All right, thought Ralph, halting in the middle of the room. If they—Stiles and whoever’s above him somewhere—haven’t already decided to get rid of me, then that’s my only chance. He resisted a powerful urge to curl up into a ball in the corner of the room and close his eyes until they came for him. After several deep breaths, he opened the apartment door and started down the hallway.
* * *
“Just close the door behind you, won’t you, Metric?” Commander Stiles waved vaguely with one hand, scattering ashes from his cigarette on his desk. “Have a seat.”
Ralph sat down. A wad of saliva had formed in his mouth but he didn’t swallow, trying to conceal his nervousness.
Behind the desk, the gray-haired base commander swivelled from side to side in his imitation leather chair. “I see you’re out of base uniform,” he remarked mildly.
Hell, thought Ralph, forgot about that. The ball in his mouth grew bigger, and he had to swallow before he could speak. “Uh . . . yeah. I guess I am.”
“That’s all right.” The cigarette described a figure in the air. “I understand how you feel.” He exhaled a small cloud between them.
“Thinking about cutting out of here, weren’t you?”
“That’s right.” Ralph felt as though his mind were racing completely free of all connections. “Actually I’ve been, uh, thinking about it for some time now. Before today, I mean.”
“Nonsense.” Stiles took a fresh cigarette from the box on his desk and lit it from the stub of his old one. “You’re scared because of what you saw last night. This morning, I mean—about five a.m. or so, wasn’t it?”
Ralph silently studied the older man’s heavily grained face. “Scared?” he asked finally.
“Come on. Don’t diddle with me, Metric. I imagine what you saw on the field was pretty upsetting. You must’ve thought something pretty big had gone wrong someplace, for something like that to happen. With Stimmitz, I mean, and the—what do you men call it?—slithergadee.”
He said nothing. The air in the room felt as though it were tensing and becoming brittle around him: any word or motion might shatter it.
“What if I told you,” said Stiles, swivelling around to gaze out the window behind him, “that what you saw didn’t happen?”
“Sir?” Ralph’s eyes jerked to the back of the imitation-leather chair.
Stiles swung back around to face him. “It didn’t happen, Metric. It was an illusion. That stupid jerk Stimmitz sneaked into the Thronsen Home the other day. We know all about it. Those kids live in a very controlled environment over there; it’s part of the treatment, and the therapists are very careful about what they’re allowed to see. Because what they see during the day is incorporated into their dreams at night. That’s how the sequences are programmed. Several of the kids saw Stimmitz when he was snooping around. We didn’t find out about it until just before all of you watchers were starting your shift last night. We pulled Stimmitz off the line just as it was being activated.”
“But Stimmitz was on the field last night—”
Stiles gestured impatiently. “That was an illusion. What you saw was the image of Stimmitz that got mixed in with the kids’ dreams. You expected him to be there on the field with you, and so your subconscious filled in the details of the image’s movements, talking and so on.”
“But he was there,” said Ralph. “I saw the slithergadee attack him, and—”
“No. We pulled the real Stimmitz off the line and fired him for breaking Opwatch regulations. He was over in Norden waiting for a bus out of here when the image you saw of him got ripped up. The stimulus of the new image—this is what the therapists over at Thronsen told me—triggered a hostility-release sequence that’s programmed around the slithergadee. It’s supposed to be used later on in the program.”
So this is what he told the others, thought Ralph. “Stimmitz isn’t dead, then? The real one, I mean.”
“No. He deserved it though.” Stiles tilted back in his chair and watched him.
Now what? Ralph avoided the other’s eyes. If what Stiles had told him was the truth, then there was nothing to worry about. But if it wasn’t, if something was still being hidden . . . He suddenly felt his universe become vague and insubstantial, like the dreamfield itself. It had been so clear and solid, if dangerous, only a few moments ago. Foggy knives, he thought, the odd image creeping through his mind.
“Not convinced, eh?” Stiles lifted his hand. “No, that’s okay, I understand, Metric. You were the one who saw it, you’re the one who should insist on proof.” He reached down and lifted a large plastic bag from behind the desk, then dumped its contents on top of the papers. “Go ahead. Take a look.”
It was a wadded-up Opwatch jumpsuit, the kind worn by the watchers during their shifts on the dreamfield.
Ralph picked it up and looked inside the collar. His own initials, RDM, were stamped inside.
“It’s yours,” said Stiles. “It’s the one you were wearing last night. We took it out of the locker room after you had gone back to your apartment.
“Now, if the slithergadee’s attack was as vicious as you described it to the other watchers, and if that had been the real Stimmitz on the field last night, then surely some of his blood would have gotten on you. Right?
“Well, go ahead, take a look. Not a spot on it.”
Carefully, Ralph inspected the jumpsuit. He could remember the blood spraying toward him after the slithergadee’s first lunge at Stimmitz. The warm fluid from the severed leg had been like some nightmare fountain, pulsing in time with Ralph’s own heartbeat.
There were no bloodstains on the jumpsuit. Ralph laid it down upon the commander’s desk.
