,” Pip told his throat mike.

“Good luck, Pip,” a voice buzzed in his ear. “Good hunting.”

Pip swung his body round and started climbing upward. The change of orientation put Earth’s soda fountain a thousand miles below his feet, blue oceans whipped with cream.

Sole’s intentions were as ice-sharp as the winter day, as he pushed the main door open and walked into the heat inside.

The Christmas tree was gone. Balloons gone. Streamers gone.

No one saw him as he fitted his key into the first security door and passed through to the rear wing.

He took the lift down and stepped out into the corridor, hurried to the first window.

Inside the Embedding World the wall screen was dead and the four children lay sleeping on the floor in a neat row.

Gulshen’s leg was encased in plaster. Rama’s hand was wrapped in bandages. Vasilki’s brow was bandaged and her face badly bruised.

Vidya was the only unblemished one. Yet he did not sleep quietly. Even through the tranquillizers and barbiturates his lips moved. Muscular tics twisted them.

Sole barely registered the peculiar circumstances. A glance showed him that Vidya was safe and that was all he cared about. He walked through the airlock ignoring the speech mask hanging up, dropped the carrier bag beside the boy and bent over him.

“Vidya!” he called tentatively.

The boy moved fitfully and his lips twitched but he didn’t open his eyes.

Drugged, Sole noted with distaste. He glanced at the video pickups. Possibly they weren’t switched on, and if they were switched on nobody would be watching, as there was nothing to record.

He emptied the clothes out of the carrier bag and began dressing Vidya. Amusing to think of the boy waking up fully dressed for the very first time—maybe feeling bound up in a bit of a strait jacket at first—then the huge enlargement of his vistas dawning on him…

Pierre’s footsteps crumpled the gravel as he skirted the blue Volkswagen and went round the side of the house.

He looked in through a window, saw a boy wriggling about in an armchair before the TV set—crossing and uncrossing his white matchstick legs under him restlessly. The boy’s face shocked him. The soft foxy features. His own childhood face, from a green buckram photograph album.

But Chris had never said anything. Hadn’t even hinted. How long was it since that time in Paris? It was possible.

His own child? It might explain Chris’s ambivalent attitude—the sense Pierre had ever since he become conscious of Chris there in the jungle, that Chris had been thrashing out some private dilemma that had nothing to do with Indians or Aliens or even his experiments at the Hospital.

Another window brought him face to face with Eileen.

For a moment she failed to recognize him, he looked so thin and worn, then she flew to the kitchen door.

“Pierre! But Chris said nothing on the phone—”

“No?”

They kissed lightly. Pierre held her by the shoulders to look into her eyes—which seemed older and cooler now.

He gestured uncertainly at the other room, where the TV was playing hurdy-gurdy music.

“I never knew—Chris didn’t mention anything. I—I am right, aren’t I?”

“Yes—his name’s Peter. My Chris doesn’t seem to have said much—”

“Ah—Chris has gone up to the Hospital for something. Maybe to give us a moment together?”

Pip floated into a corridor which carried cable-bearing pipes around the inner skin of the Globe—now they were buckled and ruptured. Further along, the corridor was pinched together by the shock wave of the explosion and its roof scraped the floor like a coalmine gallery squashed flat by subsidence.

Nearby, a hatch had sprung open. A ladder with metre-wide spaces between the separate rungs led down to a lower level. Blocking the view drifted the body of one of the angular aliens, surrounded by a frozen pink haze.

Pip bounced himself cautiously upward from rung to rung till he reached the dead unhuman floating in the nebula of its blood. He hauled the corpse aside. Its grey clothes—or was that stuff skin?—tore away from the chilled metal leaving a frozen layer behind.

Pip pushed himself into a high, vaulted corridor more spacious than the first corridor had been. He shone his light around. The corridor led off in one direction along a buckled curve, vanishing out of sight. In the other direction it opened into a hallway of idle, dead machines. A second alien body hung midway between them, turning very slowly end over end. Fingers splayed out like tree twigs. Ears had burst open into grey streamers from its skull. Pip swung his body round so that the roof became the floor again, then pushed his way by gentle shoves towards the machinery. Ambassador from the world of whipped cream, he inspected these first pickings of the meal of Mind. He snapped holograms, checked his Roentgen counter.

