Fingal fought the urge to pinch himself. If what this booklet said was trueâand he might as well believe itâit would hurt and he would
not
wake up. He pinched himself anyway. It hurt.
If he understood this right, everything around him was the product of his imagination. Somewhere, a woman was sitting at a computer input and talking to him in normal language, which came to his brain in the form of electron pulses it could not cope with and so edited into forms he was conversant with. He was analogizing like mad. He wondered if he had caught it from the teacher, if analogies were contagious.
“What the hell's wrong with a simple voice from the air?” he wondered aloud. He got no response, and was rather glad. He'd had enough mysteriousness for now. And on second thought, a voice from the air would probably scare the pants off him.
He decided his brain must know what it was doing. After all, the hand startled him but he hadn't panicked. He could
see
it, and he trusted his visual sense more than he did voices from the air, a classical sign of insanity if ever there was one.
He got up and went to the wall. The letters of fire were gone, but the black smudge of the erasure was still there. He sniffed it: carbon. He fingered the rough paper of the pamphlet, tore off a corner, put it in his mouth and chewed it. It tasted like paper.
He sat down and filled out the coupon and tossed it to the mailtube.
Â
Fingal didn't get angry about it until he was at the office. He was an easygoing person, slow to boil. But he finally reached a point where he had to say something.
Everything had been so normal he wanted to laugh. All his friends and acquaintances were there, doing exactly what he would have expected them to be doing. What amazed and bemused him was the number and variety of spear carriers, minor players in this internal soap opera. The extras that his mind had cooked up to people the crowded corridors, like the man he didn't know who had bumped into him on the tube to work, apologized, and disappeared, presumably back into the bowels of his imagination.
There was nothing he could do to vent his anger but test the whole absurd setup. There was doubt lingering in his mind that the whole morning had been a fugue, a temporary lapse into dreamland. Maybe he'd never gone to Kenya, after all, and his mind was playing tricks on him. To get him there, or keep him away? He didn't know, but he could worry about that if the test failed.
He stood up at his desk terminal, which was in the third column of the fifteenth row of other identical desks, each with its diligent worker. He held up his hands and whistled. Everyone looked up.
“I don't believe in you,” he screeched. He picked up a stack of tapes on his desk and hurled them at Felicia Nahum at the desk next to his. Felicia was a good friend of his, and she registered the proper shock until the tapes hit her. Then she melted. He looked around the room and saw that everything had stopped like a freeze-frame in a motion picture.
He sat down and drummed his fingers on his desk top. His heart was pounding and his face was flushed. For an awful moment he had thought he was wrong. He began to calm down, glancing up every few seconds to be sure the world really
had
stopped.
In three minutes he was in a cold sweat. What the hell had he
proved?
That this morning had been real, or that he really was crazy? It dawned on him that he would never be able to test the assumptions under which he lived.
A line of print flashed across his terminal.
“But when could you ever do so, Mr. Fingal?”
“Ms. Joachim?” he shouted, looking around him. “Where are you? I'm afraid.”
“You mustn't be,” the terminal printed. “Calm yourself. You have a strong sense of reality, remember? Think about this: even before today, how could you be sure the world you saw was not the result of catatonic delusions? Do you see what I mean? The question âWhat is reality?' is, in the end, unanswerable. We all must accept at some point what we see and are told, and live by a set of untested and untestable assumptions. I ask you to accept the set I gave you this morning because, sitting here in the computer room where you cannot see me, my world-picture tells me that they are the true set. On the other hand, you could believe that I'm deluding myself, that there's nothing in the pink cube I see and that you're a spear carrier in
my
dream. Does that make you more comfortable?”
“No,” he mumbled, ashamed of himself. “I see what you mean. Even if I am crazy, it would be more comfortable to go along with it than to keep fighting it.”
“Perfect, Mr. Fingal. If you need further illustrations you could imagine yourself locked in a straitjacket. Perhaps there are technicians laboring right now to correct your condition, and they are putting you through this psychodrama as a first step. Is that any more attractive?”
“No, I guess it isn't.”
“The point is that it's as reasonable an assumption as the set of facts I gave you this morning. But the main point is that you should behave the same whichever set is true. Do you see? To fight it in the one case will only cause you trouble, and in the other, would impede the treatment. I realize I'm asking you to accept me on faith. And that's all I can give you.”
“I believe in you,” he said. “Now, can you start everything going again?”
“I told you I'm not in control of your world. In fact, it's a considerable obstacle to me, seeing as I have to talk to you in these awkward ways. But things should get going on their own as soon as you let them. Look up.”
He did, and saw the normal hum and bustle of the office. Felicia was there at her desk, as though nothing had happened. Nothing had. Yes, something had, after all. The tapes were scattered on the floor near his desk, where they had fallen. They had unreeled in an unruly mess.
He started to pick them up, then saw they weren't as messy as he had thought. They spelled out a message in coils of tape.
“You're back on the track,” it said.
Â
For three weeks Fingal was a very good boy. His co-workers, had they been real people, might have noticed a certain standoffishness in him, and his social life at home was drastically curtailed. Otherwise, he behaved exactly as if everything around him were real.
