Those who dream of feasting wake to lamendation.
It was the third week in April. Orr had made a date, last week, to meet Heather Lelache at Dave’s for lunch on Thursday, but as soon as he started out from his office he knew it wouldn’t work.
There were by now so many different memories, so many skeins of life experience, jostling in his head, that he scarcely tried to remember anything. He took it as it came. He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.
His office was on the third floor of the Civil Planning Bureau; his position was more impressive than any he had had before: he was in charge of the South-East Suburban Parks section of the City Planning Commission. He did not like the job and never had.
He had always managed to remain some kind of draftsman, up until the dream last Monday that had, in juggling the Federal and State Governments around to suit some plan of Haber’s, so thoroughly rearranged the whole social system that he had ended up as a City bureaucrat. He had never held a job, in any of his lives, which was quite up his alley; what he knew he was best at was design, the realization of proper and fitting shape and form for things, and this talent had not been in demand in any of his various existences. But this job, which he had (now) held and disliked for five years, was way out of line. That worried him.
Until this week there had been an essential continuity, a coherence, among all the existences resultant from his dreams. He had always been some kind of draftsman, had always lived on Corbett Avenue. Even in the life that had ended on the concrete steps of a burnt-out house in a dying city in a ruined world, even in that life, up until there were no more jobs and no more homes, those continuities had held. And throughout all the subsequent dreams or lives, many more important things had also remained constant. He had improved the local climate a little, but not much, and the Greenhouse Effect remained, a permanent legacy of the middle of the last century. Geography remained perfectly steady: the continents were where they were. So did national boundaries, and human nature, and so forth. If Haber had suggested that he dream up a nobler race of men, he had failed to do so.
But Haber was learning how to run his dreams better. These last two sessions had changed things quite radically. He still had his flat on Corbett Avenue, the same three rooms, faintly scented with the manager’s marijuana; but he worked as a bureaucrat in a huge building downtown, and downtown was changed out of all recognition. It was almost as impressive and skyscraping as it had been when there had been no population crash, and it was much more durable and handsome. Things were being managed very differently, now.
Curiously enough, Albert M. Merdle was still President of the United States. He, like the shapes of continents, appeared to be unchangeable. But the United States was not the power it had been, nor was any single country.
Portland was now the home of the World Planning Center, the chief agency of the supranational Federation of Peoples. Portland was, as the souvenir post cards said, the Capital of the Planet. Its population was two million. The whole downtown area was full of giant WPC buildings, none more than twelve years old, all carefully planned, surrounded by green parks and tree-lined malls. Thousands of people, most of them Fed-peep or WPC employees, fitted those malls; parties of tourists from Ulan Bator and Santiago de Chile filed past, heads tilted back, listening to their ear-button guides. It was a lively and imposing spectacle—the great, handsome buildings, the tended lawns, the well-dressed crowds. It looked, to George Orr, quite futuristic.
He could not find Dave’s, of course. He couldn’t even find Ankeny Street. He remembered it so vividly from so many other existences that he refused to accept, until he got there, the assurances of his present memory, which simply lacked any Ankeny Street at all. Where it should have been, the Research and Development Coordination Building shot cloudward from among its lawns and rhododendrons. He did not even bother to look for the Pendleton Building; Morrison Street was still there, a broad mall newly planted down the center with orange trees, but there were no neo-Inca style buildings along it, and never had been.
He could not recall the name of Heather’s firm exactly; was it Potman, Esserbeck, and Rutti, or was it Forman, Esserbeck, Goodhue and Rutti? He found a telephone booth and looked for the firm. Nothing of the kind was listed, but there was a P. Esserbeck, attorney. He called there and inquired, but no Miss Lelache worked there. At last he got up his courage and looked for her name. There was no Lelache in the book.
She might still be, but bear a different name, he thought. Her mother might have dropped the husband’s name after he went off to Africa. Or she might have retained her own married name after she was widowed. But he had not the least idea what her husband’s name had been. She might never have borne it; many women no longer changed their names at marriage, holding the custom a relic of feminine serfdom. But what was the good of such speculations? It might very well be that there was no Heather Lelache: that—this time—she had never been born.
After facing this, Orr faced another possibility. If she walked by right now looking for me, he thought, would I recognize her?
She was brown. A clear, dark, amber brown, like Baltic amber, or a cup of strong Ceylon tea. But no brown people went by. No black people, no white, no yellow, no red.
They came from every part of the earth to work at the World Planning Center or to look at it, from Thailand, Argentina, Ghana, China, Ireland, Tasmania, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Honduras, Lichtenstein. But they all wore the same clothes, trousers, tunic, raincape; and underneath the clothes they were all the same color. They were gray.
