One does not pick up the phone, dial a number and connect with these folk. One does not (except by extraordinary effort) connect with them at all, except at an unhelpful distance. In the end—forty minutes later, which may, for God’s sake, be a speed record—we mounted a two-pronged attack: a friend of Master Higsbee’s (“I was able to help him with a small difficulty, some years ago,” the Master said, “and he will remember”) who was attached to the Official Household in a fairly close way—and Guin Jenn, who was, as I remembered after a little thought, Surgeon (for her specialty) to the personal household of the Governor-General.
Guin needed a little persuading. “I am not,” she said sternly, sounding much less tired than she had when I’d got her to push Michael Morse for me (well, it was mid-evening, and, except for emergencies, her surgical day not only started early but ended early)—“I am not in the habit of chivvying Lord Batesman in any way, or for any object.”
“And I am not in the habit of chivvying you, Guin,” I said, “and damn well you know it. I’ve got a situation here—or we have.”
“We?”
“Master Higsbee—you’ve met him, I think—and a Giell named Euglane, whom you may not—”
“Euglane?” she said. “The psychiatrist?”
“The psychiatrist,” I said.
“A sensible fellow,” Guin said. “I know few psychiatrists, Knave—my work deals with the real world—but I am familiar with his reputation. He appears to do good work, in his way.”
That, from Guin, was the equivalent of six medals and a brass band. “Well, we’re all facing rather a special situation,” I said, “and—”
“Can I reach him somewhere?” she said. “Nothing personal, Knave, but I should like to hear about this from Euglane himself.”
“He’s right here,” I said, stifling a small sigh. “This is reasonably urgent—”
“Knave,” she said, “I have never, in some years, known you not to be urgent. Put him on, please.”
So I did. And, with Guin’s help, and more help from the Master’s friend—who didn’t need nearly as much persuasion— we arranged for the Governor-General to call Euglane’s number within the hour.
The Governor-General would serve as our line to the Emperor, by space-four communicator—if we could persuade him. We spent a little time setting up the explanation for him, but not much; Batesman had the reputation of being a fairly sensible type (well, he didn’t have to get elected, though he did mix into politics more than his job description showed)—and, Master Higsbee said, he’d had a science background, once upon a time.
“He showed some imagination,” the Master said, “according to those who knew him at that time. Much of it will have been eroded by the demands of his career, to be sure; but some will remain. He will not dismiss us out of hand.”
“He is supposed to handle big emergencies,” Mirella said. “That’s his job, right? This qualifies.”
“Exactly so,” the Master said. “We shall make him see that. Euglane, perhaps you will best serve here.”
So it was Euglane who talked to the Governor-General, when he did phone in fifty minutes later—on a shielded phone, the shield imposed on the link straight to Euglane’s instrument.
Lord Batesman turned out to be a fairly tough sell, which was no surprise. Euglane was good—very good, using every ounce of his persuasive powers and his inbuilt combination of likeability and trust—but it took some additions from the Master to get the Governor-General to agree to find the Emperor with our message.
The Master was friendly—for the Master—and authoritative, which was no great stretch. The call went on for about half an hour, maybe a little longer, and when it was over we had only the wisp of a promise. Lord Batesman would call the Emperor “in the morning” for the Emperor’s planet and time-zone— which (he told us) was about six hours away. “I don’t guarantee I’ll speak to him directly,” he said. “I will try. But he will get your message, whether directly from me or from one of his household.”
We hoped for a direct communication; even the best middle-men (and women) are subject, like other forms of communication, to Noise. And we hoped for fast action, once the message got through.
And what had that message been? We knew, after all, very damned little. We wanted this word to get out fast: that anyone who mentioned (to a doctor, to anyone at all to whom the word could be carried) any dream in which an alien being—or a small pet, I added in, since that was the only disguise we’d seen, and it had been used several times—asked for something to be done in the dreamer’s waking life was to be advised of what we now knew—and watched, in whatever way the individual planetary setup allowed.
It was a net that had more holes in it than a mining asteroid, and all we really had was a set of hopes; but it was a start.
Now we could go back to Job One.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Euglane had one small rig I admired instantly. “Hypnotism,” he explained to us, as he’d once told me, “is not a normal part of my work; but I’ve found it useful now and then. With great care, of course.”
The usual hypnotist has a shining thing—a watch, a light, anything that glitters and is small enough to carry in your hand and move at a regular, reasonably slow speed—the speed varies with the subject, and hypnotists generally experiment till they find the right one each time—a shining thing that you stare at while it moves back and forth, and while the hypnotist talks gently to you.
Euglane had a small light attached to the end of an ancient (and silenced) metronome. He set it, he told us, to the subject’s pulse rate. “This is almost always the correct frequency,” he said, “and the regularity of the motion is a great help.”
A lovely gimmick. And it was going to be useful.
“If we are to be in touch with Folla—with these beings generally—during sleep,” Euglane said, “we will have to be able to sleep more or less at will—and, if at all possible, report back on such contacts during sleep.”
