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.