Finding Tinker as a cute but definitely pre-sex little girl, plus the excited stirring about in the apartment of Didorik, the Emergencymen, and Felston—the whole situation left Keaflyn in a state of pleasant-seeming confusion. It was very amusing.
"What's your profession, Mr. Keaflyn?" asked an Emergencyman with a notepad.
"Scientist."
"Okay." The man wrote. "What field?"
"Stabilities. I'm investigating stabilities. And I'm not one, myself," he answered.
The man didn't think the joke was as funny as Keaflyn did. "You mean things like the Resistant Globe of Bensor-on-Bensor?"
"I cut my teeth on that one, intellectually speaking. I was born on Bensor this time."
"Okay. Who's opposed to your work with stabilities?" That question was so funny that Keaflyn merely laughed instead of trying to answer.
"All right, who's opposed to your meeting Marianne Didorik, then?" the man persisted.
"Her pop seems cool to the idea," he answered, grinning roguishly at the listening Clav Didorik.
With an annoyed frown, Didorik put in, "I brought the child all the way from Danolae, to meet this man at the time and place they previously set. The only thing I'm opposed to is leaving her with him. If she likes, she can make another date to meet him somewhere eight years from now."
Keaflyn chuckled at how seriously everybody was taking everything.
The Emergencyman asked him some more questions, then moved on to Felston, and Keaflyn's attention wandered.
Some time after that he was being questioned again, this time by Tinker. She was perched on a stool in front of him, her tiny hands grasping his, and a determined, businesslike expression on her pixyish face.
"What happened this morning, Jack?" she was demanding. "What's the first thing you remember?"
"I woke up. Eureka! I woke up!"
"Okay, then what?"
"Probably breakfast. Habit of mine from way back. I always eat breakfast."
"No probablies allowed, Jack. I want you to remember waking up. Do you?"
"Oh, all right, I remember." Tinker could be a killjoy at times, he had to admit, even though there was true and durable ego-field affinity between them.
"Fine. What do you remember?"
"Well . . . I didn't feel good. Achy and despondent. I'm making that up, of course. I haven't had a psychosomatic pain for thirteen lifetimes."
"Okay, you were achy and despondent," said Tinker.
"What did you do about it?"
Keaflyn squirmed but couldn't bring himself to pull his hands free of hers.
"Scanned myself, I suppose, to see if there was an unblown trauma lurking on my backtrack."
"Don't suppose. Remember!" she insisted.
"Okay, I scanned my backtrack."
"What did you find?"
"Nothing, of course," he laughed. "You know very well, honey, I've been total-clarity for four lives now. Each and all of my trillions of years are pure as the snows of Kalobang."
"You scanned and were still achy and despondent when you finished?"
Her insistent eyes made him think about it. "Yes, I was still hurting."
"Okay, what did you do about it then?"
What did he do? What could he tell her? Let's see. What would he have done under such circumstances? Oh, sure!
"I called the city's directory and asked for a medic," he said brightly. "Thought maybe the condition was something purely physical, like a germ or ingested poison."
The Emergencymen behind Tinker were suddenly in motion. Keaflyn was vaguely aware of one of them going to the comm to check with the directory on what he had just said—which would, of course, explode the whole fantasy he was concocting for Tinker's amusement. Why didn't she look amused?
"Did you see a medic?" asked Tinker.
"Not in person. Just a commscreen consultation," he replied, wondering how he thought that up so quickly.
"What was his name?"
He was tempted to say "Smith," but that was so obviously the first name that might pop into his head that Tinker would surely suspect it. He was trying to find a convincing variation of Smith when the Emergencyman who had been on the comm returned and reported to the others, "The directory verifies that he asked for a medic at 7:17 this morning. A screen consultation was arranged with Dr. Arnod Smath."
"Smath," Keaflyn echoed. "That's right. Smath."
"Okay," the chief Emergencyman was ordering. "Get in touch with Smath. Ask him to come over here." Didorik told his daughter, "You can quit now, dear."
