Lathe of Heaven, The (21 page)

In his sleep George saw the depths of the open sea.

Heather was the secretary of an aged and otiose legal partnership, Ponder and Rutti.

When she got off work at four-thirty the next day. Friday, she didn't take the monorail and trolley home, but rode the funicular up to Washington Park. She had told George she might come meet him at HURAD, since his therapy session wasn't till five, and after it they might go back downtown together and eat at one of the WPC restaurants on the International Mall. "It'll be all right," he told her, understanding her motive and meaning that he would be all right. She replied, "I know. But it would be fun to eat out, and I saved some stamps. We haven't tried the Casa Boliviana yet."

She got to the HURAD tower early, and waited on the vast marble steps. He came on the next car. She saw him get off, with others whom she did not see. A short, neatly made man, very self-contained, with an amiable expression. He moved well, though he stooped a little like most desk workers. When he saw her his eyes, which were clear and light, seemed to grow lighter, and he smiled: again that heartbreaking smile of unmitigated joy. She loved him violently. If Haber hurt him again she would go in there and tear Haber into little bits. Violent feelings were foreign to her, usually, but not where George was concerned. And anyhow, today for some reason she felt different from usual.

She felt bolder, harder. She had said "shit" aloud, twice, at work, making old Mr. Rutti flinch. She had hardly ever said "shit" before aloud, and she hadn't intended to do so either time, and yet she had done it, as if it were a habit too old to break....

"Hello, George," she said.

"Hello," he said, taking her hands. "You are beautiful, beautiful."

How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she had ever met.

"It's five already," she said. "I'll wait down here. If it rains, I'll be in the lobby. It's like Napoleon's Tomb in there, all that black marble and stuff. It's nice out here, though. You can hear the lions roaring down in the Zoo."

"Come on up with me," he said. "It's raining already." In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of spring--the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it. "He's got a nice waiting room. You'll probably be sharing it with a mess of Fed-peep bigwigs and three or four Chiefs of State. All dancing attendance on the Director of HURAD. And I have to go crawling through and get shown in ahead of them, every damn time. Dr. Haber's tame psycho. His exhibition. His token patient...." He was steering her through the big lobby under the Pantheon dome, onto moving walkways, up an incredible, apparently endless, spiral escalator. "HURAD

really runs the world, as is," he said. "I can't help wondering why Haber needs any other form of power. He's got enough, God knows. Why can't he stop here? I suppose it's like Alexander the Great, needing new worlds to conquer. I never did understand that. How was work today?"

He was tense, that's why he was talking so much; but he didn't seem depressed or distressed, as he had for weeks. Something had restored his natural equanimity. She had never really believed that he could lose it for long, lose his way, get out of touch; yet he had been wretched, increasingly so. Now he was not, and the change was so sudden and complete that she wondered what, in fact, had worked it All she could date it from was their sitting down in the still-unfurnished living room to listen to that nutty and subtle Beatles song last evening, and both falling asleep. From then on, he had been himself again.

Nobody was in Haber's big, sleek waiting room. George said his name to a desklike thing by the door, an auto-receptionist, he explained to Heather. She was making a nervous funny about did they have autoeroticists, too, when a door opened, and Haber stood in the doorway.

She had met him only once, and briefly, when he first took George as a patient. She had forgotten what a big man he was, how big a beard he had, how drastically impressive he looked. "Come on in, George!" he thundered. She was awed. She cowered. He noticed her. "Mrs. Orr--glad to see you! Glad you came! You come on in, too."

"Oh no. I just--"

"Oh yes. D'you realize that this is probably George's last session here? Did he tell you?

Tonight we wind it up. You certainly ought to be present. Come on. I've let my staff out early. Expect you saw the stampede on the Down escalator. Felt like having the place to myself tonight That's it, sit down there." He went on; there was no need to say anything meaningful in reply. She was fascinated by Haber's demeanor, the kind of exultation he exuded; she hadn't remembered what a masterful, genial person he was, larger than life-size. It was unbelievable, really, that such a man, a world leader and a great scientist, should have spent all these weeks of personal therapy on George, who wasn't anybody.