Dr. Haber had been delighted when that happened. It had been last Saturday, their first session in a week. He had stared at himself in the washroom mirror for five minutes, chuckling and admiring; he had stared at Orr the same way. “That time you did it the economical way for once, George! By God, I believe your brain’s beginning to cooperate with me! You know what I suggested you dream—eh?”
For, these days, Haber did talk freely and fully to Orr about what he was doing and hoped to do with Orr’s dreams. Not that it helped much.
Orr had looked down at his own pale-gray hands, with their short gray nails. “I suppose that you suggested that there be no more color problems. No question of race.”
“Precisely. And of course I was envisaging a political and ethical solution. Instead of which, your primary thinking processes took the usual short cut, which usually turns out to be a short circuit, but this time they went to the root. Made the change biological and absolute. There never has been a racial problem! You and I are the only two men on earth, George, who know that there ever was a racial problem! Can you conceive of that? Nobody was ever outcaste in India—nobody was ever lynched in Alabama—nobody was massacred in Johannesburg! War’s a problem we’ve outgrown and race is a problem we never even had! Nobody in the entire history of the human race has suffered for the color of his skin. You’re learning, George! You’ll be the greatest benefactor humanity has ever had in spite of yourself. All the time and energy humans have wasted on trying to find religious solutions to suffering, then you come along and make Buddha and Jesus and the rest of them look like the fakirs they were.
They tried to run away from evil, but we, we’re uprooting it—getting rid of it, piece by piece!”
Haber’s paeans of triumph made Orr uneasy, and he didn’t listen to them; instead, he had searched his memory and had found in it no address that had been delivered on a battlefield in Gettysburg, nor any man known to history named Martin Luther King. But such matters seemed a small price to pay for the complete retroactive abolition of racial prejudice, and he had said nothing.
But now, never to have known a woman with brown skin, brown skin and wiry black hair cut very short so that the elegant line of the skull showed like the curve of a bronze vase—no, that was wrong. That was intolerable. That every soul on earth should have a body the color of a battleship: no!
That’s why she’s not here, he thought. She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born.
He had, though. He could be born into any world. He had no character. He was a lump of clay, a block of uncarved wood.
And Dr. Haber: he had been born. Nothing could prevent him. He only got bigger at every reincarnation.
During that terrifying day’s journey from the cabin to embattled Portland, when they were bumping over a country road in the wheezing Hertz Steamer, Heather had told him that she had tried to suggest that he dream an improved Haber, as they had agreed. And since then Haber had at least been candid with Orr about his manipulations. Though candid was not the right word; Haber was much too complex a person for candor. Layer after layer might peel off the onion and yet nothing be revealed but more onion.
That peeling off of one layer was the only real change in him, and it might not be due to an effective dream, but only to changed circumstances. He was so sure of himself now that he had no need to try to hide his purposes, or deceive Orr; he could simply coerce him. Orr had less chance than ever of getting away from him. Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment was now known as Personal Welfare Control, but it had the same legal teeth in it, and no lawyer would dream of bringing a patient’s complaint against William Haber. He was an important man, an extremely important man. He was the Director of HURAD, the vital center of the World Planning Center, the place where the great decisions were made. He had always wanted power to do good. Now he had it.
In this light, he had remained completely true to the man Orr had first met, jovial and remote, in the dingy office in Willamette East Tower under the mural photograph of Mount Hood. He had not changed; he had simply grown.
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more. As there was no visible limit to the power Haber wielded through Orr’s dreams, so there was no end to his determination to improve the world.
A passing Alien jostled Orr slightly in the crowd on Morrison Mall, and apologized tonelessly from its raised left elbow. The Aliens had soon learned not to point at people, finding it dismayed them. Orr looked up, startled; he had almost forgotten about the Aliens, ever since the crisis on April Fools’ Day.
