Wine of the Dreamers (4 page)

“I have given this considerable thought, Dr. Lane. If you object, I shall ask to be relieved of all future responsibility in connection with Project Tempo. That will, of course, make a stink. It will be wafted to the nostrils of our lawmakers. Already there is some discernible pressure for a senate committeee to investigate this project and the apparently endless number of dollars required. My resignation will crystallize that move. You and your project will be investigated.”

“And?” Bard Lane said softly.

“And you will find that many people in Washington, many important people, will have the same idea that I have: the only way to deep space, my scientific friend, is through further perfections in physical propulsion units, such as the current A-six tubes. All this Einsteinian space fold, time field stuff is so much dreaming.”

“If you’re so certain of that, General, why don’t you recommend that the project be discontinued?”

“That is no part of my responsibility. My responsibility is to get your ship, the Beatty One, off the ground. If it fails in flight, it is no reflection on me. If you can’t get it off the ground, we can use the hull for a military project now under consideration. You have your choice, Dr. Lane. Cooperate in the matter of my assigning Leeber, or reconcile yourself to giving up the project.”

Bard Lane took long seconds to organize his thinking. He said, “General, let me be presumptuous enough to summarize recent history of interplanetary travel. Ever since initial work on the old chemical propulsion V-two at White Sands over twenty-five years ago, it has been a history of failure. Those failures can be divided into three categories. One—technical deficiencies in staff and the ships. Two—espionage and sabotage. Three—weaknesses in the human factor.

“Project Tempo, General, has its own answer to each category of failure. Placing full authority in the civilian technical staff is the answer to category one. Secret location and careful loyalty screening is the answer to two. Dr. Inly and her staff are the answer to three. I am still in
command, as you say. I will take Major Leeber under three conditions. One—he will not discuss technical problems or theory with any member of the staff. Two—he will wear civilian clothes and conform to all rules. Three—he will submit to class A security clearance, and to an extended stability test given all new employees.”

Leeber flushed and stared at the ceiling.

Sachson said, “Dr. Lane, do you feel you are in any position to set up those restrictions?”

Bard knew that this was the focal point of the entire meeting. If he backed down Leeber would soon acquire his own staff, a nucleus of a military headquarters, and inch by inch General Sachson would take over control. If he did not back down, Sachson might do as he threatened. Yet such a resignation would not look well on the general’s record.

“I will not accept Major Leeber on any other basis,” Dr. Lane said.

Sachson stared at him for a full ten seconds. He sighed. “I see no reason not to meet you halfway, Doctor. I do resent the implication that any member of my personal staff might be a poor security risk.”

“General, I can remember the case of Captain Sangerson,” Bard reminded him gently.

Sachson appeared not to have heard. He looked at Leeber. “Get the prisoner, Major,” he said.

Leeber opened the conference room door and spoke softly to the guard. Bill Kornal was brought in immediately.

Sharan Inly gasped and hurried to his side, examined the purple swelling under Kornal’s left eye. She turned toward the General, her brown eyes suddenly brittle. “This man is a patient, not a prisoner, General. Why has he been struck?”

Kornal grinned miserably. “Don’t make an issue of it, Dr. Inly. I don’t blame the guy who clobbered me.”

“Strike that off the record, Sergeant,” Sachson said. “Take that chair, Kornal. You are—or were—a technician.”

“More than a technician,” Bard Lane said quickly. “Kornal is a competent physicist with over five years at Brookhaven.”

“I’ll accept that,” Sachson said. His eyes were cool. “But it shouldn’t be necessary to keep reminding you, Dr. Lane, that I wish answers from the person addressed.” He turned his attention back to Kornal. “You smashed delicate equipment. Do you know the penalties for willful destruction of government property?”

“That isn’t important,” Kornal said bleakly.

General Sachson smiled. “I consider that to be a very peculiar statement. Possibly you can explain it to me.”

“General,” Kornal said, “the Beatty One means more to me than I could explain to you. I’ve never worked harder for anything in my life. And I was never happier. I don’t care if the punishment is boiling in oil.”

“You have a strange way of expressing your great regard for Project Tempo. Maybe you can tell us why you destroyed government property.”

