Part 5 (1/2)

'The field activates in 20 seconds. Don't hesitate to cut loose if the experience is unbearable.'

Bill delFord ceased to exist.

The universe stopped at a concave sweep a couple of metres overhead. Flickeringly, internal lights came on, dimly, with a faint buzzing. Vestibular ca.n.a.ls signalled vertigo, free fall, acceleration. A sharp scent of sweat and urine moved in the air. n.o.body home.

Abruptly, tinnily, a ma.s.sed choir of male and female voices cried joyously: _Halleluiah, Halleluiah, hal-le-ee-loo-oo-ya!_ An elephant trumpeted, and a bloodhound belled. The imperative hoot of a fire-siren, a pompous British voice clearing its throat and saying, 'Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking', the sc.r.a.pe of many chairs as a mult.i.tude made good its escape, a symphony of cash-registers, a speeded-up j.a.panese voice saying, 'My feet are getting closer', a lavatory flus.h.i.+ng, and a moist, protracted, lubricious fart.

In the incredulous silence, there was a strangled, hysterical gasp.

'Our Farter, Which art in Heaven -- '

Peals of silly giggles.

'Fart for art's sake.'

'Sewerealism?'

Booming guffaws, like drunken oafs.

'Don't talk such s.h.i.+t.'

'You taking the p.i.s.s out of me?'

'What a b.u.mmer, it's just pouring out.'

Bill delFord did not exist, but some wiring diagram thought in desperation, This is no proper pastime for a philosopher. We need -- ' -- Sir Karl p.o.o.per.'

'”The Open Society and Its Enemas”?'

A shriek of drawn-out laughter. 'No. That's Jean-Paul Farter.' A pause. 'The existenchilist.'

'She was only a stable-hand but all the horse manure.'

'That's a handic.r.a.p.'

'Golf? Prefer the s.h.i.+t-put.'

'Never made the elimination-finals.'

'Team was pruned down.'

Pain in the chest, in the diaphragm.

'Clear your head with Diarretics.'

'Diuretics?'

's.h.i.+tology. t.u.r.domancy. Movement of the future.'

'A tissue of lies.'

'Wipe the Opposition.'

'Support the t.u.r.d World.'

'Sounds like fecism.'

'Troops in jake-boots? Flus.h.i.+ng out the Privy Council? Establis.h.i.+ng the Dung Dynasty? You're potty!'

The foolish giggles came in convulsive, uncontrollable waves. Finally they ceased, and bodies rolled in their harnesses, hands knocking against sweat-slicked flesh and, finding it, touching, palping. Legs kicked and opened.

'Lapp me.'

More silly giggles, in the swaying, terrible nowhere, and a shockingly blatant sound of slurping.

The universe returned, in a deluge to crack the head. Bill delFord screamed, piteously, and clamped palms over ears, elbows striking together. He was elevated; the light of souls beyond souls, crystalline glory, intolerable hubbub of infinite conversation; white radiance enclosed him, lifting him in a moment from his body which hung below in the silvery bubble (but that was gone already), showed him with his mouth slack and inane tears of mirth under his eyelids, his arms moving out to batter the woman beside him who turned, her thighs spreading in invitation and the other man s.h.i.+fting in weightlessness to bring down his head; all of this in an instant, imploding; and he fell back into his body, aghast, bereft, clinging to the spheres of endless light...

The astronaut lifted his face in stupefaction and humiliation, banging his head against the wire frame. Anne moaned, and her face filled with a deeper flush. Groaning, Bill reached up and took the phone in his hand. He hurled it with great force across the floor of the dome. His stomach ached abominably.

'If you're still hungry,' he said, 'let's go eat lunch.'

Lapp ignored the jibe. Glancing from the shattered phone to delFord and back to Anne, his face tightened with delayed understanding. 'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be silly,' Anne told him. Lightly, with affection, she jabbed his arm, swinging down out of the cradle. 'Par for the course. Here at Huxley, we're famous for letting it all hang out.'

Obliquely, Bill added: 'Ancient history.'

'What he means is, we had a little fling and that was that. Nice while it lasted, though.' She gave Bill a friendly hug. 'Hugh, how did the subjective effects compare to your previous test?'

Instantly Lapp was all business. 'The out-of-body phenomena, virtually identical. All that cretinous punning? Totally new. Frankly, I'm astonished. My jokes might be pretty bad, but kindergarten humour hasn't broken me up like that since I was four years old. What in h.e.l.l happened?'

They paid no attention to Harrington, who hopped anxiously from foot to foot, trying without success to insert his suddenly irrelevant technical questions. General Sutton remained aloof on the far side of the test area, isolated by his manifest disapproval of the proceedings. Bill s.h.i.+vered, and slipped his feet into his battered Indian sandals. The dome was solar-warmed, but even in California the chill of winter leaked into a large enough convecting s.p.a.ce. 'Not kindergarten, Hugh,' he said thoughtfully. 'Small children don't know the names of too many philosophers of science. Good grief. Sir Karl p.o.o.per indeed!'

'I agree,' Anne said. 'That wasn't clinical regression. I think it was something more frightening than that -- as though our brains were switched off. No, that's not right. As if conscious awareness was closed down, I felt as if my mind were functioning at the level of a, an indexing program. Pulling pieces of data out of memory and juxtaposing them on the instruction of some puerile subroutine triggered by your G.o.dd.a.m.n crude farting phone.'

'A network node,' Lapp mused. 'Operating mechanically, without any true intelligence. Certainly without a trace of mature judgment.' He scratched at his head, a curiously childlike gesture. 'But why should external s.h.i.+elding screw up the brain's interior software? Or hardware. Whichever.'

'By golly, I think maybe my hunch was correct all along,' Bill said with wonderment. 'We've proved Carl Jung right. The gluon field literally cut us off from the collective unconscious. It left us isolated. Absolutely severed from the rest of humanity. Just the three of us to anchor one another, linked in a hermetically sealed bubble...'

The technicians, he noticed, were jockeying for advantage, staring with blatant enthusiasm at Anne's naked body. He glanced down at his own uninspiring belly.

'I think we'd better get our pants on,' he said in a low voice. 'Dwayne would really be p.i.s.sed if the Vice Squad put the arm on us at this point.'

*5. California*

At three in the morning, the hour the beasts in tight leather boots prefer when they come to take you away, Bill delFord roused blurrily to the sharp knock on his door. Selma's regular breathing had not altered. He lay on his back, the formless dread of nightmare slowly ebbing. In dream, he reminded himself hazily, the voluntary muscles relax entirely. Occasionally the sense of paralysis leaks through, permeating dream with the terrors of captivity, threat, claustrophobia. Yet that inchoate sensation can also trigger tranquil illusions of levitation, he thought, of floating, of leaving the mundane body ... His heart jumped, hammering, as the brisk knocking was repeated.