In the present state of affairs—or continuum, as Haber persisted in calling it—he now recalled, the Alien landing had been less of a disaster for Oregon, NASA, and the Air Force. Instead of inventing their translator-computers hastily under a rain of bombs and napalm, they had brought them with them from the Moon, and had flown about before they landed, broadcasting their peaceful intention, apologizing for the War in Space, which had all been a mistake, and asking for instructions. There had been alarm, of course, but no panic. It had been almost touching to hear the toneless voices, on every band of the radio and every TV channel, repeating that the destruction of the Moondome and the Russian orbiting station had been unintended results of their ignorant efforts to make contact, that they had understood the missiles of the Space Fleet of Earth to be our own ignorant efforts to make contact, that they were very sorry and, now that they had finally mastered human channels of communication, such as speech, they wished to try to make amends. The WPC, established in Portland since the end of the Plague Years, had coped with them, and had kept the populace and the Generals calm. This had, Orr now realized when he thought about it, not happened on the first of April a couple of weeks ago, but last year in February—fourteen months ago. The Aliens had been permitted to land; satisfactory relations with them had been established; and they had at last been allowed to leave their carefully guarded landing site near Steens Mountain in the Oregon desert and mix with men. A few of them now shared the rebuilt Moondome peacefully with Fed-peep scientists, and a couple of thousand of them were down on Earth. That was all of them that existed or, at least, all of them that had come; very few such details were released to the general public. Natives of a methane-atmosphere planet of the star Aldebaran, they had to wear their outlandish turtle-like suits perpetually on Earth or the Moon, but they didn’t seem to mind. What they actually looked like, inside the turtle suits, was not clear in Orr’s mind. They couldn’t come out, and they didn’t draw pictures. Indeed, their communication with human beings, limited to speech emission from the left elbow and some kind of auditory receiver, was limited; he was not even sure that they could see, that they had any sense organ for the visible spectrum. There were vast areas over which no communication was possible: the dolphin problem, only enormously more difficult. However, their unaggressiveness having been accepted by the WPC, and the modesty of their numbers and their aims being apparent, they had been received with a certain eagerness into Terran society. It was pleasant to have somebody different to look at. They seemed to intend to stay, if allowed; some of them had already settled down to running small businesses, for they seemed to be good at salesmanship and organization, as well as space flight, their superior knowledge of which they had at once shared with Terran scientists. They had not yet made clear what they hoped for in return, why they had come to Earth. They seemed simply to like it here. As they went on behaving as industrious, peaceable, and law-abiding citizens of Earth, rumors of “Alien takeovers” and “nonhuman infiltration” had become the property of paranoid politicians of dying Nationalist splinter groups and those persons who had conversations with the real Flying Saucer People.
The only thing left of that terrible first of April, in fact, seemed to be the return of Mount Hood to active-volcano status. No bomb had hit it, for no bombs had fallen, this time. It had simply waked up. A long, gray-brown plume of smoke drifted northward from it now. Zigzag and Rhododendron had gone the way of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A fumarole had opened up recently near the tiny, old crater in Mount Tabor Park, well within the city limits. People in the Mount Tabor area were moving out to the thriving new suburbs of West Eastmont, Chestnut Hills Estates, and Sunny Slopes Subdivision. They could live with Mount Hood fuming softly on the horizon, but an eruption just up the street was too much.
Orr bought a tasteless plateful of fish and chips with African peanut sauce at a crowded counter-restaurant; while he ate it he thought sorrowfully, well, once I stood her up at Dave’s, and now she’s stood me up.
He could not face his grief, his bereavement. Dream-grief. The loss of a woman who had never existed. He tried to taste his food, to watch other people. But the food had no taste and the people were all gray.
Outside the glass doors of the restaurant the crowds were thickening: people streaming toward the Portland Palace of Sport, a huge and lavish coliseum down on the river, for the afternoon show. People didn’t sit home and watch TV much any more; Fed-peep television was on only two hours a day. The modern way of life was togetherness. This was Thursday; it would be the hand-to-hands, the biggest attraction of the week except for Saturday night football. More athletes actually got killed in the hand-to-hands, but they lacked the dramatic, cathartic aspects of football, the sheer carnage when 144 men were involved at once, the drenching of the arena stands with blood. The skill of the single fighters was fine, but lacked the splendid abreactive release of mass killing.
No more war, Orr said to himself, giving up on the last soggy splinters of potato. He went out into the crowd. Ain’t gonna... war no more.... There had been a song. Once. An old song. Ain’t gonna... What was the verb? Not fight, it didn’t scan. Ain’t gonna ... war no more ....
He walked straight into a Citizen’s Arrest. A tall man with a long, wrinkled, gray face seized a short man with a round, shiny, gray face, grabbing him by the front of his tunic. The crowd bumped around the pair, some stopping to watch, others pressing on toward the Palace of Sport. “This is a Citizen’s Arrest, passersby please take notice!” the tall man was saying in a piercing, nervous tenor. “This man, Harvey T. Gonno, is ill with an incurable malignant abdominal cancer but has concealed his whereabouts from the authorities and continues to live with his wife. My name is Ernest Ringo Marin, of 2624287 South West Eastwood Drive, Sunny Slopes Subdivision, Greater Portland. Are there ten witnesses?” One of the witnesses helped hold the feebly struggling criminal, while Ernest Ringo Marin counted heads. Orr escaped, pushing head-down through the crowd, before Marin administered euthanasia with the hypodermic gun worn by all adult citizens who had earned their Civic Responsibility Certificate. He himself wore one. It was a legal obligation. His, at the moment, was not loaded; its charge had been removed when he became a psychiatric patient under PWC; but they had left him the weapon so that his temporary lapse of status should not be a public humiliation to him. A mental illness such as he was being treated for, they had explained to him, must not be confused with a punishable crime such as a serious communicable or hereditary disease. He was not to feel that he was in any way a danger to the Race or a second-class citizen, and his weapon would be reloaded as soon as Dr. Haber discharged him as cured.
