Dreams (25 page)

This was going to be the big day, and once we got to work there might not be time for any meal breaks, so a good breakfast was important. Uncle Sam, I thought, is one considerate son of a bitch. He doesn't want his soldier boys to have to work on empty tummies.

What the hell time was it, anyway? The gadget was supposed to be tested at 0400 hours and it would take us an hour to get to the test site. Leaving at 0300 meant breakfast at 0200. Jesus, it was hardly worth the trouble of climbing into the sack, just to climb back out and go to work. But I was Webster Sloat, Corporal, Corps of Engineers, and I did what I was told.

It was raining cats and dogs. There was almost continuous thunder and frequent lightning flashes. I wondered how they could ever hope to get the test off under these conditions, but the big shots running the test must know what they were doing.

We formed up outside the barracks, water pouring off our rain gear, and double-timed it to the mess hall. You'd be amazed how cold the New Mexico desert gets at night, even in July. The mess hall was warm and bright inside. I was hungry and I took everything I could get as I pushed my tray past the serving tables.

Not long into the meal I realized that this was pretty boring. I guess there's nothing that says the
Dreemz
have to be exciting. My experience as Stu Sutcliffe had been a trip, but as myself, as a corporal eating breakfast in 1945, life could be dull. I tried to change to another persona. Sometimes you can do that in Dreemz. What was the big boss of the Manhattan Engineering Project doing? Leslie Groves, Major General Leslie Richard Groves. I concentrated my identity into a theoretical point somewhere inside my head and pushed.

To my delight, I found myself rushing up, right through the top of my skull. I was floating over the table. The mess hall full of GI's shoveled scrambled eggs and grilled sausage patties down their throats. The conversation was desultory, the usual GI mix of complaints, boasts, jokes, discussion of movies and of baseball games. The Cards had beat the Browns in the '44 Series but neither team looked likely to repeat. I knew—I
knew
—that in '45 the Tigers would beat the Cubs.

This was amazing. The more I experimented with my trial
Dreemz
from Dreemz.biz, the more impressed I became. I was able to move around, popping instantaneously out of existence at one place and back into existence at another, like one of those theoretical quantum particles that the high-energy physics geniuses write papers about, and ask me to turn into something resembling comprehensible English.

I could also zip into people by directing my, what should I call it, "point of self" into their heads. I tried it on one of the poor KPs in the serving line, then into the mess sergeant. Piece of cake! All right, then, whom should I become?

There was a clock on the wall. It was 0345 hours. My erstwhile buddies would be heading out of the mess hall, forming up and climbing onto two-and-a-half-ton four-by-fours for the jouncing ride to the test site. I didn't bother to travel with them. I headed for the main test site.

There it was, a hundred-foot steel tower, and there was the gadget, already hoisted into position, wired and ready to go. I looked around for another clock and didn't see one, but without benefit of machinery I knew the time. It was 0415 hours. The rain was still falling, but it was not nearly as intense as it had been for most of the night. The thunder and lightning had rolled away and only faint, distant releases flashed now and then.

The test was fifteen minutes overdue. I knew what had happened. Everything had been held up because of the storm. Some of the scientists had argued for scrubbing the test for twenty-four hours, but General Groves had huddled with Oppy and decided to wait the storm out. Of course, their decision was right. I knew that, even if they were nervous about it.

I became General Groves. Major General Leslie Richard Groves. He was forty-eight, almost forty-nine years old. With a start I realized that he was younger than I was, running this billion-dollar enterprise, commanding thousands of brilliant minds, pushing brains far better than his own to complete the gadget before Stalin's slave-scientists could get one of their own.

The official reason for the Manhattan Engineering Project had been to get the gadget before Hitler did. The Allies were going to use it on Berlin and end the war in Europe, but the Nazis crumbled before the gadget was finished. Some of Oppy's scientists had wanted to quit right then. Mostly Jews, they were, freaked out by Hitler and his policies. Not patriots, not real patriots, they couldn't care less about fighting the Japs, but Dickie Groves had held their feet to the fire and kept them on the job and the gadget was done now, ready for the big test, and if it worked then Dickie would be Harry Truman's fair haired boy and then the sky's the limit!