"No, let her continue," said the Emergencyman.
"She's doing fine."
"But neither of them is liking it!" protested Didorik.
"I know, but she's helping him. Notice how he's not laughing so constantly now?"
That was true, Keaflyn realized. He was still highly amused and filled with laughter, but right now it sufficed to display his feelings with a broad fixed smile.
Tinker's eyes and voice were demanding again, "What was said in your screen consultation with Dr. Smath?"
"Oh, I told him about my aches and pains," Keaflyn said with a soft chuckle, "and that it must be physical. He asked me . . . he asked about emotional swerves, and I told him I was despondent, and then . . . " Keaflyn blinked and became silent.
"Okay, and then?"
"I told him I was despondent, and . . . "
"That!" snapped Tinker, watching him closely as he thought about it. "That! What is it?"
"Oh, nothing much. The doc annoyed me by starting to talk flat, like I was a directory or some other kind of robot. He went out of high-comm."
Keaflyn was fairly sure now he wasn't inventing this. The directory had verified his call for a medic, and he had a picture in his mind of Smath's face.
"Why did you think he did that?" Tinker asked.
"I don't know . . . maybe that he had decided I was sicker than I realized, and that he was trying to hide the bad news from me by talking flat."
"Then what?"
"I can't remember."
"Did he prescribe any treatment?"
"Well, he told me to eat breakfast."
"Did he tell you anything else?"
"I don't know . . . Please, Tinker dear, you run along home now with your father and meet me at the Resistant Globe in Bensor City on August 1, 2850. Okay?"
Tinker flickered distress but repeated firmly, "Did he tell you anything else?"
After a long pause, Keaflyn said, "He told me to come to his exam lab."
"Did you go?"
"I think so. Yes."
"How did you go?"
"By groundcar and up the elevator when I got there."
"Then what happened?"
For several minutes Keaflyn sat silent and grinning. Tinker was eyeing him closely and clutching his hands, but she was getting no indications of meaningful thoughts to steer him into.
Finally Keaflyn laughed. "End of the line, honeybabe. It vanishes into a big glob of joy, right in the middle of my head! That's all there is."
Tinker released his hands and turned to face the Emergencyman who had been giving orders. "That's all," she said with finality.
"Okay, until we can get him into the hands of an expert," the man responded.
"I'm an expert," she shot back, "and have been since the late 20th Century. And I say nothing more can be done for him! Surely you know what's happened to him, don't you?"
The Emergencyman shook his head uncertainly.
"He's been given a pleasure overload. That is something that can be even more traumatic than pain in sufficient dosage. What's worse, it can't be blown if the load is kept on long enough. Since the ego-field doesn't want to give up pleasure—" She broke off suddenly and turned to face a window. After a moment she turned back. "No, I'll cry about him later. Now I have to make sure you leave him be, and find out who's responsible."
"A pleasure overload," the Emergencyman muttered questioningly.
"It's done electronically," said Tinker. "The ego-field is held inside the skull and certain nerve channels are artificially stimulated. It takes special equipment."
"But there's nothing like that on my backtrack," the man protested.
"You wouldn't be here if there was . . . if you were the victim." Tinker hid her face in her hands for a moment, then went on in a shaky voice. "An ego-field with . . . that kind of load . . . can go in only one direction. Down."
"Sub-human," grunted Felston.
"Y-yes. It hasn't happened very often. When somebody wanted to damage somebody else, they almost always wanted to do it with pain. But there's one instance on my backtrack—I mean, I saw it being done to somebody else. It's in the textbooks if you don't want to take my word."
"Okay," snapped the Emergencyman, turning to his associate who was still on the comm. "Parlo, haven't you reached Dr. Smath yet?"
"Not yet, Dawsett, and I'm not sure I'm going to. He may have cleared out of here. I've been checking his background. Do you know who the Sect Dualers are?"
"They're an organized group that believes contralife is real and threatening," Dawsett replied. "Is Smath a member?"
