"I asked," the girl repeated, with quiet, almost professional persuasiveness, fixing the focus of his attention on her and what she was asking, "what you experienced. What did you see? Better to tell someone now, before it gets dim; later it's very difficult to recall."
"The garrison state," he said hoarsely. "Barracks. I was there. Not long; they got to me fairly fast. But I did seek."
"Anything else?" The girl did not seem perturbed. But she listened tensely, obviously determined to miss nothing. "What about the soldier who fired the dart at you? Was there anything about him? Anything odd? Weird or unexplainable?"
He hesitated. "Christ," he said, "the hallucinations; you know lysergic acid — you're familiar with what it does. My god — I was inundated by every kind of perception. You want to hear about the Day of Judgment again, in addition to having gone through it yourself? Or the — "
"The soldier," the white-oak-haired girl said patiently.
With a ragged, sharp-pained exhalation, Rachmael said, "Okay. I hallucinated a cyclops, of the cephalopodan variety." For an interval he became silent; the effort of putting his recollection into words exhausted his precariously limited strength. "Is that enough?" he said, then, feeling anger.
"Aquatic?" Her luminous, intelligent eyes bored steadily at him; she did not let him evade her. "Requiring, or evidently requiring — "
"A saline envelope. I could see — " He made himself breathe with regularity, halting his sentence midway. "Signs of dehydration, cracking, of the dermatoid folds. From the effluvium I'd assume a rapid evaporation of epithelial moisture. Probably indicates a homeostatic breakdown." He looked away, at that point, no longer able to meet her steady, critical gaze; the strain was too much for his vitiated powers, his ability to collect and maintain his attention. Five years old, he said to himself. The abreaction of the drug period; regression to the space-time axis of early childhood, along with the limited range of consciousness, the minute faculties of a preschool-age kid, and this is the topic that has to be dealt with; this is just too much. And it would be, he thought, even if I could pull out and function as an adult again, with an adult's ability to reason. He rubbed his forehead, feeling the ache, the constriction; like a deep, chronic sinusitis which had flared to its most malignant stage. A pain-threshold alteration, he speculated dully. Due to the drug. Routine common discomfort, ordinary somatic promptings, everything enlarged to the point of unbearability, and signifying nothing, nothing at all.
Conscious of his grim, introverted silence, the girl said, "Under LSD before, did you ever experience a physiognomic alteration of this sort? Think back to the initial mandatory episode during your grammar-school days. Can you remember back that far?"
"That was under a control," Rachmael said. "One of those Wes-Dem Board of Education psychologists, those middle-age do-gooding ladies in blue smocks who — what the hell did they used to call themselves? — something like psycheleticians. Or psychedelictrix; I forget which. I guess both groups got to me at one time or another. And then of course under the McLean Mental Health Act I took it again at sixteen and again at twenty-three." But the control, he thought; that made all the difference. Someone there all the time, trained, able to do and say the right thing: able to maintain contact with the stable objective koinos kosmos so that I never forgot that what I was seeing emanated from my own psyche, type-basics, or as Jung once called them, archetypes rising out of the unconscious and swamping the personal conscious. Out of the collective, supra-personal inner space, the great sea of non-individual life.
The sea, he thought. And that physiognomic transformation of the THL soldier; my perception of him became transmuted along those lines. So I did see a type-basic, as in the previous times; not the same one, of course, because each episode under the drug is unique.
"What would you say," the girl said, "if I told you that what you saw was not mysticomimetic at all?"
"What I saw," Rachmael said, "could not have been psycheletic; it wasn't an expansion of consciousness or a rise in the sensitivity of my percept-system."
"Why not?" The girl regarded him keenly. Now two others from the living room, having left the TV set with its booming image of never-failing President Omar Jones, appeared, the thin, severe man with gold-rimmed glasses and an elderly woman with collapsed, corrugated flesh which hung in dismal wattles, with obviously dyed black, lusterless hair and far too ornate bracelets on her flabby wrists. Both seemed aware of the direction of conversation which had come before; they listened silently, almost raptly, and now a third person joined them, a dramatically colored, heavy-lidded woman in evidently her early thirties, wearing a blue-cotton Mexican-style shirt tied at the waist and open to expose effectively shaded smooth bare skin; her richly dyed, extremely tight jeans, plus the unbuttoned top of her blouse beneath the Mexican shirt, caused to be manifest a stunning, supple body — Rachmael found himself fixedly contemplating her, no longer aware of the conversation in progress.
"This is Miss de Rungs," the thin, severe-featured man with the gold-rimmed glasses said, nodding at the impressive, deeply hued woman in the Mexican shirt. "And this is Sheila Quam." He indicated the white-oak-haired girl who had prepared hot syn-cof for Rachmael.
The stout man, still poking at his mouth with his toothpick, appeared at the door of the kitchen, smiled a warped but friendly smile composed of jagged and irregular teeth and said, "I'm Hank Szantho." He held out his hand and Rachmael shook. "We're all weevils," he explained to Rachmael. "Like you. You're a weevil; didn't you know it? What paraworld did you tie into? Not a really bad one; huh?" He eyed Rachmael searchingly, his jaw working, his face coarse with shrewd but in no way malicious interest.
"We're all in the class together," the curly-haired youth said in a bellicose but oddly agitated voice, speaking directly to Rachmael as if challenging him, as if some hidden dispute, beyond Rachmael's perception, somehow had become involved. "We all have the illness; we all have to get well." He physically propelled a slender, short-haired, smartly dressed girl with sharply delineated delicate features; she gazed at Rachmael with a wild, vague anxiety which was almost an appeal — he did not know in regard to what, since the curly-haired youth — whose shoulders and musculature Rachmael noticed for the first time, appeared unusually escalated in use-value — had released her. "Right, Gretch?" the youth demanded.
To Rachmael, in a low but entirely controlled voice, the girl said, "I'm Gretchen Borbman." She held out her hand; reflexively, he shook, and found her skin smooth and lightly cool. "Welcome to our little revolutionary organization, Mr. — " She paused politely.
He gave his name.
"Arab-Israeli?" Gretchen Borbman said. "From the Federation of Semitic Peoples? Or from that drayage firm that used to be so big and now's disappeared... Applebaum Enterprise, wasn't it called? Any relation? What ever happened to it and to that lovely new liner, that Omphalos... wasn't that your flagship?"
It was beyond belief that she did not know; the news media had made a cause célèbre of such magnitude out of the Omphalos' flight to the Fomalhaut system that no one could fail to know, at least no one on Terra. But this was not Terra; already, the agreeable, normal milieu of humans in proximity to him, here, had washed into paleness the grotesque apparition of gummy seaweed slime that, caked to the steaming, drying cyclops-face, had stunk so acridly, rinsed in foulness: the degeneration into hydrokinetically-maintained organic tissue of what had once been — or convincingly appeared to be — a human being, even if it was a killer-commando mercenary of Trails of Hoffman Limited.