For a while Roger fell with his eyes screwed shut, gripping the warm little hand of his partner—the sole material object in the universe. She appeared, he noted, to be about the size of the Queen Mary, floating majestically a mile away, linked to him by a fantastically long arm which dwindled as it approached, joining with a hand of normal size. Then he realized he had been mistaken. She was actually microscopically small, and floated on the surface of his eyeball . . .
"Not too bad so far," she said. There were no audible words; the thought formed in Roger's mind with crystal clarity, in the girl's voice, complete with overtones of a passionate nature rigidly concealed beneath a calm exterior.
"How do you do that?" Roger inquired, and noted with surprise that his lips failed to move. Neither was he breathing. In sudden alarm, he tried to draw in air, but nothing happened.
"Don't struggle," Q'nell's mental voice spoke sharply. "We're in a null-time state, where events like heartbeats and respiration can't take place. Don't let it distract you, or we'll find ourselves expelled from the Channel."
"How long is this going to take?" Roger asked nervously. He felt no physical distress from lack of air, but a conviction of suffocation was rising in him.
"No time at all—other than subjectively," Q'nell said.
"How can we be sure we're actually going anywhere? Maybe we're just going to hang here in space forever, swelling and shrinking."
"That's just your parameters trying to adjust to the absence of physical stimuli," Q'nell pointed out. "Don't let it bother you. And stop asking questions. If we knew the answers, we wouldn't be here."
"Hey!" Roger said suddenly. "My eyes are still shut; I can feel them! How is it I can see you?"
"You are not seeing me, you're apprehending me directly."
"This gray stuff," Roger said. "It's just like what you always see when you close your eyes. You know, I'm beginning to wonder—"
"Don't!" Q'nell said sharply. "Whatever you do, don't start to wonder!"
"I can't help it!" Roger retorted. "This is all too ridiculous to be true! Any second now I'm going to wake up—in my own bed, back in Elm Bluffs, with my mother calling me," he added, prompted by a sudden, vivid sense of homesickness.
The gray mist was changing, forming up into walls that simultaneously receded and closed in on him. Splotches appeared, congealed into large, pastel-colored floral patterns. There was a tear in the wallpaper, with white plaster showing behind it. He sat up, stared dumbly around a big, airy room with a ceiling that slanted down at one side, open windows, a shelf stacked with dog-eared Tom Swift books and untrimmed pulp magazines with B. Paul covers. Several inaccurately aligned model planes dangled from the ceiling on strings; a framed butterfly collection hung on the wall beside a row of arrowheads wired to a board and a felt pennant lettered elm bluffs sr. high.
"Roger!" a voice called in an unmistakably maternal tone. "If I have to call you again . . . " The unuttered threat hung in the air.
Roger made a squeaking sound, staring down at his own body. He saw a narrow, ribby chest, rumpled pajama bottoms covering knobby knees, the spindly shanks of a thirteen-year-old boy. "But . . . but . . . " he mumbled. "I'm thirty-one years old, and a grown-up failure! I was in the Channel with Q'nell, headed for the terminal coordinates . . . " He paused, frowning. "Terminal what?" he said aloud. "Wow, did I dream some big words!"
Suddenly the room faded, the walls swirled away into formless mist. Q'nell's face appeared, floating toward him.
"Where did you go?" she demanded. "You disappeared!"
"I was a boy again," Roger stuttered. "I was back home, in my own bed. It was just as real as this—realer! I could feel the bed under me, and smell bacon cooking, and feel the breeze coming through the windows! I thought all this was a dream!"
"But—you couldn't. It's impossible! I'm the dominant member of this linkage! You can't do anything I don't order you to do! At least that's the theory . . . "
"That's ridiculous," Roger said. "You're only a girl, remember?"
"Look here, T'son! Don't go wrecking the mission with your irresponsible male chauvinism! For some reason—probably having to do with a temporal precession effect induced by the reduplication of the Reinforcer circuitry—you seem to have taken over control of our joint conceptualizing capacities. You'll have to exercise extreme care not to do anything impulsive! Unless we keep all our faculties attuned to the mission, you and I and a few million other captives will spend the rest of Eternity reliving the same day—or worse!"
