Farris’ house was surrounded by a great metallic wall, too high to jump, too smooth to climb. A guard was posted at the gate and another at the door.
The first guard frisked Blaine; the second demanded identification. When he was satisfied, he called a robot to take the visitor to Farris.
Paul Farris had been drinking. The bottle on the table beside his chair was better than half empty. “You took your time in coming,” he growled.
“I got busy.”
“Doing what, my friend?”
Farris pointed at the bottle. “Help yourself. There are glasses in the rack.”
Blaine poured out liquor until the glass was almost full. He said casually, “Giesey was murdered, wasn’t he?”
The liquor in Farris’ glass slopped slightly, but there was no other sign. “The verdict was suicide.”
“There was a glass on the desk,” said Blaine. “He’d just had a drink out of the carafe; there was poison in the water.”
“Why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?”
“And you’re covering up for someone.”
“Could be,” Farris said. “Could be, too, it’s none of your damn business.”
“I was just thinking. Education …”
“What’s that!”
“Education has been carrying a knife for us for a long time now. I looked up the history of it. Dreams started as a branch of Education, a technique for learning while you were asleep. But we got too big for them, and we got some new ideas—a thousand years ago. So we broke away, and …”
“Now, wait a minute; say that slow, again.”
“I have a theory.”
“You have a head, too, Blaine. A good imagination. That’s what I said this afternoon; you think standing.”
Farris lifted his glass and emptied it in a single gulp. “We’ll stick the knife into them,” he said, dispassionately. “Clear up to their gizzard.”
Still dispassionately, he hurled the glass against the wall. It exploded into dust. “Why the hell couldn’t someone have thought of that to start with? It would have made it simple … Sit down, Blaine. I think we got it made.”
Blaine sat down and suddenly was sick—sick at the realization that he had been wrong. It was not Education which had engineered the murder. It had been Paul Farris—Farris and how many others? For no one man—even with the organization the goon leader had at his command—could have worked on a thing like this alone.
“One thing I want to know,” said Farris. “How did you get that appointment? You didn’t get it the way you said; you weren’t meant to get it.”
“I found it on the floor; it fell off Giesey’s desk.”
There was no need of lying any longer, of lying or pretending. There was no further need of anything; the old pride and loyalty were gone. Even as Norman Blaine thought about it, the bitterness sank deeper into his soul; the futility of all the years was a torture grate that rasped across raw flesh.
Farris chuckled. “You’re all right,” he said. “You could have kept your mouth shut and made it stick. It takes guts to do a thing like that. We can work together.”
“It still is sticking,” Blaine told him sharply. “Take it away from me if you think you can.”
This was sheer bravado and bitterness, a feeble hitting back, and Blaine wondered why he did it, for the job meant nothing now.
“Take it easy,” Farris said. “You’re keeping it. I’m glad it worked out as it did. I didn’t think you had it in you, Blaine; I guess that I misjudged you.”
He reached for the bottle. “Hand me another glass.”
Blaine handed him another glass and Farris filled both. “How much do you know?”
Blaine shook his head. “Not too much. This business of the dream substitution …”
“You hit it on the head,” said Farris; “that’s the core of it. We’d had to fill you in before too long, so I might as well fill you in right now.”
He settled back comfortably in his chair. “It started long ago, and it has been carried on with tight security for more than seven hundred years. It had to be a long-range project, you understand, for few dreams last less than a hundred years and many last much longer. At first, the work was carried on slowly and very cautiously; in those days, the men in charge had to feel their way along. But in the last few hundred years it has been safe to speed it up. We’ve worked through the greater part of the program first laid out, and are taking care of some of the supplementary angles that have been added since. Less than another hundred years and we will be ready—we could be ready any time, but we’d like to wait another hundred years. We have worked up techniques from what we’ve already done that are plain impossible to believe. But they’ll work; we have firsthand evidence that they are workable.”
Blaine was cold inside, cold with the shock of disillusion.
“All the years,” he said.
Farris laughed. “You’re right. All the years. And all the others thought that we were lily pure. We were at pains to make them think we were; such quiet people. We were quiet from the very start, while the others bunched their muscles, shouted. One by one they learned the lesson we had known from the very first—that you keep your mouth shut, that you do not show your strength. You wait until the proper time.”
“The others learned, eventually. They took their lessons hard, but they finally learned the facts of politics—too late. Even before there was a Central Union, Dreams saw what was coming and planned. We sat quietly in the corner and kept our hands neatly folded in our laps; we bowed our heads a little and kept our eyes half closed—a pose of utter meekness. Most of the time, the others didn’t even know that we were around. We are so small and quiet, you see. Everyone is watching Communications or Transportation or Food or Fabrication, because they are the big boys. But they should be watching Dreams, for Dreams is the one that has it.”
“Just one thing,” said Blaine. “Two things, maybe. How do you know the substitute dreams run true? All the genuine ones we make are pure fantasy; they couldn’t really happen the way we fabricate them.”
“That,” Farris told him, “is the one thing that has us on the ropes. When we can explain that one, we’ll have everything. Back at the beginning there were experiments. Dreams tried it out on their own personnel—ones who volunteered, for short periods, five years or ten. And the dreams didn’t come out the way they were put in.
“When you give a dream a logical basis, instead of wish-fulfillment factors, it follows the lines of logic. When you juggle cultural factors, the patterns run true—well, maybe not true, but different than you thought they would. When you feed in illogic, you get a jumble of illogic; but when you feed in logic, the logic takes over and it shapes the dream. Our study of logic dreams leads us to believe that they follow lines of true development. Unforeseen trends show up, governed by laws and circumstances we could not have guessed—and those trends work out to logical conclusions.”
There was fear in the man—a fear that must have lain deep in the minds of many men throughout seven hundred years. “Is it just pretend? Or do those dreams actually exist? Are there such other worlds somewhere? And if they are, do we create them? Or do we merely tap them?”
“How do you know about the dreams?” asked Blaine. “The Sleepers wouldn’t tell you; if they did, you couldn’t believe …”
Farris laughed. “That’s the easy part. We have a two-way helmet. A feed-in to establish the pattern and to set up the factors, a sort of introduction to set the dream going. It operates for a brief period, then cuts out and the dream is on its own. But we have a feed-back built into the helmet, and the dream is put on tape. We study it as it comes in; we don’t have to wait. We have stacks of tape. We have at our fingertips the billions of factors that go into many thousand different cultures. We have a history of the never-was, and of the might-have-been, and perhaps the yet-to-come.”