The Dream Master (15 page)

“You have done it,” she said, “and I thank you.” Then: “Who are you, really?” (He must have wanted her to ask that.)

“I am Render.” He laughed. And they wound their way through a dark, now-vacant city, coming at last to their club and entering the great parking dome.

Inside, he scrutinized all her feelings, ready to banish the world at a moment’s notice. He did not feel he would have to, though.

They left the car, moved ahead. They passed into the club, which he had decided would not be crowded tonight. They were shown to their table at the foot of the bar in the small room with the suit of armor, and they sat down and ordered the same meal over again.

“No,” he said, looking down, “it belongs over there.”

The suit of armor appeared once again beside the table, and he was once again inside his gray suit and black tie and silver tie clasp shaped like a treelimb.

They laughed.

“I’m just not the type to wear a tin suit, so I wish you’d stop seeing me that way.”

“I’m sorry.” She smiled. “I don’t know how I did that, or why.”

“I do, and I decline the nomination. Also, I caution you once again. You are conscious of the fact that this is all an illusion. I had to do it that way for you to get the full benefit of the thing. For most of my patients though, it is the real item while they are experiencing it. It makes a counter-trauma or a symbolic sequence even more powerful. You are aware of the parameters of the game, however, and whether you want it or not this gives you a different sort of control over it than I normally have to deal with. Please be careful.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“I know. Here comes the meal we just had.”

“Ugh! It looks dreadful! Did we eat all that stuff?”

“Yes.”
He
chuckled. “That’s a knife, that’s a fork, that’s a spoon. That’s roast beef, and those are mashed potatoes, those are peas, that’s butter…”

“Goodness! I don’t feel so well.”

“… And those are the salads, and those are the salad dressings. This is a brook trout—mm! These are French fried potatoes. This is a bottle of wine. Hmm—let’s see—Romanee-Conti, since I’m not paying for it—and a bottle of Yquem for the trou—Hey!” The room was wavering.

He bared the table, he banished the restaurant. They were back in the glade. Through the transparent fabric of the world he watched a hand moving along a panel. Buttons were being pushed. The world grew substantial again. Their emptied table was set beside the lake now, and it was still nighttime and summer, and the tablecloth was very white under the glow of the giant moon that hung overhead.

“That was stupid of me,” he said. “Awfully stupid. I should have introduced them one at a time. The actual sight of basic, oral stimuli can be very distressing to a person seeing them for the first time. I got so wrapped up in the Shaping that I forgot the patient, which is just dandy! I apologize.” I’m okay now. Really I am.” He summoned a cool breeze from the lake. “… And that is the moon,” he added lamely. She nodded, and she was wearing a tiny moon in the center of her forehead; it glowed like the one above them, and her hair and dress were all of silver.

The bottle of Romanee-Conti stood on the table, and two glasses.

“Where did that come from?” She shrugged. He poured out a glassful. “It may taste kind of flat,” he said. “It doesn’t. Here—” She passed it to him. As he sipped it he realized it had a taste—a
frutte
such as might be quashed from the grapes grown in the Isles of the Blest, a smooth, muscular
charnu
, and a
capiteux
centrifuged from the fumes of a field of burning poppies. With a start, he knew that his hand must be traversing the route of the perceptions, symphonizing the sensual cues of a transference and a counter-transference which had come upon him all unawares, there beside the lake.

“So it does,” he noted, “and now it is time we returned.”

“So soon? I haven’t seen the cathedral yet…”

“So soon.”

He willed the world to end and it did.

“It is cold out there,” she said as she dressed, “and dark.”

“I know. I’ll mix us something to drink while I clear the unit.”

“Fine.”

He glanced at the tapes and shook his head. He crossed to his bar cabinet.

“It’s not exactly Romanee-Conti,” he observed, reaching for a bottle.

“So what? I don’t mind.”

Neither did he, at that moment. So he cleared the unit, they drank their drinks, and he helped her into her coat and they left.

As they rode the lift down to the sub-sub he willed the world to end again, but it didn’t.