After ten minutes, when he couldn’t make out the function of the machines, he drifted down a long rumpled ramp to a lower level still…

Sole carried the sleeping Vidya up in the lift and along the corridor. Outside the hairmesh security glass, the green barbed woods pressed a corset round the building. It was quiet.

He unlocked the first door.

In the interface between the two doors, Lionel Rosson stood waiting for him. He didn’t seem surprised to see him, or the boy in his arms.

“What are you up to, Chris? Sabotage? Or is it sentimentality? I suppose I ought to say welcome home to Haddon. But let’s get that boy back to his proper place first, hmm? Oh, I would have wanted you back here so desperately, a week ago! But now… well—it’s different, isn’t it?”

Sole whispered furiously:

“I’m taking Vidya out of here. To live a real life. I’m sick of bogus science and lying politics. Projects for the advancement of Mankind! Codename after codename for bestiality—their Leapfrogs and Mulekicks. And Haddon’s just as bad—”

“What’s a Leapfrog, Chris? What’s a Mulekick?” Rosson asked, humouringly, keeping a wary eye on the sleeping boy, and keeping his own back to the outer door.

“Hasn’t it all been on the telly then? Flying saucers. Alien menace. All that crap. I hear it knocked the wind out of the sails of revolution in South America!”

“You’ve been involved in that then, Chris? Ah well!

Time enough to tell me. You’ve seen the injuries? You realize the boy is tranked? And needs to be, damn it!”

“I’ve had my fill of needs. Political needs. Scientific needs. Humanity’s needs. Bugger all needs!”

“You don’t understand the situation, Chris. Let’s take Vidya downstairs again. We’ll work out a strategy, hmm?”

“Who wants a ‘strategy’?” sneered Sole.

“We do, Chris. Things reached crisis point—”

“You’ve ballsed things up, you bastard—you didn’t look after Vidya!”

Sole put the boy down on the floor gently.

“For Chrisake, Chris, listen to me—the language programme broke down. The kids accepted the overload on short term memory up to a certain point. But it’s broken down now like a dam bursting.”

Sole growled at the foggy figure before him.

“Bloody well leave dams bursting out of it!”

“Sure, Chris. Anything you say. But listen, will you? The kids reverted to babbling. Not baby babbling. It was concepts, ways of thinking—”

“Get out of my way, you. Fuck your ways of thinking.”

“The thing is, your embedding has—”

Sole hit Rosson in the stomach.

“—taken place,” gasped Rosson. Sole caught hold of his mane of hair and swung his head against the wall violently till Rosson crumpled up and sagged to the floor.

He picked Vidya up again and unlocked the outer door.

Pip floated into what would later be known as the First Chamber of the Brains.

His light fell on many crystal life-support boxes—row upon row towering up to a vaulted dome. Tendrils of wires led up to them, like jungle creepers climbing trees, from the instrument panels below. Wires led into the plastic jelly that filled the boxes, where they split into a million filaments, that touched every part of what those boxes contained: naked brains—set in the jelly like fruits in a trifle.

There were brains of many forms and sizes. Some resembled fungi. Some, corals. Some, rubbery cactus plants. Sections of spinal columns jutted below the brains, some as straight as ram-rods, others curled like drawn bows, others ripple-form like waves. Sense-organs stood out, attached to the brains on muscular cords and bony rods. A few were recognizable as eyeballs; others ambiguous. Were they for seeing light at all—or some other form of radiation?

Pip gazed up in a mixture of awe and disgust. The set-up reminded him of a biology lab in school—pickled sea-creatures drained of colour, floating in alcohol.

None of the life-support boxes had ruptured, though, when the Globe burst.

He wondered—could their minds have survived inside that protective gel of theirs—quick-frozen so fast that they had no time to die, but only hibernated?

There’d been no vital organs to rupture, no lungs to burst. The life support systems had just suddenly cut off—and the brain had already been plunged to a temperature where all functions were suspended.

