The Infinity Link (4 page)

"But I knew that all along."

"Well, there's a big time factor involved, now. I can't tell you—I don't even
know
exactly why—though I have some idea. Word has come from above that we have to be ready for transmission in a few weeks. That's why we've been working like madmen."

"But if it's just a test," she said carefully, "won't they have to keep working until all the bugs are out of the system?"

Hoshi chuckled. "There had better not
be
any bugs in the system," he said. "We've been smoothing out the last kinks for a couple of months, now. I'm sure there'll be more work eventually, but right now there's one transmission they're worried about, and that one
has
to go right." He resumed eating.

Mozy sipped her beer. She hardly tasted it. "So—what is it?" she asked, with poorly feigned nonchalance.

"Can't tell you."

"Well,
who's
being transmitted?"

"Can't tell you." Hoshi swallowed, then downed a third of his beer. His eyes probed hers; it was an eerie feeling, being watched by those half-seeing eyes. "You can guess, maybe," he said softly.

"Now, what's that supposed to mean?" she protested. "It could be anybody—Jonders, you, David. Some big shot." She shrugged.

"I mean," he said teasingly, "it's someone you know." He became mockingly serious. "That's all I can tell you."

Mozy scowled. She didn't like what she thought was the answer. "It's David, isn't it? It's Kadin, right?"

Hoshi blinked with reptilean deliberation. "Can't say," he murmured. But his expression did not contradict her statement.

"Shit," Mozy said.
"Shit!"
She shook her head, surprised by the intensity of the emotion. The knot in her gut was painful now; she was having trouble breathing. "It is David, isn't it? Where are they sending him? Why him? What if it doesn't work?"

"What do you care?" Hoshi said. "You don't even know him, really. And I never said it was him, anyway."

Mozy snorted at the last comment. That was just Hoshi covering his ass, after spilling. Still, he was right. Why such a strong reaction? She had never met Kadin and never would; he lived in the space settlement, and she lived on Earth, and that was it. She shrugged. "I like him, that's all. I wouldn't want to see anything happen to him."

"Uh-huh." Hoshi placed his fingertips on the table, as though playing a piano, or a computer keyboard. He smiled. "Have you considered that maybe they're transmitting him to Earth?"

"Are they?" she cried. Hoshi turned up his palms, grinning. "Tell me," she pleaded. "Is he coming here?"

At last Hoshi shook his head. "No." When Mozy glared at him, he sighed. "Sorry. Bad joke."

"He's not coming to Earth?"

He shook his head again. "Why is it so important to you?"

Angry at having been baited so easily, she sank back into the booth seat. When she spoke, her voice was harsh. "He's the only one who lets me feel involved there. The only one. It's damn frustrating, you know, just going in there twice a week, and not even seeing the results of it."

"Sometimes you do see results," Hoshi said. "You just don't know it."

She ignored him. "We're friends, in a way. Even though sometimes I'm scared half to death in the scenarios, and it's hard to
leave
them, to come back to reality—I still don't want it to end. I wish I could meet him." Stopping for breath, she gulped half of her beer. A mild alcoholic glow was spreading through her body.

Hoshi studied her. "What is it you like so much about him? Just out of curiosity."

She looked at him suspiciously for a moment, then shrugged. "He's friendly. He goes out of his way to make me feel comfortable. He treats me like a real person." Hoshi's face clouded, and she added, "Well, you do, too. But hardly anyone else does. They're always in too much of a hurry. Well, David's not that way. Even when things get crazy, in the scenarios, he never forgets that I'm involved, too, and that I might need help getting through it."

"That's part of his job," Hoshi pointed out.

"It's part of his character, too," Mozy insisted. "I just wish I knew what his part was in all this—"

"Can't tell you that."

"I
know
. I'd ask him myself, but the hypnotic blocks work so well, I always forget. Now you tell me he's going to be put through the transmitter, and maybe scattered halfway to hell. Well, I just wish I could meet him, once—in person—before then." A wave of sadness crested in her, then slowly subsided, leaving a gritty feeling in her throat. "I have all these images of him, different ones each time I meet him. I'd like to know what he
really
looks like." She toyed with her glass.