Groves looked at his watch. It was nearly 0600 hours.

I'd had enough of Groves. I shot through the top of his skull and looked around for somebody more interesting to visit. I spotted a painfully thin, harried looking individual in rumpled civvies. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and paced back and forth, muttering to himself. I couldn't understand what he was saying.

Inside his head I realized that he was thinking and muttering in German and in a flash I was able to understand his thoughts. So this was Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs, one of the great spies of his generation. He was only thirty-four years old. He was a genius. He was a Communist who had fled Hitler and wound up in England as a guest of His Majesty's government.

What a time he'd had! The Brits didn't know what to do with him. Once he had his advanced degrees he wound up in an internment camp as an enemy alien—in Quebec, of all places. But once the Brits got their Tube Alloys program under way, their version of the Manhattan Engineering Project, Fuchs was free again, back in England, working on a gadget for Mister Churchill. And when the Brits combined their program with the Americans, Oppy was delighted to have Fuchs at his side in New Mexico.

Oh, Klaus was like a bear in a honey-tree. The honey he was scooping up was going straight to Harry Gold, and from Gold to Russia, where Comrade Stalin would build a gadget of his own, and face down the capitalist aggressors as he'd faced down the Nazis. It was nervous-making, but it was important work.

Most important work.

Enough. Enough of the mind of Comrade Fuchs. My next stop was obvious. Could I find Oppy himself? Did I have to look for him? Did I have to make myself a point of consciousness and go zooming around Alamogordo like a bee in a meadow?

No,
Dreemz
didn't work that way. I wanted Oppy, I found Oppy. He looked at his watch, no, I looked at my watch. It was 0620 hours. Ten minutes to go. What was Oppy thinking?

He was leaning against a wall. He looked casual but in fact he was trembling inside, so wrought up by what he was doing that he feared to stand unsupported lest he fall down. He was wearing his famous floppy broad-brimmed hat and held a cold pipe between his teeth.

Was that reality or was it my
dream
?

He was thinking—I was thinking—of Berkeley, California, of standing in front of a room full of grad students, a blackboard behind him, a piece of chalk in his hand. He'd been outlining a problem, drawing equations on the board. The minds in the room were fine, he could almost see the keen intellects behind those shining eyes. This was the life he wanted, the life of the mind, the life of the disciple of Newton and of Einstein, a life devoted to fathoming out the deepest secrets and the most glorious creations of the mind of God.

I looked at my watch again. 0629, 0629 and ten seconds, 0629 and twenty seconds. How could a minute last so long, so long when the years of Oppy's life had sped so rapidly?

There was a flash.

What had I done? What had I done? The fireball rose, the shockwave, the blast, the flying debris, the heat, the light, what had I done?

He staggered. I staggered. Oh, Ella, Julius, Frank. Oh, Kitty, what have you married, what is the monster I have become?

And yet the fireball expanded and from it rose the column of dust and earth, the mushroom cloud that the world would know forever. I had seen the films uncounted times, the films of Alamogordo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, Eniwetok. Nothing could compare to being here. Edward would be pleased but he would not be satisfied, not until we build the super.

I laid my head in my arms. There was dancing and cheering around me, but I wept.

In my
dream
could I rewind events, unhappen them, travel into the past and change history? I left Oppy to his grief, shot forward in space, backward in time, climbed the tower like a phantom creature, plunged into the gadget itself. The countdown ended. There was a click, a flare, I thought I might make the gadget fail. This was my
dream
, wasn't it? Mine! I could make happen what I wanted to happen. But I held back.

The light, the screaming of the universe itself, the tears of God.

The alarm sounded and I sat up in bed, drenched in sweat. What was this hanging from my torso? I staggered to the mirror. My pajamas were in shreds.

Breakfast for my daughter, and off to school she went.