“There are approximately 1 billion 80 million people in the country at this time, and 560 million private automobiles. If a man occupies two square feet of land and a vehicle approximately 120, then it becomes apparent that while people take up 2 billion 160 million square feet of our country, vehicles occupy 67.2 billion square feet, or approximately 31 times the space of mankind. If, at this moment, half of these vehicles are in operation and containing an average of two passengers, then the ratio is better than 47 to 1 in favor of the cars.

“As soon as the country is made into a single paved plain, and the people either return to the seas from which they came, remove themselves to dwellings beneath the surface of the earth, or emigrate to other planets, then perhaps technological evolution will be permitted to continue along the lines which statistics have laid down for its guidance.”

Sybil K. Delphi, Professor Emeritus,
Commencement Address
Broken Rock State Teachers’ College.
Shotover, Utah

Dad
,

I hobbled from school to taxi and taxi to spaceport, for the local Air Force Exhibit—Outward, it was called. (Okay, I exaggerated the hobble. It got me extra attention though.) The whole bit was aimed at seducing young manhood into a five-year hitch, as I saw it. But it worked. I wanna join up. I wanna go Out there. Think they’ll take me when I’m old enuff? I mean take me Out—not some crummy desk job. Think so?

I do.

There was this dam lite colonel (’scuse the French
)
who saw this kid lurching around and pressing his nose ’gainst the big windowpanes, and he decided to give him the subliminal sell. Great! He pushed me through the gallery and showed me all the pitchers of AF triumphs, from Moonbase to Marsport. He lectured me on the Great Traditions of the Service, and marched me into a flic room where the Corps had good clean fun on tape, wrestling one another in nul-G “where it’s all skill and no brawn,” and making tinted water sculpture-work in the middle of the air and doing dismounted drill on the skin of a cruiser. Oh joy!

Seriously though, I’d like to be there when they hit the Outer Five—and On Out. Not because of the bogus balonus in the throwaways, and suchlike crud, but because I think someone of sensibility should be along to chronicle the thing in the proper way. You know, raw frontier observer. Francis Parkman. Mary Austin, like that. So I decided I’m going.

The AF boy with the chicken stuff on his shoulders wasn’t in the least way patronizing, gods be praised. We stood on the balcony and watched ships lift off and he told me to
go
forth and study real hard and I might be riding them some day. I did not bother to tell him that I’m hardly intellectually deficient and that I’ll have my B.A. before I’m old enough to do anything with it, even join his Corps. I just watched the ship lift of and said, “Ten years from now I’ll be looking down, not up.” Then he told me how hard his own training had been, so I did not ask howcum he got stuck with a lousy dirtside assignment like this one. Glad I didn’t, now I think on it. He looked more like one of their ads than one of their real people. Hope I never look like an ad.

Thank you for the monies and the warm sox and Mozart’s String quintets, which I’m hearing right now. I wanna put in my bid for Luna instead of Europe next summer. Maybe…? Possibly…? Contingently…? Huh—If I can smash that new test you’re designing for me…? Anyhow, please think about it.

Your son
,
Pete

“Hello.
State Psychiatric Institute.

“I’d like to make an appointment for an examination.”

“Just a moment. I’ll connect you with the Appointment Desk.”

“Hello. Appointment Desk.”

“I’d like to make an appointment for an examination.”

“Just a moment… What sort of examination.”

“I want to see Dr. Shallot, Eileen Shallot. As soon as possible.”

“Just a moment. I’ll have to check her schedule… Could you make it at two o’clock next Tuesday?”

“That would be just fine.”

“What is the name, please?”

“DeVille. Jill DeVille.”

“All right, Miss DeVille. That’s two o’clock, Tuesday.”

“Thank you.”

The man walked beside the highway. Cars passed along
the highway. The cars in the high-acceleration lane blurred by.

Traffic was light.

It was
10:30 in
the morning, and cold.

The man’s fur-lined collar was turned up, his hands were in his pockets, and he leaned into the wind. Beyond the fence, the road was clean and dry.

The morning sun was buried in clouds. In the dirty light, the man could see the tree a quarter mile ahead.

