"What did you do with her?" I yelled back, and threw myself at him with no higher ambition in life than to get my fingers into the soft fat under his chin, but he faded back before me and I clawed my way through a syrupy substance full of little bright lights and stumbled out into a room with curved walls covered with dials and winking lights, and a gray man in a form-fitting green uniform put out a hand and said, "Are you all right now, Captain?"
I looked past him. Lard Face sat before a round ground-glass screen, squinting at wiggly green lines; the bird man was next to him, tapping keys like a grocer adding up a week's supplies for a family of twelve. Trait looked over his shoulder and grinned a crooked grin and winked.
"We've just passed a field-inversion screen, Captain," the gray man was saying. "Possibly you're a bit disoriented for the moment; it sometimes has that effect . . .?"
"Where's Miss Regis?" I said, and pushed his hand away, noticing as I did that I had a fancy ring on my index finger, a complicated spiral of diamond chips. On impulse I made a fist, ring out, and pushed it at him.
"Ever see that before?" I said—and surprised myself. I'd never seen it before either—but my gesture suggested itself to me as a cagey thing to do.
The gray man's eyes bugged and he shied violently. "Put that thing away!" he gasped.
"Why should I, Eridani?"
All heads in sight jerked around when I called his name. Trait came out of his chair clawing for the gun at his hip; the gray man spun to face him just in time for a beam of green light to lance out from where Lard Face sat and bore a hole through his back. He went down coughing blood and smoke, and everyone was around me, all talking at once.
"How did you spot him, Captain?" the bird man said. "How did you know he was a spy?" Big Nose loomed up then, barking orders, clearing the mob.
"Come with me, Captain," he said. "As ship's medical officer I'm ordering you to your quarters."
I let him walk me past the door, and then turned and rammed the fist with the ring into his paunch.
"Bring her back, Van Wouk," I said.
"What . . .!" he coughed, half bent and looking up at me. "What . . .? Why . . .? Who . . .?"
"When, where, and how. Yeah," I admitted. "There are a lot of questions a guy could ask. The difference is you know some of the answers and I don't know any. Start supplying me."
He just kept gasping and looking at me as if I'd gone too far round the bend to catch sight of any longer.
But Trait stepped up jabbering fast: "Why did you strike him, Captain? We're all loyal! You know that! Can't you see what we're doing is for your benefit? Just tell us what you want—"
"What's my name?"
"Captain Florin of Security Ship 43; you've been temporarily incapacitated."
"Where am I?"
"On the command deck; the ship is nearing Grayfell in the Wolf System."
"What's this ring?" It had suddenly begun to burn my finger. In fact the glow of fire at my hand had already taken over top billing in my attention. I looked at it with care for the first time, while Trait's voice in explanation died to a buzzing in my ears. Somehow the ring was hard to look at. There were loops of what looked like miniature neon tubing, and curious twisted planes of polished metal, and rods and wires that seemed to go out of focus as I tried to trace their connections. At the center a glowing point pulsated like something alive; fire darted through the tubes and sparkled along the wires. I made a fierce gesture to pull it off my finger.
But my finger rippled and waved as if a sheet of iridescent water had come between my eyes and it. I stepped back and found the plate glass of the haberdashery stiff and unbroken at my back. Trait, Eridani, and the others still stood around me but the dust on their tuxedos showed they hadn't conversed or shaken hands or clapped each other on the back for a long long time. I turned and bumped a dummy I hadn't seen and it fell down.
I bent to look at the shattered head and found it was the Senator—again. I looked up, recognized the echoing dust-draped passage in the abandoned warehouse.
"Damn you, Florin," said a familiar voice. Bardell was getting up off the floor, rubbing his face.
"That slap in the puss wasn't in the script," he whined. "When I hired on for the good of the republic and a pair of cees they said nothing about a belaboring by the beneficiary of the project."
I grabbed him by the collar. "Cough it up. Who are you? What are you? What am I?"
"We'll give you all the information you require," said a voice behind me. I whirled and saw Lard Face and the full complement of henchmen alighting from the Nile green Buick, tommy guns at the ready. I wished for an instant of time I had the ring again—then did-n't know why I wished it. I advanced to meet them. The bullets rattled around me like horizontal hail and I reached out with the idea I'd take somebody with me wherever I was going.
