“The roach powder in the coffee,” Dasein said. “That was just ⦔
“That's a very unhappy case,” Piaget said. “She fell in love with an outsider at collegeâmuch as Jenny did, I might add. The difference is that her friend seduced her and left her. She has a daughter who ⦔
“My god! You really believe this crap,” Dasein said. He pushed himself against the head of the bed, sat glaring at Piaget.
“Gilbert, I find this far easier to believe than I do your wild theory that Santaroga has mounted a concerted attack against you. After all, you yourself must see ⦔
“Sure,” Dasein said. “I want you to explain the accident at the bridge. I want to see how that ⦔
“Easiest of all,” Piaget said. “The young man in question was enamored of Jenny before you came on the scene.”
“So he just waited for the moment when ⦔
“It was entirely on the unconscious level, that I assure you, Gilbert.”
Dasein merely stared at him. The structure of rationalization Piaget had built up assumed for Dasein the shape of a tree. It was like the tree of his dream. There was the strong trunk protruding into daylightâconsciousness. The roots were down there growing in darkness. The limbs came out and dangled prettily distracting leaves and fruit. It was a consistent structure despite its falsity.
There'd be no cutting it down, Dasein saw. The thing was too substantial. There were too many like it in the forest that
was Santaroga.
“This is a tree, see? Doesn't it look like all the others?”
“I think when you've had time to reflect,” Piaget said, “you'll come to realize the truth of what ⦔
“Oh, no doubt,” Dasein said.
“I'll, uh ⦠I'll send you up some more fresh cheese,” Piaget said. “Special stock.”
“You do that,” Dasein said.
“I quite understand,” Piaget said. “You think you're being very cynical and wise right now. But you'll come around.” He strode from the room.
Dasein continued to stare at the closed door long after Piaget had gone. The man couldn't see it, would never be capable of seeing it. No Santarogan could. Not even Jenny despite her love-sharpened awareness. Piaget's explanation was too easy to take. It'd be the official line.
I've got to get out of this crazy valley,
Dasein thought.
He slipped out of bed just as the door opened and a hatless, chubby young student nurse entered with a tray.
“Oh, you're out of bed,” she said. “Good.”
She took the old tray off the nightstand, put the new one in its place, set the old one on a chair.
“I'll just straighten up your bed while you're out of it,” she said.
Dasein stood to one side while she bustled about the bed. Presently, she left, taking the old tray with her.
He looked at what she had broughtâa golden wedge of cheese, crackers, a glass and a bottle of Jaspers beer.
In a surge of anger, Dasein hurled the cheese against the wall. He was standing there staring at the mess when a soothing sensation on his tongue made him realize he was licking the crumbs off his fingers.
Dasein stared at his own hand as though it belonged to another person. He consciously forced himself not to bend and recover the cheese from the floor, turned to the beer. There was an opener behind the bottle. He poured it into the glass, drank in swift gulps. Only when the glass was drained did he grow aware of the rich bouquet of Jaspers in the remaining drops of beer.
Fighting down a fit of trembling, Dasein put the glass on
the nightstand, crawled into the bed as though seeking sanctuary.
His body refused to be denied. People didn't take Jaspers, he thought. Jaspers took people. He felt the expanding effect within his consciousness, sensed the thunder of a host jarring across the inner landscape of his psyche. Time lost its normal flow, became compressed and explosive.
Somewhere in a hospital room there were purposeful footsteps. The toggles of a switch slammed away from their connections to create darkness. A door closed.
Dasein opened his eyes to a window and starshine. In its illumination he saw a fresh wedge of cheese on his nightstand. The mess had been cleaned from wall and floor. He remembered Jenny's voiceâsoft, musical, rippling like dark water over rocks, a plaintive tremor in it.
Had Jenny been here in the dark?
He sensed no answer.
Dasein groped for the call buzzer at the head of his bed, pressed it.
A voice sounded from the speaker: “Do you wish a nurse?”
“What time is it?” Dasein asked.
“Three twenty-four a.m. Do you want a sleeping pill?”
“No ⦠thanks.”
He sat up, slid his feet to the floor, stared at the cheese.
“Did you just want the time?” the speaker asked.
“What does a full round of Jaspers cheese weigh?” he asked.
“The weight?” There was a pause, then: “They vary. The smaller ones weigh about thirty pounds. Why?”
“Send me a full round,” he said.
“A full ⦠Don't you have some now?”
“I want it for lab tests,” he said, and he thought:
There! Let's see if Piaget was being honest with me.
“You want it when you get up in the morning?”
“I'm up now. And get me a robe and some slippers if you can.”
“Hadn't you better wait, doctor. If ⦔
“Check with Piaget if you must,” Dasein said. “I want that round now.”
“Very well.” She sounded disapproving.
Dasein waited sitting on the edge of the bed. He stared out
the window at the night. Absently, he broke off a chunk of the cheese on his nightstand, chewed it and swallowed.
Presently, the foyer door produced a wedge of light. A tall, gray-haired nurse entered, turned on the room's lights. She carried a large wheel of golden cheese still glistening in its wax sealer.
“This is thirty-six pounds of prime Jaspers cheese,” she said. “Where shall I put it?” There were overtones of outrage and protest in her voice.
“Find a place for it on one of the lab benches,” he said. “Where are the robe and slippers?”
