by Anthology
“Damn,” said Craven. “That’s the second time this week. I’ll be psychologically addicted to this dishwater pretty soon. Trade needles, Polly?”
“Hell no,” Pahlevsky replied. “Bottles.”
Silently they traded vials and each loaded a tiny syringe. They made the injections at the same time, and then busied themselves with the headpiece, in which their dreams would be projected. As the walls of the cube began to swim, each opened the fitting in his left wrist and attached the tube from the blood mixer. With a sigh, Craven lay back on the couch and made himself comfortable.
At once, a parade of voluptuous beauties began to sway through his forebrain. “How can Hansl do it?” he thought. “There must be something more to his life away from the courthouse than these girls. It’s always girls.” As his mild disapproval turned the colors of the girls muddy, Pahlevsky’s reaction made them softer, rounder, more enticing. Craven began to project thin girls at his opponent, and in a moment, Pahlevsky’s girls had grown so fat and Craven’s so thin that they turned into rows of binary digits. For a moment, the marching o’s and I’s were meaningless. Then Corky realized they were repeating, in Morse, “Queerqueerqueerqueerqueer . . .”
He snorted. That deep muscular contraction was reflected in the fragmentation of the digital figures, and the hemisphere of projection turned dark. It remained dark for a long time, surging with black on blackness, ignorant and irrelevant.
Craven half-dozed, turning over in the back of his head the industrial matrix of the quarrel. A poisonous effluent from an automatized factory seeped into a stream. The stream was muddy, algae-grown. He contracted his cortex, and the stream became clear and sparkling. Fish leaped over its surface, and it ran faster over the clean stone bottom.
Just as it was fixing on the projector’s inner surface, a great billowing cloud of dirty water engulfed him, and with a shock, he realized he was surrounded by Hansl Pahlevsky’s projection of the stream. Foul, ruined, dead, the stagnant water oozed as thick as oil into his ears and mouth. Just as it was rising to his nostrils, Craven reached back into his mind for the lovely creek he had dreamed; but it wouldn’t come back into being. With a shrug of his cerebrum, he gave up on the idyllic and began to modify the picture in front of him toward reality. At least the sun could be shining. At least the water needn’t stink. It supported a few carp and some turtles and, there! yes, a catfish. An older turtle appeared, sunning himself on a rock. All right, not a rock. An oil drum; but that turtle was twenty years old, at least. This wasn’t dead water.
A bloated alligator gar floated belly up with agonizing slowness down the stream. Corky speeded up the current, and by a supreme effort of will, simultaneously turned the gar over, sent it swimming off, and supplied a grinning youth in ragged blue jeans who threw rocks at the gar as long as it was visible.
In another instant, the child had become a textbook cretin. His lower jaw vanished. Spittle drooled from his upper lip. He opened his fly and urinated clumsily into the stinking water.
Cravan left the child growing more apelike by the instant, and widened the focus of the dream. As the whole scene appeared, the source of the water’s foulness came into the foreground. A leaping, bubbling stream of phenol with a steaming ribbon of spent sulphuric acid flowed out of a drain that plainly projected from a grim concrete box. There was no identification on the front of the building, but just over the drain, a flashing neon sign said, “Fairlawn Chemicals, Inc.”
Cravan could feel Pahlevsky twitch physically in objection to that picture. The stones began to flow and the drain became smaller. In a sort of mental judo for which he was fast gaining a reputation in the legal community, Corky let the drain shrink to the size of a garden hose, then multiplied it in the time it took a neurone to discharge. There were ten hoses draining phenol into the creek; then there were twenty. When he had a hundred pipes pouring filth into the desperate water, he blinked his eyes and spoke to Judith Hlavcek. “Just a minute longer. I’ve got him on the run now.”
Unfortunately, she appeared almost immediately in the foreground of the projector, tossing beer cans and the garbage of a picnic into the stream.
