Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (50 page)

“Granville, you must listen to us. You must listen and act as instructed. You are unique because you are unaware of your hidden potential.”

In the dream labyrinth Charles Granville listens indifferently to the voices pecking at his mind. “I beg your pardon. Most amazing thing. Did someone mention my name? I’m Granville. Dr. Charles Granville.” He giggles insipidly at a pointless dream joke. “Wanted in surgery to diagnose two-headed patient.”

Starr persists, “You can’t hang between two spaces, Granville. Join us. Come to our obverse.”

Steps falter through clotted mist and fog that sound like electricity. The voices call in living echoes, like articulate road signs. This is fizzy electric cream with goldfish that repeat your name.

“But why are the fish talking?” Granville considers the problem. “Swimming? That’s okay. In the nature of things. Quite right.” His mute voice sings without sound. “Fish got to swim. Birds got to fly. Swell idea for a song. I’m a real-life composer.”

“He’s reaching for his own lunatic reality, Starr.”

“It doesn’t matter if it gets him through to us. Will one of you check Coven for reverse interference?”

In vasty deeps a bell beats slowly.

“Do you hear that?”

“The bell?”

“Yes. It’s Coven.”

Starr calls urgently, “Granville, this way. Stay with us in the obverse.”

The bell beats faster, soaring upwards. The voices mount and blend. “Granville, listen to us. Don’t try to wake up. Hold on to your dream a little longer because your dream is your reality.”

A hand shaking his shoulder.

A single bell clattering.

A single voice repeating, “Granville! Granville! Wake up, will you, Charlie? That’s emergency you’re hearing.”

Granville stirred in the cot, trying to plunge back into sleeping and dreaming his own reality. He muttered, “Keep the goldfish quiet.”

The redheaded young man in T-shirt and white ducks exclaimed, “Jerusalem! I never saw a guy pound his ear like you, Charlie. That’s emergency hollering. This is County Hospital. It’s your turn to ride the wagon. Will you wake up!”

Granville opened his eyes to a bleak whitewashed dormitory room. “Okay, Gardner. The body is conscious.”

“Try and look it.”

“Kill that bell, will you? What time is it?”

Gardner looked at him dubiously, then stepped to the wall switch and cut the bell circuit. “Six
A
.
M
.”

“Six? Oh! Murder!”

“No, auto accident. Corner of Broad and Grove. Come on. Come on. Get dressed. The wagon’s waiting. Get that epicene look off your face, Doctor.”

“That’s bewilderdom, Doctor. I was having a demented dream when you woke me. I was hanging between two spaces, only I was in a fishbowl and the goldfish were fighting for me.”

“Put
both
shoes on.”

“And I wrote a hit song that went—I forget. But anyway, there were rivals with nudnick names who wanted me to join them in the starry space they controlled. Starry? Why starry? There weren’t any stars.”

Gardner waved his hand irritably. “Will you get the lead out, Charlie? Some poor character just got smashed under a truck.”

Granville hunted for his kit with gummy eyes. “Where’s my bag?”

“Right here.”

“Why’d they call us instead of Memorial or St. Augustine? Was he one of our patients?”

“No, but the cop who called in said he asked for us and I checked. Name of Coven. No record with us.”

Granville stopped short. “Coven!”

“Why the take? Friend of yours?”

“No, but I think it’s somebody from my nightmare.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No way, but I swear I heard the goldfish arguing and warning and bad-mouthing a character named Coven.”

“Who very kindly got himself smashed by a truck to make your cockeyed dream come true. You probably heard me mention the name when I took the call.” Gardner opened the dormitory door and shoved Granville through. “Will you get going, Florence Nightingale? You can ask Mr. Coven why he walked out of your nightmare into a truck.”

The garage was bleak and silent. Granville’s heels made sharp echoes above the grumbling ambulance motor. Eddie, the driver, glared as the intern sprinted in.

“Come on, Doc. Come on. I been waitin’ a whole five minutes. A guy could write the New Testament in five minutes.”

“Sorry, Eddie. Got held up.”

The ambulance roared and took off with a lurch. Eddie displayed his hacksaw profile and continued the conversation casually. “Get yourself held up by what, could I ask?”

“A dream.”

“Now, Doc!”

“Scout’s honor, Eddie.”