A faint nebulosity had appeared nearby, at the edge of Roger's vision. It grew, took on form and color.
"Q'nell!" Roger shouted soundlessly. "Look!"
"Now, T'son, if you're going to go on panicking every twenty-one subjective seconds, our mission is doomed. Try to relax."
"Behind you!" He stared at the knotted blanket slowly drifting into view. Under the brown folds, something was stirring, like a cat in a croker-sack.
"It's revived!" Roger blurted. "The monster!"
"Now, T'son, you know we studied your statements back in Culture One and decided that the monster concept was merely a subconscious projection—"
"Projection or not, we've got to get out!" Roger gritted his mental teeth, concentrating on the image of the homey bedroom, the flowered wallpaper . . .
A vague pathway seemed to open through the surrounding gray. Roger yearned toward it, felt himself slipping into it . . .
"T'son! What are you doing?" Q'nell's mental voice had assumed an odd, echoing quality. The tunnel was closing in, condensing into deep gloom that bulked around Roger. Sharp things poked at his back; the smell of hay was thick in his nostrils. He was, he saw, lying in a stack of the stuff, itching furiously. Overhead the lofty ceiling of a barn loomed.
"Now you've done it!" a familiar voice sounded, somewhere to the rear of his left eye. "I warned you about this sort of thing!"
"Where are we?" Roger sat up, scratched at a center of irritation on his right elbow, another on the left side of his neck, reached for a spot on his shoulder.
"Get the one on our left knee," Q'nell commanded. "Then get us out of here!"
"My God!" Roger mumbled. "Are you in the same skin with me?"
"Where else would I be, you dolt?" Q'nell retorted. "We're linked; where you go, I go, unfortunately for me. S'lunt was mad to entrust this mission to you! I might have known you'd panic and spoil it all!"
"Who's panicked! And you can scratch your own knee!" Promptly his left arm, as if possessed of a vitality all its own, did just that. Startled, Roger rose to his feet, and promptly fell on his face, since his left leg had failed to join in the effort to support him.
"I'll take the left half," Q'nell's voice stated firmly. "You'll take the right. Now reattune and get us back into the Channel!"
Roger tried to protest, but the left half of his face was wooden. "I'm paralyzed," he yelped incoherently. Threshing, he rolled from the hay onto a packed dirt floor. Across the room a wide door swung open. A tall, lean man in overalls, pitchfork in hand, stood outlined against a pale early-morning sky.
"Aha, it's you, is it, Andy Butts!" an irate voice grated. "I told you for the last time about sneaking into my barn and upsetting George and Elsie! By hokey, you'll work off your night's lodging! You can start by forking out those stalls! Now come out of there and set to!"
Roger struggled to balance himself on all fours, but fell on his face instead.
"Drunk, too!" the man with the pitchfork barked, advancing with the weapon poised. "You'd better sober up in one gosh-blasted hurry, or by Jupiter I'll give you a taste of what the hereafter'll be like! Get up!" He jabbed with the gleaming tines. Roger made inarticulate sounds and scrabbled one-armed and one-legged, describing a circle in the dust. The owner of the barn stared at him blankly.
"Goldang, Andy!" he blurted. "You all right?"
"Help!" Roger shouted. The sound emerged as a gargle. He fell on his face again.
"Andy! You've had a stroke!" the pitchforker yelled, tossing the implement aside. "Rest easy, Andy! I'll go for Doc Whackerby!"
With a supreme effort, Roger assumed sufficient control to cause the body of Andy Butts to spring wildly to its feet and topple, arms windmilling, against the barn owner, sending him spinning before crashing, jaw first, to the ground.
"He's went insane!" the man yelled, staggering to his feet. He dashed away shouting.
"What are you trying to do?" Q'nell demanded subvocally. "That maniac almost murdered us!"
"Give me back my leg!" Roger countered. "We've got to get out of here!"
"Transfer us back to the Channel!" Q'nell commanded. "Until you do, I'm not letting go!"
"Are you crazy? You'll feel that pitchfork just as much as I will!"
"Oh, no I won't! I'm leaving the sensory nervous system entirely to you, thanks!"