A tumor, a tumor... Hadn’t the carcinomic Plague, by killing off all those liable to cancer, either during the Crash or at infancy, left the survivors free of the scourge? It had, in another dream. Not in this one. Cancer had evidently broken out again, like Mount Tabor and Mount Hood.
Study. That’s it. Ain’t gonna study war no more....
He got onto the funicular at Fourth and Alder; and swooped up over the gray-green city to the HURAD Tower which crowned the west hills, on the site of the old Pittock mansion high in Washington Park.
It overlooked everything—the city, the rivers, the hazy valleys westward, the great dark hills of Forest Park stretching north. Over the pillared portico, incised in white concrete in the straight Roman capitals whose proportions lend nobility to any phrase whatsoever, was the legend: THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER.
Indoors the immense black-marble foyer, modeled after the Pantheon in Rome, bore a smaller inscription picked out in gold around the drum of the central dome: THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN- A. POPE-1688- 1744.
The building was larger in ground area, Orr had been told, than the British Museum, and five stories taller. It was also earthquake-proof.. It was not bombproof, for there were no bombs. What nuclear stockpiles remained after the Cislunar War had been taken off and exploded in a series of interesting experiments out in the Asteroid Belt. This building could stand up to anything left on Earth, except perhaps Mount Hood. Or a bad dream.
He took the walkbelt to the West Wing, and the broad helical escalator to the top floor.
Dr. Haber still kept his analyst’s couch in his office, a kind of ostentatiously humble reminder of his beginnings as a private practitioner, when he dealt with people by ones not by millions. But it took a while to get to the couch, for his suite covered about half an acre and included seven different rooms. Orr announced himself to the autoreceptionist at the door of the waiting room, then went on past Miss Crouch, who was feeding her computer, and past the official office, a stately room just lacking a throne, where the Director received ambassadors, delegations, and Nobel Prize winners, until at last he came to the smaller office with the wall-to-ceiling window, and the couch. There the antique redwood panels of one entire wall were slid back, exposing a magnificent array of research machinery: Haber was halfway into the exposed entrails of the Augmentor. “Hullo, George!” he boomed from within, not looking around. “Just hooking a new ergismatch into Baby’s hormocouple. Half a mo. I think we’ll have a session without hypnosis today. Sit down, I’ll be a while at this, I’ve been doing a bit of tinkering again. .. . Listen. You remember that battery of tests they gave you, when you first showed up down at the Med School? Personality inventories, IQ, Rorschach, and so on and so on. Then I gave you the TAT and some simulated encounter situations, about your third session here. Remember? Ever wonder how you did on ‘em?”
Haber’s face, gray, framed by curly black hair and beard, appeared suddenly above the pulled-out chassis of the Augmentor. His eyes, as he gazed at Orr, reflected the light of the wall-sized window.
“I guess so,” Orr said; actually he had never given it a thought.
“I believe it’s time for you to know that, within the frame of reference of those standardized but extremely subtle and useful tests, you are so sane as to be an anomaly. Of course, I’m using the lay word ‘sane,’ which has no precise objective meaning; in quantifiable terms, you’re median. Your extraversion/introversion score, for instance, was 49.1. That is, you’re more introverted than extraverted by .9 of a degree. That’s not unusual; what is, is the emergence of the same damn pattern everywhere, right across the board. If you put them all onto the same graph you sit smack in the middle at 50. Dominance, for example; I think you were 48.8 on that. Neither dominant nor submissive. Independence/dependence—same thing.
Creative/destructive, on the Ramirez scale—same thing. Both, neither. Either, or. Where there’s an opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re at the balance point. You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left. Now, Walters down at the Med School reads the results a bit differently; he says your lack of social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment, whatever that is, and that what I see as self-cancellation is a peculiar state of poise, of self-harmony. By which you can see that, let’s face it, old Walters is a pious fraud, he’s never outgrown the mysticism of the seventies; but he means well. So there you have it, anyway: you’re the man in the middle of the graph. There we are, now to hook up the glumdalclitch with the brobding-nag, and we’re all set.... Hell!” He had knocked his head on a panel getting up. He left the Augmentor open. “Well, you’re a queer fish, George, and the queerest thing about you is that there’s nothing queer about you!” He laughed his huge, gusty laugh. “So, today we try a new tack. No hypnosis. No sleep. No d-state and no dreams. Today I want to hook you up with the Augmentor in a waking state.”