Craven felt himself jerking and sunfishing on his couch. “Damn, damn,” he thought, “you can’t look off a minute.” He half-sat up, felt Judith’s cool fingers press him back on the couch, saw her blow a kiss from the projector, and disappear around the corner of the factory, heels twinkling and hair fluttering. He bore down on quick cuts from the stream as it had been, with birds flying and bees buzzing, to the immense drain bubbling with the grape-soda red of phenol and the stream as Pahlevsky’s clients had made it, a turgid, ugly, running sore in the land, where the only buzzes were the flies and a few hardy mosquitoes.
Although the picture wavered and shook, it held; held; held. Exultation surged in Craven, and with that momentary relaxing, there suddenly appeared a noxious herd of little people, throwing excrement and garbage into the water. For a moment, he was bemused, then he had to laugh. Catching, with devilish wit, the attitudes and mannerisms of Craven’s clients, Pahlevsky had reduced them in size to fit his opinion of their moral stature, and multiplied them into a mad band of gerbils, tearing and tossing newspaper until the pond beside which they were running had been turned into a sodden, pulpy marsh. Upstream, the drain flowed water as clear as gin, sparkling and plopping into the mess Craven’s clients had created.
But the picture had the fragility of satire. It wavered and shattered as the two lawyers laughed. Craven’s chuckles continued to distort the projection even as he pushed it back to his stated position. He dreamingly laid on the color of the effluent as he solidified Pahlevsky’s factory and its fetid drain. For a moment, he enlarged the focus, so a mile or more of the stream could be seen, because he had a subtle feeling of wrongness just out of his vision.
Sure enough, when Craven lengthened the focus, it became apparent that Pahlevsky had been at work on the peripheral aspects of the picture. The stream was not moving, and from the slope of the land, it was clear that it had never been a free flowing creek. The water was stagnant, and the effluent from the works disappeared silently into an already dead stream that hardly moved. Downriver, the really nasty character of the open sewer was reinforced by a row of privies that hung at crazy angles over the water. Craven’s chief client, an expression of contentment on his face, was just emerging from an unpainted outhouse, zipping up his pants.
Corky shifted the view up so the grade of the hill showed that the flatness through which Pahlevsky looped the creek was an illusion, that there was really a fall sufficient to make the stream flow gently, and as the brow of the hill appeared, the home of Craven’s client came in view. It was a magnificent mansion, in the new concrete castle style so favored by Houston architects, and had obviously cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Since this projection was Craven’s reprise of a factual news photograph, the house had the grainy, dot-by-dot look of a halftone; but its size and ostentation made the rickety outhouse a transparent fraud, and it vanished, along with its neighbors.
They were replaced by a smudged plumbing diagram. Pahlevsky brought up the engineer’s identification number in the lower right-hand corner, and Corky saw they were looking at the actual map of the sewers adjacent to the polluted stream. Arrows of light began to dart in and out of the diagram, pointing leaks, surface traps, inefficient sewage treatment plants, and other points from which flowage of pollutants into the stream occurred.
Despite every effort of will Craven could make, his own map of the same section of the city’s sewerage instantly flashed over Pahlevsky’s. There was a ninety percent congruence between the two, and the projector screen flashed gold as an overlay of transparent letters from the computer monitoring the trial read out, “Stipulated.” It was the first break in the surge of contention and assertion, and from that moment on would be a steady buoy around which the dreams of counsel, swirl how they might, must still flow.
Craven’s back arched in a re
flex he could not control, as he fought to wrest the projection back to the chemical plant. He rolled onto his side, drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them, assuming the posture in which, from childhood, he had experienced the most vivid dreams in his real life. Pouring with sweat, he felt his eyeballs flicking back and forth and knew his brain was gathering itself for a powerful move in the legal struggle.
Another minute passed before his rapid eye movement became effective, and then he irresistibly peeled back the stone wall of the plant, accomplishing by imaginative force what he had been denied in pretrial preparation, a view of the actual workings of the inside. The ruling of the ancillary judge before whom the motion had been heard was that the plant contained trade secrets, unpatentable but valuable, which could not be revealed by inspection without working a damage on the chemical company greater than the inconvenience of hampering Craven’s trial preparation.