Could cryogenics engineers from Earth restore any sort of consciousness to these creatures? Was there any chance they could reactivate the life support systems? Warm the brains up? Bring them back again?

Maybe the shock of pseudo-dying when the cold rushed in would have been too massive for the mind to come through intact, even if a trace of consciousness still lingered.

Yet if there was the slightest chance! Surely Humanity owed it to these prisoners, to bring them back again. And owed it to itself. As many mental sciences could stem from the contents of this chamber, as physical sciences from the machinery of the Globe.

Such thoughts exalted him—eagle scout, PhD cum laude, veteran of the crusade for Asian freedom—as he hung there among the brains of beings from across a thousand light years, and whispered a prayer.

Lord, may these brains be resurrectable.

May they be raised to a new life by Ettinger Foundation engineers. To a true mind alliance, which those ghouls denied them—as they would have denied Humanity—rushing in here to pick our brains and fly off again. Please, Lord, for Humanity’s sake.

God bless the Ettinger Foundation, whispered Pip into his helmet. Bless them and help them to bring the frozen body back to life and cure it.

It was a prayer he’d whispered many times before—his own four-year-old niece had been frozen in a tube of liquid nitrogen, dead of terminal cancer, the summer before.

Pip wept into his helmet tenderly, from sheer compassion. His torchbeam danced over the frozen brain aquarium.

Sole carried Vidya through the frozen fields by the same route as he’d come. Though it was the longer way round to his house, it was less public. He was less likely to meet anyone. As he walked, the cold air began to penetrate Vidya’s sleep. The boy had never felt such cold before. His lips tasted it and twitched. His cheeks blushed with it. His skin crawled.

Sole crossed the road where he’d parted from Pierre and set his eyes on the blue car parked by his house. The Volkswagen spelt mobility. Escape.

He held the boy tight, loving him and hating all else, as the child’s lips began to mumble sounds.

Vidya’s eyes opened, and he stared blankly at the great blue vault of sky and towering skeletons of trees.

Eileen and Pierre came out to meet him, Pierre catching hold of her arm to stop her when he saw the boy.

“Chris—what sort of game is this?”

She stared at Vidya and the boy stared back, locking on her eyes disconcertingly.

“You’ve brought an Indian boy back from Brazil?”

“Chris brought nothing but himself and me. That’s one of their experiments from the Unit. They usually keep them under lock and key—Chris must have flipped his lid bringing him here—”

Inside the house, a telephone bell began to jangle.

Pierre took his hand off Eileen’s arm, belatedly.

“Shall I answer? I can guess what it is. You mightn’t realize it, Eileen, but your Chris has just torn his precious career up and thrown the pieces in the air.”

She stared at the Frenchman in bewilderment.

“What—?”

“Chris has just committed a huge breach of security. Though God knows why. It doesn’t look like he does—”

Chris hugged the boy, and gazed down at him.

“Fortunately he’s healthy,” he said, as much to himself as to Eileen or Pierre. “There’s nothing physically wrong with him. He’s bright. Look at him taking it all in, cunning little bugger—”

Pierre gestured questioningly at the house, where the telephone kept on ringing. But Eileen wasn’t paying attention. She stared from her husband to the child in its ill-fitting clothes. Pierre shrugged and went indoors to take the call.

“Do you mean this kid is yours, Chris?”

“Why yes! Who’s else?”

“But… when? How? Is this what you dragged Pierre here to witness—this shabby domestic intrigue? This petty tit for tat. After you’ve been away such a time you can only produce this gesture—you petty hateful nobody!”

Vidya stared at her face twisted by anger. His fists balled up inside his gloves. His body arched against the restraint of clothes. He writhed about like a snake in Sole’s embrace as the cold air stung his face.

Sole stared at his wife. Her outburst puzzled him. It seemed so paranoid and irrelevant. He hadn’t even been away ‘such a time’—it was less than two weeks.

“I didn’t screw some bitch foreign nurse if that’s what you think! Vidya is the child of my—my mind.”

“So Peter isn’t a product of your precious mind? A cruel trick, Chris, bringing Pierre here to rub it in.”