Orr’s heart sank, though he did not know why. “What for?” he said.
“Principally to get a record of your normal waking brain rhythms when augmented. I got a full analysis your first session, but that was before the Augmentor could do anything but fall in with the rhythm you were currently emitting. Now I’ll be able to use it to stimulate and trace certain individual characteristics of your brain activity more clearly, particularly that tracer-shell effect you have in the hippocampus. Then I can compare them with your d-state patterns, and with the patterns of other brains, normal and abnormal. I’m looking for what makes you tick, George, so that I can find what makes your dreams work.”
“What for?” Orr repeated.
“What for? Well, isn’t that what you’re here for?” “I came here to be cured. To learn how not to dream effectively.”
“If you’d been a simple one-two-three cure, would you have been sent up here to the Institute, to HURAD—to me?”
Orr put his head in his hands, and said nothing.
“I can’t show you how to stop, George, until I can find out what it is you’re doing.”
“But if you do find out, will you tell me how to stop?”
Haber rocked back largely on his heels. “Why are you so afraid of yourself, George?”
“I’m not,” Orr said. His hands were sweaty. “I’m afraid of—” But he was too afraid, in fact, to say the pronoun.
“Of changing things, as you call it. O.K. I know. We’ve been through that many times. Why, George? You’ve got to ask yourself that question. What’s wrong with changing things? Now, I wonder if this self-canceling, centerpoised personality of yours leads you to look at things defensively. I want you to try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life—evolution—the whole universe of space/time, matter/ energy—existence itself—is essentially change.”
“That is one aspect of it,” Orr said. “The other is stillness.”
“When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is—and the more life. I’m pro-life, George. Life itself is a huge gamble against the odds, against all odds! You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully! It’s not how you get there, but where you get to that counts. What you’re afraid to accept, here, is that we’re engaged in a really great experiment, you and I. We’re on the brink of discovering and controlling, for the good of all mankind., a whole new force, an entire new field of antientropic energy, of the life-force, of the will to act, to do, to change!”
“All that is true. But there is—”
“What, George?” He was fatherly and patient, now; and Orr forced himself to go on, knowing it was no good.
“We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
Haber walked up and down the room, pausing before the huge window that framed a view northward of the serene and nonerupting cone of Mount St. Helen. He nodded several times. “I understand,” he said with his back turned. “I understand completely. But let me put it this way, George, and perhaps you’ll understand what it is I’m after. You’re alone in the jungle, in the Mato Grosso, and you find a native woman lying on the path, dying of snakebite. You have serum in your kit, plenty of it, enough to cure thousands of snakebites. Do you withhold it because ‘this is the way it is’—do you ‘let her be’?”
“It would depend,” Orr said.
“Depend on what?”
“Well... I don’t know. If reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes home and murders six people in the village. I know you’d give her the serum, because you have it, and feel sorry for her. But you don’t know whether what you’re doing is good or evil or both....”
“O.K.! Granted! I know what snakebite serum does, but I don’t know what I’m doing—O.K., I’ll buy it on those terms, gladly. And say what’s the difference? I freely admit that I don’t know, about 85 per cent of the time, what the hell I’m doing with this screwball brain of yours, and you don’t either, but we’re doing it—so, can we get on with it?” His virile, genial vigor was overwhelming; he laughed, and Orr found a weak smile on his lips.
While the electrodes were being applied, however, he ‘ made one last effort to communicate with Haber. “I saw a Citizen’s Arrest for euthanasia on the way here,” he said.
“What for?”
“Eugenics. Cancer.”
Haber nodded, alert. “No wonder you’re depressed. You haven’t yet fully accepted the use of controlled violence for the good of the community; you may never be able to. This is a tough-minded world we’ve got going here, George. A realistic one. But as I said, life can’t be safe. This society is tough-minded, and getting tougher yearly: the future will justify it. We need health. We simply have no room for the incurables, the gene-damaged who degrade the species; we have no time for wasted, useless suffering.” He spoke with an enthusiasm that rang hollower than usual; Orr wondered how well, in fact, Haber liked this world he had indubitably made. “Now just sit like that, I. don’t want you going to sleep from force of habit. O.K., great. You may get bored. I want you just to sit for a while. Keep your eyes open, think about anything you like. I’ll be fiddling with Baby’s guts, here. Now, here we go: bingo.” He pressed the white ON button in the wall panel to the right of the Augmentor, by the head of the couch.
A passing Alien jostled Orr slightly in the crowd on the mall; it raised its left elbow to apologize, and Orr muttered, “Sorry.” It stopped, half blocking his way: and he too halted, startled and impressed by its nine-foot, greenish, armored impassivity. It was grotesque to the point of being funny; like a sea turtle, and yet like a sea turtle it possessed a strange, large beauty, a serener beauty than that of any dweller, in sunlight, any walker on the earth.
