Lathe of Heaven, The (15 page)

He never stirred. She looked at him with affection, then got into the sleeping bag down on the floor. Christ it was cold down here on the floor, and hard. She hadn't blown out the light. Or did you turn out wick lamps? You should do one and shouldn't do the other.

She remembered that from the commune. But she couldn't remember which. Oooooh SHIT it was cold down here!

Cold, cold. Hard. Bright. Too bright. Sunrise in the window through shift and flicker of trees. Over the bed. The floor trembled. The hills muttered and dreamed of falling in the sea, and over the hills, faint and horrible, the sirens of distant towns howled, howled, howled.

She sat up. The wolves howled for the world's end.

Sunrise poured in through the single window, hiding all that lay under its dazzling slant.

She felt through excess of light and found the dreamer sprawled on his face, still sleeping. "George! Wake up! Oh, George, please wake up! Something is wrong!"

He woke. He smiled at her, waking.

"Something is wrong--the sirens--what is it?"

Still almost in his dream, he said without emotion, "They've landed. "

For he had done just what she told him to do. She had told him to dream that the Aliens were no longer on the Moon.

8

Heaven and Earth are not humane.

--Lao Tse: V

In the Second World War the only part of the American mainland to suffer direct attack was the State of Oregon. Some Japanese fire balloons set a piece of forest burning on the coast. In the First Interstellar War the only part of the American mainland to be invaded was the State of Oregon. One might lay the blame on her politicians; the historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad, and no military butter is ever put upon the state bread. Oregon had no stockpiles of anything but hay, no missile launch pads, no NASA bases. She was obviously defenseless. The Anti-Alien Ballistic Missiles defending her went up from the enormous underground installations in Walla Walla, Washington, and Round Valley, California. From Idaho, most of which belonged to the U.S. Air Force, huge supersonic XXTT-9900s went screaming west, shattering every eardrum from Boise to Sun Valley, to patrol for any Alien ship that might somehow slip through the infallible network of the AABMs.

Repelled by the Alien ships, which carried a device that took control of the missiles'

guidance systems, the AABMs turned around somewhere in the middle stratosphere and returned, landing and exploding here and there over the State of Oregon. Holocausts raged on the dry eastern slopes of the Cascades. Gold Beach and the Dalles were wiped out by fire storms. Portland was not directly hit; but an errant nuclear-warhead AABM

striking Mount Hood near the old crater caused the dormant volcano to wake up. Steam and ground tremors ensued at once, and by noon of the first day of the Alien Invasion, April Fools' Day, a vent had opened on the northwestern side and was in violent eruption. Lava flow set the snowless, deforested slopes blazing, and threatened the communities of Zigzag and Rhododendron. A cinder cone began to form, and the air in Portland, forty miles away, was soon thickening and gray with ash. As evening came and the wind changed round to the south, the lower air cleared somewhat, revealing the somber orange flicker of the eruption in the eastern clouds. The sky, full of rain and ashes, thundered with the flights of XXTT-9900s vainly seeking Alien ships. Other flights of bombers and fighters were still coming in from the East Coast and from fellow nations of the Pact; these frequently shot each other down. The ground shook with earthquake and the impact of bombs and plane crashes. One of the Alien ships had landed only eight miles from the city limits, and so the southwestern outskirts of town were pulverized, as jet bombers methodically devastated the eleven-square-mile area in which the Alien ship was said to have been. As a matter of fact information had arrived that it was no longer there. But something had to be done. Bombs fell by mistake on many other parts of the city, as will happen with jet bombing. There was no glass left in any window downtown. It lay, instead, in all the downtown streets, in small fragments, an inch or two deep. Refugees from southwest Portland had to walk through it; women carried their children and walked weeping with pain, in thin shoes full of broken glass.

