to experience him?”
“Seeing the image was plenty! He was just the way I saw him last, all tattered and beaten up, with that big turkey-gobbler thing of his drooping and all the colors gone. He’s about to die, Pirraghiz, and I don’t want to ‘experience’ any of that!”
“Dannerman, I would not ask you to. I chose that view of the talker on purpose so that it would be easy for you to recognize him. The tapes, however, are from other parts of his life.”
I scowled at her. “What parts?”
“Oh, Dannerman. They are parts that I think will interest you. Why do you not put the helmet on and see?”
So there I was in Dopey’s body. I knew it was so, because his head, the little cathead, was bent to look at the familiar, golden-mesh belly bag he wore. I could feel his little fingers, inside the muff, fiddling with what might have been a kind of keypad.
I wasn’t comfortable in Dopey’s body. His range of vision must have been different from mine, because the colors were odd. I felt odd, too. There was a sort of slow, rhythmic, muscle-flexing sensation at the base of my spine, but in my own body I don’t have any muscles there. Perhaps it had something to do with that scaly peacock plume he carried, I thought, and then he looked up.
I caught my breath. What he was looking at was a screen, and on it were four or five figures-human figures-and the nearest of them was me.
It was something from my own life that I was seeing. There were the five of us-Pat and Rosaleen Artzybachova, Jimmy Lin, General Delasquez and myself, when we had first arrived in Starlab. We had come there-God, it seemed a century ago-in the hope of finding some kind of extraterrestrial technology that would make us rich, and what we were doing was squabbling over the division of the Beloved Leaders stuff we saw all around us. I remembered it well. I saw us yelling at each other, and I saw Jimmy Lin get hit on the head.
And then I felt Dopey’s little hands scrabbling in his belly bag. There was a bluish flash on the screen. At once, all five of us stopped cold in the middle of the argument. We didn’t fall down. We couldn’t, being in Starlab’s microgravity. But we went limp. We didn’t speak anymore. We began to drift around the space in the orbiter.
Dopey had, somehow, put us all to sleep.
Then he got to work. He glanced back over his shoulder. For the first time I saw that there were two Docs standing immobile behind him, in a cramped little space I had never seen before. They began to move at once.
One of them pushed at a section of wall, which opened before him. The other picked Dopey up and carried him through that hidden door. Dopey’s body felt pleased with itself; I could feel the warmth and sensual pleasure that emanated from the great peacock fan that my own body didn’t have, but Dopey’s did. As we glided down a passage, one mystery was solved. I caught a glimpse of the stenciled sign on the wall we had just come through. It was supposed to be a fuel tank. Dopey had emptied it out and made it into a hidey-hole so he could watch us without being seen.
I think I was in a kind of shock again. What happened next wasn’t entirely comprehensible, but I couldn’t stop watching. Dopey’s Docs methodically lifted all five of us, one by one, and put us into the transit machine. Then, each time, without pause, they lifted us out again and went on to the next one. When we had all been transmitted-and copied!-they went to work on the next stage. One of the Docs held Rosaleen’s unconscious form while the other opened a cupboard on the wall. He took out a coppery object the size and shape of an almond, while the first Doc, talons extended, slashed a litde gash in the back of Rosaleen’s neck.
I had never seen an implant put in before.
I saw it happen to Rosaleen. I saw it happen to Delasquez and Jimmy Lin, and I saw it happen to me.
And I saw it happen to Pat Adcock, the woman I loved. I could see her, unconscious and limp. I could almost touch her, I yearned for her. And when it was all over I took the helmet off my head and stared blindly at the room around me.
Pirraghiz said something to me, but I wasn’t listening. I got up and walked over to the balcony door, slid it open and stepped outside.
It was full night now, and overhead was that spectacular, star-swarming sky. I wasn’t looking at that, either. All I was seeing was Pat, once abandoned to Dopey and his Docs on the orbiter, now abandoned, with the rest of the human race, to whatever the Beloved Leaders chose to do with them.
I had never felt more helpless-and hopeless and useless-in my life.
A moment later I felt the wicker floor move in protest, and Pirraghiz stepped out beside me. I wondered for a moment if it would hold her great weight. Then I wondered whether that mattered at all. She said tentatively, “Dannerman? Was I wrong to show you what Dopey did to you on your Starlab?”
I thought that over for a moment, then I shook my head. “It isn’t you who are wrong, Pirraghiz. What’s wrong is that everything is going to hell and I can’t do anything about it.”
She said softly, “Yes. I know what you are going through.”
That made me turn and stare at her. “Do you? Do you know what it feels like to see everyone I love about to be turned into robots, and to be able to do nothing about it?”
“Of course I do, Dannerman! I knew that for a very long time, for all the time I wore the Others’ controller. I was even more helpless than you are now. I did their bidding! I had no hope at all-but then, you see, suddenly the Horch cousins came and I was free!”
“Oh? And do you think there’s any chance that somebody will come charging along to help me?”
She looked at me for a long moment. I could see the struggle going on in her mind over what answer to give me.
Honesty won out over compassion. She said somberly, “No. In truth, Dannerman, I do not.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