His pace did not change. His eyes did not leave the tree. The small stones clicked and crunched beneath his shoes.

When he reached the tree he took off his jacket and folded it neatly.

He placed it upon the ground and climbed the tree. As he moved out onto the limb which extended over the fence, he looked to see that no traffic was approaching. Then he seized the branch with both hands, lowered himself, hung a moment, and dropped onto the highway.

It was a hundred yards wide, the eastbound half of the highway.

He glanced west, saw there was still no traffic coming his way, then began to walk toward the center island. He knew he would never reach it. At this time of day the cars were moving at approximately one hundred-sixty miles an hour in the high-acceleration lane. He walked on.

A car passed behind him. He did not look back. If the windows were opaqued, as was usually the case, then the occupants were unaware he had crossed their path. They would hear of it later and examine the front end of their vehicle for possible sign of such an encounter.

A car passed in front of him. Its windows were clear. A glimpse of two faces, their mouths made into O’s, was presented to him, then torn from his sight. His own face remained without expression. His face did not change. Two more cars rushed by, windows darkened. He had crossed perhaps twenty yards of highway. Twenty-five…

Something in the wind, or beneath his feet, told him it was coming. He did not look.

Something in the corner of his eye assured him it was coming. His gait did not alter.

Cecil Green had the windows transpared because he liked it that way. His left hand was inside her blouse and her skirt was piled up on her lap, and his right hand was resting on the lever which would lower the seats. Then she pulled away, making a noise down inside her throat.

His head snapped to the left.

He saw the walking man.

He saw the profile which never turned to face him fully. He saw that the man’s gait did not alter.

Then he did not see the man.

There was a slight jar, and the windshield began cleaning itself. Cecil Green raced on.

He opaqued the windows.

“How…?” he asked after she was in his arms again, and sobbing.

“The monitor didn’t pick him up…”

“He must not have touched the fence…”

“He must have been out of his mind!”

“Still, he could have picked an easier way.”

It could have been any face… Mine?

Frightened, Cecil lowered the seats.

—Hello, kiddies. That’s a closeup of a big, fat, tobacco-stained smile you were just rewarded with. So much for humor. This evening we are going to depart from our unusual informal format. We are going to begin with a meticulously contrived dramatic presentation in the latest art-mode:

We are going to Act a Myth.

—It was only after considerable soul-searching and morbid introspection that we decided to act out
this
particular myth for you this night.

—Ptui!

—Yes, I’m chewing tobacco—Red Man, a real good brand—that’s a free plug.

—Now, as I jump up and down and spit about the stage, who will be the first to identify my mythic agony? Don’t all rush for your phones.—Ptui!

—That’s right, ladies and gentlemen and everybody else: I am Tithonus—immortal, decrepit, and turning into a grasshopper.—Ptui!

—Now, for my next number, I’ll need more light.

—More light than that.—Ptui!

—Much more light than that…

—Blinding light!—Dazzling light!

—Very good.—Ptui!

—Now—into my pilot’s jacket, sunshades, silk scarf—there! Where’s my whip?

—All right, all set.

—Up you huskies! Mush! Mush! Gee! Haw! Haw! Up! Up! Up into the air with you, you immortal horses, you! G’wan, now! Get up there!

—More light!

—C’mon, you horses, you! Faster! Higher! Dad and Mom are watching, and that’s my girl down there! C’mon! Don’t disgrace yourselves at this altitude now! Mush!

—What the devil is
that
coming toward me? It looks like a thunderbooooo—aaaaaah!

—Uh. That was Phaeton, blindspinning in the sun-chariot.

—Next, you’ve all probably heard the old saying, ‘Only a god can make a tree.’ Well, this myth is entitled ‘Apollo and Daphne.’—Kill those kleigs…!

Charles Render was writing the “Necropolis” chapter for
The Missing Link is Man
, which was to be his first book in over four years. Since his return he had set aside every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to work on it, isolating himself in his office, filling pages with a chaotic longhand.

“There are many varieties of death, as opposed to dying…” he was writing, just as the intercom buzzed briefly, then long, then again briefly.