That, I told him, sounded like an interesting order. Going to sleep on command was manageable, certainly—and the little gadget would come in handy, because hypnosis, and a post-hypnotic trigger, is the easy, no-side-effects way to manage that—but reporting back while sleeping sounded like a brand-new trick.
“I do not know that it’s ever been tried,” Euglane said, “but it should be possible. There exist, after all, many humans who do, occasionally, talk in their sleep.”
“Well, yes,” I said, “but—”
“They don’t say much,” Mirella said, “and what they say isn’t sense.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“My cousin Donna was sleeping once,” she said, “and she started talking, so I started listening, you know? Some of it was just mumble and hiss, but she did say one thing clear. She said: ‘Barrels of mice, in strawberry jars.’”
“And remembered nothing of it when she woke,” Euglane said, “and was unable to explain the reference.”
“This always happens?” Mirella asked him.
“It is usual,” he said. “Where such speech is born, and what it means, we are not certain. But—if speech, then controllable speech, since speech is not a reflex but a learned and complex action; it is not simply producing—mumble and hiss.”
“Fine,” I said. “But, as it happens, I don’t talk in my sleep. Never have—I have it in good authority. And what if none of us do?”
“Good authority?” Mirella said, fixing me with an eye as glittering as a cobra’s.
“Another time,” I said. Euglane was nodding calmly.
“What has not been tried,” he said, “and what I propose we do try, is: a post-hypnotic command to speak during sleep, to describe the dream one encounters, and to describe it audibly and with clarity.”
“Will this work?” I said.
“We can hope,” Euglane said. “It will take a very dependable hypnotic state, of the sort usually induced by drugs. But I may be able to produce it in you—spe
cifically you, Knave, and Hilda here, since we know Folla can approach you two in the dream state—with a little time, and without the drugs.”
“Drugs cannot be used,” the Master said. “Such of them as affect sleep tend also to affect the capacity to dream, in one way or another.”
“True,” Euglane said, “which is why we’ll do this the difficult way.”
Hilda said, in a very tense voice: “Am I to be hypnotized, Sir?” She was addressing, of course, the Master.
“It will be quite safe, Hilda,” he said gently. “You have my word.”
She didn’t pause more than five seconds. “Very well, Sir.”
So we set things up—Hilda first, because she looked to be less of a threat to Folla, if he thought in terms of threats; after all, I’d already told him to quit playing games, which was more resistance than he’d had from anybody else we knew about. Euglane and Hilda stayed in his inner room, where the hypnotic metronome was, though he’d be using, of course, a pulse sound derived from it, rather than the little light, for Hilda— and where he had a cot set up, and started rigging some electronic gadgetry—and Mirella and the Master and I went out to the living-room where Euglane and I had had some talks, and where he saw most of his patients. The Master did stay behind for a few minutes—reassuring Hilda a little more, I suppose— and shut the door, when he came to join us, very quietly.
As Mirella had passed me in the doorway, she’d muttered: “Good authority? Jerry, we will talk. Soon.”
Hilda was a washout, which was as expected—after all, Folla had come into one dream of hers, months before, and though he’d clearly intended to come back, he hadn’t managed it to date. Apparently he thought I was a better candidate— likelier to be able to build the gimmick he needed?—and was concentrating, more or less, on that. “I asked her to call for him, in her dream,” Euglane said, “and I did suggest as strongly as possible that she dream. There’s a limit to the strength of such a suggestion, if it’s to be useful.”
“Make it too strong,” I said, “and the subject will invent a dream, just to please the hypnotist. Self-defeating.”
“Exactly,” Euglane said, and Mirella said:
“Jerry, how come you know so much about this?”
I shrugged. “I’ve been hypnotized,” I said. “It was the only way to deal with a Fairy Godfrog. Some day I’ll tell you about it—too long a story for right now.”
“Lots of people get hypnotized,” she said. “How come you learned about it? Just curious?”
“I don’t like things I can’t understand,” I said. “So I tried understanding it. To tell the truth, I’m not at all sure I do.”
“There exist a hundred theories regarding hypnosis,” Euglane said. “A thousand. Many are plausible; none provide certainty of any sort. Despite some interesting mathematics, little is actually known about the state.”
I sighed. “Well,” I said, “my turn.” Folla had never turned up for Hilda, but she was still on the cot—Euglane wanted to give her a chance to rest, held by a post-hypnotic. But she could be moved to an upstairs bed—a very large, wide bed, in fact, since it was Euglane’s, and of course he slept relaxed.
He and I got Hilda up the stairs and on the bed—a water-bed (“It’s a blessing, in this gravity,” Euglane told me)— without waking her. When we came downstairs the Master and Mirella were in the inner room.
He was looking at the wiring. “You measure the depth of sleep?” he said.
“Just so,” Euglane said. “For these purposes, essential: I must know, so to speak, how far into that—ah—undiscovered country our traveler penetrates.”
“But from this country,” I said, “travelers do return.”
“I hope,” Mirella said. “I still worry: if you dream you die, what then?”
