The Long Twilight (43 page)

"It doesn't sound all bad. But I get the point."

"The dream machine, unhappily, has such side-effects. Unwittingly, when you and your Council set it in operation, you created repercussions in the probability fabric that extend half across the galaxy. This is, of course, an intolerable situation. Yet, galactic law closely restricts direct interventions. Candidly, my present activities in confronting you in a semicorporeal state border on the illegal. But I judged that the circumstances warranted a slight bending of regulations."

"What does semicorporeal mean?"

"Only that I'm not actually here—no more than you."

"Where are you?"

"In the transmission cubicle of my transport, on station some two light-years from Sol. While you, of course, are occupying the dream machine in your own laboratory."

"Why the exotic Saharan background?"

"Oh, you see a desert, do you? You're supplying it from your own fund of imagery, of course. I merely dialed a neutral setting."

I looked at the desert behind him; it looked as real as a desert ever looked. He gave me time for that idea to soak through.

"I'll now intervene in the operation of the machine," he said, "to bring you back to consciousness—and sanity. In return—you will destroy the machine, including all notes and diagrams. Agreed?"

"Suppose I don't?"

"Then it will inevitably be shut down by other means, less soothing to your planetary pride."

"Just like that, eh? What if I don't believe you?"

"That's of course your option."

"I'll still know how to rebuild it—if what you say is true."

"So you will. But if you should be so unwise as to attempt to do so—or to allow any other to do so—you'll find yourself back here— quite alone. So—what do you say?"

"No deal," I said.

"Oh, come now, Florin. Surely you place some value on life and sanity?"

"I don't like blind deals. Maybe this is all happening, and maybe it isn't. Maybe you can do what you say and maybe you can't. Maybe I'm a great inventor—and maybe I'm swinging from the chandelier by my tail. You'll have to show me."

Diss jammed his cigarette out angrily, shredded the weed into the wind, and tucked the holder away.

"Look here, Florin. I've been most patient with you, considerate. I could have taken violent steps at once; I refrained. Now you seek to blackmail me—"

"Put up or shut up, Diss."

"You're a stubborn man, Florin—most stubborn!" He folded his lean arms and drummed his fingers on his biceps. "If I return you to your normal base-line in full possession of your senses and you see that matters are as I described—will you
then
destroy the machine?"

"I'll make the decision when I get there."

"Bah! You're incorrigible! I don't know why I waste time with you! But I'm a benign being. I'll go along. But I warn you—"

"Don't. It would blight our beautiful friendship."

He made an impatient gesture and turned and I got a brief, ghostly impression of vertical panels and lines of light; Diss made quick motions with his hands, and the light faded, changed quality; the distant horizon rushed closer, blanked out the sky. There was an instant of total darkness, and a sound like a series of doors slamming, far away. Ideas, names, faces rushed into my mind like water filling a bucket.

Then the lights came up slowly.

I was lying on my back in a room thirty feet on a side, ceiled with glare-panels, floored in patterned tiles, walled with complex apparatus. Big Nose stood by a console that winked and flared with emergency signals that bleeped and shrilled in strident alarm. Beside him, the gray man in a white smock bent over a smaller panel, jabbing at switches. Bardell was stretched out on the next cot, snoring.

I made a sound and Big Nose whirled and stared at me. His mouth worked, but no words came out.

"You can unstrap me now, Doctor Van Wouk," I said. "I'm no longer violent."

Half an hour had passed, as half hours are wont to do. The lard-faced man—Dr. Wolff as he was known to his intimates—had unsnapped the contacts, clucked over my wrists and ankles where the straps had cut in, and smeared some salve over the raw spots. The gray man—Dr. Eridani—had hurried out and come back with hot coffee laced with something that restored the glow to my cheeks, if not to my pride. The others—Trait, Tomey, Hyde, Jonas, et al. (the names were there, ready in my memory, along with a lot of other things) gathered around and took turns telling me how worried they'd been. The only one who hung back and sulked was Bardell.

Eridani had administered a hypo that had brought him out of his doze yelling; they had calmed him down, but he still seemed to be nursing a grudge.

"My God, Jim," Van Wouk said to me, "we thought for a while we'd lost you."