After that motion had been acted upon, Craven had managed to locate a still operator discharged two years before by Pahlevsky’s corporation, who disgorged a good deal of information. Since he was not a party to the suit, however, Corky had to take it all in verbally. A witness could not be submitted to the drugs without his consent, and the operator had been a Jehovah’s Witness, with all that sect’s ineradicable bias against drugs and mind alteration.
Necessarily, then, the projection Craven could achieve of the internal structure of the plant was gray, black in some areas where information was void, distorted, and shot with the wavering light of incompletion. He was still able to zero in on the massive exchanger which completed the essential operation of the plant and flowed off phenol as a by-product. From the point at which this occurred, Corky projected a simple drain without even a trap for tools and solid waste, and with its outflow directly above the surface of the stream. At that point, real information took over, and the knife edge clarity of the projection made Craven feel that he could afford to gamble on sucking new information out of Pahlevsky’s mind. Eyes zipping from one side of his closed lids to the other, Craven froze the picture of the emerging drain and made the cortical squeeze that called forth the corresponding picture from Pahlevsky’s brain. Even as the golden glow faded, leaving the overprint, “Stipulated,” visible, Craven convulsed himself, feeling the net of his whole nervous system contract around the mental suction with which he reached for Pahlevsky’s picture of the inside of the plant. With wrenching suddenness, it flowed onto the screen.
The lawyer realized the proportions he had projected were wrong, because his informant had not told him of a great, hulking complex of instrumentation and piping which occupied fully one third of the floor space. He writhed in a sine wave which terminated in a frightening click at the lumbosacral junction of his spine, absorbing the mass of stills and connections to make the pictures congruent, and was rewarded with a flash of gold and the stipulation overprint that meant he could move on to try to extract agreement from Pahlevsky on the nature of the operation.
The mind bruises and strains of making the three congruences caused both the lawyers to lie inert on their couches, flaccid puddles of flesh, while their brains drew on the web of nerves and its meaty envelope for the energy with which to go on. Inside the projector, Pahlevsky appeared, crouched on his knees, eyes covered with his hands. It was the only respite from the drugdreams: refusal to see.
For a little while, the projector flowed with neutral colors, clouds, and undifferentiated flashes from random energy accumulations along the two neuronic nets. In a slow, rhythmic repetition of patterns of energy flashes, Judith Hlavcek’s face took shape, lips in Cupid’s bow, eyes full forward and wide, just the way she always looked before a kiss.
Craven felt her hand on his chest, her other hand raising the hood part way. She bent gently close to him. “Polly’s on his ass. Leave him snoring for a minute. You need a breather yourself.”
She sat on her heels beside his couch, massaging his cheeks. They were suffused with blood, as always when the brain was sucking every resource of the body into the dream struggle. “Listen, I’m moving Sunday, remember? Can you borrow that pickup and be there by seven? I’ll give you breakfast.”
With the one eye still under the hood, he saw himself sliding from a double bed into a snug bedroom where Judy, diaphanous clad, beckoned in the doorway with a skillet holding two perfectly fried eggs. “All right. I can’t talk now. We’re right at the major node of this hearing. I’ll win it or lose it in the next dream.”
Smiling, he slid back under the headset and began modifying the neurone flashes into a Morse “V” . . . “Victory, Victory, Victory,” he flashed, and then suddenly brought himself up into view, right hand raised with two fingers in the Peace sign. His reply was a Peter Max colored representation of the chemical plant, somehow wearing Hans Pahlevsky’s face and body attitude. From every orifice of the factory-Pahlevsky incense poured, and the lawyer unzipped his chest to reveal a shining stainless steel precipitation tower and a circle of stainless tanks. It became clear that the tower was integral to the production process and the tanks were storing an effluent which had been made marginally profitable by increasing the volume of operations. A schematic diagram imposed itself, and it was apparent that the water used in the process was mostly recycled. What little waste there was ran off from a small drain which was enlarged so Craven could see the monitoring gauges that tested it. The water was certainly not crystal clear, but neither did it smoke and steam like Saruman’s sewer.
Corky produced an overlay, “When?”
