Lathe of Heaven, The (9 page)

What would it do to the woman? Would she understand, would she go mad, what would she do? Would she keep both memories, as he did, the true one and the new one, the old one and the true one?

She must not. She would interfere, bring in other observers, spoil the experiment completely, wreck his plans.

He would stop her at any cost. He turned to her, ready for violence, his hands clenched.

She was just standing there. Her brown skin had gone livid, her mouth was open. She was dazed. She could not believe what she had seen out that window. She could not and did not.

Haber's extreme physical tension relaxed a little. He was fairly sure, looking at her, that she was so confused and traumatized as to be harmless. But he must move quickly, all the same.

"He'll sleep for a while now," he said; his voice sounded almost normal, though hoarsened by the tightness of his throat muscles. He had no idea what he was going to say, but plunged ahead; anything to break the spell. "I'll let him have a short s-sleep period now. Not too long, or his dream recall will be poor. It's a nice view, isn't it? These easterly winds we've been having, they're godsend. In fall and whiter I don't see the mountains for months at a go. But when the clouds clear off, there they are. It's a great place, Oregon. Most unspoiled state in the Union. Wasn't exploited much before the Crash. Portland was just beginning to get big in the late seventies. Are you a native Oregonian?"

After a minute she nodded groggily. The matter-of-fact tone of his voice, if nothing else, was getting through to her.

"I'm from New Jersey originally. It was terrible there when I was a kid, the environmental deterioration. The amount of tearing down and cleaning up the East Coast had to do after the Crash, and is still doing, is unbelievable. Out here, the real damage of overpopulation and environmental mismanagement hadn't yet been done, except in California. The Oregon ecosystem was still intact." It was dangerous, this talking right on the critical subject, but he could not think of anything else: he was as if compelled.

His head was too full, holding the two sets of memories, two full systems of information: one of the real (no longer) world with a human population of nearly seven billion and increasing geometrically, and one of the real (now) world with a population of less than one billion and still not stabilized.

My God, he thought, what has Orr done?

Six billion people.

Where are they?

But the lawyer must not realize. Must not. "Ever been East, Miss Lelache?"

She looked at him vaguely and said, "No."

"Well, why bother. New York's doomed in any case, and Boston; and anyhow the future of this country is out here. This is the. growing edge. This is where it's at, as they used to say when I as a kid! I wonder, by the way, if you know Dewey Furth, at the HEW office here."

"Yes," she said, still punch-drunk, but beginning to respond, to act as if nothing had happened. A spasm of relief went through Haber's body. He wanted to sit down suddenly, to breathe hard. The danger was past. She was rejecting the incredible experience. She was asking herself now, what's wrong with me? Why on earth did I look out the window expecting to see a city of three million? Am I having some sort of crazy spell?

Of course, Haber thought, a man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.

"It's stuffy in here," he said with a touch of solicitude in his voice, and went to the thermostat on the wall. "I keep it warm; old sleep-researcher's habit; body temperature falls during sleep, and you don't want a lot of subjects or patients with nose colds. But this electric heat's too efficient, it gets too warm, makes me feel groggy. ... He should be waking soon." But he did not want Orr to recall his dream clearly, to recount it, to confirm the miracle. "I think I'll let him go a bit longer, I don't care about the recall on this dream, and he's right down in third-stage sleep now. Let him stay there while we finish talking. Was there anything else you wanted to ask about?"

"No. No, I don't think so." Her bangles clashed uncertainly. She blinked, trying to pull herself together. "If you'll send in the full description of your machine there, and its operation, and the current uses you're putting it to, and the results, all that, you know, to Mr. Furth's office, that should be the end of it. ... Have you taken out a patent on the device?"

"Applied for one."

She nodded. "Might be worth while." She had wandered, clashing and clattering faintly, over toward the sleeping man, and now stood looking at him with an odd expression on her thin, brown face.

"You have a queer profession," she said abruptly. "Dreams; watching people's brains work; telling them what to dream. ... I suppose you do a lot of your research at night?"

