Chapter 3

At Humanac’s controls Roger Staghorn leaped to his feet in alarm as he saw what was happening on the screen.

Peccary had collapsed now. The two men were draping him across the bearded man’s saddle. There wasn’t an instant to lose! Staghorn leaped to the transmitter cell where Peccary’s material body was seated, his eyes peacefully closed. Staghorn flipped the switch to disengage Peccary’s consciousness from Humanac’s circuits.

Nothing happened. Peccary’s body remained as before, blissfully asleep.

Good lord, of course nothing happened! How could it? Peccary had just been knocked cold; at the moment he didn’t have any consciousness! Staghorn opened the circuit again and whirled back to the control console.

He looked at the screen. All three men were mounted again. The bearded leader gestured them on.

They set spurs to their horses and galloped away, taking the unconscious Peccary with them.

“No!” Staghorn shouted at the fleeing images. “No, Dr. Peccary! Stay in focus!” The horsemen paid no heed--nor did Staghorn expect them to, rationally. His shouts were only involuntary expressions of despair. Grasping the geographic locator, he twiddled it wildly, managing to keep the three riders in focus for several blocks as they sped down a street of the deserted town.

Then they rounded a corner and he lost them.

By the time he got a focus on the area around the corner they were gone. For several minutes he continued to search, shifting the focal point all over town, but in vain. Dr. Clarence Peccary was lost inside Humanac’s labyrinthean brain!

Staghorn was stunned. There would be no difficulty in keeping Peccary’s physical body alive indefinitely by intravenous feeding, but it was as good as dead while separated from its sense of identity. Worse yet were the probable consequences to Humanac of having a free soul loose in its mathematical universe. These were too dire to contemplate. The machine’s reliability might be altogether ruined and Staghorn’s life work destroyed. Under the circumstances there was but one course of action. He had to find Dr. Peccary and get him back into focus, so that he could be disengaged from the computer.

First Staghorn focused the geographic locator on the town square, the point from which Peccary had been abducted; from there he could begin tracking him. Next he set the time control so that it would automatically disengage the transmitter units in exactly three hours.

Whether or not he could find Dr. Peccary in that period of time Staghorn had no way of knowing; but at least he should be able to get himself back into focus at the proper moment. Then, in case he’d failed to find Peccary, he could reset the time clock and try again.

Next he opened a second transmitter unit, sat down on the little seat and pulled the helmet down on his head. As sensations of vastness and lost dimensions spread through him, he reached out and pressed down the switch that would pour his own brain impulses into Humanac’s circuits.

Instantly, as with Dr. Peccary, Staghorn found himself standing in the little park.

He examined his hands and slapped his sides a few times, taking time to assimilate the fact that he felt perfectly solid. Ah, Bishop Berkeley was right all the time! The universe was subjective--a creation of consciousness!

He left off these speculations and recalled himself to his mission.

Glancing around, he saw that people were beginning to reappear. They came up from basements and out of the doors of the dilapidated houses and buildings. If there had been a panic, there was no sign of it now. The men and women moved indolently, returning toward the park and the sunlit streets. All were so much the same age and of such similar beauty that it was difficult to distinguish individual members of the same sex. But he finally recognized the girl Dr. Peccary had identified as Jenny Cheever. She had an attractive strawberry birthmark on her hip.

She strolled back into the park accompanied by a young man. The two of them took possession of the bench where Jenny had been seated earlier. They sat well apart from each other, silently contemplating the other passers-by.

Feeling that his knowledge of Jenny’s name constituted a sort of introduction, Staghorn approached the couple. The man paid no attention to him but Jenny watched him curiously. Staghorn was not a man over whom women swooned, and it occurred to him that she found something odd about his dark suit and thick spectacles. He seemed to be the only man in town wearing either.

“How do you do,” he said to her. “I believe you’re Ben Cheever’s daughter.”

She continued to examine him languidly, slowly stroking a heavy strand of her auburn hair. “Am I?” she said at last. “It’s been so long I’ve forgotten. But then I had to be someone’s daughter and since my name is Cheever, you may be right. I don’t remember you. We must have met ages and ages ago.”

“This is the first time we’ve met. You were pointed out to me by a friend.”

She considered this with a puzzled air, and, idly curious, said, “Do you want to marry me?”

“Good heavens, no!”

Jenny didn’t seem to be insulted by his abruptness. “I just wondered why you’d speak to me,” she said. “Because if you want to marry me you have to wait. I’ve promised to marry him first.” She gestured to the man on the bench with her. The man looked at Staghorn for the first time.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I see,” said Staghorn. “And when is this ... merry event to take place?”

“Some day,” Jenny said indifferently. “When we both feel like it. There’s no use rushing things. I don’t want to use up all the men too soon.”

“Use them up?”

“He’ll be my twenty-fifth husband.”

“Yeah,” said the man. “She’ll be my thirty-second wife.”

“Your marriages can’t last very long,” said Staghorn. Despite the physical attractiveness of both Jenny and her escort, Staghorn began to feel clammy in their presence. He had an impression of deep ill health, a sense of unclean, almost reptilian lassitude.

“They get shorter all the time,” said Jenny, and turned away as though the conversation bored her. The man too had lost interest.

Staghorn stood ignored for a moment and then spoke bluntly.

“Who are the Atavars?”