The Infinity Link Read Free

he said gently. (If you hadn't believed, the session would have been wasted. I had to convince you of the magic. That's what it was all about.)
    She knew she was blushing. (I know. It's just a silly feeling.)
    Kadin smiled in sympathy as he reached out. (We have to break the link now, Mozy.)
    She laughed. (Right. See you next time.)
    Kadin winked, and then he, and the lights illuminating him, shrank silently away. He fluttered like a candle flame and vanished.
    (Good-bye,) Mozy said softly, more to herself than to Kadin. This was always the hardest part, being left so alone. The darkness and the emptiness rang around her like a bell. She sighed . . . blinked . . . forced herself to relax . . .
     . . .felt the layers of the link slip away . . .
     . . .and opened her eyes in the gloom of the subject cubicle.
    She was seated in a reclining chair, her head encased in a helmet. Her right foot was asleep. Hearing a scratching sound, she looked to her left. A woman peered up from her clipboard. "How do you feel?" the woman asked.
     
    * * *
     
    Bill Jonders detached himself from the monitoring link and slowly brought his senses back into focus. He glanced at the console readouts. Twenty-seven minutes, elapsed time. Rubbing his eyebrows, he keyed the audio circuit to Kadin. "Looks like a fine run, David. I'll get back to you soon for debriefing. Any problems I should know about?"
    "None," answered Kadin. "I'll be waiting."
    On one of the screens, Jonders saw Mozelle Moi removing her headset, with Lusela Burns's help. He touched a switch. "Mozelle—it looked like one of your best. Very good." In the monitor, Mozelle nodded. Jonders switched channels. "Hoshi, run the profiles across my board, please. I'd like to get ready for the review with Kadin."
    Hoshi Aronson grunted from the next console.
    Jonders removed his own helmet and massaged his temples. He was weary, and not just from the day's work. For weeks, the pace had been unrelenting. It would kill them all, if it didn't stop soon; but the transmission date had just been moved up, again, to three weeks from tomorrow. The work had to be done by then. Marie, bless her, had merely been hinting, rather than demanding, that the kids should see more of their father. They would have to be patient a little while longer.
    The monitors blinked, bringing him back to the present. Profile displays appeared, with Hoshi's rough-cut analysis of the last run. Jonders focused on the holographic contours. The graphs looked good, with few of the indecision dips and plateaus of the early days; and the decision folds were all nicely surrounded by confidence peaks. It was a good run.
    Kadin's profile was improving daily. By now, Jonders knew intuitively what to expect on the graphs, but he could still be surprised by nuances and subtleties. One thing he noted now was an increase in contours of imaginative activity. It confirmed his own sense of the session; the landscapes and situations devised by Kadin had been unusually vivid and creative, well beyond the scope of the original instructions. Jonders placed code-markers at points to be referenced later, then jumped ahead to look at the emotional-component analysis of Kadin's responses to Mozelle.
    He'd already lost track of the clock by the time he donned his helmet again for direct manipulation of the graphic images, and a final debriefing with Kadin.
     
    * * *
     
    "Good night, Mozy," Lusela Burns said. She glanced at her clipboard. "See you Thursday at fifteen hundred?"
    Mozy nodded and rose. "Right," she said. "Bye." Her head was buzzing as she walked from the room. The feeling had returned; she'd felt it the instant the link had dissolved. Reality was an intrusion. It always was, after her times with Kadin. The debriefing didn't help much, either; nothing against Lusela, but she needed time, and privacy, to readjust to being back in her own body, and they never gave that to her. Maybe it wouldn't help, anyway. Maybe nothing