“If I do,” I said, “I’ll tell you all about it when I wake up.”
She scowled at me. “Very funny,” she said. “Just take care. Who knows what an alien can do?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
So I lay down, and Euglane started with his wiring. Most of it was hooked to a flexible cap; the cap generated a field that echoed electrical activity inside my head. He eased the cap onto my head and adjusted it a little, not fussily, and I shut my eyes and told my body to relax.
“You’ve been hypnotized before,” Euglane said.
“I know how it works,” I said. “You’ll want me sitting up, won’t you? To see the swinging light?”
“Not necessary,” he said. “It’s mirrored above you; I’ll switch it on.”
He did, and when I opened my eyes I was staring at a good, but not too shiny, mirror, with the metronome ticking silently away in the middle of it.
After a little while, I was sleeping, and knew I was sleeping, and looking around for a dream to have. I felt calm and fairly confident, and hoped Folla would pop up.
Trying to generate a dream, even as cloudily as I was doing it in my induced sleep, is an unusual feeling—like trying to invent a tall story to tell somebody in a bar. It’s not the kind of thing I’ve ever been good at—the stories I spin in bars, when I fall into that odd habit, are usually all too depressingly true— and I kept asking myself what dream materials would be likeliest to attract Folla.
That was a useless kind of question, on six or seven different grounds, but I was still asking it when I found myself in a dog factory. Large mechanicals were putting dogs together on a long, old-fashioned assembly-line belt, out of parts they took from bins ranged alongside the belt. The rate was just slow enough for me to follow the steps: a small, hairless torso appeared at the start of the belt, a head was stuck on, then hind legs, forelegs and a tail. The last two mechanicals attached small, pointed and floppy ears, and sprayed the finished product with immense globs of hair, which settled all over the animal, leaving feet and eyes bare. At the end of the belt, each dog stood, shakily for a second, barked twice, and then jumped off, trotting into the shadows beyond my view.
I watched this process, with only very faint surprise, for about a minute and a half, dream-time—say six dogs’ worth. Then a dog got fully assembled at the end of the belt, stood, looked at me and said: “Statement: you wish to aid me.”
“I wish to talk with you,” I said. “Folla?”
“So identified,” the dog said. He trotted over to me. “Shall you select a subject for conversation?”
“If I’m going to provide any help,” I said, “I’ll want to be paid. What can you offer?”
“Question: offer?”
“You offered another human a new sense,” I said. The dog cocked his head at me.
“Your sensorium is full,” he said. “I can provide that only with changes.”
Bargaining time? “What kinds of changes?”
“New material would have to be grown,” he said. “Time would elapse, and isolation would be essential.”
“What length of time?” I said. “And what would the new sense do?”
“Would you enjoy perception of temporal extension?” he said.
“I would know when I looked at something how long it had lasted?” I said.
“You will see its temporal extent,” he said. “Its time of beginning, its existence and its time of ending. The perception will be suited to your experience of temporality.”
It sounded like a very handy thing to be able to do, I told myself. Look at something and see when it had started, when it was going to end. “This perception will apply to what kind of object?”
“Any and all,” he said. “Partial list: objects constructed, objects grown, other beings of all sorts. Do you wish this sense?”
“Isolation required,” I said. “How much isolation, and for how long?”
“Reply in series,” he said. “One: total isolation from all other beings and living objects. Two: uncertainty exists. Growth factors are individuated.”
“Give me a horseback guess,” I said, and immediately translated: “An approximate figure. Minutes, days or years?”
“In your experience of temporality,” he said, “between two days and six months Standard.”
“How will I know when time is up?”
“When perception begins, you will experience it,” he said.
“How?” I said.
“Reply not expressible,” he said, which was what I’d expected.
I tried to act as if I were thinking it over. “I’ll need time to decide,” I said.
“What time is required?” the small dog said.
“Days, and not many days,” I said. “How will I find you again?”
“I will watch,” he said. “When you have decided, I will know, as soon as you enter these spaces.”
“As soon as I dream again?”
“Dreaming is your perception of this entry,” he said. “Your dream will advise me.”
“Automatically?”
“You will wish to tell me of your decision,” he said. “That wish will create a suitable experience in these spaces, and I will watch for such an experience.”
“Two questions,” I said.
“Questions in series awaited.”
I took a breath. The assembly line was still going on; our talk had been punctuated with barks every now and then. “One,” I said. “Can I rely on this agreement remaining open, or will you make an agreement of some kind with some other being? Two: why do you appear as a dog, along with a small girl?”
He cocked his head at me again. His ears went up, and down. “Reply in series,” he said. “One: No other being has made agreement. Of beings reachable, you alone have discussed to this extent. I will await further discussion. Two: Humans have pets. Small common pets are non-threatening and inspire friendship and confidence. Young female humans inspire confidence and affection.”
I nodded. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” I said. “Now I must wake up.”
And I did. Euglane was looking down at me, his face, what I could read of it, dispassionately kind. “An interesting discussion,” he said, and I cleared my throat, blinked once or twice and said:
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