“We have none,” the Master said. “We were about to inquire after them when you arrived.” His head turned. “Hilda?”
She’d sat down in the light-blue chair again (Euglane was on a small sofa of his own, facing the Master and at an angle to Hilda and to me). “Details, Sir?” she said.
“Of your dream,” the Master said gently. “Hilda, you said it predicted a true event. What was the event?”
She looked flustered. “It—well, it’s nothing important, Sir,” she said. “The—the being—Dube—he told me I had to wake up. After we had talked, I mean. For a little while. He said I had to wake up now, because Mr. Garson was entering the building—the hospital building—and had come to visit me, and I would want to be fully awake for him.”
“Thoughtful of him,” the Master said. Euglane and I were trying to be as inaudible as possible while the Master got the story. “Mr. Garson?”
“He was my superior,” Hilda said. “At the lab. He hadn’t come to see me before. He only did come that once, I never expected it, really. But I did wake up, and he came into the room a few minutes later.”
“You couldn’t have heard him approaching?” the Master said, keeping it very gentle, very calm. “While you were sleeping, perhaps—and made his coming a part of your dream, so to speak?”
“I don’t see how that could be,” Hilda said. “I mean, it wasn’t right away. He was just coming into the building, Dube said. It was five or ten minutes before he got to my room at all—he had to ask at the information desk downstairs, and get a pass to visit, and everything.”
“And what did you talk about?” he said. “Not you and Mr. Garson—you and this Dube.”
“In the dream, Sir?” she said. “He said he would visit me, because he knew I would help him. He said he needed help.”
I said: “To get in.” The Master turned his head toward me, frowning. Well, I shouldn’t have said a word, but I’d been tense.
Hilda didn’t seem disturbed, thank God. “To come in,” she said. “To meet everybody. He said he needed help to do that. He said he’d help me, too. He told me he would—give me a new sense to replace—to replace my eyes, he said.”
The Master took a deep breath. “What sort of new sense?” he said. “And what did he want you to do, exactly?”
“Well, Sir,” Hilda said apologetically, “that was as far as we got, you know. Because I had to wake up. It was a dream— but there had to be something real about it, didn’t there? Because it predicted a true event.”
There was a little silence. Then the Master said: “And has he returned? In another dream?”
Hilda gave him one of those spasm smiles of hers. “Not yet, Sir,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Master said gently: “Thank you, Hilda. Would you see about the dinner? It should be in preparation for about half an hour from now.”
I am not a big fan of machine cookery. There exist people who claim that, given good machinery and good programs, it is impossible to tell a machine-prepared meal from one made with human hands, and the Master is one of them. I’ve always been able to tell the difference, but it’s not a subject I’d want to bring up with him at any time—if we’re going to argue seriously, it’s going to be on a subject the size of the heat-death of the universe.
And that evening, I might even have agreed with him. He’d set up an interesting vegetarian meal—tailored to Euglane, which meant not only that there was no animal material involved, but no tubers or roots—and it was absolutely edible, though artichokes vinaigrette will never replace the old standard with drawn butter.
He’d remembered my fondness for chili, and had come up with a vegetarian version, as a main dish, that surprised me by being edible—I think. The truth is, I wasn’t paying all that much attention to the food, and neither was anyone else—Hilda just possibly excepted. One day I will have to try that chili with artichokes vinaigrette as an accompaniment; it doesn’t sound like a possible combination, but that dinner was no time to test it. I ate without noticing much what I was eating—which is unusual.
Euglane tried to get more details from Hilda over dinner, the four of us seated around the Master’s dining-room table. He worked gently, carefully and very, very effectively. He got one, and a beaut, but it took a while
What had Dube sounded like? It wasn’t a real voice, it was a voice in her head, even in the dream. What had he looked like? She hadn’t seen him, exactly, though in her dreams she did see normally.
“He was just an invisible voice in your head, in the dream?” Euglane said.
“No, I’m sorry, Mr. Euglane,” Hilda said. He’d tried telling her just to call him Euglane, with as much success as I would have trying to get her to call me Knave instead of Gerald. The Master called me Gerald, so that was my name. Euglane was an honored guest of the master, so he was Mr. Euglane. He didn’t press her, after the one try.
“He was something else, then?” Euglane said gently. “Not simply invisible?”
“I knew it wasn’t how he would really be,” Hilda said. “I don’t know how he would be. He said it wasn’t important.” She looked worried. “It isn’t important, is it, Mr. Euglane?” She turned toward the Master. “Sir?”
Euglane let the Master take it. “It’s perfectly all right, Hilda,” he told her. “You are doing very well. You should be proud that you remember so efficiently.”
She looked almost persuaded. Euglane said, after a second: “How did he appear to you, in your dream? What did he look like?”
She gave us that spasm of a smile. “He was a small dog,” she said. “A sort of cute dog. I thought it was silly, but sort of funny, too, just a little talking dog. With a little girl holding him.”
The Master and Euglane nodded. I sat there frozen solid.
After a long, long time—maybe all of ninety seconds—I said: “I had a dream myself.”
The Master frowned. “You have not mentioned it to me, Gerald,” he said.