In the Saab I turned on the radio and channel-surfed until I found a religious station. What was I looking for? What comfort was I seeking?

Whatever it was, I did not find it. The hymns were vapid, the preaching worse. I surfed to a music station and listened to a Shostakovich string quartet. The music was stormy and troubling, a match for my mood.

I still had my third sample
Dream
but I didn't use it for weeks. If Carter Thurston Hull was worried about me, he didn't show it. My emails contained the usual mix of business correspondence, baby photos from cousins in Minnesota and Connecticut, jokes and political rants and spam. I answered the business communications, deleted the jokes and rants and spam, and let the photos of new cousins and nephews and nieces tug at my heartstrings. I sent baby presents to Minneapolis and Westport. The proud parents sent thank you messages by email.

At the Fremont office I attended meetings and did my work on autopilot. At home there were no meetings, that was the only difference. Nobody seemed to detect any change in me. What does it mean when you don't show up for work and nobody notices?

My daughter asked if she could spend the weekend with her best friends. I knew the girls involved, knew their parents. They were all solid citizens. I wasn't worried. I let her go.

I sat in the living room the first night she was gone with a bottle of Laphroaig and a stack of CDs. I started with Grieg and moved on through Dvorak, Vivaldi, Michael Haydn, Joseph Haydn, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, Carl Friedrich Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, Sibelius and my old friend Dmitri Dmitrievich. I ended with the incomparable Ludwig. I felt that I had no choice. Not his big works, his chamber music. I fell asleep to the music.

The next day I was not hung over. I ate an apple for breakfast and drove out into the country. I spent the day walking in woods, listening to birds, watching clouds. I went home and phoned the house where my daughter was visiting. I spoke with the father of the house. The girls were having a grand time being thirteen-year-olds. Did I want to speak to my daughter? I wanted to, desperately, but I told him, No, I don't want to intrude on the girls' party.

For dinner I heated a can of soup and ate half of it. I closed myself in the living room in darkness and silence. Somewhere a dog barked.

The third Dreemz.biz disk was on my desk, I knew, next to my computer. It would take me to Providence, to the cramped and cluttered home of Howard Phillips Lovecraft during the brief period of his greatest creativity. I was convinced he was a genius. I had long been intrigued by his strange, dreamlike narratives, his portrayals of the terrors that lurked in every corner of his Id. I had been drawn to him, fascinated by the thought of entering his mind. But my two previous
Dreemz
now made me wonder.

Was this what I really wanted? In
Dreemz
I could be anyone, anything I wanted. I could be Abraham Lincoln. I could be Adolf Hitler. I could be Jesus. I could be the Shadow. I could be the Green Lantern. I could be James Bond.

I could be a woman.

I could be an animal.

I could be an extraterrestrial.

What did I really want?

I knew that I would have to write to Carter Thurston Hull, pay whatever fee was involved, become a member of Dreemz.biz. But I realized, also, that a danger lurked here. I thought I had as good a grip on reality as most modern men. I had experimented with a few of the more popular drugs when I was in college. I enjoyed them, in a mild way, but they did not excite my enthusiasm and there was certainly no chance that I would become addicted.

Dreemz.biz was a lot like drugs. I had tasted a forbidden fruit and now I wanted more. But I was still able, I knew, to distinguish between the experience of
Dreemz
and that of the real world. In my
dream
, Stu Sutcliffe had performed at Candlestick Park in 1966. I had
been
Stu Sutcliffe in my
dream
. But I had not changed reality. When I played the CD of that 1966 concert, Sutcliffe was not on it. When I looked him up on the internet, Sutcliffe had still died in 1962.

But I wasn't sure. My experience on the freeway, playing that Candlestick Park concert CD, hearing an extra guitar and voice on "I Wanna Be Your Man" was haunting me. Was it all an illusion? Or was my dream—my
dream
—starting to invade my reality? Or—scariest of all—was my
dream
affecting not just my personal, subjective reality, but the objective reality of the real, physical world?