The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  But something had to be done. Bombs fell by mistake on many other parts of the city, as will happen with jet bombing. There was no glass left in any window downtown. It lay, instead, in all the downtown streets, in small fragments, an inch or two deep. Refugees from southwest Portland had to walk through it; women carried their children and walked weeping with pain, in thin shoes full of broken glass.

  William Haber stood at the great window of his office in the Oregon Oneirological Institute watching the fires flare and wane down in the docks, and the bloody lightning of the eruption. There was still glass in that window; nothing had landed or exploded yet near Washington Park, and the ground tremors that cracked open whole buildings down in the river bottoms so far had done nothing worse up in the hills than rattle the window frames. Very faintly he could hear elephants screaming, over in the zoo. Streaks of an unusual purplish light showed occasionally to the north, perhaps over the area where the Willamette joins the Columbia; it was hard to locate anything for certain in the ashy, misty twilight. Large sections of the city were blacked out by power failure; other parts twinkled faintly, though the streetlights had not been turned on. No one else was in the Institute Building. Haber had spent all day trying to locate George Orr. When his search proved futile, and further search was made impossible by the hysteria and increasing dilapidation of the city, he had come up to the Institute. He had had to walk most of the way, and had found the experience unnerving. A man in his position, with so many calls on his time, of course drove a batcar. But the battery gave out and he couldn't get to a recharger because the crowds in the street were so thick. He had to get out and walk, against the current of the crowd, facing them all, right in amongst them. That had been distressing. He did not like crowds. But then the crowds had ceased and he was left walking all alone in the vast expanses of lawn and grove and forest of the Park: and that was a great deal worse.

  Haber considered himself a lone wolf. He had never wanted marriage nor close friendships, he had chosen a strenuous research carried out when others sleep, he had avoided entanglements. He kept his sex life almost entirely to one-night stands, semipros, sometimes women and sometimes young men; he knew which bars and cinemas and saunas to go to for what he wanted. He got what he wanted and got clear again, before he or the other person could possibly develop any kind of need for the other. He prized his independence, his free will.

  But he found it terrible to be alone, all alone in the huge indifferent Park, hurrying, almost running, toward the Institute, because he did not have anywhere else to go. He got there and it was all silent, all deserted.

  Miss Crouch kept a transistor radio in her desk drawer. He got this, and kept it on softly so he could hear the latest reports, or anyway hear a human voice.

  Everything he needed was here; beds, dozens of them, food, the sandwich and soft-drink machines for the all-night workers in the sleep labs. But he was not hungry. He felt instead a kind of apathy. He listened to the radio, but it would not listen to him. He was all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude. He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything. This horror of being by himself was strong enough that it almost drove him out of the Institute and down into the crowds again, but the apathy was still stronger than the fear. He did nothing, and the night darkened.

  Over Mount Hood the reddish glow sometimes spread enormously, then paled again. Something big hit, in the southwest of town, out of view from his office; and soon the clouds were lit from beneath with a livid glare that seemed to rise from that direction. Haber was going out into the corridor to see what could be seen, carrying the radio with him. People were coming up the stairs, he had not heard them. For a moment he merely stared at them.

  "Dr. Haber," one of them said.

  It was Orr. "It's about time," Haber said bitterly. "Where the hell have you been all day? Come on!"

  Orr came up limping; the left side of his face was swollen and bloody, his lip was cut, and he had lost half a front tooth. The woman with him looked less battered but more exhausted: glassy-eyed, knees giving. Orr made her sit down on the couch in the office. Haber said in a loud medical voice, "She get a blow on the head?"

  "No. It's been a long day."

  "I'm all right," the woman mumbled, shivering a little. Orr was quick and solicitous, taking off her repulsively muddy shoes and putting the camel's-hair blanket from the foot of the couch over her; Haber wondered who she was, but gave it only the one thought. He was beginning to function again. "Let her rest there, she'll be all right. Come here, clean yourself up. I spent the whole day looking for you. Where were you?"