I felt like finding a wall to beat my head against. “I never thought of it,” I said. “It was a dream. It wasn’t anything special, for God’s sake. Just a dream.” I shook my head, feeling remarkably stupid. “I didn’t get instructions from Folla—Folla, not Dube. I never even thought it was Folla.”
Euglane said, mildly: “And now?”
“And now,” I said, “I am telling you I had a dream. About a little dog named Folla. A hat-sized little dog named Folla. And a little girl. And my savings account.”
I went through it for them—little girl, hairy little dog, big hall, safe, man with pince-nez and all. “There may have been more,” I said at last. “That’s what I remember. I had no special reason to put it in file, so to speak. Just a dream, God damn it.”
“And so it may be,” Euglane said. “None of the elements seems—terribly unusual, for a human dream.”
The Master was still frowning, but not, I think, at me any longer. “We may be forced to accept coincidence,” he said. “That Folla should appear in your dream is not to be wondered at. The rest seems—normal dream-material, as Euglane is saying.”
“And the damn dog?” I said. “A little dog, and a little girl. Like Hilda’s.”
Hilda, for no reason I could see, said: “I’m sorry.”
“Dogs are not uncommon features of many dreams,” Euglane said. “Doubtless you have dreamed of a dog before, at some time. Many humans have had dreams which include domestic pets. The Gielli have—equivalents, not pets but sharers of our lives. They, too, appear at times in our dreams.”
“And all your dreams share the same basic background,” I said. “The same single dream world.”
“Is this important?” Euglane said, and I said:
“How the Hell should I know? But here we have Folla— and Dube, for God’s sake—popping up in people’s dreams and saying they want help to get in to us. And here we have a girl and a little dog, twice. Dreams have suddenly become worth looking at.”
“So they ar
e,” Euglane said. The Master said:
“Dreams as a means of communication. It is not a novel notion—but such supposed communications have usually come from—ah—the Great Beyond, in one way or another. If I am not mistaken, the father of Prince Hamlet appeared to him in a dream; that is the usual course of such stories.”
Euglane said: “Ah. Shakespeare?”
“Right,” I said. “The frustrated psychiatrist. Dreams are supposed to be prophetic—or carry messages from the dead, or from angels, or some such. But this is something else.”
“Indeed it is,” the Master said. “The question—and it will have to be answered, somehow—is: What are dreams?”
Hilda stirred. “Sir,” she said uncomfortably, “have I made some sort of trouble with my dream?”
“Not at all, Hilda,” the Master told her gently. “It is extremely valuable. You are an immense aid to us all, Hilda. Should you dream again—or should you recall anything further about the dream you have outlined for us—it would be helpful if you would tell me at once. No matter when, and no matter what I happen to be doing.”
“Yes, Sir,” Hilda said, sounding a little better, and there was a small silence. I broke it.
“There’s another question,” I said. “What do Folla and Dube want to get in to our spaces—to our universe—for? They might, after all, want to be friends. They might be explorers. Or, say, whatever passes for scientists, where they are.”
“We must decide the color of their hats,” the Master said. Euglane looked baffled.
“Black hats are bad people, white hats are good people,” I said. “PreSpace slang.” He nodded; I could see him filing it away.
“Perhaps,” the Master said, “we can, in fact, decide. Suggestions?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“They haven’t done anything threatening,” I said after a second. “Folla did me a favor—got me from nowhere to Ravenal in an eye-blink. Everything else has been talk, and talk in dreams at that. If Ms MacEvoy was dreaming, like Hilda, when Dube came along—she didn’t say, and I didn’t want to press her; she was flaky enough as it was.”
“It is interesting,” the Master said, “that he was able to move your ship. He is not yet—ah—in, as he says. He exists somewhere outside; he requires help to enter our own little sheaf of spaces fully—and yet he moved your ship.”
I thought about it. “He did something real,” I said, “in real space-time—in what we recognize as space-time. How did he manage it—and why does he need help to do something else real—to build whatever machine it is he wants built?”
“A conflict,” Euglane said. We were sitting in front of empty plates. “Of some interest.” The Master said:
“Hilda?”
She reached with her foot for a buzzer and pushed it. After a few seconds a Totum came rolling in, surveyed the situation and began removing plates. Euglane had gone right on:
“If he can move a ship, why can’t he move—metal objects, plastics, glassex, whatever it is he needs for his machine?”
“Too small, maybe,” I said. “He lacks fine control. Shoving a ship around wouldn’t take that.”
Euglane chuckled. “You make him sound like one of Cornelia Rasczak’s patients,” he said. “Somehow I doubt it.”
Hilda said, in a soft baritone: “Perhaps—maybe he can build the machine. Maybe he’s lying.”
“It is a poor first assumption,” the Master said. “And I see no motive for such a lie. Though, to be sure, discussion of the motives of an alien being is a vain occupation.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and the Master said at once:
“We must explore all theories. Some will prove false, Hilda. It is not matter for apology to have eliminated a false theory, or to have posited one.” She nodded. “And Gerald—the idea of a lack of fine control is, I’m afraid, equally false. Locating a parking orbit around a planet is a fairly precise matter, if no more; but it was done with some speed.”