“That’s the way it is,” said Stiles. “It was too bad that Stimmitz had to go and be so stupid, cause so much trouble for us and so much worry for you. But you’re a good man, Metric, and we don’t want to lose you. That’s the bottom line of it all. Tell you what; you’ve been here long enough to qualify for a week’s vacation. Get your mind off what you saw on the field.”
He gestured expansively with his cigarette.
“Maybe,” said Ralph. It felt as though a hollow cylinder had formed inside him. Dimly, he wondered if this was the same way he had always felt before. “Maybe I’ll do that. I’ll let you know.”
“Sure, sure. Anytime will do. Close the door after you, will you? Dust gets on everything.”
The thought struck him as Ralph closed the door and stepped away from the commander’s office. They could have switched jumpsuits. They could have taken one of my others from the laundry bin and showed me that. They could have gotten rid of the one with the blood on it. It would have been simple.
“Do you really believe it?”
“Well, sure, Ralph.” Kathy brushed her unkempt hair from her shoulders. “Don’t you?”
Goodell leaned forward in his Rec hall chair and wiped a line of beer from his upper lip. “Come on,” he said. “Do you have a better explanation for what happened?”
“What didn’t happen,” corrected Ralph vaguely. He looked around at the twenty or so watchers, male and female, gathered in the Rec hall’s main room. Some unspoken need had made them seek each other’s company. Even Glogolt was there, slouched down in one of the chairs with a beer can perched on his stomach. Some of them look a little vexed, noted Ralph. The ripples from the stone that fell in their shallow waters haven’t quite gone away yet.
“Well? Do you?” said Goodell.
“No,” said Ralph. His fingers slowly blurred a trickle of sweat on his forehead. “They told us their story, and nobody can tell one any different, so what Stiles and the others said must be the truth.”
“Ralph, don’t be so creepy.” Kathy looked annoyed at the trace of sarcasm she had detected in his voice. “You’re just imagining things.”
“Did anybody see Stimmitz leave?” Ralph felt his own desperation, trying to connect the last amorphous bit of suspicion with something solid. “How come he left a
ll of his stuff back in his apartment?”
“I’d want to cut out before anybody saw me, too,” said Goodell, “if I’d pulled anything so stupid. Sneaking into Thronsen . . . what a jerk.”
“You mean you’re not curious? You don’t wonder about what might be going on over there?”
“Why should I be?”
Ralph looked from Goodell’s face to those of the other watchers. They all had the same expression around the eyes. He got up without speaking, pushed past their outstretched legs and then out through the dark glass door.
Outside, his shoulders bore the weight of the noon sun. Through the glare he could see the hills and desert beyond the base’s grounds; the rocks and sand dunes resembled the other watchers’ eyes—flat, solid, objects rather than human. Looking away, he walked on towards the apartment building.
Two men were busily working in Stimmitz’s old second-floor apartment. They were loading the books and other things into large cartons. As Ralph looked in through the open doorway he saw the words Zenith Van and Storage on the backs of their gray overalls.
“Howdy,” said one of the men, turning and spotting him in the doorway. “Hey, do you know somebody around here named—what was it—hey, who was that package for?”
“Ralph Metric,” said the other mover, lifting Stimmitz’s tape deck from the bookshelves.
“That’s me.”
“Here,” said the first mover. “This guy left this behind for you.” He picked up a flat square object from the floor and handed it to Ralph.
It was a boxed reel of tape. Bach cantatas, on a European import label.
He turned it over in his hands and saw the inscription in felt pen. Give to Ralph Metric After I Leave. Below that was Stimmitz’s signature.
“Thanks,” muttered Ralph, holding the box. Damn, he thought, I don’t even have a tape recorder to play this on. Stimmitz knew that. Maybe he really was—or is—flipped out, or something. “Thanks.” He walked slowly down the hallway, then turned and walked back to the doorway of Stimmitz’s apartment. “Where’s all this stuff being sent to?”
“We’re just storing it,” said the mover. “Until the guy comes and picks it up.”
“Oh.” Ralph nodded and started down the hallway again.
Inside the door of his own apartment, he opened the tape box. There was nothing but the clear plastic spool wound about with the tape and a little booklet with the words to the cantatas in three languages. He paged quickly through the booklet—there were the tiny black letters and odd-looking photos of the soloists. Some of the tape uncoiled from the reel as he threw the entire package onto his sofa in a fit of frustration and disgust.
There was a tape recorder in the Rec hall, he knew, on which he could listen to the tape. Later, he thought. Not now— I’m too tired. A depressing premonition sapped at him. Somehow he felt sure there would be no messages for him on the tape.
Perhaps there would never be any messages for him. He pulled a chair up to the window, sat down and gazed out over the base. The last of that other universe, where things had seemed to be connecting up at last, was draining from him like blood. Welcome back, he thought grimly. This is just like the old Juvenile Hall all over again. The memory, an old wound, came sliding back.
