Fire Pattern

CHAPTER 5

There was something strange about the three men and two women who were regarding Jerome so anxiously.

It was not the shoulder-length hair of the men, although that was a style he had not seen since around 1990; nor was it the dress of all five, although that in itself was highly unusual. They were wearing short blue-grey skirts which looked like silk, and loose upper garments of a similar material which was cut into narrow strips and appended from black collars. The only differentiation for sex was that the men’s collars were chokers, while those of the women sat lower and were cut square.

Beyond the group Jerome could see part of a circular, windowless room with a domed ceiling, and that too had an indefinable strangeness which was nothing to do with the architecture. He sat quite still, aware of the pressure of soft upholstery against his body, and tried to isolate and identify the unfamiliar element which was common to everything in his surroundings.

The tallest of the three men shook his head and said, “Na tostin arvo kald.” The woman beside him gasped, covered her face with her hands and turned away.

Jerome watched her in a kind of numb bemusement and far down in his consciousness, like a prisoner awakening in a dungeon, a sly uneasiness began to stir. Perhaps, instead of pursuing the elusive subtlety in the environment, he should be asking himself where he was and who these…

I’ve got it! The discovery filled him with dull wonderment. I’m not wearing my glasses—but I can see perfectly. It’s all hard-edged and detailed…near and far…I’m in a hospital and they’ve done something to my eyes!

He felt a momentary satisfaction before the uneasiness returned amid a swirl of questions.

Exactly where am I? Did the man from the filling station shoot me? If this is a hospital, why aren’t the staff properly dressed? And why is it that I don’t really give a damn about any of this?

The tall man moved closer to Jerome, leaned over him and said, “My name is Pirt Sull Conforden. Are you Raymond Jerome?”

“My first name is Rayner,” Jerome replied, wondering at the odd timbre of his own voice. It’s a family name.”

“Very well, Rayner. There are many things you will want to know and are entitled to know, so you and I are going to talk for a while.” Conforden glanced at his companions and they immediately turned and walked away, one of the men putting an arm around the woman who appeared to be in distress. They went through an archway and moved out of Jerome’s view in a narrow corridor which seemed to have curving walls like those of a tunnel. Jerome began to wonder if he was in some kind of an underground complex, but the curious apathy he was experiencing prevent him from pursuing the matter.

“Why is that woman upset?” he said, again noticing an unusual quality in his voice.

“A close friend has just died. You will understand later.” Conforden’s English was unaccented but spoken with a precision which suggested he was a good linguist using a slightly unfamiliar tongue. He appeared to be in his late thirties and had an oval face which was boyish and at the same time stamped with a look of world-weariness. His skin was pale and so uniformly flawless that it could have been sprayed with matt plastic.

“I know you are feeling muzzy and detached,” Conforden said, “and there will probably be some nausea, for which I apologize in advance. Those are the effects of drugs in your system and they will be short-lived.”

“Drugs? Anaesthetics? My eyes…”

“Don’t worry about your eyes. Is your vision better or worse than before?”

“Much better,” Jerome said. “Is this a trauma unit? Have I been shot?”

Conforden shook his head and spoke with a persuasive gentleness. “You are in perfect health. I want you to relax. Allow yourself to float, but try to absorb the information I am going to give you. Much of it will be difficult to assimilate in the beginning, but I am here to answer all your questions, and I can assure you that you will come to no harm in this new phase of your existence.”

Jerome considered the other man’s final words, dreamily aware that he should have found them ominous. “That sounded like a welcome to heaven or hell or some place in between.”

“No, you are still very much alive,” Conforden replied. “It was a welcome to the planet you know as Mercury.”

Jerome stared into the dome of the ceiling for what might have been one minute or five. His brain had been turned into a ball of cotton, a pliant mass which was unable to respond properly to any kind of stimulus. He could feel the objects which were his heart and lungs going about their customary business, but they were as remote as pulsars, lost in druggy distance.

All right, the proposition is that I’m on Mercury, he thought. Shouldn’t be too hard to deal with that one.

He drew his lips into a smile. “Are you going to tell me how I got here?”

“It is essential that you be told everything.”

“Just tell me how I got to Mercury.”

Conforden frowned, detecting the verbal challenge, but his voice lost none of its softness. “First, it is necessary for you to understand that Nitha Roll Movik—the Dorrinian you knew as Pitman—never had any intention of killing you. We are an ethical people who do not countenance the taking of life.”

Jerome recalled the events at the lake, leached-out images on a fuzzy screen. “The gun.”

“That was merely a physical restraint. Others before you have accidentally learned too much about Dorrinian operations on Earth, forcing us to silence them. The method we use is the transference of the personality of a Dorrinian volunteer into the body of the Terran. But, even for a supertelepath, it is difficult to focus a kald lens on one individual at interplanetary distances. Normally it takes several hours, but the process can be compressed into one hour or less if the target kald is immobile in an unpopulated area of Earth. That is why Movik held you so long at gunpoint—he was waiting for the transference to be effected.”

“Unfortunately, he waited too long.”

“When you are ready I want you to tell me exactly what happened to him.”

“Don’t you know?” Jerome said, feeling that he was somehow straying away from a vastly more important point. “Can’t you read my mind?”

“Not really. My telepathic faculties are not very well developed. There is something about another firearm…a duel…”

“We were out on the lake in my rowboat,” Jerome said, still locked in an unnatural calmness while the silent clamour echoed through lower levels of his mind. “A man at the side of the lake shot Pitman with a rifle. He tried to kill me as well, but I…I managed to bring him down.”

An unreadable expression appeared on Conforden’s face. “What did this man look like?”

“Ugly. Mean.” Jerome visualized the pallid face, the pike-mouthed smile. “I couldn’t look him straight in the eye.”

“It was the Prince himself,” Conforden said slowly. “You were lucky to get away with your life.”

“That’s the impression I…” Jerome paused as sluggish connections were finally completed in his mind. “How did I get away? I tried to talk all this out with Pitman. I told him this transference business was no different than murder in my eyes, but he didn’t have time to answer me.”

“It is a reciprocal process,” Conforden said. “When a transfer is completed the Terran and Dorrinian exchange bodies.”

“I should have guessed,” Jerome said resignedly, and when he raised his hands he saw at once that they belonged to a stranger.