"Used to. The Augmentor may save us some of that; we'll be able to get sleep whenever we want, of the kind we want to study, using it. But a few years ago there was a period when I never went to bed before 6 A.M. for thirteen months." He laughed. "I boast about that now. My record. These days I let my staff carry most of the graveyard-shift load.

Compensations of middle age!"

"Sleeping people are so remote," she said, still looking at Orr. "Where are they? . . ."

"Right here," Haber said, and tapped the EEG screen. "Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy.

The sleeper turns his back on everyone. 'The mystery of the individual is strongest in sleep,' a writer in my field said. But of course a mystery is merely a problem we haven't solved yet! . . . He's due to wake now. George . . . George . . . Wake up, George."

And he woke as he generally did, fast, shifting from one state to the other without groans, stares, and relapses. He sat up and looked first at Miss Lelache, then at Haber, who had just removed the trancap from his head. He got up, stretching a little, and went over to the window. He stood looking out.

There was a singular poise, almost a monumentally, in the stance of his slight figure: he was completely still, still as the center of something. Caught, neither Haber nor the woman spoke.

Orr turned around and looked at Haber.

"Where are they?" he said. "Where did they all go?"

Haber saw the woman's eyes open wide, saw the tension rise in her, and knew his peril.

Talk, he must talk! "I'd judge from the EEG," he said, and heard his voice come out deep and warm, just as he wanted it, "that you had a highly charged dream just now, George.

It was disagreeable; it was in fact very nearly a nightmare. The first 'bad' dream you've had here. Right?"

"I dreamed about the Plague," Orr said; and he shivered from head to foot, as if he were going to be sick.

Haber nodded. He sat down behind his desk. With his peculiar docility, his way of doing the habitual and acceptable thing, Orr came and sat down opposite in the big leather chair placed for interviewees and patients.

"You had a real hump to get over, and the getting over it wasn't easy. Right? This was the first time, George, that I've had you handle a real anxiety in a dream. This time, under my direction as suggested to you in hypnosis, you approached one of the deeper elements in your psychic malaise. The approach was not easy, or pleasant In fact, that dream was a heller, wasn't it?"

"Do you remember the Plague Years?" Orr inquired, not aggressively, but with a tinge of something unusual in his voice: sarcasm? And he looked round at the Lelache, who had retired to her chair in the corner.

"Yes, I do. I was already a grown man when the first epidemic struck. I was twenty-two when that first announcement was made in Russia, that chemical pollutants in the atmosphere were combining to form virulent carcinogens. The next night they released the hospital statistics from Mexico City. Then they figured out the incubation period, and everybody began counting. Waiting. And there were the riots, and the fuck-ins, and the Doomsday Band, and the Vigilantes. And my parents died that year. My wife the next year. My two sisters and their children after that. Everyone I knew." Haber spread out his hands. "Yes, I remember those years," he said heavily. "When I must."

"They took care of the overpopulation problem, didn't they?" said Orr, and this time the edge was clear. "We really did it."

"Yes. They did. There is no overpopulation now. Was there any other solution, besides nuclear war? There is now no perpetual famine in South America, Africa, and Asia.

When transport channels are fully restored, there won't be even the pockets of hunger that are still left. They say a third of humanity still goes to bed hungry at night; but in 1980 it was 92 per cent. There are no floods now in the Ganges caused by the piling up of corpses of people dead of starvation. There's no protein deprivation and rickets among the working-class children of Portland, Oregon. As there was--before the Crash."

"The Plague," Orr said.

Haber leaned forward across the big desk. "George. Tell me this. Is the world overpopulated?"

"No," the man said. Haber thought he was laughing, and drew back a little apprehensively; then he realized that it was tears that gave Orr's eyes that queer shine.

He was near cracking. All the better. If he went to pieces, the lawyer would be still less inclined to believe anything he said that fitted with whatever she might recall.