"But I don't know how!" Roger yelled silently.
"Try!"
"Well . . . " Lying on the floor, Roger closed his eye. He stared into the formless gray, swimming with pulsating points and lines of pale-colored light, searching for some clue—any clue to escape. Instead, he was aware of the weight of fat on the body he now occupied, the rasp of stubble on his jowls, the pains shooting from his empty stomach, a clammy, shivering feeling of early-morning hangover.
"Ugh!" Q'nell exclaimed. "How revolting!"
"Quiet! How can I concentrate?"
"Hurry up! That barbarian's coming back!"
"I'm trying!" Roger gritted his teeth, realized with a dull shock that he was grinding toothless gums together, became aware simultaneously of the coating on his tongue, a gluey feeling about the eyes, small creatures exploring his scalp, dirty socks—and an unreasoning dread of Doc Whackerby.
"He's trying to take over!" Roger shouted soundlessly. "The owner of this miserable body!" With an effort, he forced his attention away from the reactions of Andy Butts, blanking his mind to allow his hypnotic training to come to the fore. The grayness thinned, receding. Two foci of relative brightness swam into his ken, radiating calmness.
"I think I've located our bodies!" he communicated. "I'll try to bring them in . . . " He willed himself toward the objectives, which floated, vague and formless, in the remote distance—or millimeters away. He was faintly aware of excited voices approaching, of pounding feet, of a renewed pang of Buttsian fear. With a final desperate effort, he lunged mentally for the nearest brightness, felt a wrench as Q'nell was torn from his side—
He was in a tiny space that compressed him like a straitjacket. Sounds crackled and boomed around him; sharp odors assailed his nostrils. Blurry gray and white forms moved vaguely before him. He tried to move, to call out, felt the shift of cumbersome members, the play of remote, impersonal muscles stretching under insensitive hide. His field of view swung, came to rest on a massive bulk beside him. He blinked, made out the shape of a vast draft horse in the next stall.
"Q'nell!" he tried to shout, instead uttered a bleating whinny. He recoiled, felt an obstruction behind him. At once, in instinctive reaction, his rear legs shot out in a frantic kick. Boards shattered and split. A surge of equine panic sent him blundering through the side of the stall.
Small, excited figures scattered before him. He longed for open space, charged toward it, burst into the open, shied as something tall and dark loomed before him, leaped a fence, and galloped for the safety of the open plains . . .
A detailless image of the comforting bulk of the mare rose in his mind. He slowed, rounded into the wind, sniffed for her distinctive scent. He felt his heart pounding slowly, massively, was aware of air snorting in through wide nostrils, felt himself quivering with a fear that drained away as memory of its origin faded from his mind. He tossed his head and trotted back toward the barn. The mare appeared, galloping into perfect focus. She came up to him, nuzzled him—
"T'son! What have you done?"
The words seemed to mean something—almost. But the effort to unravel the meaning was too much . . .
"T'son! Use your training! Pull yourself together! Remember the mission!"
He lunged playfully for the mare, followed as she retreated, inspired suddenly by a vague but powerful urge which impelled him to rear and whinny, renew the pursuit.
"Stop that, you idiot!" Q'nell commanded as he succeeded in shouldering alongside her. She retreated frustratingly. He lunged again.
"Try, T'son! You can do it! Concentrate. Align your parameters!"
"Elsie—you're beautiful!" Roger succeeded in formulating the thought into word-patterns. "So desirable! So . . . so horsy!"
"I'll horsy you if we ever get out of this one, you cretin!" Q'nell's voice penetrated his euphoria. "Remember the Channel? Remember the Museum, and all those people, locked up in it like capuchin monkeys? Remember how you were going to trace the system back to its source and become the savior of us all?"
"Yes . . . I remember . . . sort of. But it all seems so unimportant, compared with that lovely, shapely, inviting—"
"Later, T'son!" Q'nell said frantically. "First, you get us back where we belong; then we'll talk about my shapely inviting!"
"I don't want to talk," Roger capered, pawing the turf. "I want action!"
"The Channel, T'son! Here comes the farmer! He'll hitch you up to a plow and work you like a horse all day, and tonight you'll be too tired to do anything at all!"