"Nevertheless I'm here," I said. "Give me a report, the whole thing, from the beginning."

"Well . . ." He ran his fat fingers through his thinning hair. "As you know—"

"Assume I know nothing," I said. "My memory's been affected. I'm still hazy."

"Of course, Jim. Why, then, on completion of SAVE—the Symbolic Abstractor and Visual Elaborator, that is to say—you authorized an operational test, with yourself as subject. I objected, but—"

"Stick to the substantive, Doctor."

"Of course, sir. Ah, an operational test was initiated, with you as subject. You were placed under light hypnosis and the electrodes positioned. Calibration proceeded normally. The program was introduced, the integrator energized. Almost at once, power demand jumped tenfold. Feedback protection devices were activated without result. I tried various control and damping measures in an effort to regain control, to no avail. I reluctantly ordered an abort, and cut all power—but you remained in a deep coma, failing to respond to the recall signals. It was as though you were drawing power from some other source, fantastic though that seems.

"In desperation, I tried corrective reprogramming, to no avail. Then—out of a clear sky—you snapped out of it."

"Any idea why?"

"None. It was as though an external vector had been introduced. Neural potentials that had been running sky-high—at full emergency stimulus level—suddenly dropped back to rest state. The next moment—you were with us again."

I tipped my head toward Bardell, who was sitting across the room, nursing a cup of coffee and looking resentful. "What does he do?"

"Why, that's Bardell. Temporary employee; he was used as an ancillary vector in the mock-ups during the test. A sort of, ah, bit player, you might say."

"All part of the dream machinery, eh?"

"The . . .? Oh, yes, a very appropriate nickname, Jim."

"How does it work?"

He stared at me. "You mean . . .?"

"Just pretend I've forgotten."

"Yes. Why, then, ah, it's simply a matter of first monitoring the dream mechanism, then stimulating the visual, olfactory, and auditory cortex in accordance with previously determined symbolic coding to create the desired, eh, hallucinatory experiences. The program mock-ups occupy the adjacent bay—"

"Show me."

"Why . . . certainly, Jim. Just this way." He walked across to a blank wall and pushed a button and a plain gray panel slid back on two walls of a shabby hotel room, complete with brass bed and broken windows.

He noticed me looking at the latter and chuckled insincerely. "You grew rather violent a time or two, Jim—"

"Have you always called me Jim?" I cut in.

"I—" He stopped and glittered his eyes at me; his jowls quivered a little. "I beg your pardon, Doctor," he said stiffly. "I suppose during these tense hours I've allowed protocol to lapse, somewhat."

"Just asking," I said. "Show me the rest."

He led the way through the conference room—not nearly so plush, in a good light—the street scenes—cardboard and plaster— the boardinghouse; all just shabby, hastily built sets, that wouldn't fool a blind man.

"All that was required," Van Wouk explained importantly, "was a triggering stimulus; you supplied the rest from your subconscious."

The series of sets ended at a heavy fire door, locked.

"Our premises end here," Van Wouk said. "Another agency has that space."

The route back led through the warehouse scene. I poked a toe at the broken dummy that looked like Bardell.

"What was this for?"

He seemed to notice it with surprise. "That? Oh, we hoped at first to make use of manikins; but we soon determined that human actors were necessary." He gave me a twitch of his jowls. "A human being is a rather complex device, not easy to simulate."

"How does all this get into the picture? If I was strapped down in the next room—"

"Oh, that was only at the end. After you, er, ran out of control. We began with you in an ambulatory state, under light narcosis."

"How long since this test began?"

Van Wouk looked at a big watch expensively strapped to his fat hairy wrist.

"Nearly eight hours," he said, and wagged his head in sympathy for himself. "A trying eight hours, Jim—ah, sir, that is."

"And now what, Doctor?"

"Now? Why, an analysis of the tapes, determination of just what it was that went wrong, corrective action, and then—new tests, I would assume."

"I'd have to authorize that, of course."

"Naturally, sir."

"What would you think of suspending testing?"

Van Wouk pulled at his lower lip; he cocked an eye at me. "That's for you to determine, of course, sir," he murmured, "if you're convinced there's danger—"

"Maybe we ought to smash the machine," I said.