“If you'll be patient, I'll get them for you,” she said. She shouldered her way through the lab door, returned in a moment and crossed to a narrow door at the far end of the room, opened it to reveal a closet. From the closet she removed a green robe and a pair of black slippers which she dumped on the foot of Dasein's bed.
“Will that be allâsir?”
“That'll be all, for now.”
“Hmmmph.” She strode from the room, shut the foyer door with a final-comment thump.
Dasein took another bite of the cheese from his nightstand, put on the robe and slippers, went into the lab. The nurse had left the lights on. The round of cheese lay on an open metal bench at his right.
Alcohol won't kill it,
he thought.
Otherwise, it couldn't be incorporated in the local beer. What does destroy it? Sunlight?
He recalled the dim red light of the Co-op's cave.
Well, there were ways of finding out. He rolled back the sleeves of his gown, set to work.
Within an hour he had three-fourths of the round reduced to a milky solution in a carboy, set about feeding it through the centrifuge.
The first test tubes came out with their contents layered in a manner reminiscent of a chromatograph. Near the top lay a thin silver-gray band of material.
Dasein poured off the liquid, burned a hole in the bottom of a test tube and removed the solids intact by blowing into the hole he'd created. A bit of the gray material went on a slide and he examined it under the microscope.
There was the mycelium structure, distorted but recognizable. He smelled the slide. It was redolent of Jaspers. He put a hand to the microscope's variable light control, watched the specimen while rotating the control. Abruptly, the specimen began to shrivel and crystallize before his eyes.
Dasein looked at the light control. It was the spectrum-window type and, at this moment, was passing light in the Angstrom range 4000-5800. It was cutting off the red end, Dasein noted.
Another look through the microscope showed the specimen reduced to a white crystalline mass.
Sunlight, then.
What would do the job? he wondered. A bomb to open the cave? A portable sunlamp?
As he thought this, Dasein felt that the darkness outside the hospital parted to reveal a shape, a monster rising out of a black lake.
He shuddered, turned to the carboy of milky solution. Working mechanically, he put the rest of the solution through the centrifuge, separated the silver-gray band, collected the material in a dark brown bottle. The solution produced almost a pint of the Jaspers essence.
Dasein smelled the bottleâsharp and definite odor of Jaspers. He emptied the bottle into a shallow dish, caught a bit of the substance on a spatula, touched it to his tongue.
An electrifying sensation of distant fireworks exploded from his tastebuds through his spine. He felt he could see with the tip of his tongue or the tip of a finger. Dasein sensed his core of awareness becoming a steely kernel surrounded by desolation. He concentrated his energy, forced himself to look at the dish of Jaspers essence.
Empty!
What had destroyed it? How could it be empty.
He looked at the palm of his right hand. How close it was to his face! There were specks of silver-gray against the pink flesh.
Tingling pulses of awareness began surging out from his throat and stomach, along his arms and legs. He felt that his entire skin came alight. There was a remote feeling of a body
slipping to the floor, but he felt that the floor glowed wherever the body touched it.
I ate the entire dish of essence,
he thought.
What would it doâthe active agent from more than thirty pounds of Jaspers cheese? What would it do? What was it doing? Dasein felt this to be an even more interesting question.
What was it doing?
As he asked the question of himself, he experienced anguish. It wasn't fear, but pure anguish, a sense of losing his grip on reality.
The steely kernel of selfdom! Where was it?
Upon what fundament of reality did his selfdom sit? Frantically, Dasein tried to extend his awareness, experienced the direct sensation that he was projecting his own reality upon the universe. But there was a projection
of
the universe simultaneously. He followed the lines of this projection, felt them sweep through him as though through a shadow.
In this instant, he was lost, tumbling.
I was just a shadow,
he thought.
The thought fascinated him. He remembered the shadow game of his childhood, wondered what forms of shadows he could project by distorting the core of self. The wondering produced the effect of shapes. Dasein sensed a screen of awareness, a shapeless outline upon it. He willed the shape to change.
A muscled, breast-beating hero took form there.
Dasein shifted his emphasis.
The shadow became a bent-shouldered, myopic scientist in a long gown. Another shift: It was naked Apollo racing over a landscape of feminine figures.
And againâa plodder bent beneath a shapeless load.
With a gulping sensation of
deitgrasp
Dasein realized he was projecting the only limits his finite being could know. It was an act of self-discovery that gave birth to a feeling of hope. It was an odd sort of hope, unfixed, disoriented, but definite in its existenceânot a hope of discernment, but pure hope without boundaries, direction or attachments.
Hope itself.
It was a profound instant permitting him to grasp for a fleeting
instant the structure of his own existence, his possibilities as a being.
A twisted, dented and distorted
something
crossed the field of Dasein's awareness. He recognized the kernel of selfdom. The thing had lost all useful shape. He discarded it, chuckling.
Who discarded it?
Dasein wondered.
Who chuckles?
There was a pounding soundâfeet upon a floor.
Voices.
He recognized the tones of the gray-haired nurse, but there was a tingling of panic in the sounds she made.
Piaget.
“Let's get him on the bed,” Piaget said. The words were clear and distinct.
What was not distinct was the shape of a universe become blurred rainbows, nor the pressures of hands which blotted out the glowing sensation of his skin.