The elevator used by the medical teams was open, but Julia used the flight of concrete steps that went down around it. At the bottom, she walked along the main corridor, passing the rows of steel, white-painted lockers, and the many numbered doors.
She stopped at one room, knocked, then opened the door. As she had hoped, Marilyn James, one of the physiotherapists on the project, was there.
‘Hello, Marilyn. I’m looking for John Eliot.’
‘He’s been looking for you. I think he’s in the conference room.’
‘I’m late. I was stuck in traffic.’
‘I don’t think it matters,’ Marilyn said. ‘We were just a bit worried in case there had been an accident. Did you have a good holiday?’
‘So-so,’ Julia said, thinking of Paul, thinking of the bitterness of the night before. ‘It wasn’t long enough to enjoy myself.’
It was cold in the tunnel, although it was supposed to be heated. Julia walked on, thinking about Paul again.
The conference room was at the very end of the main corridor, and Julia went straight in. Dr Eliot was here, sitting back in one of the armchairs, and reading a typewritten report. At the far end of the room, where the coffee-machine was, a group of five of the technicians sat at a table playing cards.
‘Have I kept you waiting?’ she said to Eliot.
‘Come and sit down, Julia. Have you eaten today?’
‘A slice of toast for breakfast,’ she said. ‘And I had a cup of coffee on the way down.’
‘Nothing more? Good.’
Since the death of Carl Ridpath eighteen months before, John Eliot had been in charge of all projector functions at the Castle. He and Ridpath had worked in associated fields of neurhypnological research for several years, and it was partly as a result of a paper about neural conduction Eliot had published some fifteen years before that Ridpath developed his equipment. The fact that the neurhypnological projector bore Ridpath’s name gave no indication of the debt he owed Eliot, one which he repeatedly affirmed in his lifetime, and yet it was as the ‘Ridpath projector’ that the equipment was now known, not only by those sections of the media which took an interest in such matters, but by the participants too.
During Ridpath’s last illness Eliot had taken over the running of the project as if it had been his all along. Unlike Ridpath, though, who until the appearance of the cancer had enjoyed excellent health, Eliot suffered from a recurrent heart-murmur, and had never himself entered a projection, even for experimental purposes. He sometimes spoke to the participants about this, not enviously, but regretfully.
Now as Julia sat down beside him, he handed her a small pile of reports, including the one of her own she had filed a week before.
She settled down to concentrate on them, forcing thoughts of her private life out of her mind. This reading of reports was one of the more irksome duties to which she had to attend, but also one of the most crucial.
After this she asked for, and was granted, some time to herself, and she went to one of the private cubicles to study the file she had been compiling on David Harkman. The conversation with his ex-wife hadn’t seemed to yield much at the time, but she went through the notes again, looking for anything that might add insights into his personality, however remotely.
Eliot came to the cubicle.
‘This was sent down from Bincombe,’ he said to her, and gave her an envelope. ‘It arrived on Saturday.’
Julia glanced at the handwriting. ‘Should I read it now?’
‘It’s up to you, of course. Do you know who it’s from?’
‘I don’t think so.’ But there was an old familiarity to it, an unpleasant association. ‘Leave it here. I’ll read it later.’
When Eliot had gone, she picked up the envelope and slit it hurriedly. She knew the handwriting: it was Paul Mason’s.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded in half. She held it without opening it, logic struggling with curiosity.
She knew that concentration on her work was essential in the next hour, and that distraction would only hamper this. To read any kind of personal letter shortly before rejoining the projection was unwise, and one from Paul, who, with such unerring skill, could throw up so much emotional static in her, was especially risky. On the other hand, during yesterday’s unpleasant scene with him she had not found out what was his connection with the Wessex project, and she was anxious to know. The letter, obviously written before the weekend, might have the answer.
At last she decided to read it, realizing that if she didn’t the continuing curiosity would be as much a distraction as anything the letter might contain. As a compromise with herself, she resolved to practise the rote mnemonics afterwards, like an errant nun imposing twelve Hail Marys on herself.
The letter was short, and, to anyone not herself, apparently harmless. As soon as she had read it Julia put aside her file and went to take a shower.
Dear Julia,
I suppose you’ll be as surprised to read this as I was to discover that our paths have crossed once more. I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to recently, and how you’ve been keeping. Well, now I know. I’m hoping to come down to visit Maiden Castle soon, so I hope you can get an evening off to have dinner with me. I’m still very fond of you, and would like to see you again. I’m sure we will have a lot to say to each other.
Paul
Julia soaped herself angrily in the shower. Paul’s knack for touching on old wounds was amazing. ‘Now I know’ ... how much did he know? Why should he want to? Written by anyone else it was a mild platitude; written by Paul it reawakened all the paranoia of old. ‘I’m sure we will have a lot to say to each other’; he’d written that before the weekend, before they discovered that what they had to say to each other was like the leftovers from a meal gone cold six years before, spiced up with many an afterthought.
And he had always been fond of her, like a possessive child is fond of a tormented puppy; he’d never used the word ‘love’, not once. Not even when they were closest. Not even to sign off a letter.