But, of course, George's case was very important, researchwise.

"One last session," he was saying, while adjusting something in a computerish-looking thing in the wall at the head of the couch. "One last controlled dream, and then, I think, we've got the problem licked. You game, George?"

He used her husband's name often. She remembered George's saying a couple of weeks ago, "He keeps calling me by my name; I think it's to remind himself that there's someone else present."

"Sure, I'm game," George said, and sat down on the couch, lifting his face a little; he glanced once at Heather and smiled. Haber at once started attaching the little things on wires to his head, parting the thick hair to do so. Heather remembered that process from her own brain-printing, part of the battery of tests and records made on every Fed-peep citizen. It made her uneasy to see it done to her husband. As if the electrode things were little suction cups that would drain the thoughts out of George's head and turn them into scribbles on a piece of paper, the meaningless writing of the mad. George's face now wore a look of extreme concentration. What was he thinking?

Haber put his hand on George's throat suddenly as if about to throttle him, and reaching out with the other hand, started a tape which spoke the hypnotist's spiel in his own voice:

"You are entering the hypnotic state...." Within a few seconds he stopped it and tested for hypnosis. George was under.

"O.K.," Huber said, and paused, evidently pondering. Huge, like a grizzly bear reared up on its hind legs, he stood there between her and the slight, passive figure on the couch.

"Now listen carefully, George, and remember what I say. You are deeply hypnotized and will follow explicitly all instructions I give you. You're going to go to sleep when I tell you to, and you'll dream. You'll have an effective dream. You'll dream that you are completely normal--that you are like everybody else. You'll dream that you once had, or thought you had, a capacity for effective dreaming, but that this is no longer true. Your dreams from henceforth will be just like everybody else's, meaningful to you alone, having no effect on outward reality. You'll dream all this; whatever symbolism you use to express the dream, its effective content will be that you can no longer dream effectively. It will be a pleasant dream, and you'll wake up when I say your name three times, feeling alert and well. After this dream you will never dream effectively again.

Now, lie back. Get comfortable. You're going to sleep. You're asleep. Antwerp!"

As he said this last word, George's lips moved and he said something in the faint, remote voice of the sleep-talker. Heather could not hear what he said, but she thought at once of last night; she had been nearly asleep, curled up next to him, when he had said something aloud: air per annum, it sounded like. "What?" she had said, and he had said nothing, he was asleep. As he was now.

Her heart contracted within her as she watched him lying there, his hands quiet at his sides, vulnerable.

Haber had risen, and now pressed a white button on the side of the machine at the head of the couch; some of the electrode wires went to it, and some to the EEG machine, which she recognized. The thing in the wall must be the Augmentor, the thing all the research was about.

Haber came over to her, where she sat sunk deep in a huge leather armchair. Real leather, she had forgotten what real leather felt like. It was like the vinyleathers, but more interesting to the fingers. She was frightened. She did not understand what was going on. She looked up askance at the big man standing before her, the bear-shaman-god.

"This is the culmination, Mrs. Orr," he was saying in a lowered voice, "of a long series of suggested dreams. We've been building toward this session--this dream--for weeks now. I'm glad you came, I didn't think to ask you, but your presence is an added boon in making him feel completely secure and trustful. He knows I can't pull any tricks with you around! Right? Actually I'm pretty confident of success. It'll do the trick. The dependency on sleeping drugs will be quite broken, once the obsessive fear of dreaming is erased. It's purely a matter of conditioning. ... I've got to keep an eye on that EEG, he'll be dreaming now." Quick and massive, he moved across the room. She sat still, watching George's calm face, from which the expression of concentration, all expression, was gone. So he might look in death.

Dr. Haber was busy with his machines, restlessly busy, bowing over them, adjusting them, watching them. He paid no heed at all to George.

