Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  And …

  At Disney, nobody fucks with The Mouse.

  VISIONARY

  (Written with Joe L. Hensley)

  Under the pastel and quiet skies their minds conversed.

  “There is the need,” they thought, and: “They are maturing,” and: “Soon we will be in the togetherness.” And they turned and watched the quiet skies and the reaching roof and spires in anticipation*

  I had this dream. I’d been having it for years before I knew it for something more than vague remembering. A child’s dream, but it did not fade and change. It was a solemn dream, disquieting. And, after a while, it became more real than the other things that I found in books and lived with.

  There wasn’t a great deal to it. Just an enormous building, the background around it pastel misty. The building was like a great cathedral, and yet my feeling when I saw it was not religious, though it was akin to it. Always I seemed to be hanging far above it, struggling, but never reaching it. And I would awaken …

  I knew, somehow, that everything would be right for me if 1 could find it. And I knew that I would, some day.

  But then, there was the dreaming: The architecture was odd and alien. It seemed to be many organ pipes, thrust down into a soil that was pinkish and fine. The pipes were set flush against one another, so that a great wall of rounded shapes rose up and fit the sky. The roof of the building was of a design I could not identify. Neither Gothic nor Baroque; neither Art Nouveau nor Victorian; certainly it was not Contemporary, yet in a configuration that struck a chord at the rim of familiarity.

  There were openings here and there and the openings were dissimilar. Circular and squared apertures; originality of design, in such depth that none of them could be called doors or windows with certainty. They were merely openings: for what purposes I did not know. I looked for one that would fit me.

  And there was a scintillance, a shimmering quality to the scene, as if I were viewing it through a membrane, or from a great distance, distorted by heat ghosts.

  That was my dream.

  Over and over and over again. Waking was a sense of loss, sleeping was life.

  There was a sorrow and a strangeness in me then; and I grew older resonating to some soundless song no one else could hear. I was always alone … walled in, yet much freer than those who ran and played around me—my brothers and sisters. And because I was different, it was not an easy life.

  My father and mother were second generation Italian Americans, and my father was historically impressed by an early American patriot named Whitelaw Martin. He was like that. My name bothered me until junior college. They constantly abbreviated it to “Whitey,” and my hair was pitch black—that and a perfect body were the last vestiges of my Italian heritage. But there were a lot of other things that bothered me also. When you are a child you must run with the pack. I couldn’t do it. At first my brothers fought my fights for me, stood up for me, but later I lost even my brothers. And I was strange, I knew that. It took strong stimulus to get through to me. Kid’s games never did it. I found something that did and I buried myself in the daytime too.

  Books.

  At first there were fairy tales. I could lose myself in those fabled lands and the cathedral would become unnecessary for a while. When I was ten I read through the Brittanica and I spouted facts until I was beaten to my knees. Then I learned that it is unwise to be wise. At fourteen I’d read almost everything that was worthwhile and lots that was not. I’d read Shakespeare and I could quote whole acts; I’d read the mad, brilliant ones like Fort and Nostradamus, I’d read Hemingway and Plato and The Com-pleat Angler.

  And I grew away from those around me, without boyhood or regret for it. One day, when I was nineteen, and in college, I looked around and saw that I was tolerated, but not loved. And the conscripters were breathing at my heels for I’d lost interest in school and my stats were marginal.

  I enlisted in the Force.

  It was still the Air Force, but it sounded ridiculous to call a service that spent most of its budget in the vacuum of deep space the “Air” Force. So the jingoists, and then the newsfax shortened it to Force.

  I became a Forceman. That may sound dramatic, but it wasn’t. At least, not at first.

  I was trained, and assigned as a hot-stuff drainage expert to a coolant team, based with a limpet missile unit outside La Paz. Based there, but we did a lot of traveling.

  It was during the travels—Borneo, Lebanon, Malta, the Arctic, Chad, Kingsland—that the dream ceased to trouble me. I looked for the building in every land and could not find it. But as the dream faded, so did the obsession retreat.

  Oh, there were remembrances. On clear nights, when the stars were so painfully sharp they hurt my eyes, and I was pulling guard mount under them, then I’d remember the dream. But it was as if I’d put it aside, this dream that was almost a knowledge, and it was waiting for me, but willing to wait. As if it were saying: My time will come.

  And yet I was not completely patient in my waiting. I collected buildings, in much the same way that many people collect books or stamps. I had pictures of every famous structure in the world, thousands of pictures. My favorite was a framed photo of a tiny Shintoist shrine, that had a vague, grudging resemblance to my dream building. But they were all wrong—Taj Mahal to ruined Angkor Wat—none of them even reasonably resembled mine. So the fixation remained and I continued to look. The thirst could not be slaked, no matter how much I drank.

  They were using radex fusion propellants then, and every once in a while we, or the Cubans, or the Sheikdoms would send out a one man job that would attempt to crack the barrier beyond the Edge. But none came back. None of ours for sure and the others never claimed any success; I suppose for fear they’d have to substantiate the claim.

  The fights went on in the U. N.: bickering about territories that neither of us could really use; limited wars; police actions; border incidents; each nation striving to establish superiority over the other.