From the still-lifted left elbow the voice issued flatly: “Jor Jor,” it said.
After a moment Orr recognized his own name in this Barsoomian bisyllable, and said with some embarrassment, “Yes, I’m Orr.”
“Please forgive warranted interruption. You are human capable of iahklu’ as previously noted. This troubles self.”
“I don’t—I think—”
“We also have been variously disturbed. Concepts cross in mist. Perception is difficult. Volcanoes emit fire. Help is offered: refusably. Snakebite serum is not prescribed for all. Before following directions leading in wrong directions, auxiliary forces may be summoned, in immediate-following fashion: Er’ perrehnne!”
“Er’ perrehnne,”Orr repeated automatically, his whole mind intent on trying to understand what the Alien was telling him.
“If desired. Speech is silver, silence is gold. Self is universe. Please forgive interruption, crossing in mist.” The Alien, though neckless and waistless, gave an impression of bowing, and passed on, huge and greenish above the gray-faced crowd. Orr stood staring after him until Haber said, “George!”
“What?” He looked stupidly around at the room, the desk, the window.
“What the hell did you do?”
“Nothing,” Orr said. He was still sitting on the couch, his hair full of electrodes. Haber had pushed the OFF button of the Augmentor and had come around in front of the couch, staring first at Orr and then at the EEG screen.
He opened the machine and checked the permanent record inside it, recorded by pens on paper tape. “Thought I’d misread the screen,” he said, and gave a peculiar laugh, a very clipped version of his usual full-throated roar. “Queer stuff going on in your cortex there, and I wasn’t even feeding your cortex at all with the Augmentor, I’d just begun a slight stimulus to the pons, nothing specific.... What’s this.... Christ, that must be 150 mv there.” He turned suddenly to Orr. “What were you thinking? Reconstruct it.”
An extreme reluctance possessed Orr, amounting to a sense of threat, of danger.
“I thought—I was thinking about the Aliens.”
“The Aldebaranians? Well?”
“I just thought of one I saw on the street, coming here.”
“And that reminded you, consciously or unconsciously, of the euthanasia you saw performed. Right? O.K. That might explain the funny business here down in the emotive centers, the Augmentor picked it up and exaggerated it.
You must have felt that—something special, unusual going on in your mind?”
“No,” Orr said, truthfully. It had not felt unusual.
“O.K. Now look, in case my reactions worried you there, you should know that I’ve had this Augmentor hooked up to my own brain several hundred times, and on lab subjects, some forty-five different subjects in fact. It’s not going to hurt you any more than it did them. But that reading was a very unusual one for an adult subject, and I simply wanted to check with you to see if you felt it subjectively.”
Haber was reassuring himself, not Orr, but it didn’t matter. Orr was past reassurance.
“O.K. Here we go again.” Haber restarted the EEG, and approached the ON button of the Augmentor. Orr set his teeth and faced Chaos and Old Night.
But they were not there. Nor was he downtown talking to a nine-foot turtle. He remained sitting on the comfortable couch looking at the misty, blue-gray cone of St. Helen out the window. And, quiet as a thief in the night, a sense of well-being came into him, a certainty that things were all right, and that he was in the middle of things. Self is universe. He would not be allowed to be isolated, to be stranded. He was back where he belonged. He felt an equanimity, a perfect certainty as to where he was and where everything else was. This feeling did not come to him as blissful or mystical, but simply as normal. It was the way he generally had felt, except in times of crisis, of agony; it was the mood of his childhood and all the best and profoundest hours of the boyhood and maturity; it was his natural mode of being. These last years he had lost it, gradually but almost entirely, scarcely realizing that he had lost it. Four years ago this month, four years ago in April, something had happened that had made him lose that balance altogether for a while; and recently the drugs he had taken, the dreams he had dreamed, the constant jumping from one life-memory to another, the worsening of the texture of life the more Haber unproved it, all this had sent him clear off course. Now, all at once, he was back where he belonged.
He knew that this was nothing he had accomplished by himself.
He said aloud, “Did the Augmentor do that?”
“Do what?” said Haber, leaning around the machinery again to watch the EEG screen.
“Oh... I don’t know.”
“It isn’t doing anything, in your sense,” Haber replied with a touch of irritation. Haber was likable at moments like this, playing no role and pretending no response, wholly absorbed in what he was trying to learn from the quick and subtle reactions of his machines. “It’s merely amplifying what your own brain’s doing at the moment, selectively reinforcing the activity, and your brain’s doing absolutely nothing interesting.... There.” He made a rapid note of something, returned to the Augmentor, then leaned back to observe the jiggling lines on the little screen. He separated three that had seemed one, by turning dials, then reunified them. Orr did not interrupt him again. Once Haber said sharply, “Shut your eyes. Roll the eyeballs upward. Right. Keep them shut, try to visualize something—a red cube. Right....”