“You been sniffin’ ether again.” Eddie tsk-tsked. “Shame on you. Why don’t you practice what you preach?” The early morning traffic was beginning to litter the streets. Eddie started the ambulance siren and raised his voice to a conversational howl. “I thought you M.D.’s was writin’ books to stop people from dreamin’. Psycho stuff. Ain’t you kinda double-crossin’ your profession?”

“Do you ever dream, Ed?”

“Every night.”

“Do you dream real?”

“Do I! The broads! Like, wow!”

“So real you can’t tell whether it happened or not?”

“Who knows whether anything really happens, Doc.” Eddie swung the heavy ambulance into Broad and thread-needled up to the Grove intersection. “Oh, man! Will you look at that red carpet?”

There was a skewed truck and a doughnut of people clustered around the front bumper staring at a scarlet puddle. A slender, pasty man with thinning hair was exhorting the public irritably. “All right, folks, move along. Move along. This ain’t a sideshow. Ain’t you got something better to do this morning? Why get the creeps? Go buy breakfast or something.”

Granville shoved through the crowd, swinging his bag like a truncheon to clear a path. “I’m Doctor Granville. County Hospital. Who’s in charge here?”

The pasty man looked at him with bleary blue eyes. “I am, Doc. The name is Simmons. Detective Division. Was passing when it happened and took over. Here’s your patient; what’s left of him.”

Granville knelt alongside the broken body. The face was pressed into the asphalt, strangely smiling. Black hair shot with grey. The features of a dissipated Caesar. The body terribly crushed.

Granville shot a look at Simmons. “Why in hell is he grinning? It’s like his one joy in life was to get himself smashed by a truck. Take me two hours to list the damage done.”

“Name is Coven, Sidney A. Address in his wallet, 910 South Street.”

“Coven,” Granville murmured. “But of course.” Then aloud, “Nothing I can do for Sidney A. He’s unadulterated DOA. Mashed like a pancake and loving it. Going to hold the driver?”

Simmons looked perplexed. “I don’t know. He tells a story you ought to hear.” The detective called, “Casey! Over here.”

A lumbering man with a broad tonsure detached himself from the truck’s front suspension and trudged up to them. His eyes showed panic. He croaked, “It’s like I said, Cap. All you got to do is look at my record. I been drivin’ three hundred forty-seven thousand miles and no accident. I never—”

Simmons snapped, “Save it. This ain’t no grand jury.”

“So help me, Cap—”

“Sergeant.”

“Sure. Sure. Sergeant.”

“Tell the story to the Doc.”

The driver’s eyes swiveled to Granville, desperately avoiding the dead body and the crimson rug. “Jeez, Doc, I been drivin’ three hundred and forty-seven thousand miles and no accid—”

“Just tell him what happened.”

“Well, I’m comin’ down Broad, see. I got five hundred gallons of Grade A, two fifty of cream, and—”

“Never mind the inventory.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Casey took a breath. “So like I was sayin’ I’m doin’ about forty and I see this guy walkin’ down Broad on my side. The right-hand sidewalk. Get it?”

Granville closed his bag and stood up, “Coven?”

“The dead guy.”

“He’s Coven, the Doc says,” Simmons interjected. “Go ahead.”

“So this Coven waves to me I should pull over. He’s an official-looking guy so I figure it’s a sneak pinch. I pull over to the curb and slow down and I’m just gonna give him an argument when Voom.”

“Voom?”

“He takes a dive right under my front wheels.”

Granville stared at the driver uncertainly and then turned to Simmons. “Is the story straight?”

The driver jerked back. “So help me …”

“There’s witnesses,” Simmons said. “It’s straight.”

“Then it’s suicide.”

“I don’t think so,” the driver mumbled. “I think he was off his rocker.”

“Why? How?”

“He yelled something crazy when he took the dive.”

“Yelled what?”

“About astronomy.”

“Astronomy?”

“He said the stars weren’t going to get him.”

“The stars!”

“Yeah.”

Granville could not choke back the impulse to recite:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
. He deliberately dropped his bag then stooped to pick it up. He could feel himself blushing like a child.

Simmons said, “I ask you, Doc. Is that a
magilla?
Does it sound crazy or don’t it?”

“I don’t know.” Granville tried to grin. “It sounds crazy all right, only it just occurred to me that maybe Coven isn’t your lunatic. Maybe it’s me.”