  All this, even in an era of limited exploration of the Solar System. We should have known better.

  And then along came something out of a magician’s hat and what was to be … was set in motion. But I didn’t know that— not yet.

  They’d been giving Force-wide tests. They were odd tests, unlike any I’d ever taken. The questions were odd and peculiarly-phrased and yet, sometimes, lucid and almost exciting to me in their familiarity—as if someone should have asked them of me long ago, so that I would know and they would know. There were questions about foods and smells and what you would do in a given situation. There were many of those. But every once in a while there was something else, like: “What do you think it would be like to die?” or “Have you ever felt apart from all places and things?” or “What is the loveliest thing that you can remember?”

  And there were physicals, too. Good competent physicals, not hurried and superficial, as were the annual checkups.

  The dreams came back then—nearer and closer.

  I was sorry when the tests were completed: the dream became sporadic again—once more it receded.

  Six weeks later I was cut new orders. They flew me out. A special VTOL. I was the lone passenger.

  I counted.

  I had to show my orders exactly fourteen times from the minute I reached Bong Field until I was billeted there. I never saw so many guys with guns—off safety—even in a battle area. And they didn’t just check my orders—they read them. Then they checked my face against my I. D. card and made me rattle off my service number. Then they fluoro-ed my retinas and took my fingerprints and checked them against copies from my “master file.”

  They’d taken a group of old hangars and put high fences around them. Real high and charged. Then they’d put a guard along every fifteen or twenty yards of fence. There was another fence inside the outer one and more guards. I guess they wanted to keep what they had inside. A close-mouthed captain took me to a barracks and there were other men billeted there. But that night the d
ream wasn’t there. I couldn’t sleep.

  In the morning they started more tests on me and about thirty others who appeared to have been shipped in from almost everywhere. At first, physicals. The tests were similar to what had been run before. After a while they became more complicated. Doctors beat on me, and pinched me, and took my blood, and flashed lights at me, and depressed my tongue, and scraped bits of skin off me. Then they whirled me in a thing like a “whip” at the carnival and shot me up in an ejection seat. And I endured it all with the same vague excitement I’d felt during the other tests. But no one came to tell us what we were there for.

  They had the bunch of us in two old barracks. But by ones and twos and threes they eliminated until there were only six of us left. And whenever the taciturn captain came in I knew it was not for me—just knew it.

  I got to know the other five pretty well. They were all different from me in many ways. In one way we were the same. The first of them was a large-boned, wry black man embarrassingly named Washington Jones. Then there was Samuels and Kahn, who was very tiny, and the two women, Pearson and Ludwig. They were all different from me—except for their eyes.

  When it got down to six, a colonel came into the barracks one day and pinned bars on our lapels and shook our hands.

  I suppose we all knew, in a way, what was going on. We figured they’d found something and, from the tests, that we were their guinea pigs.

  The dream was very close now. It was as though I was reliving a bit of my childhood. I saw myself up there again—my face, the same child’s face I’d always had, with the wide eyes and the freckles and the black, black hair and the slash of a mouth, wide and frowning. But the body was different. It was bigger than life, man-plus. Hard and ripplingly-muscled, tall and golden, like a God out of a Greek myth. I was that god.

  I recognized the egocentricity of it, naturally, but my cathedral waited beneath me. And I awoke.

  The barracks was quiet around me. All but our six bunks were empty now. Faint dawn light filtered down the walls. I lay awake for a while, remembering; then I scratched a cigarette alight.

  Another spot of red bloomed from a nearby bunk and Wash Jones’s voice said softly: “You awake, Fazio?”

  I grunted.

  “I been working it over in my mind,” he said. “Why we’re here —why I’m here. I’m afraid. All my life I’ve been waiting for something to happen to me. Now that it is, I’m afraid of it but I want it.”

  “Do you ever dream?” I asked.

  His voice was almost lost: “I dream, but I can’t share it.” When his voice came again it was hesitant: “Did you ever read Charles Fort, Fazio?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Remember what he said about time?” His voice strengthened. “That there are ages in which certain occurrences are predestined to happen. Not by divine ordinance, but just because it’s their time to happen. The time of the wheel and the steam engine and the automobile. And if someone comes up with one too early, there’s a singular, almost mystical, disregard of the invention. As though the world were snubbing it till it was ready for it.”

  I felt the excitement grow a little again and what he said was right and it fit inside me, fit in with my dream.

  And I lay there and thought about it; and for a long time we were silent.

  I was almost back to sleep when I heard him muttering to himself. “What time is it now, Washington Jones? What time is it now?’

  I checked Charles Fort out of the base library next day and read him through again. I had nothing but spare time. We waited, and no one told us a damn thing. Once Jones saw me with the book and we grinned at each other self-consciously. But the book did not engender in me the kind of excitement that I’d hoped for. Fort was quite brilliant and quite paranoid.

  Yet the dream persisted and Jones’s concept was some part of it and something to mull over in my spare time.

  Which was something I had little time for.

  Because without warning they started the question and answer tests again.