"Yeah. Suppose there's any connection?" Dawsett frowned. "According to Keaflyn, Smath began talking flat after Keaflyn told him about feeling despondent. If the illness had been physical, Smath knew, it wouldn't give that feeling to a man with a cleaned backtrack. And Keaflyn couldn't find a psychosomatic source for the illness. With both physical and traumatic sources ruled out, Smath would, as a Sect Dualer, be inclined to think the cause was a contralife invasion of Keaflyn. He would shift into flat talk if this notion gave him intentions he wanted to conceal from Keaflyn."
"What kind of intentions?" growled Felston as the Emergencyman hesitated.
Dawsett shrugged and pointed to Keaflyn.
"Well, you see what's happened to him. Call it exorcism of a demon if you like. If there's such a thing as contralife, the theory is that it would react to pleasure as we react to pain. Give Keaflyn a pleasure load and the contralife entity would get out. Make the load permanent and the entity would stay out."
Clav Didorik exploded, "In this day and age? A witch doctor who would drive a patient mad and dump him somewhere to die? I can't buy that, Dawsett!"
The Emergencyman grinned without humor. "No crazy doctors today, huh? No murderers, no mindwreckers? I'd agree with you, Didorik, except for one thing: Keaflyn's condition. He was a sane man; now he's a hysteric. And according to your daughter, he's doomed to stay that way, or get worse, through such lives as he has to come.
"Of course, it's still supposition on my part that Smath is the responsible party, but let's continue to assume it for the present. Would he have to be psychotic to do something like this? And if so, how do we account for the existence of a psychotic human in the year 2842, especially a psychotic medic?
"The answer," he went on, "is that Smath is not psychotic; he's a Sect Dualer. As such, he would see perfectly sound reasons to use any effective means to defeat a contralife impingement on our universe."
"But the whole idea of a negative universe, with contralife inhabitants trying to destroy our own," rumbled Didorik, "—that's crazy on its face!"
The Emergencyman shrugged. "I'm inclined to agree with you again. So would almost everyone else. But the Sect Dualers consider the evidence of an inhabited negative universe convincing. It is a minority viewpoint, certainly, but one based on theory, and perhaps on backtrack experience, not on a difference in sanity. If Smath did this, he did it for the highest motives—the protection of humanity and humanity's universe."
"I'd like to bloody him up," growled Felston, "also for the highest motives."
Keaflyn, who had been grinning quietly for several minutes, burst out laughing, because they were talking about him as if he weren't present. Also, Dawsett's reconstruction of what had happened to him sounded vaguely familiar, as if it were something that might have happened, if only he could recall it . . . In any case he needed to react to it, and laughter was the only reaction readily available.
The others watched him until he became silent again. Then Tinker rushed into the next room and closed the door behind her. Keaflyn considered following her, because someone should explain to her that he hadn't really been harmed, that in fact he felt fine, that there was no reason for tears. But Didorik brought up an amusing point just then.
"The hell of it is, if Smath's responsible, an informal bloodying-up is all that can be done to him. Crimes like this don't exist now, so there are no laws and no punishment. Right?"
Dawsett nodded. "Laws and punishment lost applicability centuries ago. How do you do justice to an egofield? Fortunately, the question seldom comes up. Mr. Felston could vent his anger in the physical abuse of Smath's body, of course, but even a fatal beating would be a triviality to the ego-field, hardly likely to make it change its viewpoint. It would merely give Mr. Felston a certain satisfaction."
"To hell with it," grunted the cowpoke defeatedly. He flopped down in a chair. "Besides, even though I'm not a Sect Dualer, I think they might be right. It seems to me that this universe of ours has a damn sight more beat-down ego-fields than anybody can account for. Our backtracks show us several trillion years of mighty ugly stuff, I admit, but it wasn't enough to reduce us to cows, or dogs, or insects, or trees. Still; sometime, somewhere, an awful lot of ego-fields were reduced to those levels. I just don't see how ego-fields could give each other that hard a time. It has to be some kind of outside enemy . . . "
"Maybe those low-level ego-fields were low to start with," suggested one of the Emergencymen.
