Lathe of Heaven, The (16 page)

"How'd she happen to be with you?"

"She was looking for me, came to the cabin after me."

"You can explain all that later," Haber said. There was no time to waste on this trivia.

They had to get out, to get out of this burning exploding world.

Just as they entered Haber's office the glass burst out of the great double window with a shrill, singing sound and a huge sucking-out of air; both men were impelled toward the window as if toward the mouth of a vacuum cleaner. Everything then turned white: everything. They both fell over.

Neither was aware of any noise.

When he could see again, Haber scrambled up, holding on to his desk. Orr was already over by the couch, trying to reassure the bewildered woman. It was cold in the office: the spring air had a moist chill in it, pouring in the empty windows, and it smelled of smoke, burnt insulation, ozone, sulfur, and death. "We ought to get down into the basement, don't you think?" Miss Lelache said in a reasonable tone, though she was shivering hard.

"Go on," Haber said. "We've got to stay up here a while."

"Stay here?"

"The Augmentor's here. It doesn't plug in and out like a portable TV! Get on down into the basement, we'll join you when we can."

"You're going to put him to sleep now?" the woman said, as the trees down the hill suddenly burst into bright yellow balls of flame. The eruption of Mount Hood was quite hidden by events closer at hand; the earth, however, had been trembling gently for the past few minutes, a sort of fundamental palsy that made one's hands and mind shake sympathetically.

"You're fucking right I am. Go on. Get down to the basement, I need the couch. Lie down, George.... Listen, you, in the basement just past the janitor's room you'll see a door marked Emergency Generator. Go in there, find the ON handle. Have your hand on it, and if the lights fail, turn it on. It'll take a heavy pressure upward on the handle. Go on!"

She went. She was still shaking, and smiling; as she went she caught Orr's hand for a second and said, "Pleasant dreams, George."

"Don't worry," Orr said, "It's all right."

"Shut up," Haber snapped. He had switched on the Hypnotape he had recorded himself, but Orr wasn't even paying attention, and the noise of explosions and things burning made it hard to hear. "Shut your eyes!" Haber commanded, put his hand on Orr's throat, and turned up the gain. "RELAXING," said his own huge voice. "YOU FEEL

COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED. YOU WILL ENTER THE--" The building leaped like a spring lamb and settled down askew. Something appeared in the dirty-red, opaque glare outside the glassless window: an ovoid, large object, moving in a sort of hopping fashion through the air. It came directly toward the window. "We've got to get out!"

Haber shouted over his own voice, and then realized that Orr was already hypnotized.

He snapped the tape off and leaned down so he could speak in Orr's ear. "Stop the invasion!" he shouted. "Peace, peace, dream that we're at peace with everybody! Now sleep! Antwerp!" and he switched on the Augmentor.

But he had no time to look at Orr's EEG. The ovoid shape was hovering directly outside the window. Its blunt snout, lit luridly by reflections of the burning city, pointed straight at Haber. He cowered down by the couch, feeling horribly soft and exposed, trying to protect the Augmentor with his inadequate flesh, stretching out his arms across it. He craned over his shoulder to watch the Alien ship. It pressed closer. The snout, looking like oily steel, silver with violet streaks and gleams, filled the entire window. There was a crunching, racking sound as it jammed itself into the frame. Haber sobbed aloud with terror, but stayed spread out there between the Alien and the Augmentor.

The snout, halting, emitted a long thin tentacle which moved about questingly in the air.

The end of it, rearing like a cobra, pointed at random, then settled in Haber's direction.

About ten feet from him, it hung in the air and pointed at him for some seconds. Then it withdrew with a hiss and crack like a carpenter's flexible rule, and a high, humming noise came from the ship. The metal sill of the window screeched and buckled. The ship's snout whirled around and fell off onto the floor. From the hole that gaped behind it, something emerged.

It was, Haber thought in emotionless horror, a giant turtle. Then he realized that it was encased in a suit of some kind, which gave it a bulky, greenish, armored, inexpressive look like a giant sea turtle standing on its hind legs.