“I don’t know.”

“Possibly you don’t want to tell us who employed you to smash the panels?” Sachson said in a silky voice.

“All I can do is tell you the way I told Bar—–Dr. Lane, General. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I put my clothes on and went out for some air and a smoke. I was standing outside when all of a sudden the cigarette fell out of my hand. Like somebody took over my hand and opened the fingers. Like I was being pushed back into a little corner of my mind, where I could look out, but I couldn’t do anything.”

“Hypnotized, I suppose,” Sachson said acidly.

“I don’t know. It wasn’t like when they give you that hypnotic drug. My own mind wasn’t fogged up. Just shoved back into a corner. That’s the only way I can describe it.”

“So there you were with your mind in a corner. Continue, please.”

“I went over to where the carpenters had been putting up a new bunkhouse. The plumbers had left some lengths
of pipe around. I picked up a short length and shoved it inside my belt. Then I went over to the lab and walked up to the two guards. They knew me. All this time you’ve got to understand, my body was doing things without my mind telling it to. And I had the funny feeling, sort of on the
edge
of my mind, that it wasn’t right to be building the Beatty One. It was nasty, somehow. Dirty. And all my friends, all the people sleeping in the area, they were enemies and not … very bright. You know what I mean?”

Sachson stared at him. “I think that needs a little more explanation.”

Kornal scratched his head. “Look. Suppose you went into an African village at night, General. They were all asleep. You would feel a lot smarter and superior to those savages, General, and yet you might be a little afraid of them waking up and ganging up on you. It was like that. I pulled out the pipe and hit the two guards, backhand and forehand. They dropped and I broke the door down. I went in, and it was like I’d never been there before. The equipment, the panels and all, they weren’t familiar to me. They were dirty, like the Beatty One, and I had to smash them. I had ten minutes in there before they got me. As soon as they grabbed me, I was myself again. I did a good job in there. Adamson cried when he saw it. Cried like a baby. The thing that took over my mind and body … it was a kind of devil, I guess.”

Bard intercepted Sharan’s quick, startled look.

“The devils had you, eh?” Sachson said, his eyebrows arching up toward his hairline in mock astonishment.

“Something had me. Something walked in and took over. There wasn’t a single damn thing I could do about it, either. After I was myself again, I tried to kill myself. But I couldn’t do it.”

Sachson turned to Colonel Powys. “What’s S.O.P., on such cases, Roger.”

Powys had a rusty, rumbling voice. “We can’t bring it to trial, General, if the suspect knows too much about any top secret project still under process of completion.
When that man tried to blow up the Gettysburg Three he had almost the same story this man has. The head doctors thought up a name for it, and we stowed him away in the nut house until the Gettysburg Three took off. Of course she turned unstable at five hundred miles up and crashed off Hawaii—–”

“I didn’t ask for a history of the Mars flights, Colonel. What happened to McBride?”

“Well, sir, when Gettysburg Three was done for, the head doctors said McBride had recovered and so we brought him to trial. Because he was an enlisted man, we were able to give him five years at hard labor, but as I see it, this Kornal doesn’t come under us.”

Sachson gave Powys a frigid glare. “Thank you, Colonel. Brief and to the point, as usual.”

Bard spoke to Kornal. “Bill, I think you’d better come back on the project. Want to try it?”

“Want to?” He held out his clever hands. “God, how I’d work! Adamson says four months lost. I could cut that down to less than three.”

Sachson said harshly, “Are you completely mad, Lane?”

Bard ignored him. “What do you think, Sharan?”

“If he can pass the original psycho-screening tests, I don’t see why not. We are using the best tests known. If he can pass them, he should be as acceptable as anyone who can pass them. Major Leeber can take them at the same time.”

“I go on record as objecting to this,” Sachson said.

“Me too,” Powys rumbled.

“Sorry, General,” Bard said. “Kornal is a highly trained man. We need him. If this was a temporary aberration, and not part of a repetitive pattern, he can help us undo the harm he did. I haven’t time for thinking about fitting punishment to crime. Bill will punish himself more than anyone else ever could.”