But his patience had limits. This had already dragged on for longer than he had expected. He began to fidget at his desk, let his mind wander. Feeding information into a computer can be frustrating, unrewarding, and eventually stultifying. He had been feeling it even before his trip to Kenya; it had been the
cause
of his trip to Kenya. He was sixty-eight years old, with centuries ahead of him, and stuck in a ferro-magnetic rut. Longlife could be a mixed blessing when you felt boredom creeping up on you.
What was getting to him was the growing disgust with his job. It was bad enough when he merely sat in a real office with two hundred real people, shoveling slightly unreal data into a much-less-than-real-to-his-senses computer. How much worse now, when he knew that the data he handled had no meaning to anyone but himself, was nothing but occupational therapy created by his mind and a computer program to keep him busy while Joachim searched for his body.
For the first time in his life he began punching some buttons for himself. Under slightly less stress he would have gone to see his psychist, the approved and perfectly normal thing to do. Here, he knew he would only be talking to himself. He failed to perceive the advantages of such an idealized psychoanalytic process; he'd never really believed that a psychist did little more than listen in the first place.
He began to change his own life when he became irritated with his boss. She pointed out to him that his error index was on the rise, and suggested that he shape up or begin looking for another source of employment.
This enraged him. He'd been a good worker for twenty-five years. Why should she take that attitude when he was just not feeling himself for a week or two?
Then he was angrier than ever when he thought about her being merely a projection of his own mind. Why should he let
her
push him around?
“I don't want to hear it,” he said. “Leave me alone. Better yet, give me a raise in salary.”
“Fingal,” she said promptly, “you've been a credit to your section these last weeks. I'm going to give you a raise.”
“Thank you. Go away.” She did, by dissolving into thin air. This really made his day. He leaned back in his chair and thought about his situation for the first time since he was young.
He didn't like what he saw.
In the middle of his ruminations, his computer screen lit up again.
“Watch it, Fingal,” it read. “That way lies catatonia.”
He took the warning seriously, but didn't intend to abuse the newfound power. He didn't see why judicious use of it now and then would hurt anything. He stretched, and yawned broadly. He looked around, suddenly hating the office with its rows of workers indistinguishable from their desks. Why not take the day off?
On impulse, he got up and walked the few steps to Felicia's desk.
“Why don't we go to my house and make love?” he asked her.
She looked at him in astonishment, and he grinned. She was almost as surprised as when he had hurled the tapes at her.
“Is this a joke? In the middle of the day? You have a job to do, you know. You want to get us fired?”
He shook his head slowly. “That's not an acceptable answer.”
She stopped, and rewound from that point. He heard her repeat her last sentences backwards, then she smiled.
“Sure, why not?” she said.
Felicia left afterwards in the same slightly disconcerting way his boss had left earlier, by melting into the air. Fingal sat quietly in his bed, wondering what to do with himself. He felt he was getting off to a bad start if he intended to edit his world with care.
His telephone rang.
“You're damn right,” said a woman's voice, obviously irritated with him. He sat up straight.
“Apollonia?”
“Ms. Joachim to you, Fingal. I can't talk long; this is quite a strain on me. But listen to me, and listen hard. Your navel is very deep, Fingal. From where you're standing, it's a pit I can't even see the bottom of. If you fall into it I can't guarantee to pull you out.”
“But do I have to take
everything
as it is? Aren't I allowed some self-improvement?”
“Don't kid yourself. That wasn't self-improvement. That was sheer laziness. It was nothing but masturbation, and while there's nothing wrong with that, if you do it to the exclusion of all else, your mind will grow in on itself. You're in grave danger of excluding the external universe from your reality.”
“But I thought there was no external universe for me here.”
“Almost right. But I'm feeding you external stimuli to keep you going. Besides, it's the attitude that counts. You've never had trouble finding sexual partners; why do you feel compelled to alter the odds now?”
“I don't know,” he admitted. “Like you said, laziness, I guess.”
“That's right. If you want to quit your job, feel free. If you're serious about self-improvement, there are opportunities available to you there. Search them out. Look around you, explore. But don't try to meddle in things you don't understand. I've got to go now. I'll write you a letter if I can, and explain more.”
“Wait! What about my body? Have they made any progress?”
“Yes, they've found out how it happened. It seems . . .” Her voice faded out, and he switched off the phone.
The next day he received a letter explaining what was known so far. It seemed that the mix-up had resulted from the visit of the teacher to the medico section on the day of his recording. More specifically, the return of the little boy after the others had left. They were sure now that he had tampered with the routing card that told the attendants what to do with Fingal's body. Instead of moving it to the slumber room, which was a green card, they had sent it somewhereâno one knew where yetâfor a sex change, which was a blue card. The medico, in her haste to get home for her date, had not noticed the switch. Now the body could be in any of several thousand medico shops in Luna. They were looking for it, and for the boy.
Fingal put the letter down and did some hard thinking.
Joachim had said there were opportunities for him in the memory banks. She had also said that not everything he saw was his own projections. He was receiving, was capable of receiving, external stimuli. Why was that? Because he would tend to randomize without them, or some other reason? He wished the letter had gone into that.
In the meantime, what did he do?