It stood quite still, near Haber's desk. Very slowly it raised its left arm, pointing at him a metallic, nozzled instrument.

He faced death.

A flat, toneless voice came out of the elbow joint. "Do not do to others what you wish others not to do to you," it said.

Haber stared, his heart faltering.

The huge, heavy, metallic arm came up again. "We are attempting to make peaceful arrival," the elbow said all on one note. "Please inform others that this is peaceful arrival. We do not have any weapons. Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear. Please cease destruction of self and others. We do not have any weapons. We are nonaggressive unfighting species."

"I--I--I can't control the Air Force," Haber stammered.

"Persons in flying vehicles are being contacted presently," the creature's elbow joint said. "Is this a military installation?"

Word order showed it to be a question. "No," Haber said, "No, nothing of the kind--"

"Please then excuse unwarranted intrusion." The huge, armored figure whirred slightly and seemed to hesitate. "What is device?" it said, pointing with its right elbow joint at the machinery connected to the head of the sleeping man.

"An electroencephalograph, a machine which records the electrical activity of the brain

--"

"Worthy," said the Alien, and took a short, checked step toward the couch, as if longing to look. "The individual-person is iahklu'. The recording machine records this perhaps.

Is all your species capable of iahklu'?

"I don't--don't know the term, can you describe--"

The figure whirred a little, raised its left elbow over its head (which, turtle-like, hardly protruded above the great sloped shoulders of the carapace), and said, "Please excuse.

Incommunicable by communication-machine invented hastily in very-recent-past. Please excuse. It is necessary that all we proceed in very-near-future rapidly toward other responsible individual-persons engaged in panic and capable of destroying selves and others. Thank you very much." And it crawled back into the nose of the ship.

Haber watched the great, round soles of its feet disappear into the dark cavity.

The nose cone jumped up from the floor and twirled itself smartly into place: Haber had a vivid impression that it was not acting mechanically, but temporally, repeating its previous actions in reverse, precisely like a film run backward. The Alien ship, jarring the office and tearing out the rest of the window frame with a hideous noise, withdrew, and vanished into the lurid murk outside.

The crescendo of explosions, Haber now realized, had ceased; in fact it was fairly quiet.

Everything trembled a little, but that would be the mountain, not the bombs. Sirens whooped, far and desolate, across the river.

George Orr lay inert on the couch, breathing irregularly, the cuts and swellings on his face looking ugly on his pallor. Cinders and fumes still drifted in the chill, choking air through the smashed window. Nothing had been changed. He had undone nothing. Had he done anything yet? There was a slight eye movement under the closed lids; he was still dreaming; he could not do otherwise, with the Augmentor overriding the impulses of his own brain. Why didn't he change continuums, why didn't he get them into a peaceful world, as Haber had told him to do? The hypnotic suggestion hadn't been clear or strong enough. They must start all over. Haber switched off the Augmentor, and spoke Orr's name thrice.

"Don't sit up, the Augmentor hookup's still on you. What did you dream?"

Orr spoke huskily and slowly, not fully awakened. "The ... an Alien was here. In here. In the office. It came out of the nose of one of their hopping ships. In the window. You and it were talking together."

"But that's not a dream! That happened! Goddamn, we'll have to do this over again. That might have been an atomic blast a few minutes ago, we've got to get into another continuum, we may all be dead of radiation exposure already--"

"Oh, not this time," Orr said, sitting up and combing off electrodes as if they were dead lice. "Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber."

Haber stared at him.

"I suppose your Augmentor increased the.immediacy of it for you," Orr said, still with extraordinary calmness. He appeared to ponder for a little. "Listen, couldn't you call Washington?"

"What for?"

