“You’re telling me that I’ve left my entire world behind because you had a hunch?” Terri demanded. Her bony shoulders were high up, and her arms were folded tightly.
“It would appear so, yes.”
“And you just decided to use all our lives?”
Iphwin seemed mildly exasperated. He was at least human enough so that he was bothered to be confronted with something he had not thought of before; few human beings really like the unexpected. “What I am doing is no different from what a president or king does when he starts a war, or from what a corporation president does when he orders a new product into production. I am changing billions or trillions of people’s lives drastically without their consent. The only difference here is that ten of you are having the opportunity to confront me about it. If the confrontation makes you feel better, I suppose that’s all right. But it doesn’t make any other difference, and I wish we could concentrate on more basic issues.”
“Not having our lives torn up is about as basic an issue as there is,” Helen said, “and Terri is absolutely right to be upset. If you want our assent, you’re going to have to offer us something better than just making us rich, or give us a reason better than just because you happened to need it and thought we would make a good team. Why should we conduct your investigation for you? Show us why we shouldn’t all walk out of here and start dialing the phone at random, until we manage to find somewhere close enough to home so that we’ll want to stay.”
Iphwin sighed and spread his hands. “I suppose in some sense that my inability to anticipate this does demonstrate the difference between human and machine. But I had thought that since in fact you have been bouncing from one world to another every time you use the phone, or the net, or ride in a guided vehicle, that you would realize that you aren’t being ripped from your homes—that in fact you’ve never been home for many years, and you were never going home.”
Helen folded her arms and stood her ground in a way very like the Helen I remembered. “Well, we only just found out we’ve been crossing from world to world a few minutes ago, you idiot. We’re still getting used to that idea. And now we learn that you’ve been deliberately causing part of it. How do you expect us to feel?”
“I have great difficulty expecting anyone to feel anything,” Iphwin pointed out. “And I am forced to admit that even in this body I don’t feel things very much myself—I suppose that’s a matter of the body not having received any emotional conditioning when it was younger. I suppose you might say I feel more like I’m wearing it than as if I am it. But I do notice that the glandular systems have a great deal of lag time—that emotions often persist long after their cause is removed. Is that the sort of problem you’re talking about?”
“It might be, but it’s a very lengthy and not-human way of expressing it,” Helen said, grudgingly. “The point is, you have to allow us some time for emotional adjustment. We’re all new to what’s going on, it’s frightening, and you are at that core of what is frightening about it. And if I may add without offending you, Terri—Terri’s godawful young to discover that you’ve separated her from her parents, possibly forever, and I don’t think your mission, however important you may think it is, is going to justify that sort of thing in any of our minds.
“I suppose what you are asking for might be logical, or reasonable, or whatever, but it isn’t even remotely sensible in emotional terms. Now, if you really want our trust, you’re going to have to give us at least some evidence that there is a good reason for us to give it to you, rather than just walk out of here. And don’t try to make it sound like a geometry proof while you’re doing it.”
Iphwin sat down at the edge of the low stage, balling his hands into tight fists, clearly frustrated. “I don’t have a good answer for you,” he said, finally. “There is something strange about the disappearance of a whole nation from the earth, from history, from everything, and the unknown forces that prevent our knowing anything about what happened. And maybe we don’t see it because we are too close, but I think there is also something strange about the way that very few people have noticed or are reacting to it.
“What I want to do is to resolve that question. The part of me that is a product of so many years as a machine intelligence really has no motivations other than curiosity, given that sex and death are beyond it. And the part of my mind that has grown into this body is just a few years old and has had no childhood, no imprinted memories to speak of, no distinctiveness from any other human body. In the circumstances, I made my best guess. I looked for people who had the knack of abduction, and who I thought might still have enough love for the idea of America. And I did what was necessary to get them together into a single event sequence so that we can work. That was the best solution I could think of. If it has not worked, then either you, with your abductive gifts, must think of a better way to solve it, or it will have to be left unsolved.”
There was a very long, awkward silence, before Roger Sykes stretched, fluffed out his white hair, and stood up, propping himself with his cane. He said, “Uh, well. You know, I’m bored stiff. And I was born into the regiment; my dad told me about being a boy in the States but I never went there myself. And I’m an old guy, if I die, you know, no big deal, I was planning to do that sooner or later anyway. So ... I guess I’ll go and take a look.”
Iphwin looked up with hope in his eyes. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Long as I’m here, and so forth. But you really do need to develop your skills at asking people instead of manipulating them.”
“Yes, I suppose I do.”
After a moment, Esmé got up and moved next to Sykes. She was even bigger than my first impression had said she was—she absolutely towered over the older man. “Colonel, I’d be pleased to go with you. There’s just not that much going on in my life and I don’t have anything I’d rather do. And it would be kind of interesting to find out what’s happened to America.”
“And if Esmé is going, I better go too,” Paula said, “to keep you two out of trouble.”
Jesús Picardin spoke next and said, “You know, I have been very bored with my work, and I would have to say that there could hardly be a more interesting kind of case for a detective than having an entire nation go missing. And probably I’d never get back home anyway, and frankly this just sounds much more interesting than anything else I could be doing.”
“This is starting to seem like a lot of peer pressure,” Kelly complained. “All right, you want to go, so go. There’s not necessarily a good reason for the rest of us to go, is there?”
“Not necessarily, but let’s see what the options are,” Helen said grudgingly. “I don’t like to admit it but I think Iphwin here has us over a barrel. If I understand all this Schrödinger stuff, we can wander around for the rest of our lives picking up phones and then hanging up, and going for rides in robot vehicles, and logging on and off the net—but the odds of getting back to a world that we recognize are pretty small. And anyway, all we’d be doing is displacing some other version of ourselves, bumping someone else into our mess. For the time being I suppose we’re pretty much stuck in this world—and what world is this, anyway?”