"I don't want to plow; I want to—"
"I know!" Q'nell sounded desperate. "But back in the Channel we can be together!"
"Together? In the Channel?" Roger struggled to fix the concept in his cramped, dimly lit mind. He remembered the grayness, the presence that had drifted beside him there. And there it was now, hovering near at hand, a dim blur, and another beyond . . .
"No, T'son! That's the farmer and another man! Keep looking! Narrow your parameters!"
Roger groped outward, swimming upward. Or was it sideways? Or no, he was falling . . . falling endlessly through the medium that was not space, and there, linked to his outstretched hand was . . . was . . .
"You blundering imbecile!" Q'nell's voice came through loud and clear. "You've gotten us back inside the wrong bodies!"
* * *
"How could you ever have made such an idiotic mistake?" Q'nell queried for the thirty-fifth time in four minutes. "Trapping me inside your clumsy, undisciplined, masculine corpus!"
"Well, I'm just as badly off, aren't I?" Roger replied. "I'm stuck in this silly, flimsy female body of yours!" He felt an unaccountable impulse to cry—not that he felt any particularly poignant emotion; it just seemed like the thing to do. "I was only trying to do what you said!"
"Ha! If I'd only sided with R'heet and gone ahead and dug the Reinforcer out of your skull by force, instead of going all mushy inside and voting to keep you alive."
"What? You mean that two-faced sneaky little R'heet suggested that? Why, I'll scratch his eyes out—I mean, I'll knock his block off," Roger corrected.
"Don't start wandering again!" Q'nell warned sharply. "You're just barely holding us in stasis now! We can't afford to drop out again!"
"It could have happened to anybody," Roger said loftily. "Now, please don't bother me with your petty little complaints unless you have something constructive to contribute."
"Constructive! If it hadn't been for me, you'd still have been horsing around, trying to—"
"Please!" At the recollection of his recent emotions, Roger felt what would have been a deep-purple blush if his blood had been circulating. "Suppose we discuss what we're going to do when we get there," he hurried on. "Now, my idea is that we just go right up to whoever's in charge and give them a piece of our mind."
"Don't try to think, T'son!" Q'nell boomed. "Leave that to me. Your job is just to keep us focused while I do the actual work. As for what we do when we get there, inasmuch as we haven't the faintest idea what we'll find, suppose we play it by ear, eh? You just take your cue from me."
"Well! What makes you so superior?" Roger came back.
"Say!" Q'nell cut in. "It just dawned on me! If I've got your body, I've also got your limited brain!"
"Don't you dare use my brain!" Roger ordered sharply.
"Quiet; I'm checking out the circuitry," Q'nell ordered. "If I'm stuck with it, I may as well see what I have to work with . . . " There was a momentary pause. "Say—you've got a lot of unused capacity here! I might be able to use it!"
"You just stick to our orders," Roger insisted. "Now that I've gotten us back where we belong—well, practically back where we belong—don't go spoiling it all experimenting!"
"Orders are made to be broken," Q'nell said callously. "I've got a notion that if I just nudge this parameter here—and then twist this one over here—"
Roger felt the insubstantial frame of reference about him tilt suddenly, flip upside down. "Stop!" he cried. "You're doing it wrong!"
"Oops! Hold on tight; looks as if maybe I should have twisted that one instead!"
There was a sickening sensation as space turned inside out. Roger felt himself expand instantaneously to infinite size, shrink as suddenly to minuteness, and disappear, to reemerge on the other side. Light burst in his face, sound roared. He was whirling, falling, sinking into cold syrup—
He fetched up with a thump, rolled over twice, and opened his eyes. He lay on an expanse of waving grasses which glowed eerily like an aquarium lit from below, under a sky of total velvety black. His body, he saw, shone in the dark, a soft, lightning-bug green. He looked across at the frightened-looking luminous man with rumpled hair who was sitting up nearby, rubbing an unshaven jaw.
My God, do I really have that bewildered look? he wondered, watching himself staring at the scenery.
"Well, don't lie there staring at me," Q'nell said over the roar and crackle of the sky. "Start having ideas!"