William Haber stood at the great window of his office in the Oregon Oneirological Institute watching the fires flare and wane down in the docks, and the bloody lightning of the eruption. There was still glass in that window; nothing had landed or exploded yet near Washington Park, and the ground tremors that cracked open whole buildings down in the river bottoms so far had done nothing worse up in the hills than rattle the window frames. Very faintly he could hear elephants screaming, over in the zoo. Streaks of an unusual purplish light showed occasionally to the north, perhaps over the area where the Willamette joins the Columbia; it was hard to locate anything for certain in the ashy, misty twilight. Large sections of the city were blacked out by power failure; other parts twinkled faintly, though the streetlights had not been turned on. No one else was in the Institute Building. Haber had spent all day trying to locate George Orr. When his search proved futile, and further search was made impossible by the hysteria and increasing dilapidation of the city, he had come up to the Institute. He had had to walk most of the way, and had found the experience unnerving. A man in his position, with so many calls on his time, of course drove a batcar. But the battery gave out and he couldn't get to a recharger because the crowds in the street were so thick. He had to get out and walk, against the current of the crowd, facing them all, right in amongst them. That had been distressing. He did not like crowds. But then the crowds had ceased and he was left walking all alone in the vast expanses of lawn and grove and forest of the Park: and that was a great deal worse.

Haber considered himself a lone wolf. He had never wanted marriage nor close friendships, he had chosen a strenuous research carried out when others sleep, he had avoided entanglements. He kept his sex life almost entirely to one-night stands, semipros, sometimes women and sometimes young men; he knew which bars and cinemas and saunas to go to for what he wanted. He got what he wanted and got clear again, before he or the other person could possibly develop any kind of need for the other. He prized his independence, his free will.

But he found it terrible to be alone, all alone in the huge indifferent Park, hurrying, almost running, toward the Institute, because he did not have anywhere else to go. He got there and it was all silent, all deserted.

Miss Crouch kept a transistor radio in her desk drawer. He got this, and kept it on softly so he could hear the latest reports, or anyway hear a human voice.

Everything he needed was here; beds, dozens of them, food, the sandwich and soft-drink machines for the all-night workers in the sleep labs. But he was not hungry. He felt instead a kind of apathy. He listened to the radio, but it would not listen to him. He was all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude. He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything. This horror of being by himself was strong enough that it almost drove him out of the Institute and down into the crowds again, but the apathy was still stronger than the fear. He did nothing, and the night darkened.

Over Mount Hood the reddish glow sometimes spread enormously, then paled again.

Something big hit, in the southwest of town, out of view from his office; and soon the clouds were lit from beneath with a livid glare that seemed to rise from that direction.

Haber was going out into the corridor to see what could be seen, carrying the radio with him. People were coming up the stairs, he had not heard them. For a moment he merely stared at them.

"Dr. Haber," one of them said.

It was Orr. "It's about time," Haber said bitterly. "Where the hell have you been all day?

Come on!"

Orr came up limping; the left side of his face was swollen and bloody, his lip was cut, and he had lost half a front tooth. The woman with him looked less battered but more exhausted: glassy-eyed, knees giving. Orr made her sit down on the couch in the office.

Haber said in a loud medical voice, "She get a blow on the head?"

"No. It's been a long day."

"I'm all right," the woman mumbled, shivering a little. Orr was quick and solicitous, taking off her repulsively muddy shoes and putting the camel's-hair blanket from the foot of the couch over her; Haber wondered who she was, but gave it only the one thought. He was beginning to function again. "Let her rest there, she'll be all right. Come here, clean yourself up. I spent the whole day looking for you. Where were you?"

"Trying to get back to town. There was some kind of bombing pattern we ran into, they blew up the road just ahead of the car. Car bounced around a lot. Turned over, I guess.

Heather was behind me, and stopped in time, so her car was all right and we came on in it. But we had to cut over to the Sunset Highway because 99 was all blown up, and then we had to leave the car at a roadblock out near the bird sanctuary. So we walked in through the Park."

"Where the hell were you coming from?" Haber had run hot water in his private washroom sink, and now gave Orr a steaming towel to hold to his bloody face.

"Cabin. In the Coast Range."

"What's wrong with your leg?"

"Bruised it when the car turned over, I guess. Listen, are they in the city yet?"

