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stories, official denials, covert surveillance programs. He could quickly get
used to this place, Hugh thought.
He squeezed Yvonne's hand as it lay lightly in his. She turned her head from
watching wisps of cloud slide across the craggy faces of Yosemite below, and
smiled. "It's wonderful," she said. "A lot better than the train down to LA."
"Wait till you try a jet."
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"We'll see what David from England thinks about it. This is going to be so
strange, meeting these friends of yours. I can't imagine what it will be like
with three of you around."
"They're great people. You'll like them."
"I think I might have to. Now I've gotten more used to you, it makes everybody
I've known before seem dull." She eyed him impishly for a second. "You might
be stuck with me for a long time, you know, Mat."
Mat. That was something he was just going to have to get used to, he guessed.
Although, that wasn't really true because by this time "he" was as much
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Matthew
Shayne as he was Hugh Brenner. There was no longer a subordination of one by
the other but a composite awareness that combined both equally. The pictures
in his mind of Brenner's strife-torn, rubble-strewn Berkeley ranked alongside
those of the home in Sonoma where Shayne's father owned a share in a winery.
The irrigating of the Sinai deserts in one world was as familiar as the tank
battles fought there in the other; the annual Berlin Music Festival, as the
onetime Berlin
Wall; Chinese garden cities, as Chinese orbiting bombs. Nothing of him
remained suppressed now. He was simply more alive and alert, more conscious,
more perceiving an expanded version of what either of them had ever been.
And the indications were that the condition would persist if the connection to
Los Alamos were abruptly broken. Hugh had thought about going it alone and
writing himself a one-way ticket. In fact, one night when he had worked late
alone in the lab, he had written and installed the code to do it, intending to
make his decision irrevocably the next day.
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Then, for some reason that he didn't quite understand, a feeling of guilt at
the thought of abandoning his own world had afflicted him again and caused him
to pause. The struggle and conflict of that world had produced the relentless
striving that had brought him here. It was the people of that world who had
expended the lives, endured the suffering, uncovered the knowledge. He owed
them, all of them. If there was just some way he could reciprocate even if
only to lessen their pain.
On a train pulling out of Binghampton, New York State, Sarah studied the other
people sharing the compartment. She had been watching people all the way from
Detroit, and in the process had finally put her finger on what had enabled
Otherwhereians to create the kind of world that they had. They minded their
own business. It was amazing how agreeable people could be when others let
them be and think what they wanted, even when they disagreed with their
choices. The
Carol part of her was amazed that the Sarah part should find it amazing.
The same blending of personalities was taking place with her as Hugh had
described though not yet to the same degree. When the QUADAR link was
established as at present she was more Sarah than Carol; when it was broken,
she was more Carol. The combining of their differing perspectives into one
viewpoint was a new, vividly revelational experience for both. Now she
understood what Dave and Hugh had meant when they talked about seeing
everything in ways they had never grasped before, which they found impossible
to describe.
It reminded her of Sam's repeated assertion of the connectedness of all
people, all life, and ultimately all things; that the perceptions of
separateness and alienation that form the roots of strife are illusions. She
still didn't understand it
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not in any way she could have put into words; but, to some degree at any
rate, she could feel it. Sam believed that what mystics tried to describe was
the freeing of consciousness deliberately or otherwise from the restraints
that normally define identity, into the quantum-connected paths of the
Multiverse. Now, she thought she was experiencing the same thing on a smaller
scale across the bridge of connectivity that united her and Carol.
Although she had not faced the issue squarely in her mind as yet, there was
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already a part of her that knew there could be no going back now to what she
had been. Making it permanent was the only other option. That made both sides
of her, each for its own reasons, all the more anxious over the forthcoming
meeting with the radio astronomer from Manchester, who at that moment should
be somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. This had to be the strangest blind date of
all time in either universe.
Elson had been pressing for all the information that Calom could provide on
Otherwhere and in particular on the analogs of Brenner and the other two that
he was trying to talk into escaping there with him. However, the surveillance
tapes were yielding less information than usual. Brenner and the others were
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