"There," he said softly--not to her, Heather thought; he was his own audience. "That's it.

Now. Now a little break, second-stage sleep for a bit, between dreams." He did something to the equipment in the wall. "Then we'll run a little test...." He came over to her again; she wished he would really ignore her instead of pretending to talk to her. He seemed not to know the uses of silence. "Your husband has been of inestimable service to our research here, Mrs. Orr. A unique patient. What we've learned about the nature of dreaming, and the employment of dreams in both positive and negative conditioning therapy, will be of literally inestimable value in every walk of life. You know what HURAD stands for. Human Utility: Research and Development. Well, what we've learned from this case will be of immense, literally immense, human utility. An amazing thing to develop out of what appeared to be a routine case of minor drug abuse! The most amazing thing about it is that the hacks down at the Med School had the wits to notice anything special in the case and refer it up to me. You seldom get so much acuteness in academic clinical psychologists." His eye had been on his watch all along, and he now said, "Well, back to Baby," and swiftly recrossed the room. He diddled with the Augmentor thing again and said aloud, "George. You're still asleep, but you can hear me. You can hear and understand me perfectly. Nod a little if you hear me."

The calm face did not change, but the head nodded once. Like the head of a puppet on a string.

"Good. Now, listen carefully. You're going to have another vivid dream. You'll dream that . . . that there's a mural photograph on the wall, here in my office. A big picture of Mount Hood, all covered with snow. You'll dream that you see the mural there on the wall behind the desk, right here in my office. All right. Now you're going to sleep, and dream. . . . Antwerp."

He bustled and bowed at his machinery again. "There," he whispered under his breath.

"There .. . O.K. . . right." The machines were still. George lay still. Even Haber ceased to move and mutter. There was no sound in the big, softly lit room, with its wall of glass looking out into the rain. Haber stood by the EEG, his head turned to the wall behind the desk. Nothing happened.

Heather moved the fingers of her left hand in a tiny circle on the resilient, grainy surface of the armchair, the stuff that had once been the skin of a living animal, the intermediate surface between a cow and the universe. The tune of the old record they had played yesterday came into her head and wouldn't get out again.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you, but I know it's mine. ...

She wouldn't have thought that Haber could hold still, keep silent, for so long. Only once, his fingers flicked out to a dial. Then he stood immobile again, watching the blank wall.

George sighed, raised a hand sleepily, relaxed again, and woke. He blinked and sat up.

His eyes went at once to Heather, as if to make sure she was there.

Haber frowned, and with a jumpy, startled movement pushed the lower button of the Augmentor. "What the hell!" he said. He stared at the EEG screen, still jigging with lively little traces. "The Augmentor was feeding you d-state patterns, how the hell did you wake up?"

"I don't know." George yawned. "I just did. Didn't you instruct me to wake soon?"

"I generally do. On the signal. But how the hell did you override the pattern stimulation from the Augmentor.... I'll have to increase the power; obviously been going at this too tentatively." He was now talking to the Augmentor itself, there was no doubt of it. When that conversation was done he turned abruptly on George and said, "All right. What was the dream?"

"Dreamed there was a picture of Mount Hood on the wall there, behind my wife."

Haber's eyes flicked to the bare redwood-paneled wall, and back to George.

"Anything else? An earlier dream--any recall of it?"

"I think so. Wait a minute. ... I guess I dreamed that I was dreaming, or something. It was confused. I was in a store. That's it--I was in Meier and Frank's buying a new suit, it had to have a blue tunic, because I was going to have a new job, or something. I can't remember. But anyhow, they had a guide sheet that told you what you ought to weigh if you're so tall, and vice versa. And I was right in the middle of both the height scale and the weight scale for average-build men."

"Normal, in other words," Haber said, and suddenly laughed. He had a huge laugh. It startled Heather badly, after the tension and the silence.

"That's fine, George. That's just fine." He clapped George on the shoulder, and began taking the electrodes off his head. "We have made it. We have arrived. You're in the clear! Do you know it?"