  "Trying to get back to town. There was some kind of bombing pattern we ran into, they blew up the road just ahead of the car. Car bounced around a lot. Turned over, I guess. Heather was behind me, and stopped in time, so her car was all right and we came on in it. But we had to cut over to the Sunset Highway because 99 was all blown up, and then we had to leave the car at a roadblock out near the bird sanctuary. So we walked in through the Park."

  "Where the hell were you coming from?" Haber had run hot water in his private washroom sink, and now gave Orr a steaming towel to hold to his bloody face.

  "Cabin. In the Coast Range."

  "What's wrong with your leg?"

  "Bruised it when the car turned over, I guess. Listen, are they in the city yet?"

  "If the military knows, it's not telling. All they'll say is that when the big ships landed this morning they split into small mobile units, something like helicopters, and scattered. They're all over the western half of the state. They're reported to be slow-moving, but if they're shooting them down, they don't report it."

  "We saw one," Orr's face emerged from the towel, marked with purple bruises, but less shocking now the blood and mud were off. "That's what it must have been. Little silvery thing, about thirty feet up, over a pasture near North Plains. It seemed to sort of hop along. Didn't look earthly. Are the Aliens fighting us, are they shooting planes down?"

  "The radio doesn't say. No losses are reported, except civilians. Now come on, let's get some coffee and food into you. And then, by God, we'll have a therapy session in the middle of Hell, and put an end to this idiotic mess you've made." He had prepared a shot of sodium pentothal, and now took Orr's arm and gave him the shot without warning or apology.

  "That's why I came here. But I don't know if—"

  "If you can do it? You can. Come on!" Orr was hovering over the woman again. "She's all right. She's asleep, don't bother her, it's what she needs. Come on!" He took Orr down to the food machines, and got him a roast beef sandwich, an egg and tomato sandwich, two apples, four chocolate bars, and two cups of coffee with. They sat down at a table in Sleep Lab One, sweeping aside a Patience layout that had been abandoned at dawn when the sirens began to howl. "O.K. Eat. Now, in case you think that clearing up this mess is beyond you, forget it. I've been working on the Augmentor, and it can do it for you. I've got the model, the template, of your brain emissions during effective dreaming. Where I went wrong all month was in looking for an entity, an Omega Wave. There isn't one. It's simply a pattern formed by the combination of other waves, and over this last couple of days, before all hell broke loose, I finally worked it out. The cycle is ninety-seven seconds. That means nothing to you, even though it's your goddamn brain doing it. Put it this way, when you're dreaming effectively your entire brain is involved in a complexly synchronized pattern of emissions that takes ninety-seven seconds to complete itself and start again, a kind of counterpoint effect that is to ordinary d-state graphs what Beethoven's Great Fugue is to Mary Had a Little Lamb. It is incredibly complex, yet it's consistent and it recurs.

  Therefore I can feed it to you straight, and amplified. The Augmentor's all set up, it's ready for you, it's really going to fit the inside of your head at last! When you dream this time, you'll dream big, baby. Big enough to stop this crazy invasion, and get us clean over into another conti
nuum, where we can start fresh. That's what you do, you know. You don't change things, or lives, you shift the whole continuum."

  "It's nice to be able to talk about it with you," Orr said, or something like it; he had eaten the sandwiches incredibly fast, despite his cut mouth and broken tooth, and was now engulfing a chocolate bar. There was irony, or something, in what he said, but Haber was much too busy to bother about it.

  "Listen. Did this invasion just happen, or did it happen because you missed an appointment?"

  "I dreamed it."

  "You let yourself have an uncontrolled effective dream?" Haber let the heavy anger lie in his voice. He had been too protective, too easy on Orr. Orr's irresponsibility was the cause of the death of many innocent people, the wreckage and panic loose in the city: he must face up to what he had done.

