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but he
doesn't care. He's pampered with a towel. It's okay, he thinks, the
dream has taken him to the gym.
     
     
    “Hey Jamie.”
    “Hey.” He's awake now, the stiffness in his body
real.
    “How are you feeling?”
    Jamie, caught in the lingering images of the dream,
can't answer.
    “You've been asleep for two days.”
     
     
    When he's ready they show him evidence beyond the
time and date of days moving on. He was asleep for most of it but
they kept visual records of his encounter in the ionizer. The
sketchy images corroborate Jamie's dream. He's floored, unable to
speak. It's an invasion of his mind. They've taken his dream and
made a movie without his permission. He turns away from them and
eats Billy's goulash. He slinks away a mere shadow of himself back
to the pod. He curls up on the bed and runs through the course of
events in a fractured timeline. It's all too fluid to be real.
     
     
    “There's no need for embarrassment,” says Ray,
“consider them a mirage, planted there by your surroundings, what
we're fed all our lives to believe will make us happy. You're not
impervious to what afflicts us all.” He's lost the violated Jamie
who would stuff his ears with cotton wool if he could, but Ray
knows how precious time is and can't afford to let Jamie think too
much. “See the positive,” he says, “you have far more in common
with your fellow kind than you imagined. Empathy Jamie, it's
significant if you're going to help them.”
    Jamie prefers to play with his feet. They tap the
cold floor. He's on his way to finding ground as Ray continues,
“It's designed to be provocative, to upset the apple cart. Facing
the futile image of ourselves.” It draws a wry smile from Jamie, he
wonders what image Ray has of himself. If he asks he intuits the
answer will be a lie. Whatever trust he once had in those
mysterious eyes has dissipated. The talk always had an element of
bull, but his soul, that spoke a truth, the one that had drawn him
back if Jamie was honest. It's Po who's more intriguing. He assumes
she underwent the same ordeal and yet here she is, hanging
around.
    He finds her in the lab with a tube of slime
preparing for a range of tests, the sliding doors of his entrance
noisy enough to distract her. She offers no protest at his
presence; rather she seems to be open to his company.
    “What happened to you?” he asks.
    Po assesses the petri dish in front of her. She seems
remorseful, at least on the surface. “It's never the same,” she
says. There's a perceptible shift in her tone, as if Jamie's
experience affected her too.
    “Thank you,” he says.
    She's quizzical.
    “I know it was you who saved me.”
     
    He returns to the pod, a key has been left in the
glass doors of the bookshelf cabinet. It's not so much temptation
as natural for Jamie to open it and remove the book that wasn't
there before; The Caves of Liita . Like the dream the pages
are blank. Another Foundation tease. It's no matter, he's been
energy free since he emerged from sleep and the idea of reading a
thousand page volume is low on his priorities. Po is on his
mind—and then in front of him—as the sliding doors open.
    “Reading my mind again?”
    “I don't read them per se.”
    “But you do read them?”
    Po's reluctant to talk about herself, however a
growing bond between her and Jamie allows the smallest of openings.
“It's a combination of factors,” she says, “purely reading minds
would be hell.”
    Jamie's beginning to understand why she's the way she
is. To exist in this world with that ability.
    “My 'gift' is manageable.”
    “The foundation is sanctuary then?”
    “I wouldn't go that far.”
    “You're treating me differently, you know that?”
    “Because you're changing.”
    “I'm just tired, I don't have the energy to rile
you.”
    “Could be that. But you're changing.”
    “Said by someone who's been through this.”
    “It's never the same,” she says. Po picks up The
Caves of Liita . “It's an