The Long Sleep (12 page)

He reached the bottom of the steps, hesitated almost a minute, then turned into a room where overhead lightstrips glimmered uncertainly.

That was the instant when it all broke apart like good stemware dropped on a brick floor.

See what you've done!

He couldn't move. He was more frightened than he had ever been. This time, he had really thought it was okay. He had thought it was over. What a joke.

Maybe it would never be over.

In front of him, floating in ten glass-walled nutrient tanks, wired to robotic machinery which dangled overhead, were ten human bodies, both men and women. In the nearest tank, directly before him, the faceless man lay on the jelly-like nutrient, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

XV

He wanted to wake Allison at once and spirit her out of the house. He found it difficult if not impossible to believe that she was a
willing
conspirator. They had a hold of her. That was the only explanation. He recalled Galing and the faceless man speaking of her in one of those other illusory realities; the old man had said that she was drugged to insure her cooperation. If that were the case, he had to take her with him, now.

Nevertheless, he was also aware that the cellar door had been let ajar to get his attention. Henry Galing wanted him to discover the bodies in the glass tanks. This time, the illusion had been shattered on purpose. The old bastard would be expecting him to go back for Allison.

Therefore, the thing to do was to go outside and explore the lawn, the woods, and whatever lay beyond. When he had a better idea of what they were up against, he could come back for her with more of a chance of gaining their freedom.

Still in his pajamas, he left the house through the kitchen door. He stood on the dark lawn, drawing deep lungfuls of chilly air. The stars were bright. The moon was huge. And the grass was damp from the sprinkling the meager formation of clouds had given it ten minutes ago. This
had
to be real.

It wasn't.

Although the lawn appeared to be hundreds of feet deep, Joel crossed the whole of it in twelve long steps, just as he had done when he and Allison had made their first escape, before they'd been trapped in the wrecked shuttle.

The woods were filled with night sounds: the squeaky telegraphy of crickets, small animals shuffling through the underbrush, leaves rustled by the breeze. The air was redolent of leaf mulch, various pollens, and the odor of wet bark.

Yet it was as fake as the immense lawn. He crossed it in a moment and came onto the sidewalk on that street full of neat houses and willow trees. It was all calm and precise and middle-class and reassuring. It was meant to be; a damned good stage designer had made it that way.

Walking as if the pavement were made of eggs, as if it would crack beneath him and plunge him into an abyss within the shell, he crossed the two lanes of the highway, stepped up on the other sidewalk. He opened the gate in the fence which encircled the nearest house, and he went up the walk to the porch.

The porch was well furnished. It held a swing, two lawn chairs, and two wrought iron tables with ceramic tops. Two whiskey glasses were set on each table. The place looked lived-in, homey.

“Very nice, Mr. Galing,” he said.

The small window in the center of the front door was curtained with filmy white lace sewn on a dark blue cotton. Between the two lengths of fabric, a cracked paper shade was drawn all the way down to the sill.

He knocked, politely.

The sound reverberated loudly in the night, but no one came to open the door. The house remained dark and still as a sepulchre.

Although he suspected that it was a useless gesture, he knocked again, louder this time, kept on knocking until he thought that the glass would break.

The house was deserted.

“Good enough,” he said. He felt better when he talked aloud to himself.

He went over to the nearest wrought iron table and took the whiskey glasses from it. He put the glasses on the floor, out of the way. When he found the ceramic top was detachable, he detached it and put it down beside the glasses. He hefted the iron base, took it back to the front door, and smashed in the window. He cleared away the jagged shards, reached inside, pushed the lacy curtains out of his way, felt for the lock, threw it open, and opened the door.

“Won't you come in, Mr. Amslow?” he asked himself.

“Why, thank you,” he told himself. “I will.”

Three feet inside the front door, the house ended in a blank, cement wall. The room in which he stood extended only three feet on either side, hardly large enough for him to turn around in; the whole damn house contained eighteen square feet of living space. He did manage to turn, however, and he looked up at the timbers, beams, and braces that held the false front of the house in place. He could not see much of the construction details in this dim light, but he saw more than enough to be convinced that the entire street was probably a fake, an enormous stage setting in the most fundamental sense.

Why?

He stood in the open door, leaned against the frame, and surveyed the porch, the lawn, the open street, and the dark woods across the way. Nothing moved. So far as he could tell, no one was out there waiting for him.

“Are you watching me, Galing?” he asked.

Silence.

“Hidden camera and microphones?” he asked.

He
thought
that he was on his own, that Galing didn't know where he was. But he couldn't take anything for granted now. The worst paranoia fears could prove to be true.

Anything could happen.

“Well,” he said softly, “if you are listening, you'd better come after me right away with your hypodermic gloves. I'm starting to get the goods on you. Before you know it, I'm going to have you and this crazy place figured.”

He suddenly decided that it was healthy to stand here talking to himself. He went across the porch, down the steps, and over to the open ground between this house and the next. He wanted to know why he hadn't seen the cement wall that surely lay between them. Even close up to it, he seemed to be staring at a vista of lawns and other houses on parallel streets, the winking red warning lights on a distant radio tower . . . He turned, searched the shrubs that grew between the houses, and in a minute he located the hologram projectors. When he kicked these part, the pretty pictures ceased to be and were replaced by a plain cement wall.

Now he was getting somewhere.

But he didn't know just where in the hell he was getting.

