The Long Twilight (40 page)

After that I gave a lucky barber a crack at my locks. He trimmed me back to an early Johnny Weissmuller length, and said, "That's a switch. I seen black hair with gray roots, but never before visey-versey."

"It's my diet," I said. "I just went on distilled carrot juice and virgin duck eggs, boiled in pure spring water."

He made a note of that on the back of an envelope, threw in a free shave that hit the spots I'd missed the evening before, and offered me a chance in what he called a lottery.

"I'm doing you a favor," he said, getting confidential. "This here is the hottest game in town." He showed me a purple ticket to prove it. If fancy engraving was any indication, I was onto something. I paid my buck and tucked it away. As I left he was looking at me over the cash register, grinning a lipless grin and glittering his eyes in a way that reminded me of something I couldn't put a finger on.

I sat in the park after that and breathed fresh air and watched the people pass. None of them looked at me. I bought my dinner at a grocery store, making a point of including lettuce and carrots and other wholesome items. I ate in my room, without much appetite.

Two weeks went by that way, at the end of which I had drunk no booze, had gained five pounds, lost the stomachache, and was broke. I spent the last day looking for work, but there seemed to be a shortage of job opportunities for applicants of indefinite age and uncertain abilities. My landlady seemed uneager to extend any credit. We parted with expressions of mutual regret, and I went and sat in the park a little longer than was my custom, right through dinner time, as a matter of fact.

It got cold when the sun went down. The lights were still on in the Public Library across the way. The librarian gave me a sharp look but said nothing. I found a quiet corner and settled down to enjoy as much of the warmth as possible before closing time. There's something soothing about the quiet stacks, and the heavy old yellow oak chairs and the smell of dusty paper and bindings; even the whispers and the soft footsteps.

The footsteps stopped, and a chair scraped gently, being pulled out. Cloth rustled. I kept my eyes shut and tried to look like an old gent who'd come in to browse through the bound volumes of
Harper's
and just happened to doze off in mid-1931; but I could hear soft breathing, and feel eyes on me.

I opened mine and she was sitting across the table from me, looking young and tragic and a bit threadbare, and she said, "Are you all right?"

"Don't disappear, lady," I said. "Don't turn into smoke and vanish. Don't even get up and walk away. Just sit there and let me get my pulse back down into the low nineties."

She blushed a little and frowned.

"I . . . thought perhaps you were ill," she said, all prim and proper and ready to say all the magic words that made her a conforming member of the current establishment.

"Sure. What about the fellow I came in with? Isn't that the way the next line goes?"

"I haven't any idea what you mean. No one came in with you— not that I saw. And—"

"How long have you been watching me?"

This time she really blushed. "Why, the very idea—"

I reached across and took her hand. It was soft as the first breath of spring, as smooth as ancient brandy, as warm as mother love. My hand closing around it felt like a hawk's talon getting a grip on a baby chick. I let go, but she hadn't moved.

"Let's skip over all the ritual responses," I said. "Something pretty strange is happening; you know it and I know it, right?"

The blush went away and left her pale, her eyes clinging to mine as if maybe I knew the secret that would save a life.

"You . . . you
know
?" she whispered.

"Maybe not, Miss, but I've got a strong suspicion."

It was the wrong word; she tensed up and her lips got stiff and righteous.

"Well! It was merely a Christian impulse—"

"Balls," I said. "Pardon my crudeness, if it is crudeness. You sat down here, you spoke to me. Why?"

"I told you—"

"I know. Now tell me the real reason."

She looked at the end of my nose, my left ear, finally my eyes. "I . . . had a dream," she said.

"A bar," I said. "On the shabby side. A fat bartender. A booth, on the right of the door as you come in."

"My God," she said, like somebody who never takes the name of her deity in vain.

"Me too," I said. "What's your name?"

"Regis. Miss Regis." She stopped, as if she'd said too much.

"Go ahead, Miss Regis."

"In the dream I was someone who was needed," she said, not really talking to me now, but to someone inside herself maybe, someone who hadn't had a whole lot of attention in the past. "I was important—not in the sense of rank and titles, but because I'd been entrusted with something of importance. I had a duty to perform, a sense of . . . of honor to live up to."