“That’s an accident, Pierre being here. Honestly. My God, why should it be a trick?”

“Can I see into your heart any better than you can yourself? Do I know why your subconscious needs a set-piece like this?”

“Setpiece? What the hell are you talking about!”

“Pierre arriving. Then your dramatic entry with your ’real’ child in your arms. That’s a child of the mind is it? I can’t compete with that. What on earth is a child of the mind!”

The boy’s eyes flashed from Sole to his wife and back again. The electricity of words flowed between them, and he fed on it greedily. Sole had to hold him tighter as his limbs flexed and he twisted about in his arms. It was all emotional nonsense Eileen was talking. It didn’t make sense. The idea of bringing Pierre here hadn’t been that at all. It had been—generosity. An attempt to give her something, not take something away, or humiliate her.

“I don’t suppose I can stay here anyhow. Have you got the car keys? I’ll have to take him somewhere else.”

“This is beyond me. You just… simply… amaze me.”

Sole began to feel a curious light-headedness.

Eileen was receding into the background. The house, the car, the landscape were all changing subtly. Still there, but—different.

He was still seeing familiar things; but seeing them as though this was the first time he had set eyes on them. The familiar things were at the same time infinitely strange and fresh. They had taken on an unsettling double life. Their colours were faded and at the same time bright. Their shapes fitted in neatly to his customary picture of things—and simultaneously were oddly distorted and foreshortened as though the rules of perspective were being interfered with.

The house, as well as being a house, was now a giant red box of plastic bricks. The car was a Volkswagen saloon—and also a great plastic and glass spheroid of no very obvious function.

Eileen stood before him—a flat figure posturing on a screen suspended in mid-air.

Beyond, a barren plateau stretched out into infinite distance, unable to terminate itself with any solid boundary. Panic mounted in him as he searched for the boundaries that ought to be there, and were not. The most he could locate was a circular zone of confused light, very far away. Or was it very far away? Or very near? He couldn’t tell—and when he tried to concentrate on the problem, the world flashed in and out at him, frighteningly, growing alternately very large and very small. In that confused zone far off, lines of sight broke down and vanishing points stubbornly refused to vanish. He tried to fashion a wall out of that medley of lights and darks far off—but the wall, half-completed, flowed in at him and out again, flexing and contracting about him, as though he had been swallowed by a soft glass stomach he could see through—and the stomach walls pulsed in and out while its acids nibbled at his bare skin, licking it with a harsh invisible tongue.

From this unbounded, menacing plateau sprung at intervals stiff towering giants, balanced upon great solitary legs, waving their hundreds of arms and thousands of fingers slackly overhead.

Above their reach was more of the great opaque stomach—its foggy depths were coloured blue, up there. They fled away and raced towards him, compressing him to a tiny spot, then inflating him till it seemed his head would burst with thinking of it.

Then he did an impossible thing.

He twisted about, in fright, in his own grasp; for an instant, saw both himself holding, and himself being held—saw the Self that held him, and saw the Self he held; the two sights superimposed on one another. Almost as soon as it formed, this double vision fell apart, and the two states began to alternate separately before his horrified eyes.

Rapidly, the two versions of Himself speeded up their substitutions of one another—quickening pace till they were flashing before his gaze like a film and producing a sickening illusion of continuity—but continuity in being two separate places at once.

Soon the visions fused again—and he was holding on to himself, and struggling against himself, not knowing which was the true state.

As before, the double vision shattered. He was Sole the Man staring in fear and nausea into the Boy’s eyes. But these eyes swelled into deep pools. Mirrors. Saucers of glass. He could see himself reflected in them, at the same time as he saw himself through them.

In their depths a whirlpool spun frantically on its own axis, sucking everything in to a vanishing point that never vanished but only grew fearfully dense with light—with all the sights it was seeing yet couldn’t find a way to discard from attention.

He wore the sky close as a hat. He knew the moil and coil of wisp clouds barely visible in the blue, intimately. His fingers branched the branching of the trees. His tongue tasted one by one the rows of brick teeth in that closed red mouth of a house that would swallow him, swallow him. And, at the very same time, he knew he was already swallowed, by the pulsing translucent stomach of the outside world.