"If I didn't know better," Hoshi said, "I'd say you're kind of sweet on this—guy." Hoshi looked poised and controlled, his fingers drumming lightly on the table's edge. His eyes seemed to focus and unfocus as he peered at her—seeing heaven-knew-what pattern of shadows, what image of her face. Those grey irises, with their slightly dilated pupils, seemed to stare right through her.

She cleared her throat uneasily. "I wouldn't exactly say I was sweet on him," she said.

Hoshi drummed. "Oh, no?"

She flushed. "Well, maybe a little. But how could I be really 'sweet' on someone I've never even met?"

Hoshi's smile became lopsided. "Easy. The way anybody gets hung up on anybody else. It just happens."

She thought, yeah, it just happens. "I suppose it's possible," she said, "but I don't think so. Not this time." She glanced at her watch. "Hey, it's getting late."

They pooled their money to pay the tab, then made their way to the exit. Outside, Mozy stuck her hands in her coat pocket. "See you later. Thanks for the drink," she said. Then she turned away and walked quickly home.

The apartment was still. She stood in the center of the living room, her mind still spinning from the conversation. She cast her coat aside and went into the bathroom and rummaged around for her hairbrush. She perched her purse on the edge of the sink and, pawing through it, found the hairbrush; she also found, unopened, the letter from Kink. She turned it over. When had she last heard from her sister? A year, anyway. She still used the same awful perfumed stationery.

Mozy carefully tore the envelope and extracted two thin, folded pages. The green-ink handwriting was the same—hurried-looking, and sloppy.

"Dear Mozy—I know I haven't written in ages, and I guess Mom hasn't, either . . ."

What else is new?

"Now I have to tell you that we should forget whatever squabbles we had . . . ."

Mozy brushed at her hair, scowling as she read.

Bill Jonders glanced at the monitor showing the subject sitting quietly in the gloom. He keyed an inner circuit. (We're go to start in thirty seconds, Ben. Are you ready?)

(Ready . . . and . . . waiting,) came the answer, a silent whisper.

(Hoshi?)

(On line.) Hoshi's voice was soft and vibrant in Jonders's head.

After a last check of the board, Jonders opened his own link to the computer. His external awareness dissolved to internal signals: quasi-visual cues, light patterns indicating the activity of various program elements. A tone warned him of Kadin's presence, and the pale outline of a face appeared. (David? Prepare for transition. Ben Horton's waiting.) Kadin's face vanished again and Jonders said, (Initiating hypnotic blocks.) The abstract patterns flashed momentarily, then blinked out. An odd, phantom landscape appeared around him, etched out of the darkness by purely geometric, intersecting strands of light. Moving with ease across the field, he rose to the top of a steep pyramid form outlined in threads of amber. From this perch, he looked out across the "jumpoff field"—a midnight plain, crosshatched with violet tracers. There were two tiny figures out on the plain, moving slowly toward one another.

Jonders waited for the memory-blocking and memory-implant programs to run their course with the subjects. Two tones sang in opposite corners of his mind, indicating readiness. (Sequence start,) he murmured, nudging the lower pitch higher, and the higher pitch lower. As he brought them slowly into tune, the two glittering figures converged across the field.

He tripped one more cue, and the two figures accelerated down the plain—and vanished at the edge of the violet grid.

Jonders opened an observer's portal to their new world, a planet with an emerald sky and a ripe orange moon, and with two groups of aliens greeting the landing party.

* * *

He scanned the telltales flowing in the form of color-coded digits across the gridded field. In a window floating above the plain, images flickered of the scenario world, as seen by the two subjects. A difficult negotiation was being concluded, with uncertain results.

Not for the first time, Jonders wished that it were possible to gain a clearer perception of the subjects' thoughts and feelings. As always, he was faced with the dilemma of seeking to observe a process without interfering with its results. It was a fundamental conflict in all of the sciences, and no less so here; for that reason, they depended heavily on post-session debriefing and analysis to augment their evaluations.

At the moment, his intuition was that this scenario had outlived its usefulness. Kadin and Horton were dickering with two fictional entities, one apparently hostile, and one apparently friendly, but demanding; and Kadin, as leader, was pursuing a cautious course, but one that was leading neither to conflict nor to resolution. Jonders suspected that this scenario might be in need of redesign.