But I made the trip alone. The Buick shimmered and slid away. The street was gone. I turned and was standing in a desert and the lizard man was leaning against a rock ten feet away, dressed all in pink and smiling at me lazily.
"Well," he said. "At last. I was beginning to fear you'd never tread the maze to its conclusion."
I took a deep breath of hot, dry air that had a faint smell of eucalyptus, or of something that smelled like eucalyptus, and had a look around. Sand, a few pebbles, rocks, plenty of stone, all well-worn by time and the patient elements. No signs of life, not even a cactus.
"A swell place to visit," I said. "But I wouldn't want to die here."
"No need for any talk of dying," Diss said in his ashes-of-roses voice. "The only danger that existed was to your sanity, and it seems to me you've handled that quite nicely. In fact, you showed unexpected resourcefulness. I was quite surprised, actually."
"That relieves my mind a whole lot," I said. "What do you do now, stick a gold star in my book?"
"Now," he said briskly, "we can begin to deal." He twinkled his little red eyes expectantly at me.
"That's my cue to ask you what kind of deal," I said. "OK—what kind of deal?"
"There's only one kind of deal, wherever in the Universe one happens to be. There's something you need, and something I need. We exchange."
"Sounds simple. What do I need?"
"Information, of course."
"What's your end of it?"
He shifted position and waved a lean lilac-colored hand. "There's a service you can perform for me."
"Let's start with the information."
"Certainly. What first? The Senator?"
"He's not a Senator; he's an actor named Bardell."
"Bardell is Bardell," the lilac lizard stated. "The Senator . . . is the Senator."
"If that's a sample, I don't think we're going to get together."
"You," the lizard man said with the air of one enjoying himself, "are the victim of a plot."
"I knew it all along."
"Now, Florin, don't discount what I tell you in advance." He produced a long cigarette holder from under his pink vest, fitted a brown cigarette to it and tucked it in a corner of a mouth that was made for catching flies on the wing. He puffed and pale smoke filtered out his noseholes.
"That doesn't make you any easier to believe," I said. "If this pitch is supposed to convince me, you're going at it all wrong."
"Oh, I'm not interested in convincing you of anything in particular. I feel the facts will speak for themselves—"
"Where's Miss Regis?"
Diss frowned; even his cigarette holder drooped.
"Who?"
"The girl. A nice, quiet little lady, not like the rest of the inmates of this menagerie. She was trying to help me; I don't know why."
Diss was shaking his head. "No," he said judiciously. "Really, Florin, it's time you began to distinguish the actual players from the simulacra. There is no young lady involved."
I took a step toward him and he recoiled slightly.
"Dear me," he said, sounding amused, "surely it's not necessary for me to point out that I'm not susceptible to any hasty, violent impulses on your part." He curved the smile at me. "I'm not precisely an ally, Florin, but I mean you no harm—and as I've said, you can be of service to me. Wouldn't it be best if we simply explore matters in a rational way and seek an accommodation?"
"Go ahead," I said. "I'm too tired to argue."
"Ah, there's a clever chap. Now, the plot: A benign plot, you understand, but a plot nonetheless. A plot, to be brief, to restore you to sanity."
"Late reports from the front indicate it's not working. You may not believe this, but at this very moment I'm imagining I'm having a heart-to-heart with a fatherly salamander."
Diss opened his mouth and made some hissing sounds that I guessed were supposed to be laughter.
"It must be confusing for you at this point, I concede; however, remember to apply the simple criterion: facts are facts, however revealed. And if my revelations illuminate the situation—why then, if I'm not real I'm as good as, eh?"
"I've also got a headache," I said. "You just got to where they were saving my sanity. How about mentioning who 'they' are, and why they're interested in unscrambling my wits, if I've got any."
"They . . . are the Research Council, a high-level governmental group—of which you were—or are—chairman."
"You must have the wrong pigeon, Diss. The only research I do is into who pulled the trigger or pushed the breadknife, as the case may be."
