Blaine yelled at the camel and slapped him with the reins; he wondered what in hell was going on, and he was back in the cubicle again. His shirt was stuck against his back with perspiration, and he could feel the heat of the desert sun fading from his face.
He lay for a long moment, gathering his wits, reorienting himself. Beside him the reel moved slowly, bunching up the tape against the helmet slot. Blaine reached out a hand and stopped it, slowly spun it backwards to take up the tape.
Then the horror of it dawned upon him, and for a moment he was afraid that he might cry out; but the cry died in his throat and he lay there motionless, frozen with the realization of what had happened.
He swung his feet off the cot and jerked the reel from its holder, stripping the tape out of the helmet. He turned the reel on its side and read the number and the name. The name was Jenkins, and the number was the identifying code he’d punched into the dream machine that very afternoon. There could be no mistake about it. The reel held the Jenkins dream. It was the reel that would be sent down in another day or two, when Jenkins came to take the Sleep.
And Jenkins, who had hankered for a big-game hunting trip, who had wanted to spend the next two hundred years on a shooting orgy, would find himself standing in a red and yellow desert on a track that could be called a road only by the utmost courtesy; in the distance he would see a moving dot, that would turn out later to be a camel and a cart.
He’d find himself in a desert with ragged pants and tattered shirt and with something in his pocket of more than ordinary value—but there would be no jungles and no veldt; there’d be no guns and no safari. There’d be no hunting trip at all.
How many others? Blaine asked himself. How many others failed to get the dream they wanted? And what was more: Why had they failed to get the dream they wanted?
Why had the dreams been substituted?
Or had they been substituted? Had Myrt—
He shook his head at that one. The great machine did what it was told. It took in the symbols and equations and it chattered and it clanked and thundered, and it spun the dream that was asked of it.
Substitution was the only answer, for the dreams were monitored in this very cubicle. No dream went out until someone had checked to see that it was the dream ordered by the Sleeper.
Collins had lived out five hundred years in a world which lacked the profit concept. And the red and yellow desert—what kind of world was that? Norman Blaine had not been there long enough to know; but there was one thing he did know—that, like Collins’ world, the Jenkins world was one no one would ask to live in.
The cart had wooden wheels and had been pulled by camel-power; that might mean that it was a world in which the idea of mechanized transportation never had been thought of. But it might, as well, be any one of a thousand other kinds of cultures.
Blaine opened the door of the cubicle and went out. He put the reel back in the rack and stood for a moment in the center of the icy room. After a moment, he realized that it was not the room that was icy, but himself.
This afternoon, when he had talked with Lucinda Silone, Blaine had thought of himself as a dedicated person, had thought of the Center and the guild as a place of dedication. He had talked unctuously of the fact there must be no taint upon the guild, that it must at all times perform its services so as to merit the confidence of anyone who might apply for Sleep.
And where was that dedication now? Where was the public confidence?
How many others had been given substituted dreams? How long had this been going on? Five hundred years ago, Spencer Collins had been given a dream that was not the dream he wanted. So the tampering had been going on five hundred years, at least.
And how many others in the years to come?
Lucinda Silone—what kind of dream would she get? Would it be the mid-nineteenth century plantation or some other place? How many of the dreams that Blaine had helped in fabricating had been changed?
He thought of the girl who had sat across the desk from him that morning—the honey color hair and the blue eyes, the milky whiteness of her skin, the way she talked, the things she had said, and the others that she had not said.
She, too, he thought.
And there was an answer to that. He moved swiftly toward the door.
He climbed the steps and rang the bell; a voice told him to come in.
Lucinda Silone sat in a chair beside a window. There was only one light—a dim light—in the far corner of the room, so that she sat in shadow. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “You do the investigating, too.”
“Miss Silone …”
“Come in and have a seat. I’m quite willing to answer any questions; you see, I am still convinced …”
“Miss Silone,” said Blaine, “I came to tell you not to take the Sleep. I came to warn you; I have …”
“You fool,” she said. “You utter, silly fool.”
“But …”
“Get out of here,” she told him.
“But it’s …”
She rose out of her chair and there was scorn in every line of her. “So I can’t take a chance. Go ahead; tell me it’s dangerous. Go on and tell me it’s a trick. You fool—I knew all that before I ever came.”
“You knew …”
They stood for a moment in tense silence, each staring at the other. “And now you know.” And she said something else he had thought himself not half an hour before: “How about that dedication now?”
“Miss Silone, I came to tell you …”
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “Go back home and forget you know it; you’ll be more comfortable that way. Not dedicated, maybe, but much more comfortable. And you’ll live a good deal longer.”
“There is no need to threaten …”
“Not a threat, Blaine; just a tip. If word should get to Farris that you know, you could count your life in hours. And I could see that the tip got round to Farris. I know just the way to do it.”
“But Farris …”
“He’s dedicated, too?”
“Well, no, perhaps not. I don’t …”
The thought was laughable. Paul Farris dedicated!
“When I come back to Center,” she said, speaking evenly and calmly, “we’ll proceed just as if this had never happened. You’ll make it your personal business to see that my Sleep goes through, without a hitch. Because if you don’t, word will get to Farris.”
“But why is it so important that you take the Sleep, knowing what you do?”
“Maybe I’m Entertainment,” she said. “You rule out Entertainment, don’t you? You asked me if I was Entertainment and you were very foxy while you were doing it. You fob off Entertainment because you’re afraid they’ll steal your Dreams for solidiographs. They tried to do it once, and you’ve been jumpy ever since.”
“You’re not Entertainment.”
“You thought so this morning. Or was that all an act?”
“It was an act,” Blaine admitted miserably.
“But this tonight isn’t an act,” she said coldly, “because you’re scared as you’ve never been before. Well, keep on being scared. You have a right to be.”
She stood for a moment, looking at him in disgust. “And now get out.”
Philo did not meet him at the gate, but ran out of a clump of shrubbery, barking in high welcome, when he swung the car around the circle drive and stopped before the house. “Down, Philo,” Blaine told him. “Down.”