She left the shower, and dried herself, then sat naked on the edge of the wooden chair in the cubicle. She closed her eyes, and determinedly recited the mnemonics to herself, fulfilling the terms of her own compromise. This late in the projection, the mnemonics had lost much of their earlier use, but they still had the function of concentrating the mind.
Ideally, the minds of the participants should be as uncluttered with personal thoughts as was humanly possible. Personal identity continued, of course, on an unconscious level, but the maximum projective effect was achieved when the conscious mind was directed along the chosen course. In this case, Julia’s main function was to establish contact with David Harkman, and the better she concentrated on that now the better the chance later of making that contact.
She glanced over her file on Harkman once again, then put on the simple surgical gown that had been left in the cubicle for her use. She folded up the rest of her clothes, and scribbled a note asking one of the staff to take them up to her room at Bincombe House.
Dr Eliot was waiting for her in the conference room.
‘Don’t forget to sign the release,’ he said, pushing a printed form across to her. Julia signed it without reading it, knowing it was the standard permission form, allowing Eliot to hypnotize her and place her body inside the Ridpath.
‘I’d like to see Harkman,’ she said.
‘We thought so. He’s ready.’
She followed Eliot into the large, brightly lit room that the participants called, with conscious irony, the mortuary. It was more properly known as the projection hall, for it was here that the thirty-nine cabinets of the Ridpath projector were placed. In spite of the many electric lights beamed down on to the cabinets - necessary illumination for the constant medical attention the participants required - the hall was always cold, because it was air-conditioned by a refrigeration system, so that the effect of working by the cabinets was akin to sunbathing in an Arctic bre
eze. As Dr Eliot and one of the technicians slid Harkman’s body out on the drawer of the cabinet, Julia wrapped her arms about her body, shivering.
Harkman lay as if dead. His body had been placed full-length along the surface of the drawer, with his head inwards. He was lying face-up, with his head and shoulders resting on the moulded supports so that his neck and spine made contact with the neural sensors implanted in the drawer. Seeing this, Julia felt a twinge of sympathetic pain in her own back, knowing the burning sensation she felt whenever she was taken from the projector.
Harkman had been inside the machine for almost two years without a break, and in that time his body had grown soft and flabby, in spite of the constant physiotherapy he received. His face was pale and waxen, as if embalmed, and his hair had grown long.
Julia stared impassively, watching his facial muscles twitch occasionally, and his hands, folded across his chest, tremble as if about to grasp at something. Beneath his lids, his eyes flickered like those of a man dreaming.
He was dreaming in a sense: a dream that had lasted nearly two years so far, a dream of a distant time and a strange society.
Dr Trowbridge, who was Eliot’s chief assistant, came over to them from where he had been working at the far end of the hall.
‘Is there anything wrong, Dr Eliot?’
‘No ... Miss Stretton is familiarizing herself with Harkman’s appearance.’
Trowbridge looked down at the face of the man in the drawer. ‘Would photographs not give a more accurate impression? Harkman has put on so much weight.’
Julia said, still staring at the unconscious man: ‘I suppose he could have wilfully changed his appearance.’
‘Have any of the others?’ Eliot said.
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘It’s not consistent with his profile,’ Eliot said. ‘Everything we know about him underlines an inherent stability. There are no lapses. Harkman’s personality is ideal for projection.’
‘Perhaps too ideal,’ Julia said, remembering his forceful arguments. She looked intently at the pale face, trying to imprint it on her memory, at the same time remembering how he had talked and acted before the projection began. This body was too like a dummy to imagine it alive and thinking. She said: ‘I wonder if he was repressing some resentment against the others? Perhaps he felt we were somehow intruding, and on projecting he willed himself away from the rest of us.’
‘It still isn’t likely,’ Eliot said. ‘There’s nothing in his pre-projection notes to indicate that. It has to be a case of unconscious programming. We’ve had several minor cases of that.’
‘And one major one, perhaps,’ Julia said. She nodded to Trowbridge and the technician. ‘You can put him back. I think I’m ready.’
They slid the drawer, and it closed with a sound of heavy, cushioned metal.
Eliot said to Trowbridge: ‘I think we should cut back on his intravenous feeding. I’ll talk to you later.’
He took Julia’s arm, and they went back through the side- tunnel to his surgery. As she followed him into the room, and he closed the door behind her, Julia thought momentarily of Paul. She remembered the row, and his letter, but she thought of them as unpleasant incidents in her experience, not as intrusions into her life. She felt a certain satisfaction that she had the strength at last to file him away into a cubby-hole of her conscious mind.
She went to sit in the deep chair in front of Eliot’s littered desk, ready to accept his will.