"But half an hour ago, George, you were profoundly worried, anxious, because you believed that overpopulation was a present threat to civilization, to the whole Terran ecosystem. Now I don't expect that anxiety to be gone, far from it. But I believe its quality has changed, since your living through it in the dream. You are aware, now, that it had no basis in reality. The anxiety still exists, but with this difference: you know now that it is irrational--that it conforms to an inward desire, rather than to outward reality.

Now that's a beginning. A good beginning. A damn lot to have accomplished in one session, with one dream! Do you realize that? You've got a handle, now, to come at this whole thing with. You've got on top of something that's been on top of you, crushing you, making you feel pressed down and squeezed in. It's going to be a faker fight from now on, because you're a freer man. Don't you feel that? Don't you feel, right now, already, just a little less crowded?"

Orr looked at him, then at the lawyer again. He said nothing.

There was a long pause.

"You look beat," Haber said, a verbal pat on the shoulder. He wanted to calm Orr down, to get him back into his normal self-effacing state, in which he would lack the courage to say anything about his dream powers in front of the third person; or else to get him to break right down, to behave with obvious abnormality. But he wouldn't do either. "If there wasn't an HEW observer lurking in the corner, I'd offer you a shot of whisky. But we'd better not turn a therapy session into a wing-ding, eh?"

"Don't you want to hear the dream?"

"If you want."

"I was burying them. In one of the big ditches ... I did work in the Interment Corps, when I was sixteen, after my parents got it. ... Only in the dream the people were all naked and looked like they'd died of starvation. Hills of them. I had to bury them all. I kept looking for you, but you weren't there."

"No," Haber said reassuringly, "I haven't figured in your dreams yet, George."

"Oh, yes. With Kennedy. And as a horse." "Yes; very early in the therapy," Haber said, dismissing it. "This dream then did use some actual recall material from your experience

--"

"No. I never buried anybody. Nobody died of the Plague. There wasn't any Plague. It's all in my imagination. I dreamed it."

Damn the stupid little bastard! He had got out of control. Haber cocked his head and maintained a tolerant, noninterfering silence; it was all he could do, for a stronger move might make the lawyer suspicious.

"You said you remembered the Plague; but don't you also remember that there wasn't any Plague, that nobody died of pollutant cancer, that the population just kept on getting bigger and bigger? No? You don't remember that? What about you, Miss Lelache--do you remember it both ways?"

But at this Haber stood up: "Sorry, George, but I can't let Miss Lelache be drawn into this. She's not qualified. It would be improper for her to answer you. This is a psychiatric session. She's here to observe the Augmentor, and nothing further. I must insist on this."

Orr was quite white; the cheekbones stood out in his face. He sat staring up at Haber. He said nothing.

"We've got a problem here, and there's only one way to lick it, I'm afraid. Cut the Gordian knot. No offense, Miss Lelache, but as you can see, you're the problem. We're simply at a stage where our dialogue can't support a third member, even a nonparticipant. Best thing to do is just call it off. Right now. Start again tomorrow at four. O.K., George?"

Orr stood up, but didn't head for the door. "Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber," he said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, "that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality's being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the tune--only we don't know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that's true, I guess we're lucky not knowing it. This is confusing enough."

Genial, noncommittal, reassuring, Haber talked him to the door, and out of it.

"You hit a crisis session," he said to Lelache, shutting the door behind him. He wiped his forehead, let weariness and worry appear in his face and tone. "Whew! What a day to have an observer present!"

"It was extremely interesting," she said, and her bracelets chattered a little.

"He's not hopeless," Haber said. "A session like this one gives even me a pretty discouraging impression. But he has a chance, a real chance, of working out of this delusion pattern he's caught in, this terrific dread of dreaming. The trouble is, it's a complex pattern, and a not unintelligent mind caught in it; he's all too quick at weaving new nets to trap himself in. ... If only he'd been sent for therapy ten years ago, when he was in his teens; but of course the Recovery had barely got underway ten years ago. Or even a year ago, before he started deteriorating his whole reality-orientation with drugs.