He waved that away. "A transparent rationalization. Your own common sense must tell you that it's necessary now to widen the scope of your self-concept. Would I waste my time interviewing an obscure private eye, with or without his wits about him?"
"I pass. Keep talking."
"You last project as Chairman was the development of a device for the study of dreams, an apparatus designed to search the subconscious for operative symbols, and concretize and externalize them, making the unconscious mental activities available for study. You insisted on being the first test subject. Unfortunately, due to fatigue and stress factors, you were unequal to the experience. Your mind embraced this new avenue of escape; you slipped away into a fantasy world of your own devising."
"I'm disappointed in me; I'd have thought I could devise something that was more fun than being chased, run away from, shot at, slugged, and generally scared to death."
"Indeed?" Diss chuckled, like a safety valve letting off a little extra pressure. "Know thyself, Florin. You're a scientist, a theoretician, not a doer of deeds. You welcomed the opportunity to shed responsibility in a simpler world of brute law, of kill or be killed. But your loyal henchmen, naturally enough, were far from content with this turn of events. It was necessary that they bring you back from your dreamworld. You had escaped into the
persona
of a legendary character of Old Earth—Florin by name. Van Wouk countered this move by setting you a task—in your chosen guise, of course—and thereupon introducing difficulties into your path, with the object of rendering your refuge untenable. Matters proceeded as planned—to a point. You entered the fantasy, accepted the charge. Abruptly, things went awry. Unplanned elements cropped up, complicating affairs. Van Wouk attempted to abort the treatment, but found himself unable to do so. Matters had been taken out of his hands. He was no longer in control of the dream machine." He paused for the question. I asked it.
"
You
were now in charge, of course," he said. "Rather than acting as a passive receiver of the impulses fed to your brain, you seized on them and wove them into a new fabric, closer to your needs: specifically, the need to cling to your chosen role."
"Why don't I remember any of this? And what do you mean, 'Old Earth'?"
"You still don't remember, eh?" Diss said. "A portion of your mind has carefully blanked out the evidence of the situation you found insupportable. By supplying the data from another source, I am in effect outflanking your own mental defenses. As for Old Earth—it's the name given to a minor world thought by some to be the original home of humanity."
"I guess this is where I say I thought humanity only had one home."
"Oh, of course—Earth was the setting you chose for yourself, as appropriate to your role as Florin, the Man of Steel. But by now you must be ready to accept the thesis that such a stage is a trifle too small to contain both you and—myself." He gave the lipless smile.
"Not to mention Grayfell—and the monkey man."
Diss made his hissing laughter again. "Van Wouk was growing desperate. He intended to pacify you by offering you an alternate avenue of rational escape, an acceptable alibi to seize on: that you were a secret agent, suffering from a brainwashing during which you had gained certain false impressions; but you carried his gambit on to a
reduction ad absurdum
, discrediting it. He then attempted to overawe you with authority, convince you you were delirious, emerging from anesthetic—and again you twisted his charade into absurdity. He tried again, closer to home, thrusting you into the role of an authority figure broken by overwork—and a third time you used his strength against him, reaching out, in fact, to attack and nearly destroy him. It was at that point that I felt it essential to step in—both to save your sanity and to prevent a wider tragedy."
"I see; just a selfless individual, out to do a little good in the big bad imaginary world."
"Not quite." He tipped the ashes from his cigarette. "I mentioned that there was a service you could perform for me."
"I guess you'll tell me what it is, whether I coax you or not."
"The dream machine," he said, "is a most ingenious device;
too
ingenious, I fear. You're to be congratulated, my dear Florin, on your achievement. But it won't do, you know. It will have to be shut down—permanently."
I scratched my jaw, which I discovered hadn't been shaved for quite a while, which might have been a clue to something, but at the moment I didn't stop to chase it down.
"Picture the problems which would be created," Diss went on, "if a band of untutored aborigines on some remote ocean isle accidentally stumbled on a means of generating powerful radio waves. Some incidental by-product, perhaps, of an improved anti-devil charm. In all innocence they could well disrupt planetary communications, interfere with satellite operations, wreak havoc with Trideo, and open and close carport doors on the other side of the planet."