This world flipped, into a new state of being.

It fell apart from lines and solids into a pointillist chaos of dots. Bright dots and dark dots. Blue dots, red dots, green dots. No form held true. No distance held fast. New forms making use of these dots in entirely arbitrary, experimental ways, sprang into being among the overwhelming debris of sense perceptions outside of him—fought to impose themselves on the flux of being—failed. Fell apart. And new forms rose.

A new creation was struggling to build itself out of the flood of information pouring at him. A new meaning. But all the sane, functional boundaries had dissolved and this chaos was saturated with meaning to such an extent it had lost all possibility of meaning any one thing or set of things. All appeared as of equal value.

A terrible, physical pressure was building in him, to crystallize this saturated world out into meaning—at all costs.

Where was the third dimension, that kept reality spaced out? This world seemed two-dimensional now—pressing tight about his eyes and ears and nose like a membrane, as packed with matter as the heart of a collapsed star. A flat sphere of dots of sense data pressing directly on to his brain, bypassing even his eyes and ears. It bound his thoughts about like a hungry womb.

The pressure in his head became an urgent need to smash his way through this membrane—to force things to become three-dimensional again, and absorb the vast excess of data.

And yet he was aware, instinctively, that the world he was seeing already was three-dimensional—that this two-dimensional quality was merely an agonizing illusion. Aware that he was trying to force something upon the world that could not be there in any rational universe—a dimension at right angles to this reality: somewhere to store the sheer volume of information flooding his brain and refusing to fade away.

He was watching a movie—but as the new scenes arrived, the old scenes refused to yield and pass on. They too continued to be screened. He had to find somewhere to put them, where he could forget about them.

‘A dimension at right angles’? The image stung him to awareness of where he was, and who. The Man holding the Boy. And he realized with horror that these thoughts and emotions were largely Vidya’s—and how he was now trapped by them.

Reason—rationality—is a concentration camp, where the sets of concepts for surviving in a chaotic universe form vast, though finite, rows of huts, separated into blocks by electric fences, which the searchlights of Attention rove over, picking out now one group of huts, now another.

Thoughts, like prisoners—imprisoned for their own security and safety—scurry and march and labour in a flat two-dimensional zone, forbidden to leap fences, gunned down by laser beams of madness and unreason if they try to.

Vidya’s concentration camp had bulged at the seams. The fences fell over from sheer pressure of bodies. The outermost fence—the boundary beyond which lay the inarticulable—had snapped too. And this was unfortunate—for the concentration camp is the survival strategy of the species.

Vidya’s thoughts spilled out—into Sole’s mind, and into that chaos beyond, ‘whereof we cannot speak’, dragging him after them.

Sole grew vaguely aware of a flat ghost of a figure parading before his eyes, and gesticulating.

A man’s voice, with a French accent, cried:

“For God’s sake get away from him, Chris—leave him alone I The boy’s mad. He can infect you with it, if you’re too near him. They said on the phone, a projective em-path. And mad. They’re coming for him with an ambulance. Put him down and walk away—”

The flat, posturing ghost of dots pulled a second ghost figure back into the brick-toothed mouth that had wanted to gulp him and swallow him up in the flatness of its walls. But he was beyond boundaries, flying high.

“You don’t see any vision of truth, Chris—my God, you’ve created a monster worse than that Xemahoa beast!”

The world flowed around him more demandingly again—a million bits of information. His present awareness, however much it distended, still ached with the strain of finding room for all this fearful wealth. The world was about to be embedded in his mind in its totality as a direct sensory apprehension, and not as something safely symbolized and distanced by words and abstract thoughts. The Greater was about to be embedded in the Lesser. Frantically he searched for adjacent dimensions of existence to receive this spill—the spill-water from a flooded dam. Yet the pressure could only discharge back into the same dimensional framework as the brain that perceived it. His fear of the coming discharge grew—a wild panic as the Embedding coiled within him.

“Come away, Chris. The boy has to be kept sedated. They’ll have to operate on him. They’ll have to cripple his brain, to save him. Put him inside the car, shut the door on him.”