Felston glared at him. "You work with bovines for a few lifetimes, friend. Get really acquainted with them. Then you come tell me that and I might listen to you."
"This isn't finding Smath," said Dawsett, "or determining precisely what was done to Keaflyn, and why and by whom. Mr. Didorik, will you accept authority here while we continue our investigation elsewhere?"
"Certainly, but only for a few hours. I want to get my daughter out of here pretty soon. This kind of situation isn't too good for an eleven-year-old body, you know." Dawsett nodded. "Hang on through the night," he requested. "We should have everything wrapped up by morning. Help Keaflyn to sleep if you can."
Suddenly realizing he was bored by all this seriousness and stiff formality, Keaflyn stood up. It was time to straighten things out, starting with Tinker. While the Emergencymen were leaving, he went into the room where she was sprawled face down on a relaxer and sat beside her, stroking her dark red hair gently.
"You're taking this all wrong, Tinker," he murmured.
"I'm feeling fine. Our only problem is our difference in body-age, and that's purely temporary. In a few lifetimes we can get our ages back in synch again. Even so, we'll do all right in this one. In six years you'll be seventeen and I'll be thirty-one, and you know how sexy a dirty old man can be. In the meantime, you'll be busy growing up, and I've got plenty of work to do."
Tinker raised her small, tear-stained face to regard him with large and sad eyes. "Oh, Jack!" she choked.
"Can't you understand at all? Don't you know you're radiating distress so strong I can feel it even without holding your hands? And didn't you listen to what I was saying? The kind of trauma that horrible doctor loaded you with can't be blown. It gets worse! It makes you susceptible to accumulation of more traumas, which cluster around the first. Nobody who was ever loaded with a pleasure-impress like yours is living today as a human! Don't you see what that means, Jack?"
Keaflyn chuckled. "Okay, a few lifetimes from now I might be one of Felston's bovines. What's so bad about that? Of course I'll miss you, but we can't have everything, can we?"
"This is like dying used to be," she sobbed, "back when we thought death was final. I'd forgotten how awful it was to lose someone completely."
Tinker could be very stubborn, Keaflyn reflected with amused chagrin. "Look!" he said suddenly. "Since I'm the first real hysteric in centuries, think what I can offer to mental science as an experimental subject. How do you know a pleasure-impress like mine can't be cleaned up? Instead of mourning over me, you ought to get that little noggin of yours busy figuring out how to cure me. Think what a contribution to science that would be!" She blinked and wiped her eyes. "Well, it's better than crying, anyway," she said thoughtfully. "I don't think it's ever been done in the history of the universe. But it's worth trying. Just don't get your hopes too high, Jack, because I and the others I can interest in working on it might fail."
He laughed. "I don't need any hopes. I'm doing fine!" She almost clouded up again when he said that, he noticed with puzzlement. But then she managed a weak smile and climbed off the relaxer.
"I'd better go out," she said. "I don't believe Pop Didorik likes for me to be alone with you."
Keaflyn gave her a laughing kiss on the cheek and followed her back to Didorik and Felston.
"I'm checking out, gents," he grinned. "My business here was with Tinker, and that's settled until she either grows up or gets a research project started. In the meantime, I want to get to work. Alo, many thanks for the noble rescue."
"Now simmer down, Mark," the cowpoke urged, getting to his feet. "Let's wait and see what Dawsett and his boys find out. Besides, you need some sleep, pardner."
"Right," Didorik said firmly. "I assured Dawsett I would get you to sleep, one way or the other. You're not a well man, Keaflyn. You have to understand that." Keaflyn felt a touch of irritability at being crossed, and a slight physical distress—not enough to call an ache, but definitely a discomfort. Tiredness? he wondered. Maybe so. Perhaps he had to expect such sensations, now that he had a traumatized track. Maybe sleep would help.
"Okay," he shrugged, and went off to bed grinning.