Mrs. Dukas:
Will you kindly report at your earliest convenience to the above section. This is of greatest importance. Please bring your son.
Sincerely,
Dr. M. Bart
Ed was both cold with tension and hot with eagerness. The following day he and his mother were in the battered City. Fire had scarred it. A boiling tidal wave had washed over portions of it. But the great building over the many subterranean levels of the Schaeffer Labs had stood firm. Quakes had not broken it down.
An elevator took them below, to that steel- and lead- and concrete-shielded place which might have resisted for a while even a noval outburst of the sun. They were requested to lie down on something like sensipsych couches. A voice—maybe Dr. Bart's—spoke to them from a swift-gathering dream: "Think about Jack Dukas. Your husband. Your father. Things he said. His manner of speech. His expressions, gestures, temperament, likes and dislikes, hobbies, jokes, skills. The people that he knew. Their faces and mannerisms. As many of them as possible will be contacted and psyched like this, too. Think of his memories told to you. Think of everything ... everything ... everything...."
For Eileen Dukas it must have been much the same as for her son. Pearly haze seemed to float inside Eddie's mind. Like a million bits of ancient news clippings always in motion, his recollections of his father seemed to burst in a thousand ever-shifting fragments within his brain. He felt an awful compulsion to recall. It sapped his strength until all consciousness faded away. Yet before this happened he knew that the probing would go on and on.
The next thing he knew he was sitting groggily in a pneumatic tube train, with his mother, all but exhausted, too, leaning against him. Almost as an afterthought, their own minds and bodies had been "recorded" there at the laboratory. They seldom exchanged questions or speculations afterward about what had happened to them. It had been a dream. Let it be a dream.
[II]
Life had become hard enough for Eileen Dukas and her son. While most people treated them all right—from some they even received exaggerated kindness—there was, very often, a certain disturbing expression in eyes that looked at them.
Les Payten, Eddie's friend said once, "I promise, Ed. No more talk about your uncle from me. Finished, see? You've had enough."
Eddie suppressed the anger which sprang from loyalty to Mitchell Prell, for he understood Les Payten's good intentions.