Later, as she listened to Eliot speak to her of the Wessex projection, she wanted to look away, to see him with her peripheral vision, but she was unable to. Sitting before her, Eliot spoke calmly, repetitively, quietly, and soon she fell into a trance.
three
It was late afternoon in Dorchester, and the open-air cafes along Marine Boulevard were enjoying a busy trade as the tourists returned from the beaches. Inside the harbour, the whole extent of which could be seen by the people strolling along the Boulevard, the private yachts were marooned on the pebbles and mud of low tide, held upright by ropes and pontoons. A few men and women from the hired crews were on some of the boats, but most of the owners and their guests were ashore. When the tide was in, the private section of the harbour was a bustle of yachts coming and going, with visitors sitting on the decks enjoying the view and the sunshine, but for the moment those visitors still aboard their boats were concealed from public gaze beneath their gaily coloured canopies and festoons.
Outside the harbour, a small fleet of fishing boats was waiting for the tide.
Along the walls and quays that surrounded the harbour, and for the length of Marine Boulevard, hundreds of people milled about with an air of pleasurable languor. Beggar-musicians moved amongst them, collecting-bags swinging from the necks of their guitars, and along the part of the Boulevard overlooking the harbour were the licensed stalls and entertainers, the book and magazine stands, Sekker’s Bar, and the store where tide- skimmers could be bought or hired and where the fashionable were always to be seen. It was in this part of town, at this time of day, that the visitors gathered.
The building of the English Regional Commission was situated in one of the sidestreets leading into Marine Boulevard, and it was from this that Donald Mander and Frederick Cro emerged. They walked slowly through the crowd towards the harbour, Cro still wearing his jacket, but Mander carrying his over his arm.’
They walked as far as the end of the quay, where they stopped to buy two citrons pressés at the soft-drinks bar.
From this position it became possible to see under the canopy of one of the yachts, and there, otherwise invisible from the harbour walls, were two young men and a woman. Although the men were dressed in beach-shorts and shirts, the young woman was naked. She sat quietly in a canvas chair, flipping through a magazine.
The Commission men both noticed her at the same time, but neither of them remarked on her. They were habitually guarded in what they said to each other, and by nature discreet with their reactions. Both men were bachelors in their fifties, and although they had worked in adjacent offices at the Regional Commission for more than twenty years they were still not on first-name terms.
When they had finished their drinks they walked slowly back down the quay.
Mander pointed towards the waiting fishing boats, most of which were grouped together in the deeper water about fifty metres from the harbour entrance. Several of the boats were lying low in the water, while their crews sat lazily in the warm sunlight on deck.
‘There’s been a good catch,’ Mander said.
Cro nodded, and Mander smiled to himself. He knew that the other man detested sea-food, and rarely ate in the local restaurants. One of the few facts Mander knew about Cro was that he lived on parcels of provisions, sent over by his parents, who were still alive and lived in relative affluence on the English mainland.
On the far side of the harbour, where the commercial work of the port was done, a steam crane emitted a loud hissing noise accompanied by a white jet of vapour. In a moment it trundled slowly along its rails to the regular berth of the hydrofoil service from the mainland. The boat was late this evening, and the carts of several tradesmen from the town stood waiting by.
Beyond, the bay was calm and blue.
The two men left the quay and walked into the crowd on Marine Boulevard, heading for Sekker’s Bar. They looked out of place in this leisurely part of town, more for their watchful manner than their clothes. The tourists stared as they sauntered in the warm air, caring only to notice and be noticed; Mander and Cro, though, glanced uneasily about them, minor public servants constantly on watch for minor details.
As they came near to the multi-coloured umbrellas over the tables of Sekker’s Bar, Cro pointed towards one of the stalls of merchandise.
‘The people from Maiden Castle,’ he said. ‘They’re still here. I thought you were going to check their licence.’
‘I did. There’s nothing irregular.’
‘Then it must be rev
oked. How did they get hold of one?’
‘In the usual way,’ Mander said. ‘It was bought in the office.’ ‘We could find an ideological objection ...’
Mander shook his head, but not so the other would see. ‘It’s never as easy as that.’
The stall Cro had indicated would have seemed innocuous enough to eyes less instantly hostile. It was no larger than any of the others, and constructed along the same lines. Even the goods on offer were similar, at first sight, to those peddled from stalls all along the Boulevard. The wooden surface of the counter had been covered with a green woollen cloth, and spread out across this was a selection of hand-crafted goods: wooden bowls and candlesticks, ornamented chess-sets, brooches and armbands set with polished semi-precious stones, unglazed pottery; each item seemed well made and substantial, but with an appealing roughness to the finish that served only to emphasize the essential craft.
In this way the goods differed from those offered at the other stalls, for they sold inexpensive but uniform wares, mass-produced in cooperatives on the mainland. This individual quality was not lost on the tourists, for the stall was attracting more customers than most of the others.
Cro glanced disparagingly at the goods, and at the people selling them.
There were two women and a man behind the simple counter. One of the women sat upright on a stool at the back, but she was at ease and with her eyes closed. She wore the clothes that the Commission men had immediately recognized, the plain, dull-brown hand woven garments that were worn by the entire community at Maiden Castle. The man and the other woman were both younger, although the man - who was thin and pale, and had prematurely balding hair-was moving slowly, as if tired.
A Dream of Wessex Page 2