But Vidya is my mindchild. How do I leave my mind?

Sole-Vidya had no way to leave himself.

All sensory information about the situation flowed the other way.

Inwards. Sucked into the whirlpool—occupying mental space without being able to oust what had already flowed in.

The spring would overwind—would burst and fly apart.

“Please come away,” begged Eileen. “Leave him.”

Leave Vidya? Leave himself?

Vidya’s limbs thrashed about in a mechanical dance as Sole held him tighter in his arms, and loved him, agonizing with him…

“Kid snapped his own neck,” Rosson told Sam Bax bitterly as a male nurse lifted the dead boy into the back of the ambulance. He rubbed his own skull tenderly beneath the mop of hair.

“Injuries weren’t nearly so bad with the other kids. You might say this boy was the ringleader. I can’t say I didn’t warn you, Sam.”

“How does this affect the use of PSF in general, Lionel?” the Director demanded in a testy tone. “Is this the first sign of a general breakdown? God, what a mess if it is. All those people we’ve treated and let go home.”

“Not necessarily, Sam. PSF is being used in conjunction with straightforward language procedures in the main part of the Unit. It can only do good there. Dorothy and I are working with logical patterns. There’s not this saturation effect. Richard’s world might give us some trouble soon, I dunno… I’m just astonished by the form this particular breakdown took—the projective empathy factor. Now that’s really a fascinating byproduct. If Chris had damn well listened to me we might have had a chance to explore it instead of a snapped neck. We still have a chance with the other three kids. For God’s sake let’s be careful.”

“A kind of telepathy, is it, Lionel?”

Rosson looked doubtful.

“I think what was happening in Vidya’s brain was an overload of data that his mind couldn’t switch off. It was forced to go on processing it. Couldn’t filter it out. The brain circuits must have fused open—repeating and repeating. And this amplified the voltage flow far beyond what the brain machine is designed for. In fact, the current got so strong that it was able to transmit some kind of echo of itself that other brains could detect. That must be how this projective empathy works—and I suppose other parapsychological phenomena. Some sort of field is laid down that another brain can pick up, which disturbs the chemical balance of the corresponding sets of neurons in the other brain and stimulates them to a ghost firing. That’s your telepathy for you—such as it is. Not genuine communication of ideas from mind to mind. Not dialogue—but a domineering influence, a sort of electrochemical hypnosis. Frightening—and not very useful. Since the boy was effectively insane—and broadcasting his insanity. I felt the same effect myself, when I was close to the boy, before we sedated them. When Chris comes out of shock, perhaps he’ll be better qualified to comment—he’s been dragged deeper into it than me.”

Sam Bax stared irritably at Sole’s body lying sedated on a second stretcher.

“With this little escapade I rather fear our Dr Sole has cooked his goose.”

Rosson looked at Sole too. His head was hurting him.

“He’s been under strain. Let’s not make too much fuss about it, Sam. We’ll all need to pull together to clear this mess up,” he said generously—though he cursed Sole for a bastard and a fool.

Sam shrugged, unimpressed. He looked round for Eileen.

“Ah—Mrs Sole. Your husband will have to go into the Unit for observation, you realize. I’ll see you’re kept informed. It might be as well if you didn’t visit him immediately.”

“Quite,” she answered dryly.

Shortly after, the ambulance drove away.

“Unless Sole’s mind is cracked as bad as the boy’s,” Sam Bax purred at Rosson, ushering him impatiently towards his own car.

Rosson tossed his mane of hair, winced as it tugged at his broken scalp.

A thousand miles over the Solomon Islands, travelling northward, minds weren’t cracked at all, but deepfrozen—to a degree above absolute zero…

To the north of Las Vegas, beside the Atomic Energy Commission testing ground, minds weren’t cracked at all, but dispersed in lightly radioactive debris drifting slowly south before settling into the desert.

The casinos were far enough south for nobody to need worry. The gambling went on. Minds reckoned the odds.

Five thousand miles further south, a Xemahoa Indian named Kayapi wasn’t much worried either.