  "It wasn't," Orr was just beginning, when a really big explosion hit. The building jumped, rang, crackled, electronic apparatus leaped about by the row of empty beds, coffee slopped in the cups. "Was that the volcano or the Air Force?" Orr said, and in the midst of the natural dismay the explosion had caused him, Haber noticed that Orr seemed quite undismayed. His reactions were utterly abnormal. On Friday he had been going all to pieces over a mere ethical point; here on Wednesday in the midst of Armageddon he was cool and calm. He seemed to have no personal fear. But he must have. If Haber was afraid, of course Orr must be. He was suppressing fear. Or did he think, Haber suddenly wondered, that because he had dreamed the invasion, it was all just a dream?

  What if it was?

  Whose?

  "We'd better get back upstairs," Haber said, getting up. He felt increasingly impatient and irritable; the excitement was getting too extensive. "Who's the woman with you, anyway?"

  "That's Miss Lelache," Orr said, looking at him oddly. "The lawyer. She was here Friday."

  "How'd she happen to be with you?"

  "She was looking for me, came to the cabin after me."

  "You can explain all that later," Haber said. There was no time to waste on this trivia. They had to get out, to get out of this burning exploding world.

  Just as they entered Haber's office the glass burst out of the great double window with a shrill, singing sound and a huge sucking-out of air; both men were impelled toward the window as if toward the mouth of a vacuum cleaner. Everything then turned white: everything. They both fell over.

  Neither was aware of any noise.

  When he could see again, Haber scrambled up, holding on to his desk. Orr was already over by the couch, trying to reassure the bewildered woman. It was cold in the office: the spring air had a moist chill in it, pouring in the empty windows, and it smelled of smoke, burnt insulation, ozone, sulfur, and death.

  "We ought to get down into the basement, don't you think?" Miss Lelache said in a reasonable tone, though she was shivering hard.

  "Go on," Haber said. "We've got to stay up here a while."

  "Stay here?"

  "The Augmentor's here. It doesn't plug in and out like a portable TV! Get on down into the basement, we'll join you when we can."

  "You're going to put him to sleep now?" the woman said, as the trees down the hill suddenly burst into bright yellow balls of flame. The eruption of Mount Hood was quite hidden by events closer at hand; the earth, however, had been trembling gently for the past few minutes, a sort of fundamental palsy that made one's hands and mind shake sympathetically.

  "You're fucking right I am. Go on. Get down to the basement, I need the couch. Lie down, George....

  Listen, you, in the basement just past the janitor's room you'll see a door marked Emergency Generator.

  Go in there, find the ON handle. Have your hand on it, and if the lights fail, turn it on. It'll take a heavy pressure upward on the handle. Go on!"

  She went. She was still shaking, and smiling; as she went she caught Orr's hand for a second and said,

  "Pleasant dreams, George."

  "Don't worry," Orr said, "It's all right."

  "Shut up," Haber snapped. He had switched on the Hypnotape he had recorded himself, but Orr wasn't even paying attention, and the noise of explosions and things burning made it hard to hear. "Shut your eyes!" Haber commanded, put his hand on Orr's throat, and turned up the gain. "RELAXING," said his own huge voice. "YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED. YOU WILL ENTER THE—" The building leaped like a spring lamb and settled down askew. Something appeared in the dirty-red, opaque glare outside the glassless window: an ovoid, large object, moving in a sort of hopping fashion through the air. It came directly toward the window. "We've got to get out!" Haber shouted over his own voice, and then realized that Orr was already hypnotized. He snapped the tape off and leaned down so he could speak in Orr's ear. "Stop the invasion!" he shouted. "Peace, peace, dream that we're at peace with everybody! Now sleep! Antwerp!" and he switched on the Augmentor.

  But he had no time to look at Orr's EEG. The ovoid shape was hovering directly outside the window. Its blunt snout, lit luridly by reflections of the burning city, pointed straight at Haber. He cowered down by the couch, feeling horribly soft and exposed, trying to protect the Augmentor with his inadequate flesh, stretching out his arms across it. He craned over his shoulder to watch the Alien ship. It pressed closer.