  Those tests—sometimes I felt like slamming a wall. Tests unlike any that I’d known existed. Ponder the significance of this:

  Do you lose things constantly? (If answer is “yes” indicate how often, what type of thing lost, where found, mental condition at time of recovery, and any other emotional data.)

  On some days the questions came as adjuncts to weird movies. I remember some of them. The first was a reel of kaleidoscopic wheeling and whirling and shunting from one hue to another. Before it was done I felt as if I was beaten and torn. I felt as if the future had vanished and swallowed me.

  The question was: What are your feelings about death in the abstract? In the specific? (Do not use qualifiers.)

  Later there was an existentialist movie about sadism, and a rose, and a fruitless love affair between a cripple and a girl with one eye. There was a miracle in the end. I didn’t understand the picture, but I didn’t want the lights to come back on.

  Question two was: What is your stand on God? Answer bluntly, avoid partisan religious referents, where possible.

  They gave us one more that first day. It was a movie about a man who dreamed strange dreams and who thought he was insane. The actor made it seem very real—chillingly real.

  And the question was: Have you ever dreamed that you could fly or thought that you were flying without the use of any mechanical aid?

  That one I had real trouble with. I answered it finally by saying that I had, “in my childhood.”

  And so it went. For better than a week. That sort of question. Some that were almost nonsense, some that were so sharp and keen that the point penetrated deep within me.

  They told us we were not to discuss the questions in the barracks. So we did, of course. At great length. And there were a lot of theories, but nothing concrete.

  Finally they told us.

  There was this little man. He couldn’t have been much over forty, but he wore the star of a brigadier. He was a Doctor Something, I later found out it was “Stein,” a psychiatrist, with degrees in things that ran from linguistics to physics and a mind that worked like a fine computer. He must have come here voluntarily from some other country, I never found out which. His eyes were sad behind thick-lensed glasses, and his voice was phlegmy with the heritage of Central Europe. He was rough to understand, but I felt an instinctive liking for him.

  When he talked—we listened.

  “It’s different out there,” he said. “We know that. On the few flights we’ve made we’ve found a great deal. And still we know very little.”

  He looked out around the room and his eyes behind the lenses were lost in the big dream, the thwarted longing. “The things we do here don’t work well out there—the stamina that we possess means little. Our laws of logic, our world’s ethical structure, most of what we’ve postulated goes … wrong … out there. It’s as if when the force of gravity, of Earth-touching, is lost, everything else is lost too. It’s cost some good fives and it’s made us change our method of selection.”

  “And now we’re going out further than ever before. We’re going out—past the barrier. We have the means to do it. And you people are specially qualified to do it for us.”

  The room around me rippled with sound. My pulse sprinted and I forced calmness, so that I would not miss the words.

  “We have asked you questions that made you feel we were not quite right in the head.” He smiled. He was missing two teeth on the upper left.

  “But the questions had a purpose—some to shock you into a non-conformist awareness—some to tell us things about you the Force-wide tests merely hinted at.” He leaned forward on the podium. “Each of you is a loner. Each of you has the ability to maintain, even to transcend against whatever conditions exist around you, remaining essentially yourselves, with no great personality change. There is a segment of the brain that does not work well under the pressure of gravity, but which tends to become dominant when gravity is removed as a
factor. There are other areas that only work when gravity is present. We theorize that there are other areas that will work only under conditions produced by exceeding the speed of light. We have not been lucky with deep space beyond the barrier so far. Yet we have learned.

  We feel that we’ll be luckier now that we know—now that we are able to look for qualities such as you have.” He looked out at us and I felt both excited and queasy. And I explored me and lost myself in what he was saying. What was he saying, actually? Psi? I knew something about that and Rhine’s old failed experiments, decades ago. There were remarks about the cortex and four-fifths of the brain inactive, and random reflexes. And after a while I only understood a word here and there.

  But I understood his final remarks.

  “We know the ship will work. There have been tests. We are more interested now in studying human behavior—in finding out if the human race can survive the trip to the stars. We have built our ship around a special bank of instruments, which will be closely telemetered, to record every thought, every emotion, every vision you sustain.

  “Do any of you wish to volunteer?”

  I put my hand up and then looked around. There were five more hands raised. My hand felt wet in the moving currents of the room, but my throat was dry.

  Stein smiled. “We’ll have to draw lots.”

  Whitelaw Fazio’s luck. I pulled second. Ludwig pulled first, the star-marked ballot. She would be the first to go to the stars. I felt a deep disappointment when I saw her bright eyes.

  And yet there was relief, too.

  “Do any of you want to ask questions?” Dr. Stein asked, when the lottery was done.

  Wash Jones’s hand went up. “Sir,” he said, “what have we discovered that will let us get to the stars? As far as we knew, a few months back, they couldn’t even get one of the stage ships back.”

  The glasses came up and shone in the light. The face went a little strange. “I have a degree in physics, Mr. Jones. But I was working on something else, something more in my own field of interest—you need not ask the nature of my primary specialty, I think you can guess—and I stumbled onto what we now call a ‘force-bead-generator.’ It goes beyond accepted physics. It gives a sure, never failing power source.”