Suddenly he heard the music which Pahlevsky was quietly piping in behind this idyllic scene. It was the old prophetic song, “In the Year 2525.” Craven’s repulsion at this effectively indefinite postponement of anti-pollution equipment was so total that he actually spoke, and earned a reprimand from the judge upstairs, which slowly silhouetted itself in the projector. ” ‘Shit no!’ is not a legal objection. Objections must be projected, not spoken.”
He nearly sat up, but another gross breach of courtroom etiquette after the first might prejudice his clients completely out of the case. With an effort, he lay rigidly outspread on his couch and projected the current year’s anthem, “Now! Wow! The Word Is Now!” Corky did not subscribe to the religious attitude embodied in the song, but the lyric fitted his legal position.
He could hear Pahlevsky squirming on the other couch, and there erupted on the projector’s curved inner face a mad collage of the great and near-great figures of American Industrial History. Their boots crunched forests, their mouths engulfed rivers, and their nostrils drank the air in storm-sized masses; but on their shoulders and backs rose a dizzying, growing pyramid of consumers, from whose throats burst a paean of praise. Every second a vote was conducted on the life of a valley, the color of a river, or the smell of somebody’s air, and production always won. Somehow, though the face of the land changed, the growing hordes following after the industrialists were accommodated. The glow that surrounded all this grew ever brighter, and out in front strode Uncle Sam, his snowy whiskers spread to the breeze, a smile of common sense and compassion illuminating his apple cheeks and twinkling eyes.
Craven contented himself with one comment. In the upper left corner of the picture he brought up Chairman Pao, not quite concealing a smile with his hand as he contemplated America burying itself in its own garbage. By a convulsive contraction of his neural net, Corky cleared the projector and wiped its color to a neutral gray. Carefully, but powerfully, he called up the congruences already of record. He had to admit the public sewer leakage, but it was minimal beside the consequences of the un-trapped, unfiltered drain running the effluent from the complex of stills and cracking towers which Craven had pried out of Pahlevsky’s brain. Relentlessly, he bore down on that total picture, calling up portions of it to repeat for emphasis, until Pahlevsky resignedly began to overprint, “So? So? So? So?”
Craven left the projector dripping with phenol and began to gather a picture of an undefiled stream, neither p
oisoned nor heated beyond the tolerance of fish, when he saw Pahlevsky erecting a projection of a plant improved by way of a large settling pond next to it. The effluent was flowing into the sludge pit, and the water which trickled through a small spillway into the natural stream was almost clear. Question marks hovered in a ribbon over the picture.
Brutally, Craven toppled a child into the settling pond. Even as its screams gurgled away, a high plank fence went up, painted so as to make it a work of art. Without hesitation, Corky sent resolute neighborhood children swarming over the fence and into the pool. Some staggered out blinded, some floated mutely on the surface, some were only scarred and frightened, but none climbed whole back over the fence. With sickening rapidity, the attorney played the record of an actual occurrence the year before, when a child had slid into the water a few meters downstream from the offensive drain. The little girl’s accusing face filled the screen, filth streaming from her hair, one eye gleaming white with its destroyed sight.
Pahlevsky failed to overcome that image with the stacks of greenbacks he piled up to indicate the amount the company had paid, for Craven spread the picture in time to show that the money had been ordered to be paid only after a bitter trial . . . and a query to the computer upstairs indicated that the half-blinded child’s case was still on appeal.
Now the lawyer gathered himself for a major clash. Deep in his central nervous system, primitive responses came slowly to the boil. On the projector screen, he played a diversion, the last annual meeting of the Sierra Club in Houston, at which a venerable white-haired conservationist talked with affection of that portion of the Big Thicket which had been saved from destruction. At one point in his speech, the old man lowered a screen and turning back to the auditorium, called for, “The first slide, please.”
With total concentration, Craven projected on that screen a report he knew existed, but to which he had been denied access. It was a one-page outline of a low-profit marketing plan for the liquid effluent from the plant. The key, he knew, was that a plastics plant ten blocks away could utilize, almost unconverted, what Pahlevsky’s people were throwing away. A pipeline would be needed for the most economical transportation of the material, and some filtering would have to be done before the slurry went into the line. The typewritten lines flowed and jumped in half-guessed projection.