They parted on that note of confusion.

At two-thirty he finally caught Gardner in the busy corridor outside Maternity. The redheaded intern carried six Erlenmeyer flasks with the deftness of a variety artist. He had had no lunch and was acerbic.

“Well, well, well. The dreamy kid in the flesh. How’d you do this morning, Doctor? Did the corpse interpret your nightmare or did you get Eddie to read your palm?”

Granville gave him a dogged look with his spaniel eyes. “Come into the stockroom a minute, Gardner. I want to ask you something.”

“Make it snappy. I’ve got two dozen blood-sugars waiting.”

The stockroom door swung shut. The room was silent and gloomy. In a corner an autoclave muttered sinister secrets.

“Listen, Gardner …” Granville hesitated and rubbed a hand up the back of his neck into his seal-brown hair. There was an interminable wait.

Exasperated, Gardner said, “You wanted to ask me something. So ask. Is this about home, career, ambition, fighting with my sister?”

“No.”

“Sure? Jinny’s got a redheaded temper. I remember you two fighting over the engagement ring. Wow!”

“It isn’t anything like that. Will you listen for a minute?”

“Avidly, when you’re ready to talk.”

“It’s about the dream I had this morning.”

“Oh, for the love of—”

“I told you about me hanging between two spaces and the goldfish that were competing to enlist me on their rival teams. The honcho of one team was named Starr.”

“As in telly-a-scope.”

“Be serious. Starr and his little friends were worried frantic about someone named Coven.”

“Guy who got mashed under the truck?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“Coven deliberately jumped under the truck.”

“Suicide?”

“Maybe, but dig this. Just as he took the dive he yelled something about Starr not getting him. Then he was smashed.”

“End of story?”

“It’s got me rattled, Gardner. I was dreaming those two names when it happened. Maybe they were fighting over me. I could be the
him
Starr wasn’t supposed to get. What do you think?”

“You really want to know?”

“I’m asking.”

“The marriage is off.”

“Can’t you ever be serious?”

“But I am.” Gardner rattled the Erlenmeyers alarmingly. “You think I’d let my ever-lovin’ sister marry a schizoid? You should lay there and bleed.”

“I am already.”

“Go back to school, Doc. Remember about dreams? They take a fraction of a second. A sleeping man can hear a door slam and dream an entire episode that culminates in that door slam.”

“All right. So maybe I heard you mention Coven’s name on the phone. But what about Starr? When the truck driver told me what Coven yelled, I knew I’d been dreaming about him.” Granville shook his head dazedly. “What right does a complete stranger have to intrude on me like that?”

“Fatigue, brother, fatigue. The tired mind gets frazzled. You hear something for the first time and you could swear you’re remembering it. But it’s really only fatigue doing a con job on you.”

“No.” Granville turned away. “It isn’t as simple as that.”

“You want it the other way? The dream way?” Gardner put the flasks down carefully and flipped up a cigarette. “You want to believe those two characters were actually fighting to enlist you, somewhere in the wild blue yonder?”

“That’s how I remember it.”

Gardner lit the cigarette and shoved it into Granville’s mouth. “So to win this contest, Coven walks out of your head into a truck. Great. Just the kind of level thinking the AM A is trying to foster.”

“Well what do you want me to think?”

“That you’ve been on duty seventy-two hours, which is enough to make anyone’s mind play tricks. That Jinny is supposed to pick her ever-lovin’ brother up in half an hour and take him driving. That you’re going instead.”

Forty minutes later, Granville sat in the passenger seat of Jinny’s car.

“It’s about time I got you to myself,” she said.

“You’re like a black widow spider,” Granville said comfortably. “They eat their husbands.”

“No I’m not. I’m … like a snapshot album, waiting for pictures to be pasted in. I don’t care about your past. To hell with the past … but I’ve got the future all marked out. Picture of Chuck’s first baby … picture of Chuck’s twenty-first baby …”

“Hey, lady! Have a heart.”

“Your babies. Not mine. I’ll be more restrained. Picture of Chuck reading research paper to medical convention.”

“Am I bald?”

“Not yet. You are when you receive the Humphrey Hickenlooper Memorial Award.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I just know you’re going to get some kind of award. That’s the fun, darling … knowing and waiting for it to come true. I think the nicest thing about falling in love is that you get somebody else’s dreams to wish for too.”