Sachson stood up. “It seems to be your baby. But it’s all in the minutes. When he loses another four months for you, Project Tempo will either be disbanded, or have a
new director. Sergeant, Dr. Lane will give you the exact wording on his request for Major Leeber. Meeting adjourned. Take Leeber with you when you drive back.”

They stood in silence as the little general strode out of the room, favoring them all with a final bleak nod.

As soon as the door closed behind the general, Major Leeber said unctuously, “I know that you folks are thinking of me as a thorn in your side. It wasn’t my fault the Old Man pushed me down your throat. But, believe me, I’ll stay out of your way. Tommy Leeber can be a real happy guy. All the boy needs is that five o’clock jolt of firewater and a few shell-pink ears to whisper into. Couple of times a week I’ll mail the old man a double-talk report and we can all live happily together in the mountains.”

Leeber had a lazy grin on overly-full lips under the dark military moustache, but under sleepy lids his eyes were steady, cold, unwinking black.

“Happy to have you with us,” Bard said without warmth.

Sharan stood up. Leeber moved closer to her. “And how about you, Miss Inly? Are you glad to have me aboard?”

“Of course,” she said absently. “Bard, how soon are we starting back?”

“Better make it noon. That will give some time for a little sleep.”

The others left. The sergeant looked expectantly at Bard. Bard smiled at him. “You know your boss. Write it up in any way that will make him happy, just so long as the conditions I imposed are included. Do you have them down?”

“Yes sir. Want me to read them back?”

“No need of that.” He walked toward the door.

The sergeant said, “Uh … Doctor Lane.”

He turned. “Yes?”

“About Major Leeber. He’s very smart, Doctor. And he gets along fine in the Army. I think maybe someday he’ll be a general.”

“A worthy ambition, I suppose.”

“He likes to make a … good impression, where it counts most.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. Thanks very much.”

The sergeant grinned. “Mention it not, Doctor.”

Back in the room assigned him in the B.O.Q., Bard Lane lay awaiting the steep drop into exhausted sleep. He thought of what Kornal had said. Possession by devils. A devil that could invade the unwilling mind, use the reluctant body as a tool. Were the ancients closer to the truth than we, with our measurements and dials and ink blot tests? A man could not face the theory that there is a measure of built-in instability in the mind, that insanity can come with the next breath. Even a theory of devils is more comforting than that. Maybe, he thought, we share this planet, have always shared it. We are … things that the Others can use to amuse themselves. Maybe they can slip gently into the human mind and exercise their evil humor. Maybe they visit us from some far planet, a gaudy picnic for them, a stained excursion. And perhaps they laugh.…

THREE

Raul Kinson’s world had walls. It was a world of rooms, of ramps, of corridors.

There was nothing else. Thought could not reach
beyond
the walls, beyond the furthest rooms. He had tried to thrust his thoughts
through
the walls, but thoughts cannot encompass the idea of nothingness, and so his thoughts curled back, repelled by a concept beyond the authority of the mind.

When he was ten years old he had found the opening in the wall. It was an opening you could not crawl through, because it was covered with something you
could look through as you look through water. Yet the substance was hard to the touch.

He was not yet old enough then to be permitted to dream.

Dreaming was for the older ones, the ones who had grown big enough to join the mating games.

In the ancient micro-books he had found the word for that hole in the wall. Window. He said it over and over. No one else read the micro-books. No one else knew the word. It was a secret that was precious, because it was not a made-up secret. It existed. Later, of course, he found that in the dreams there are many windows. They could be touched, opened, looked through. But not with one’s
own
hands. That was the difference. In the dreams you had to use other hands, other bodies.

He would not forget the day he had found the window. The other children angered him. He had never liked the games they played. They laughed at him because he was not frail, as they were. His games, the muscle-stretching games, hurt them and made them cry out. On this day they had permitted him to play one of their games. The old game of statue dance, in one of the biggest rooms on the lowest level. One spindly girl held the two white blocks and as they danced the girl would unexpectedly clap the blocks together. At that signal everyone stopped as though turned to stone. But Raul had been off balance and when he tried to stop he crashed awkwardly into two of the frail boys, knocking them to the floor with shrill yelps of pain and pettish anger. They were angered but his anger surpassed theirs. The translucent floor glowed softly amber.