XVI

He trotted up the empty street to the intersection, turned the corner, and saw the wrecked fan shuttle. It was upside-down, on its roof as he remembered it, crumpled against the big willow tree.

A smashed picket fence lay across the road like the vertebrae of a reptilian fossil. Four or five quarts of oil had leaked out of the shuttle and now lay in thick pools on the pavement, congealing like blood.

He stood with his hands on his hips for a few minutes, taking it all in, and then he walked down to have a closer look. He leaned in the open driver's door and had an immediate, vivid flash of the accident.

Here was irrefutable proof that the illusions had not been illusions at all—unless, of course, he was now in the same dream he had suffered through before.

He turned away from the car, angry with himself. What in the hell was the matter with him?

Was he a moron or something? He was, at long last, uncovering the truth behind the stage settings, and he should have begun to make sense of it. Not much, maybe. But a little bit, anyway.

Obviously, he was still in the windowless building where he had originally awakened from the life support pod. It was an enormous place, and it had been dressed up to fool him. But the dressings were very shabby duds, capable of deceiving only a man who wanted to be deceived. Why all this trouble to confuse him? He could not get a handle on it no matter how hard he tried, and he became angrier and angrier as the answer continued to elude him like a darting fish.

Looking down this second avenue, he saw a duplication of the first street: quaint houses, mown lawns, clipped hedges, a few fan shuttles parked at the curb, darkness except for the mercury vapor streetlamps, quiet. A long way off, a traffic light winked one amber eye; a long low car pulled up on the cross street where the light would be blinking red, paused, then drove through the intersection and passed out of sight.

If they had not wrecked here, where would they have ended? How far did this grand deception continue?

He walked down the avenue toward that distant traffic light. His footsteps rebounded from the fronts of the fake houses and the cement wall between them. Seventy yards later he confronted another wall upon which a hologram film of the rest of the street was projected. The redlight and the moving car and the rest of the pretty suburb were all features of a cleverly made background film, nothing more.

Therefore, Galing had never meant for him and Allison to come this far. They would have plowed into the wall at sixty or seventy miles an hour; they would have been killed if they hadn't crashed back at the intersection. As violent as it had been, the fan shuttle accident was nothing more than another scene in the play, a carefully set-up drama that had been programmed to occur even before Joel had climbed into the car.

Why? . . . .

Unable to cope with the complexity of the deception, he went back to find the hologram projectors that were responsible for this facet of the illusion.

On the porch of the last house he discovered a projector concealed from the street by the banisters. He kicked it apart and brought darkness to one half of the corridor wall.

Across the street, on another porch, tucked in behind a big outdoor chaise lounge, another projector was thrumming softly as the hologram cube whirled and whirled inside of it. He picked it up and threw it down. He kicked it into the wall of the house, kicked it again, stomped on it with his heel. He went out onto the lawn and picked up a child's tricycle which was turned on its side by a hedge, and he brought the tricycle back onto the porch, and he used the cycle like a hammer, flailing away at the projector with all of his strength. He enjoyed the destruction, even though he wasn't gaining a whole hell of a lot from it.

He pretended that he was pounding on Henry Galing, the faceless man, and Richard.

When there was nothing more for him to smash, when the machine lay in total ruin, when the sweat was dripping steadily into his eyes and dribbling in salty rivulets over his lips, Joel dropped the tricycle and staggered backwards and sat down heavily on the chaise lounge. He let his chin rest on his chest, and he breathed in slowly and evenly as his head began to clear. He was ashamed of himself for losing control like that; rage had accomplished nothing, and it might have lost him most of what he'd gained in the last hour. If Galing hadn't known he was out here, the old bastard might have gotten the idea from all the racket if it carried as far as the mansion. He'd been through a lot, of course; but this was thoughtless, childish, the last thing he—

It was then that Joel noticed the neatly folded sheet of dark paper which had lain beneath the now demolished hologram projector. It was partly concealed by the bent housing of the machine, and it looked as if it had been put there for him to find.

“Galing?” he asked, staring out at the street, searching for movement.

But he was alone.

“Okay,” he said hoarsely. “I'll play along with you, Galing. What have I got to lose?”

He slid off the lounge, hunkered down, and picked up the paper. It was yellowed with age, and the creases in it were so dry that they cracked when he disturbed them. Flakes of paper speckled his trembling hands. The sheet fell into three separate pieces as he opened it.

He went to the porch stoop where the light from the streetlamps was bright enough to read by, and he sat on the top step. Fitting the fragments together like pieces of a puzzle, he looked disbelievingly at the message. He read it three times:

Dear Joel:

Nothing is as it seems to be. Yet everything is what you suspect it is. Don't despair. You've
been this way before
—
and you might even be this way again. Yet you're sane and alive. Sane
and alive. Just remember that.

The note had been written with a dull pencil.

It had been written in haste.

And the handwritting was his own.

XVII

The longer he stared at the ancient note and the more he tried to make sense of it, the less clear it became. If he had written this himself, he had done it decades ago—at least fifty years ago, judging from the condition of the paper. And how was that possible, when he was not even thirty years old?

The pods? Furthermore, if he had been this way, why couldn't he remember it? If the intent of Henry Galing's deceptions was not sinister, why did he have this gut-level fear, this sense of im-pending disaster? And having taken the time to write this note to himself, why had he not explained to himself the circumstances behind this charade?