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of
waking up, that startled feeling when someone wakes you suddenly after you've
nodded off. I had, in fact, never nodded off. I was convinced of it. From the
moment I relieved Breck till the moment he spoke to me some three hours later,
I
had experienced complete continuity of thought and consciousness-and somehow
it
had been "compressed" so that it seemed like only ten or fifteen minutes.
No, I had not fallen asleep. Something had been done to me. The question was,
by
whom?
If it was Mondago, who was presumably at the controls, then it was some sort
of
new wrinkle that he .had never tried before and I could see no purpose to it.
Breck had told me that, with time, I would become much more aware of
interface
and he was right. I didn't think that anyone at Game Control, not even Coles,
could pull a stunt like that without my at least being aware of something
being
done, even if it was only after the fact-as had happened when Cass Daniels
activated my natural defensive mechanisms and amplified them into an attack
of
paranoia which had saved my life. Later on, when I had a chance to think
about
it, I could pinpoint the exact moment when it happened and I could recall the
feeling. But this time, there was nothing.
It gnawed at me as we climbed higher up into the hills. If someone back at
Game
Control was playing with my perceptions, what purpose would it serve? Why
interfere with an operative out on a mission? Unless, of course, this wasn't
really happening at all and it was simply one more hallucinact, with Coles
pressing some new buttons so he could see what happened. I had to admit that
was
a possibility, but I could not afford to consider it a probability. I had to
act
on the information of my senses-whether it was happening objectively, in real
life, or subjectively, in my mind, it had to be real for me or else I might
not
survive it. At least not with my sanity intact.
Breck had once told me, with characteristic black humor, that psychos could
not
afford to doubt the reality of their perceptions. It was an involuted pun,
one
that grimly underscored the thin line between a Pyschodrome pro and a
psychotic.
The only difference between our sort of psycho and the real thing was that we
were better able to handle alternate realities-at least until we crossed over
that line. I could not consider that a possibility. That way, literally, lay
madness.
That left one other explanation. If it wasn't Game Control, and if I wasn't
going crazy, then it could only have been Tyla. We knew that shapechangers
could
read minds. And at least one of them-the ambimorph Coles had code named
Chameleon-was learning how to use a biochip to send. Tyla could be an
ambimorph.
Or maybe it was Higgins.
What did we really know about him, anyway? It occurred to me that this whole
thing could be a trap. What if both Higgins and Tyla were shapechangers? What
better way to divert suspicion from themselves than to have staged that
confrontation in the Red Zone? The Purgatory settlements had to be infested
with
the creatures. And all we had to do was catch one. I felt as if I'd been given
a
speargun and told to bring home a fish for dinner-then dumped into the middle
of
a school of sharks.
I had to talk to Breck. I had to convince him that I hadn't simply fallen
asleep
on watch. But I had to have a chance to talk with him alone and that would be
difficult with Tyla and Higgins around. Supposedly, Tyla didn't speak our
language. However, we had only Higgins's word for that. And if she was a
shapechanger, she wouldn't need to speak our language. She could simply read
our
minds. She could be reading my mind even now . . .
I stopped short, my heart pounding, my stomach suddenly in knots as paranoia
washed over me in waves. It was insane. There was absolutely no defense. How
could you hope to prevail over an enemy who knew what you were thinking?
"O'Toole?" said Higgins, looking at me strangely. "You all right?"
"Yeah . . . sure," I said, wondering if he could read my mind, if he was
human
or a creature that could assume any shape at will, leading Breck and me to
some
ungodly fate out in the wilds of Purgatory.
"You sure?" he said. "You look a little pale. You want to rest?"
"No. Let's go on."
Breck was watching me, the expression on his face unreadable. Did he know what
I
was thinking? Was he thinking the same thing? Or was he using his formidable
.mental discipline to mask his thoughts in a way that I could not?
As I hurried to catch up with the others, I wondered what my audience at home
was thinking. Their interface with me wasn't telepathic, after all, but
telempathic, which meant that they could share perceptions with me and a
great
many of my feelings, too. As I had learned, some psychos "projected" far more
strongly than did others and I was one of them. So even though my home
audience
did not know what I was thinking, they could undoubtedly infer a lot about my
thoughts from the emotions that I projected through the interface. And in
that
sense, I wondered if I was not a two-edged sword for Coles, on one hand
acting
as his eyes and ears-the ultimate intelligence agent, a sort of remote,
ambulatory sensor bank through which he could pick up information-and on the
other, an unpredictable human link between a home audience that did not
suspect
how it was being manipulated and a secret agency that was hiding in plain
sight,
playing a deadly game within a game that was far more ominous than anybody
realized.
The day grew late and the sun began to sink behind the hills, staining the
sky
incarnadine and violet. We made camp in a little valley created by a ridge, a
rocky outcropping that rose up several hundred feet, curled around in a
semicircular shape and leveled off gradually at either end. It was a spot
protected from the mountain winds, which made our situation somewhat more
comfortable. We stacked rocks to create improvised bunkers that were open on
the
top and we put our bags down inside these makeshift shelters, on top of beds
made of piled scrub-tree branches. It wasn't until Higgins started to make a
fire that I noticed Tyla had gone off again. She reappeared by the time
Higgins
had the fire going, threw down the freshly killed carcass of a creature that
looked like a cross between a small antelope and a hairy mountain goat, and
imperiously departed once again somewhere off into the darkness, where she
wouldn't have to witness the distasteful spectacle of males eating, and
ruining
perfectly good flesh by roasting it. I was beginning to feel seriously
inadequate.
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