"Well, a famous scientist right here in the middle of it all might get listened to. They'll be looking for explanations. Is there somebody in the government you know, that you might call? Maybe the HEW Minister? You could tell him that the whole thing's a misunderstanding, the Aliens aren't invading or attacking. They simply didn't realize until they landed that humans depend on verbal communication. They didn't even know we thought we were at war with them. ... If you could tell somebody who can get the President's ear. The sooner Washington can call off the military, the fewer people will be killed here. It's only civilians getting killed. The Aliens aren't hurting the soldiers, they aren't even armed, and I have the impression that they're indestructible, in those suits.

But if somebody doesn't stop the Air Force, they'll blow up the whole city. Give it a try, Dr. Haber. They might listen to you."

Haber felt that Orr was right. There was no reason to it, it was the logic of insanity, but there it was: his chance. Orr spoke with the incontrovertible conviction of dream, in which there is no free will: do this, you must do it, it is to be done.

Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use, even to obey, the weak tool? This went through his mind, not for the first time, but even as he thought it he was going over to the desk, to the telephone. He sat down and dialed direct-distance to the HEW offices in Washington. The call, handled through the Federal Telephone switchboards in Utah, went straight through.

While he was waiting to be put through to the Minister of Health, Education, and Welfare, whom he knew fairly well, he said to Orr, "Why didn't you put us over in another continuum where this mess simply never happened? It would be a lot easier.

And nobody would be dead. Why didn't you simply get rid of the Aliens?"

"I don't choose," Orr said. "Don't you see that yet? I follow."

"You follow my hypnotic suggestions, yes, but never fully, never directly and simply--"

"I didn't mean those," Orr said, but Rantow's personal secretary was now on the line.

While Haber was talking Orr slipped away, downstairs, no doubt, to see about the woman. That was all right. As he talked to the secretary and then to the Minister himself, Haber began to feel convinced that things were going to be all right now, that the Aliens were in fact totally unaggressive, and that he would be able to make Rantow believe this, and, through Rantow, the President and his Generals. Orr was no longer necessary.

Haber saw what must be done, and would lead his country out of the mess.

9

Those who dream of feasting wake to lamendation.

--Chuang Tse: II

It was the third week in April. Orr had made a date, last week, to meet Heather Lelache at Dave's for lunch on Thursday, but as soon as he started out from his office he knew it wouldn't work.

There were by now so many different memories, so many skeins of life experience, jostling in his head, that he scarcely tried to remember anything. He took it as it came.

He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.

His office was on the third floor of the Civil Planning Bureau; his position was more impressive than any he had had before: he was in charge of the South-East Suburban Parks section of the City Planning Commission. He did not like the job and never had.

He had always managed to remain some kind of draftsman, up until the dream last Monday that had, in juggling the Federal and State Governments around to suit some plan of Haber's, so thoroughly rearranged the whole social system that he had ended up as a City bureaucrat. He had never held a job, in any of his lives, which was quite up his alley; what he knew he was best at was design, the realization of proper and fitting shape and form for things, and this talent had not been in demand in any of his various existences. But this job, which he had (now) held and disliked for five years, was way out of line. That worried him.

Until this week there had been an essential continuity, a coherence, among all the existences resultant from his dreams. He had always been some kind of draftsman, had always lived on Corbett Avenue. Even in the life that had ended on the concrete steps of a burnt-out house in a dying city in a ruined world, even in that life, up until there were no more jobs and no more homes, those continuities had held. And throughout all the subsequent dreams or lives, many more important things had also remained constant. He had improved the local climate a little, but not much, and the Greenhouse Effect remained, a permanent legacy of the middle of the last century. Geography remained perfectly steady: the continents were where they were. So did national boundaries, and human nature, and so forth. If Haber had suggested that he dream up a nobler race of men, he had failed to do so.

But Haber was learning how to run his dreams better. These last two sessions had changed things quite radically. He still had his flat on Corbett Avenue, the same three rooms, faintly scented with the manager's marijuana; but he worked as a bureaucrat in a huge building downtown, and downtown was changed out of all recognition. It was almost as impressive and skyscraping as it had been when there had been no population crash, and it was much more durable and handsome. Things were being managed very differently, now.