When at last he turned the machines off and began to detach the electrodes, the serenity Orr had felt did not lapse, like the induced mood of a drug or alcohol. It remained. Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, “Dr. Haber, I can’t let you use my effective dreams any more.”
“Eh?” Haber said, his mind still on Orr’s brain, not on Orr.
“I can’t let you use my dreams any more.”
“‘Use’ them?”
“Use them.”
“Call it what you like,” Haber said. He had straightened up and towered over Orr, who was still sitting down. He was gray, large, broad, curly bearded, deep-chested, frowning. Your God is a jealous God. “I’m sorry, George, but you’re not in a position to say that.”
Orr’s gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.
“Yet I do say it,” he replied mildly.
Haber looked down at him, really looked at him for a moment, and saw him. He seemed to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a granite door. He crossed the room. He sat down behind his desk. Orr now stood up and stretched a little.
Haber stroked his black beard with a big, gray hand.
“I am on the verge—no, I’m in the midst—of a breakthrough,” he said, his deep voice not booming or jovial but dark, powerful. “Using your brain patterns in a feedback-elimination-replication-augmentation routine, I am programming the Augmentor to reproduce the EEG rhythms that obtain during effective dreaming. I call these e-state rhythms. When I have them sufficiently generalized, I will be able to superimpose them on the d-state rhythms of another brain, and after a period of synchronization they will, I believe, induce effective dreaming in that brain. Do you understand what that means? I’ll be able to induce the e-state in a properly selected and trained brain, as easily as a psychologist using ESB induces rage in a cat, or tranquillity in a psychotic human—more easily, for I can stimulate without implanting contacts or chemicals. I am within a few days, perhaps a few hours, of accomplishing this goal. Once I do, you’re off the hook. You will be unnecessary. I don’t like working with an unwilling subject, and progress will be much faster with a suitably equipped and oriented subject. But until I’m ready, I need you. This research must be finished. It is probably the most important piece of scientific research that has ever been done. I need you to the extent that—if your sense of obligation to me as a friend, and to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the welfare of all humanity, isn’t sufficient to keep you here—then I’m willing to compel you to serve a higher cause. If necessary, I’ll obtain an order of Obligatory Ther— of Personal Welfare Constraint. If necessary, I’ll use drugs, as if you were a violent psychotic. Your refusal to help in a matter of this importance is, of course, psychotic. Needless to say, however, I would infinitely rather have your free, voluntary help, without legal or psychic coercion. It would make all the difference to me.”
“It really wouldn’t make any difference to you,” Orr said, without belligerence.
“Why are you fighting me—now? Why now, George? When you’ve contributed so much, and we’re so near the goal?” Your God is a reproachful God. But guilt was not the way to get at George Orr; if he had been a man much given to guilt feelings he would not have lived to thirty.
“Because the longer you go on the worse it gets. And now, instead of preventing me from having effective dreams, you’re going to start having them yourself. I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live in yours.”
“What do you mean by that: ‘the worse it gets’? Look here, George.” Man to man. Reason will prevail. If only we sit down and talk things over.... “In the few weeks that we’ve worked together, this is what we’ve done. Eliminated overpopulation; restored the quality of urban life and the ecological balance of the planet. Eliminated cancer as a major killer.” He began to bend his strong, gray fingers down, enumerating. “Eliminated the color problem, racial hatred. Eliminated war. Eliminated the risk of species deterioration and the fostering of deleterious gene stocks. Eliminated—no, say in process of eliminating—poverty, economic inequality, the class war, all over the world. What else? Mental illness, maladjustment to reality: that’ll take a while, but we’ve made the first steps already. Under HURAD direction, the reduction of human misery, physical and psychic, and the constant increase of valid individual self-expression, is an ongoing thing, a constant progress. Progress, George! We’ve made more progress in six weeks than humanity made in six hundred thousand years!”
Orr felt that all these arguments should be answered. He began, “But where’s democratic government got to? People can’t choose anything at all any more for themselves. Why is everything so shoddy, why is everybody so joyless? You can’t even tell people apart—and the younger they are the more that’s so. This business of World State bringing up all the children in those Centers—”
But Haber interrupted, really angry. “The Child Centers were your invention, not mine! I simply outlined the desiderata to you among the suggestions for a dream, as I always do; I tried to suggest how to implement some of them, but those suggestions never seem to take hold, or they get twisted out of all recognition by your damned primary-process thinking. You don’t have to tell me that you resist and resent everything I’m trying to accomplish for humanity, you know—that’s been obvious from the start. Every step forward that I force you to take, you cancel, you cripple with the deviousness or stupidity of the means your dream takes to realize it. You try, each time, to take a step backward. Your own drives are totally negative. If you weren’t under strong hypnotic compulsion when you dream, you’d have reduced the world to ashes, weeks ago! Look what you almost did, that one night when you ran off with that woman lawyer—”
“She’s dead,” Orr said.