"If the military knows, it's not telling. All they'll say is that when the big ships landed this morning they split into small mobile units, something like helicopters, and scattered.

They're all over the western half of the state. They're reported to be slow-moving, but if they're shooting them down, they don't report it."

"We saw one," Orr's face emerged from the towel, marked with purple bruises, but less shocking now the blood and mud were off. "That's what it must have been. Little silvery thing, about thirty feet up, over a pasture near North Plains. It seemed to sort of hop along. Didn't look earthly. Are the Aliens fighting us, are they shooting planes down?"

"The radio doesn't say. No losses are reported, except civilians. Now come on, let's get some coffee and food into you. And then, by God, we'll have a therapy session in the middle of Hell, and put an end to this idiotic mess you've made." He had prepared a shot of sodium pentothal, and now took Orr's arm and gave him the shot without warning or apology.

"That's why I came here. But I don't know if--"

"If you can do it? You can. Come on!" Orr was hovering over the woman again. "She's all right. She's asleep, don't bother her, it's what she needs. Come on!" He took Orr down to the food machines, and got him a roast beef sandwich, an egg and tomato sandwich, two apples, four chocolate bars, and two cups of coffee with. They sat down at a table in Sleep Lab One, sweeping aside a Patience layout that had been abandoned at dawn when the sirens began to howl. "O.K. Eat. Now, in case you think that clearing up this mess is beyond you, forget it. I've been working on the Augmentor, and it can do it for you. I've got the model, the template, of your brain emissions during effective dreaming. Where I went wrong all month was in looking for an entity, an Omega Wave. There isn't one. It's simply a pattern formed by the combination of other waves, and over this last couple of days, before all hell broke loose, I finally worked it out. The cycle is ninety-seven seconds. That means nothing to you, even though it's your goddamn brain doing it. Put it this way, when you're dreaming effectively your entire brain is involved in a complexly synchronized pattern of emissions that takes ninety-seven seconds to complete itself and start again, a kind of counterpoint effect that is to ordinary d-state graphs what Beethoven's Great Fugue is to Mary Had a Little Lamb. It is incredibly complex, yet it's consistent and it recurs. Therefore I can feed it to you straight, and amplified. The Augmentor's all set up, it's ready for you, it's really going to fit the inside of your head at last! When you dream this time, you'll dream big, baby. Big enough to stop this crazy invasion, and get us clean over into another continuum, where we can start fresh. That's what you do, you know. You don't change things, or lives, you shift the whole continuum."

"It's nice to be able to talk about it with you," Orr said, or something like it; he had eaten the sandwiches incredibly fast, despite his cut mouth and broken tooth, and was now engulfing a chocolate bar. There was irony, or something, in what he said, but Haber was much too busy to bother about it.

"Listen. Did this invasion just happen, or did it happen because you missed an appointment?"

"I dreamed it."

"You let yourself have an uncontrolled effective dream?" Haber let the heavy anger lie in his voice. He had been too protective, too easy on Orr. Orr's irresponsibility was the cause of the death of many innocent people, the wreckage and panic loose in the city: he must face up to what he had done.

"It wasn't," Orr was just beginning, when a really big explosion hit. The building jumped, rang, crackled, electronic apparatus leaped about by the row of empty beds, coffee slopped in the cups. "Was that the volcano or the Air Force?" Orr said, and in the midst of the natural dismay the explosion had caused him, Haber noticed that Orr seemed quite undismayed. His reactions were utterly abnormal. On Friday he had been going all to pieces over a mere ethical point; here on Wednesday in the midst of Armageddon he was cool and calm. He seemed to have no personal fear. But he must have. If Haber was afraid, of course Orr must be. He was suppressing fear. Or did he think, Haber suddenly wondered, that because he had dreamed the invasion, it was all just a dream?

What if it was?

Whose?

"We'd better get back upstairs," Haber said, getting up. He felt increasingly impatient and irritable; the excitement was getting too extensive. "Who's the woman with you, anyway?"

"That's Miss Lelache," Orr said, looking at him oddly. "The lawyer. She was here Friday."