  The snout, looking like oily steel, silver with violet streaks and gleams, filled the entire window. There was a crunching, racking sound as it jammed itself into the frame. Haber sobbed aloud with terror, but stayed spread out there between the Alien and the Augmentor.

  The snout, halting, emitted a long thin tentacle which moved about questingly in the air. The end of it, rearing like a cobra, pointed at random, then settled in Haber's direction. About ten feet from him, it hung in the air and pointed at him for some seconds. Then it withdrew with a hiss and crack like a carpenter's flexible rule, and a high, humming noise came from the ship. The metal sill of the window screeched and buckled. The ship's snout whirled around and fell off onto the floor. From the hole that gaped behind it, something emerged.

  It was, Haber thought in emotionless horror, a giant turtle. Then he realized that it was encased in a suit of some kind, which gave it a bulky, greenish, armored, inexpressive look like a giant sea turtle standing on its hind legs.

  It stood quite still, near Haber's desk. Very slowly it raised its left arm, pointing at him a metallic, nozzled instrument.

  He faced death.

  A flat, toneless voice came out of the elbow joint. "Do not do to others what you wish others not to do to you," it said.

  Haber stared, his heart faltering.

  The huge, heavy, metallic arm came up again. "We are attempting to make peaceful arrival," the elbow said all on one note. "Please inform others that this is peaceful arrival. We do not have any weapons.

  Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear. Please cease destruction of self and others. We do not have any weapons. We are nonaggressive unfighting species."

  "I—I—I can't control the Air Force," Haber stammered.

  "Persons in flying vehicles are being contacted presently," the creature's elbow joint said. "Is this a military installation?"

  Word order showed it to be a question. "No," Haber said, "No, nothing of the kind—"

  "Please then excuse unwarranted intrusion." The huge, armored figure whirred slightly and seemed to hesitate. "What is device?" it said, pointing with its right elbow joint at the machinery connected to the head of the sleeping man.

  "An electroencephalograph, a machine which records the electrical activity of the brain—"

  "Worthy," said the Alien, and took a short, checked step toward the couch, as if longing to look. "The individual-person is iahklu'. The recording machine records this perhaps. Is all your species capable of iahklu'?

  "I don't—don't know the term, can you describe—"

  The figure whirred a little, raised its left elbow over its head (which, turtle-like, hardly protruded above the great sloped shoulders of the carapace), and said, "Please excuse. Inco
mmunicable by communication-machine invented hastily in very-recent-past. Please excuse. It is necessary that all we proceed in very-near-future rapidly toward other responsible individual-persons engaged in panic and capable of destroying selves and others. Thank you very much." And it crawled back into the nose of the ship.

  Haber watched the great, round soles of its feet disappear into the dark cavity.

  The nose cone jumped up from the floor and twirled itself smartly into place: Haber had a vivid impression that it was not acting mechanically, but temporally, repeating its previous actions in reverse, precisely like a film run backward. The Alien ship, jarring the office and tearing out the rest of the window frame with a hideous noise, withdrew, and vanished into the lurid murk outside.

  The crescendo of explosions, Haber now realized, had ceased; in fact it was fairly quiet. Everything trembled a little, but that would be the mountain, not the bombs. Sirens whooped, far and desolate, across the river.

  George Orr lay inert on the couch, breathing irregularly, the cuts and swellings on his face looking ugly on his pallor. Cinders and fumes still drifted in the chill, choking air through the smashed window. Nothing had been changed. He had undone nothing. Had he done anything yet? There was a slight eye movement under the closed lids; he was still dreaming; he could not do otherwise, with the Augmentor overriding the impulses of his own brain. Why didn't he change continuums, why didn't he get them into a peaceful world, as Haber had told him to do? The hypnotic suggestion hadn't been clear or strong enough. They must start all over. Haber switched off the Augmentor, and spoke Orr's name thrice.