“Good. She was a destructive influence on you. Irresponsible. You have no social conscience, no altruism. You’re a moral jellyfish. I have to instill social responsibility in you hypnotically, every time. And every time it’s thwarted, spoiled. That’s what happened with the Child Centers. I suggested that the nuclear family being the prime shaper of neurotic personality structures, there were certain ways in which it might, in an ideal society, be modified. Your dream simply grabbed at the crudest interpretation of these, mixed it up with cheap Utopian concepts, or cynical anti-utopian concepts perhaps, and produced the Centers. Which, all the same, are better than what they replaced! There is very little schizophrenia in this world—did you know that? It’s a rare disease!” Haber’s dark eyes shone, his lips grinned.
“Things are better than they—than they were once,” Orr said, abandoning hope of discussion. “But as you go on they get worse. I’m not trying to thwart you, it’s that you’re trying to do something that can’t be done. I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it. To use it only when I must. When there is no other alternative. There are alternatives now. I’ve got to stop.”
“We can’t stop—we’ve just begun! We’re just beginning to get any control at all over this power of yours. I’m within sight of doing so, and I will do so. No personal fears can stand in the way of the good that can be done for all men with this new capacity of the human brain!”
Haber was speechmaking. Orr looked at him, but the opaque eyes, gazing straight at him, did not return his look, did not see him. The speech went on.
“What I’m doing is making this new capacity replicable. There’s an analogy with the invention of printing, with the application of any new technological or scientific concept. If the experiment or technique cannot be repeated successfully by others, it is of no use. Similarly, the e-state, so long as it was locked into the brain of a single man, was no more use to humanity than a key locked inside a room, or a single, sterile genius mutation. But I’ll have the means of getting the key out of that room. And that ‘key’ will be as great a milestone in human evolution as the development of the reasoning brain itself! Any brain capable of using it, deserving of using it, will be able to. When a suitable, trained, prepared subject enters the e-state under the Augmentor stimulus, he will be under complete autohypnotic control. Nothing will be left to chance, to random impulse, to irrational narcissistic whim. There will be none of this tension between your will to nihilism and my will to progress, your Nirvana wishes and my conscious, careful planning for the good of all. When I have made sure of my techniques, then you’ll be free to go. Absolutely free. And since you’ve claimed all along that all you want is to be free of responsibility, incapable of dreaming effectively, then I’ll promise that my very first effective dream will include your ‘cure’—you’ll never have an effective dream again.”
Orr had risen; he stood still, looking at Haber; his face was calm but intensely alert and centered. “You will control your own dreams,” he said, “by yourself—no one helping, or supervising you—?”
“I’ve controlled yours for weeks now. In my own case, and of course I’ll be the first subject of my own experiment, that’s an absolute ethical obligation, in my own case the control will be complete.”
“I tried autohypnosis, before I ever used the dream-suppressing drugs—”
“Yes, you mentioned that before; you failed, of course. The question of a resistant subject achieving successful autosuggestion is an interesting one, but this was no test of it whatever; you’re not a professional psychologist, you’re not a trained hypnotist, and you were already emotionally disturbed about the whole issue; you got nowhere, of course. But I am a professional, and I know precisely what I’m doing. I can autosuggest an entire dream and dream it in every detail precisely as thought out by my waking mind. I’ve done so, every night this past week, getting in training. When the Augmentor synchronizes the generalized e-state pattern with my own d-state, such dreams will be effectivized. And then—and then—” The lips within the curly beard parted in a straining, staring smile, a grin of ecstasy that made Orr turn away as if he had seen something never meant to be seen, both terrifying and pathetic. “Then this world will be like heaven, and men will be like gods!”
“We are, we are already,” Orr said, but the other paid no heed.
“There is nothing to fear. The dangerous time—had we known it—was when you alone possessed the capacity for e-dreaming, and didn’t know what to do with it. If you hadn’t come to me, if you hadn’t been sent into trained, scientific hands, who knows what might have happened. But you were here, and I was here: as they say, genius consists in being in the right time in the right place!” He boomed a laugh. “So now there’s nothing to fear, and it’s all out of your hands. I know, scientifically and morally, what I’m doing and how to do it. I know where I’m going.”
“Volcanoes emit fire,” Orr murmured.
“What?”
“May I go now?”
“Tomorrow at five.”
“I’ll come,” Orr said, and left.