I had sense enough not to say anything while she thought about it, remembering how it had been.

"The call came in the middle of the night, the secret message I'd been waiting for. I was ready. I knew there was great danger, but that was unimportant. I knew what to do. I got up, dressed, went to the appointed place. And . . . you were there." She looked at me then. "You were younger, bigger, stronger. But it was you. I'm certain of that."

"Go on."

"I had to warn you. There was danger—I don't know what sort of danger. You were going to face it, alone."

"You asked me not to go," I said. "But you knew I had to go away."

She nodded. "And . . . you went. I wanted to cry out, to run after you—but . . . instead, I woke up." She smiled uncertainly. "I tried to tell myself it was just a foolish dream. And yet—I knew it was important."

"So you came back."

"We walked through cold, empty streets. We entered a building. Nothing was as it seemed. We went through room after room, searching for . . . something. We came to a wall. You broke it down. We were in a big room with a strange, elaborate chandelier, like a place where kings and ambassadors might sign treaties. And the next room was a flophouse."

"Oh, I don't know," I said, "I've seen worse."

"Then a man burst in," she went on, ignoring me. "He had a gun. He aimed it at you and . . . shot you down at my feet." The tragic look was back, a look to break a stone heart down into gravel.

"Not quite," I said. "I'm here. I'm alive. It didn't really happen. None of it. We dreamed it—together."

"But—how?"

"I was in an experiment. A human guinea pig. Big machines, hooked to my head. They made me dream, crazy stuff, all mixed up. Somehow, you got mixed into my dream. And the funny thing is—I don't think they know it."

"Who are they—the people you're talking about?"

I waved a hand. "At the university. The lab. Some bigdomes, doctors, physicists. I don't know. The kind of guys who spend their time in little rooms full of radio tubes and dials, making marks on a clipboard."

"How did you happen to be taking part in their tests?"

I shook my head. "That's all a little vague. I think I was on the sauce pretty heavy, for a long time."

"Where's your family, your home? Won't they be worried about you?"

"Don't waste your sympathy, Miss Regis. I don't have any."

"Nonsense," she said, "no human being exists in a vacuum." But she let it go at that. "You mentioned a university." She tried a new tack. "What university was it?"

"How many you got in your town, lady?"

"Please don't talk like a hobo. You don't have to, you know."

"Apologies, Miss Regis. The one over that way." I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. "Nice grounds, big trees. You must have noticed it, if you live here."

"I've lived here all my life. There's no university in this town."

"OK, so maybe it's a research lab; a government project."

"There's nothing like that. Not here, Mr. Florin."

"Three blocks from where we're sitting," I said. "Maybe four. Ten acres if it's an inch."

"Are you sure it wasn't part of the dream?"

"I've been living on their money for the last two weeks."

"Can you lead me there?"

"Why?"

She stared at me. "Because we can't just drop it, can we?"

"I guess it can't hurt to take a look," I said. "Maybe I can touch 'em for a new stake."

She followed me out into the night, trailed by the disapproving eyes of the elderly virgin at the front desk. It took us ten minutes to do the three blocks to where I had left the university grounds two weeks before. A block away I knew something was wrong with my calculations. The stores and gas stations and pawnshops along the way looked all right, but where the high red brick wall should have been there was an abandoned warehouse: an acre or so of warped siding and broken glass.

Miss Regis didn't say any of the things she could have. She came along quietly while I retraced the route. I found a familiar pawnshop with a dummy in the window wearing a dusty tux, the candy shop with the dusty fudge, the street where my ex-boardinghouse was. But when we got back to the university, it was still a warehouse.

"The neighborhood's still here," I said. "All that's missing is the college campus. Kind of big to mislay, but at my age a man tends to get careless."

"Are you sure you walked all the way from—wherever you were—to the rooming house? Maybe you took a cab, or—"

"Uh-uh. No cab, no bus, no trolley, not even a bicycle. Shanks' mare. I don't remember much, maybe, but what I remember I remember good. The way I felt I couldn't have walked over a quarter of a mile. Let's face it, Miss Regis. Somebody swiped the university and left this dump in its place, maybe for a reason. My trick is to figure the reason."