"Hmmm. Perhaps you're right."

In the next room, voices were raised excitedly.

". . . I don't know what you're trying to pull now," Bardell was yelling, "but I won't stand for it! Unlock this door, damn you! I'm leaving here, right now!"

We went back in. Bardell was at the hall door, wrenching at the knob, his face pink from exertion. Eridani was fluttering around him; Trait was at the side door, rattling the knob. He looked up at Van Wouk.

"Some joker has locked this from the outside," he said. He went across to Bardell, shouldered the bigger man aside, twisted the knob, then stepped back and gave the door a kick at latch height. It looked as if it hurt his toe, if not the door.

"Here—what the devil are you doing, Trait!" Van Wouk went to the door and tried it, turned and looked at me with a disturbed expression.

"Do you know—" he started, then changed his tack. "Some error," he said. "Somehow, I suppose, the security system has become engaged."

"You won't get away with this," Bardell shouted. He grabbed up a metal chair and crashed it against the door; it bounced off, one leg bent. Van Wouk brushed past me into the room we had just come out of, hurried to the broken window and swung the frame out and recoiled.

"Is this your doing?" he said in a choked voice. I went across and looked at what he was looking at: solid concrete, filling the space where the passage had been.

"That's right," I said. "While you were watching Red kick the door I ordered up two yards of ready-mix and had it poured in here. Sorry, I forgot to scratch my initials in it."

He snarled and ducked around me, ran back into the green-tiled lab. Eridani and Trait and the others were in a huddle; Bardell was against the wall at the far side, watching everybody. I went to the door he had tried first and pounded on it; it gave back a solid
thunk!
that suggested an armored bunker.

"No phone in here?" I asked.

"No, nothing," Eridani said quickly. "Special isolation arrangements—"

"Got a pry bar?"

"Here—a locking bar from the filing cabinet." Trait hefted the four-foot length of one-inch steel as if he might be thinking about using it on my head; but he went to the door, jimmied the flat end in between door and jamb, and heaved. Wood splintered; the door popped wide.

Solid concrete filled the opening.

Trait staggered back as if he were the one who'd been hit with the bar. Bardell let out a yelp and scuttled sideways to a corner.

"You plan to kill me," he yelled. "I'm on to you now—but it won't work—" He broke off, his eyes fixed on me. "You," he said. "They'll get you, too; you're no safer than I am! Maybe together we can—"

Van Wouk whirled on him. "You damned fool! Don't appeal to
him
for help! We're all his victims! He's the one who's responsible for this! It's
his
doing!"

"Liar!" Bardell yelled, and swung back to me. "You're the one they were out to get! They tricked you into the dream machine! They intended to drive you insane—certifiably insane! It was the only way to eliminate you without killing you—"

Trait reached him then, slammed a hard-looking fist into his stomach, straightened him up with a left hook. It didn't knock him out, but it shut him up. He sagged against the wall, his mouth open.

"All right!" Van Wouk said, his voice a little high, a trifle shaky. He swallowed hard and lowered his head as if I were a brick wall and he was going to ram me.

"Call it off," he snapped. "Whatever it is you're up to—call it off!"

"Let's you and him make me," I said.

"I told you," Eridani said. "We were tampering with forces we couldn't control. I warned you he was taking over!"

"He's taking over nothing," Van Wouk snapped, and groped inside his coat and brought out a flat gun with a familiar look.

"Call it off, Florin," he snapped. "Or I'll kill you like a snake, I swear it!"

"I thought Florin was folklore," I said. "And your needler won't work; I jimmied it."

He gave a start and aimed the gun off-side. It went
bzzaap!
and something screamed past my knees as I went low and took him just under the belt-line and slammed him back and down across the slick floor and into the wall. His head hit pretty hard; he went limp and I scooped up the gun and came up facing them before they had gotten more than halfway to me.

"Fun's over," I said. "Back, all of you." I jerked a thumb at the connecting door. "Through there."

Bardell advanced, blubbering.

"Listen to me, Florin, you're making a mistake, I was on your side all along, I warned you, remember? I tried to help, did all I could—"