He allowed it to carry him along away from the familiarity of the hotel. He had come to the inevitable conclusion that he was asleep and dreaming, and that, dreaming, he was exploring his own subconscious. He knew a moment of intense embarrassment at the realization that wherever his mind was, his body was still in Larry Bourbon’s suite in a shameful state of repose.
He was hearing “Mars,” now and hummed along tunelessly, watching the glowing, featureless walls move imperceptibly by. Curious. How can one know one is in motion if one cannot observe the evidence of motion?
As “Mars” continued to play, Beck noticed changes in his environment. The album beneath his feet was now carrying him toward a golden hoop that protruded from the glowing wall some yards ahead at a height of about twenty feet. The hoop, like the walls, seemed to gleam with its own light. It was turned on edge, its open circle facing him. He thought of brass rings and carousels, which were not unlike turntables in their basic design. It was a consistency that both delighted and comforted him. Approaching the hoop, he wondered if he could manipulate the dream plane.
That train of thought derailed when he noticed a mist gathering around the golden circle. It seemed to issue from nowhere, surrounding the ring, flowing through it, then lowering itself toward the turntable. Obvious symbology. His particular brass ring was the book contract he had just signed; the mist was something that attempted to obscure it from him.
As he was pondering the mist, the turntable slowed perceptibly and a wire basket filled with soccer balls appeared to his right along the wall. Beck started to analyze exactly how the basket had appeared and what it might mean, then decided, instead, to accept the playful nature of the dream. He reached into the basket as he passed by it, fished out one of the balls and lobbed it through the hoop, expecting to miss. As this was a dream, he did not miss; the shot was perfect, soaring through the ring without touching any part of its gleaming rim. If only he might have done that in high school.
Beck laughed and turned to get another ball. The basket was gone. A tone sounded—like a crystal goblet struck with a mallet. Overhead, the mist sucked away into the noplace it had come from and the hoop went dark. The turntable picked up speed. Beck knew this without knowing how he knew it. There was no breeze, the walls gave up nothing but diffused light; he simply knew.
Another ring appeared high on the curving wall ahead. A basket of balls awaited his approach. This time, the turntable didn’t slow, but continued on at a leisurely pace. Beck snagged a soccer ball and put it through the hoop with pinpoint accuracy.
Perhaps it was the sixth hoop or the seventh at which Beck decided he no longer wanted to play. He was bored and the turntable was moving more briskly; he wasn’t convinced he could make the shot. He wasn’t convinced he cared enough to try. He approached the hoop, lazily dribbling the soccer ball off the grooved surface beneath his feet. When he had bypassed the point at which he usually threw, the turntable slowed. He continued to dribble the ball, glancing toward the center of the record. The cut was “Uranus.” He could no longer see the spindle.
Movement above him drew his eyes back to the great golden ring. The vapor that had surrounded it seconds before was sinking toward him. An icy cold prickled over his skin. The vapor was malevolent; he was absolutely certain of it. Not poisonous, not toxic, but malevolent. In the instant it touched his face, he loosed the soccer ball, hurling it in a soaring arc through the golden hoop. The vapor was gone in a breath, leaving behind the irrational conviction that it had almost sucked his soul out of his body.
He did not tempt the vapor at the next hoop or the next. He sent the soccer ball through unerringly, still uncertain how a man for whom sport was torture was able to do such sporty things. As the bright ball cleared the ninth hoop accompanied by the strains of “Pluto,” the world around Beck changed. The turntable glided to a halt and to his right, in the curving wall, a doorway spilled light out onto the grooved, black plane.
Beck glanced around. Pluto. Unlike the others, this cut was oddly disturbing. Beck had little time to decide why. As he hovered in the open door, all light disappeared from the turntable as if sucked up by a vacuum. He stepped through the door.
He stood in a corridor, at the end of which he could vaguely make out a staircase. If he recalled his Freud correctly, climbing that would be symbolic of having sex. He wondered if the nights without a willing Marian were beginning to take their toll. He chuckled. The hoops and balls would no doubt also count as expressions of sexual desire in Freud’s book. How wonderful and complex was the language of dreams.
Before him the floor of the corridor lit up. It was a simple pattern of blue-and-white tiles that seemed to be pulsing in a random sequence. He stared at the checkerboard momentarily. It brought to mind his grandmother’s kitchen floor. A floor on which he used to play his own peculiar version of hopscotch. As he recalled, grandma’s kitchen floor hadn’t blinked on and off.
Another memory was invoked, oddly, of an episode of Dr. Who in which the good Doctor(s) (five of them, as he recalled) was confronted by such a puzzle. It had been booby-trapped with a laser beam that would zap anyone unwary enough to wander onto the wrong square. Beck crouched to watch the play of light across the tiles. The Doctor’s solution to the puzzle had lain in computing the value of pi. He rose. Pi. There were nine rows of tiles. 3.14159… The digits couldn’t stand for rows of tiles, but they might stand for columns.
In the first row of tiles, a white lit up, three tiles from the left edge of the checkerboard. Beck moved to stand in front of the tile and waited. When it lit up again, he stepped on it. A tone sounded, the tile blinked several times in rapid succession and then stayed on. He looked down at his feet. There was just enough room for both of them on the tile.
“OK,” he said aloud. “I’ll play your silly game.” He watched the first tile in the next row for a flash of light. When it came, he missed it, because the tile was a deep blue. He waited nearly a full minute (or so he thought) until the square lit up again. He stepped on it this time and was rewarded as before with the tone. As the first, the tile stayed lit.
It was easy after that—merely a game of waiting and leaping. In due time, he found himself in the very center of the corridor. There the pattern made an abrupt change. Both feet on a tile of blazing white, Beck stared in consternation at the floor ahead of him. From where he stood to the suddenly distant staircase, the tiles formed an expanse of strangely patterned brown and muted gold. Here was a group of three gold tiles, here a group of two, here a single tile. The squares themselves were smaller, too, leaving room for only one foot at a time to occupy them.
Recognition made Beck chuckle. He’d viewed similar patterns of tiles in myriad public men’s rooms. He waited, but none of the tiles before him lit up. After a moment of study, it seemed to him that the gold tiles did seem to form an irregular, but navigable, path from here to there, if one had a reasonably long stride and was willing to play hopscotch. The only problem was the size of the squares. Dreamer’s instinct told him that stepping over the edge of one was a Bad Thing.
He was contemplating his first move when he noticed a slight dimming in the corridor. A glance over his shoulder revealed the reason—behind him, the lighted tiles were winking out, darkness marching toward him. He had the creeping feeling that it would not be very pleasant to find out what happened when the square he was standing on went dark. He glanced ahead. About three feet away was a set of two gold tiles set about two feet apart. Not a bad split. He leapt.