"Mr. Florin—it's late. You're tired. Perhaps it would be better if you rested now. Tomorrow we can meet after work, perhaps . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"Sure," I said. "Good idea, Miss Regis. Sorry to have wasted your time. You were right all along. No university, no scientists, no dream machine. But the hundred bucks was real. Let's leave it at that. Good night, and thanks for your company."

She stood there looking undecided. "Where will you go?"

"Who knows, Miss Regis? The world is a big place, especially when you aren't tied down by any arbitrary limitations. Grayfell, maybe. It's a nice place, with eighteen percent light gravity and plenty of O
₂
and a big yellow sun, a couple hundred lights from here."

"Who told you about Grayfell?" she whispered.

"Bardell. He was an actor. Not a very good one. Funny thing, Big Nose thought I was him. Can you figure it?"

"Grayfell was our summer place," she said, sounding puzzled.

"Don't tell me: at the lake, twenty-eight miles from here."

"Where did you get that idea?"

"All right—you tell me."

"Grayfell is in Wisconsin—near Chicago."

"Stop me if I'm singing off-key—but isn't this Chicago?"

"Why—no. Of course not. It's Wolfton, Kansas."

"I knew there was something unfamiliar about the place."

"How could you have been here for weeks, as you said, without knowing that?"

"The question never arose. Of course, my social contacts were limited."

She looked at me and I could almost hear her thinking over all the things she might say. What she came up with was, "Where will you sleep tonight?"

"I feel like walking," I said. "A night of contemplation under the stars."

"Come home with me. I have room for you."

"Thanks, Miss Regis. You're a nice kid—too nice to get mixed up in my private war with the universe."

"What are you
really
going to do?" she whispered.

I tilted my head toward the warehouse. "Poke my nose in there."

She looked earnest and businesslike. "Yes, of course, we'll have to."

"Not you. Me."

"Both of us. After all . . ." she gave me a glimpse of a smile like an angel's sigh. "It's my dream too."

"I keep forgetting," I said. "Let's go."

The doors were locked, but I found a loose board and pried it free and we slid into big dark gloom and dust and cobwebs and the flutter of bats' wings, or of something that fluttered. Maybe it was my heart.

"There's nothing here," Miss Regis said. "It's just an old abandoned building."

"Correction: it's a place that looks like an old abandoned building. Maybe that's window dressing. Maybe if you scratch the dust you'll find shiny paint underneath."

She made a mark on the wall with her finger. Under the dust there was more dust.

"Proves nothing," I said. "For that matter nothing proves anything. If you can dream a thing you can dream it's real."

"You think you're dreaming now?"

"That's the question, isn't it, Miss Regis? How do you know when you're alive and awake?"

"Dreams aren't like this; they're vague and fuzzy around the edges. They're two-dimensional."

"I remember once thinking about dreams while I was walking up a hill in a college town in the fall. I could feel the dry leaves crunching under my shoes, and the pull of gravity at my legs; I could smell leaves burning somewhere, and feel the bite of the nippy autumn air, and I thought: 'Dreams aren't like reality. Reality is
real
. All the senses are involved, everything is in color and dimension.'" I paused for effect. "Then I woke up."

She shivered. "Then you can never be sure. A dream within a dream within a dream. I'm dreaming you—or you're dreaming me. We can never know—really."

"Maybe there's a message in that for us. Maybe we should be looking for truths that are true awake or asleep. Permanent things."

"What things?"

"Loyalty," I said. "Courage. Like you. Here with me, now."

She said, "Don't be silly," but she sounded pleased. I could barely see her face in the gloom.

"What do we do now? Go back?" she said.

"Let's look around first. Who knows? Maybe it's a game of blind-man's bluff and we're only an inch from winning." I felt my way forward across the littered floor, over scraps of board and paper and cardboard and tangles of baling wire. A rickety door was set in the far wall. It opened into a dark passage no neater than the big room.