He nudged open a channel to Hoshi. A bank of darkness shifted in the sky over the control pyramid, and a pale gleam linked them. (What's your opinion?) he asked.

There was a pause, then Hoshi answered, (Stalemate. We've gotten all we're going to get.)

(I agree. Let's bring them home.) Jonders cued the termination sequence. In the observation window, he saw the images of the aliens withdraw.

The gridded plain and the spidery outline of the pyramid shrank, then darkened. Jonders experienced an instant of dizziness as he detached himself from the link—the inner images escaping in a gentle rush, and the control board floating back into focus.

For the next hour and a half, he was occupied with analysis and debriefing. Hoshi worked steadily at the next console, helmet over his head, hands folded above the keyboard. As Jonders got up to leave, he keyed the audio circuit. "Hoshi, finish that up for me and prep for the next session, will you?"

Hoshi's voice came back snappishly, "What do you think I'm doing? It'll be done when it's done."

Jonders nodded to himself, thinking, let it pass; if you push harder, you'll just get mistakes for your trouble.

Leaving the rest of his people to their work, he went to his office and closed the door behind him. He allowed himself two minutes of silence behind his desk, with his eyes closed. You're in the army now, he thought. For a civilian, and a scientist, why did he feel so much like a drill sergeant?

Sighing, he rocked forward and punched up Ken Fogelbee, the computer systems manager, on the phone. "Ken," he said, as his boss's image focused in the screen. He muttered a curse. The phone was distorting the image again; he'd just had the thing repaired for the third time.

"What's wrong, Bill?" Fogelbee said.

"Nothing. Sorry, it's just this damn phone."

"Why don't you get it fixed? Did you call to give me an update?"

"Right." Jonders's breath hissed out as he glanced at his summary sheets. "I can give you guarded optimism, with respect to the new schedule."

"Why 'guarded'?" his boss asked.

"Because," he said carefully, "while his performance is steady in the moderate-difficulty levels, we really don't have a baseline yet on high-level sophistication. Our results have been more uncertain at that level."

"That still gives you three weeks," Fogelbee said. "We're really talking about fine tuning, aren't we? That can be continued after the transmission."

"I still think it would make more sense to wait until we're sure."

Fogelbee's face distorted a little more as he scowled. "That decision's been made, Bill. Accept it."

"If you gave me a reason, I could accept it more easily," Jonders said.

Fogelbee shrugged noncommittally. "I'll pass your concerns on. But I don't think Marshall and Hathorne are likely to change their minds. In fact, Hathorne is leaning on us to bring it all together now."

Jonders saw that it was futile to argue. "I'd better get back to work, then."

After signing off, he switched on the computer screen and scanned the scheduling trees for items that could be streamlined or cut. There wasn't much left that could go; he'd already done his best to compress the schedule.

He was interrupted by Lusela Burns, at the door. "Bill? Got a minute?" He looked up. "It's Mozelle," his assistant explained.

"Mozelle? Isn't she scheduled for this afternoon?"

Lusela nodded. "Yes. But she came in early to talk to you."

"Me?" he asked in surprise.

"Well, it seems she's unhappy with her situation here," Lusela said, frowning. "She came to me about it—but I think it's something she really should discuss with you."

Jonders muttered under his breath and glanced at the time. "Is she here now?"

"In the debriefing room."

He sighed. "Let's go." He followed Lusela down the hall and into the room where Mozelle was sitting quietly, fussing with her hair. She raised her eyes as they sat down across the table from her. "Hi. What's up, Mozelle?" he asked, putting on his best supervisory manner.

Mozelle cleared her throat, fidgeting. He raised his eyebrows. She shrugged. "It's . . . about the job."

"So I hear. Is there something that you're unhappy with?"

"Well, Lusela told me that it's ending soon. And I . . . was a little shocked by that. I had thought . . . because of something you said once earlier, that I might . . . be able to stay on longer."

Jonders blinked and slowly shook his head. "I'm not sure what you mean, really. If we gave you the wrong impression, I'm sorry. Did Lusela explain that we're near the end of the phase of the project that you're helping us with?"