* * *
Over a year ago he had been working the graveyard shift at the Juvenile Hall in one of the counties below L.A. From eleven at night until seven in the morning, the same hours as the shifts on the dreamfield, he had been responsible for one of the “living units,” as each group of rooms housing twenty or so kids had been called. They were nearly always asleep when he got there. Every half hour he was supposed to walk down the unit’s long hallway with a flashlight and peek through the little window set in each room’s locked door—to make sure none of the kids being detained there had decided to kill himself with his bedsheet knotted around his neck, or had managed to escape by somehow dicing himself through the tough steel grating over the outside windows. None of the kids had tried to do either while he had been working there.
The rest of the time he was supposed to sit at a desk in the unit’s day room, just be available: a good job, he had been told when he applied for it, for somebody going to college or with something of their own to do.
After a short walk every half hour for exercise, he could spend the rest of the time studying or whatever. Ralph hadn’t been in college then but he had been working on a novel. He would spread his notebooks out upon the desk top as soon as he had arrived.
The book never got written. The same thing happened to him that he had seen happening to everyone else who worked there at night, but no one had ever seemed to talk about it. Like a nerve disease edging along the spine and out into the arms and legs, a paralysis of the will set in. Every night he would sit there, the hours crawling past, the blank pages in front of him. But the things he had wanted to do had swollen into obstacles of crushing size and weight.
The world of the graveyard shift had become gradually stranger and stranger. Every half hour he would make his room checks, going with his flashlight from one small window to the next. The kids had slept on, wrapped in whatever dreams were theirs alone.
In the Juvenile Hall the kids had been mainly passively delinquent, their offenses often something to do with being stoned too often and too publicly. The violent ones, the ones with psyches corkscrewed into a hard, sick knot were quickly sorted out and dispatched to special state facilities; from these juveniles, the hardest would end up at Thronsen Home and Operation Dreamwatch. The ones in the Hall had weightless lives, content for the most part to be pushed along by the current of the adult world they might someday inherit by default.
Sometimes, as he had looked in on their slack faces, it had seemed as if their mild dreams and nightmares had somehow seeped out from under the doors of their rooms like an invisible gas, and poisoned all of the night staff. Most of those who had taken the job in order to study wound up flunking their classes and dropping out of college. Ralph would go home in the morning, feeling as if something had been drained out of him.
Then he received a form letter from the Operation Dreamwatch recruiting office in L.A. He had wound up applying—drifted into it, really—and had found himself here, in this desert that always seemed as vacant as the space that had grown inside him.
* * *
Ralph gazed out his apartment window at the Opwatch base.
Now what? The sun was setting—he had lost the last several hours somehow.
As though he were back at Juvenile Hall, fluid time had leaked away and evaporated again. He rose and picked the tape up from the couch.
As he entered the Rec hall, one of the watchers lounging in the chairs signalled to him with a beer can. “Hey,” called the watcher. “No shift tonight. Blenek just told us we’ve got the night off.”
Ralph nodded and walked on. It wasn’t unusual, the most frequent explanation was that the field insertion device needed adjusting.
In the Rec hall’s small, scarcely-used library, he let himself into the booth containing the tape recorder. After a moment studying the directions fastened to the front of the machine, he snapped the tape into place and threaded it through the rollers. He slipped on the headphones and pressed the Play button.
The tape was nearly two hours long. He listened to it all. There were no messages on it, nothing had been added on top of the Bach cantatas.
When it was done he gently touched the empty reel to stop its spinning.
He sat in front of the machine for a long time. The silence spread around him.
Chapter 4
The clock beside his bed read eight a.m. when Ralph awoke. He shook away the last vestiges of a dream about teeth sliding in a scaled mouth.
The room was already bright with the desert sun filtering through the curtains. He sat up and stared at his knees beneath the sheet as though what he was thinking was printed there.
Helga, he said to himself. Of course, you ass. Why not go talk to Helga
Warner? She’s the one who went into Thronsen with Stimmitz—she should know something about what’s going on. Ralph swung his legs over the edge of the bed and reached for the clothes he had dropped on the floor the night before.
On the pathway to the other apartment building, he ran into Kathy.
“Hello, Ralph,” she yawned, idly scratching below the blue and gold Opwatch emblem on the sleeve of her blouse. “What’s up?”
“Huh?” He stopped and looked at her so intensely that she took a step backwards. “What did you say?”
She returned his stare. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Never mind. Nothing.” He stepped past her and hurried on towards the other building.
Helga’s apartment was on the third floor. He had never been inside—of all the watchers, she had always been the least sociable—but he remembered seeing her unlock her door once while he had been talking to Kathy in the hallway. Upon finding the right door he knocked, waited, then knocked again.
“Who’s there?” Helga’s voice came through the still closed door.
“It’s Ralph. Ralph Metric. I want to talk to you.”
A few seconds of silence. “What about?” Her voice slowed with a strange caution.
“Well—can I come in? It’s important.”
There was no answer. “It’s about Stimmitz,” he said.
The door opened a few inches, revealing a section of Helga’s wide face.
She looked Ralph over, then glanced past him into the hallway. Without speaking, she pulled the door open and stood back.
As Ralph stepped past her into the apartment he felt her watching him.
He turned and met her eyes with his own, then looked quickly away. Wow, he thought, she looks like she’s about to bite my head off. He stared out her window at the harsh desertscape.
The Dreamfields Page 3