“It was done damn well instantly,” I said. “Right.”
“And yet help is needed,” the Master said. “Help has been requested from at least two human beings.”
I looked at him. “Right,” I said. “And from God alone knows how many others we haven’t run into yet.”
He smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. “Some of whom,” he said quietly, “may have provided him with help—or be providing it as we speak.”
“Well,” Euglane said, “as we’ve been saying, he may be friendly. He may—”
“It is unlikely,” the Master said flatly.
Into the silence, I said: “All right. Why?”
Another smile. “He knows something of human beings—he or Dube, or both. He appears to have known little when he encountered your ship, Gerald, but he may not at first have recognized you as a human being. He went through a brief survey of you, classifying you broadly as human—or humanlike, we cannot be certain—what he called a first cut—which was very general; but he did so in our language. A version of our language, but an understandable one.”
“I was all alone,” I said, “and a long, long way from any place human beings congregate.”
“Human beings may not be recognizable—immediately recognizable—as singlets,” Euglane said. “It’s been known by humans since before the—the immense War you had, you know—that humans do not exist as singlets, but in terms of other human beings. This is true, in important ways, even for human isolates.”
“But he found Ravenal,” I said. “From my mention of the name alone. Without waiting for any sort of directions—even if my directions could have made sense to him, even if we shared a coordinate system.”
“Not impossible,” the Master said. “He had your ship to consult. Your locator would know Ravenal, and its location in terms of other systems.”
“He did it awfully damn fast.”
“So he did,” the Master said. “And thereby did you a favor—a favor neither he nor Dube has done for others.”
I shrugged. “They weren’t lost.”
“But Dube has promised Hilda a ‘new sense’—whatever it might be—in exchange for her help. He has given her nothing.” He paused and frowned. “This Hester MacEvoy: I do not know the specifics of her difficulty, but might he have promised her some sort of gift as well—and perhaps not yet delivered it?”
“She didn’t say anything about it,” I said. “I suppose it’s possible. As I say, she’s flaky.”
“He has offered payment for aid,” the Master said. “In one case alone, this other, Folla, has given aid without stint; and in that case he may not have recognized you as clearly human.”
“That doesn’t make him evil,” I said. “People expect to be paid for what they do, and why not?”
“Why not indeed?” he said. Hilda was perfectly still, open-mouthed. Euglane was watching—and thinking of something. Hard. I could tell that much from his eyes, and his arms, which were tightening and relaxing, slowly. “But Folla said to you,” the Master went on, “that no payment would be required ‘at this time’. Dube might have made the same arrangement—or a similar one—with Hilda, or with Ms MacEvoy.”
“Why should he?” I said. “He wants something done— whatever sense it makes for him to need help with it. He says he’ll pay for it. You can’t expect him to amble around scattering gifts.”
One more smile. “He is a guest,” the Master said. “He is a stranger asking entrance. It becomes him to offer something to his putative hosts.”
“That,” I said, “is the way people think. Humans, anyhow. For an alien being—”
Euglane said: “It would appear to be a universal. Gielli act so, as well. It becomes a guest to gift his host—a stranger to provide evidence of his worth. The host’s time and attention—and his house—our spaces—have value.”
“Evidence,” the Master said. “Provided value. Not promises.”
I shook my head. “Maybe he can’t,” I said. “Maybe he could move my ship from—wh
erever he is—but not do anything else.”
“Though Dube has promised action to Hilda, it is possible,” the Master said. “I do not think my verdict decisive. But it is, at least, a tentative verdict; we have nothing with which to make a better one.”
“And, damn it,” I said, “he’s alien. Really alien. You can’t judge his motives the way you judge people’s—”
“Gerald,” the Master said gently, “I am not judging his motives. I seldom judge motives. I am judging his actions. Whatever they are, the color of his hat depends upon them—not upon his motives.”
“True enough,” Euglane said. “As with the—the murder of Cornelia Rasczak. Whatever the motive for the act, the act is an act of murder.”
“Well—” I said, and thought of Mirella talking about killing people. There are special cases for everything. “I suppose so,” I said. “In general.”
“We have, then,” the Master said, “and tentatively, to be sure—an alien being, with a black hat.”
There was, of course, more discussion, but facts, clearly, were missing. Euglane had introduced the murder again, and he kept nudging us back to it.
The thing looked so thoroughly impossible, I said at one point, that Folla (or Dube) looked to be our best suspect.
The Master chuckled. It’s not a petty sound. “Yet one further example of his ability to interact with our space-time?” he said. “If we go on so, Folla will prove capable of any act anywhere.”
“For all we know, he might be,” I began, and he waved a hand.
“That cannot be so,” he said. “To begin with, he has limitations. We do not know what they are, but he exists inside some universe or universes; any such being has limits.”
“For some reason,” I said, “that doesn’t fill me with any great hope.”
The chuckle again. “Perhaps this will improve you,” he said. “He has asked for help. He has limits that make this help necessary to him.”
Euglane said: “That’s moving things along a bit too fast. He might be asking for this help for any number of hidden reasons; he may not need it at all.”
Alienist Page 12