Through its door of dark glass he could see a few of the other watchers.
The sweat on his forehead and along his arms chilled as he pushed open the door and stepped into another air-conditioned area.
“What’s up, Ralph?” Slouched in one of the sagging, upholstered chairs, Kathy Foyle continued to gaze dispassionately at a section of newspaper. A bit of nail came loose from the rest and she took her forefinger away from her mouth. A lock of her dark hair straggled in front of one ear.
“Nothing much. About the same.” The exchange had become a ritual with them, a section of meaningless time that had formed into a loop and kept splicing itself in. There were other loops as well, Ralph knew, which were capable of multiplying into whole days.
The rest of the newspaper lay on the unused pool table in the middle of the room. The table’s felt had become gritty with the little bit of the Californian desert that came into the room every time the door was opened. Ralph’s fingertips left little marks as he picked up the L.A. Times’ front page.
Where was that? The name sounded Mexican to Ralph, though he hadn’t been aware that the fighting had spread that far north. Considering his only mild curiosity, the text below the headline looked too dense to penetrate. He laid down the paper, then headed along the hall’s main corridor to pick up his mail.
He peered into the little box set into the wall with all the others. There was nothing except an offer to join some record club—he got a lot of those; he was on somebody’s list somewhere—and his weekly copy of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party Agitant. A mimeographed note was stapled to the low-grade paper. It stated that if he didn’t send a couple more dollars, they would regretfully have to let his one-month trial subscription come to an end. The same note had been stapled to every issue he had received for the past six months.
He took a quick glance at the paper—SUPPORT SOCIALIST MARTYRS OF XIMENTO!—then dropped it and the record-club offer into a waste can and walked back to the main room.
Kathy was gone but Fred Goodell was now sprawled in one of the chairs, gazing out the glass door and scratching between the creases of his sweat-stained Opwatch dress shirt. His bored-ferret face looked up at Ralph. “You on tonight?”
“Yeah,” said Ralph. He lowered himself into one of the chairs. The tired upholstery sighed even under his thin frame. “This is my Monday.”
Goodell nodded. “Two more nights for me.” The watchers’ shifts were staggered through the week. “Then I’ll be off.” The conversation dissolved into silence.
I’d better go fix myself something to eat, thought Ralph vaguely. And then go to sleep for a while. Rest up for another eight hours on the dreamfield tonight. After half a year on this job, there were still times when spending the night wandering around in other people’s dreams seemed like an unnatural thing to do.
Chapter 2
“All right, men.” Operations Chief Blenek paced back and forth in front of them with his clipboard held behind his back. “Straight through, tonight. No heroics. Just do everything by the manual, the Opwatch way. All right?”
“Oh, brother,” muttered Chuck Fletchum, and slouched lower in his folding metal chair next to Ralph. “They must be running those World War Two bomber squadron flicks on TV again.”
Ralph said nothing. He could recall the week that one of the local stations had scheduled a batch of 1940s’ spy movies, and the pudgy functionary had actually shown up at the pre-shift briefings wearing a belted trenchcoat.
Blenek had fallen silent and was now glaring at the two dozen men in front of him, his small eyes set to impale whomever he had heard talking; they fastened on Glogolt, who was a couple of chairs ahead of Ralph.
“What was that smart remark, Mr. Glogolt?”
“Didn’t say anything,” mumbled the accused. He shifted his sacklike bulk, a small mountain of flesh encased in a wrinkled jumpsuit.
“Look at those shoes,” snarled Blenek, pressing his case. “When was the last time you took a rag to them? And pull up your zipper—you’re a mess.”
Ralph leaned back and studied Glogolt—he was a mess. He always looked as if he were somehow disintegrating inside his clothes, as if the effort to retain human shape had become too much for him. It made one tired just to look at him. Stimmitz is right, thought Ralph. What good is there having somebody like that around!
He looked over at Stimmitz sitting with his chair pushed against the wall of the briefing room. The eyes in the impassive face focused somewhere beyond the room. Ralph wondered what he was thinking. One of Stimmitz’s hands gripped the edge of his chair, his knuckles tensed white.
The voice of one of the other watchers broke through Ralph’s attention.
“Come on, Blenek, get on with it.”
Blenek’s eyes swept over the group again, then narrowed. They became two thin gauges of the anger he obviously felt over the difference between Operation Dreamwatch as it was and his fantasies of it. Clashing universes, Ralph found himself thinking—a phrase picked up from Stimmitz.
“This just came over from the Thronsen Home,” said Blenek sullenly. “They’ve started a new pattern some of you guys might observe tonight. In it, the kid is accused of shoplifting a candy bar, kid denies it, shopkeeper hits kid and searches him, in doing so tears the new jacket the kid’s mother gave him, shopkeeper turns into kid’s mother, and then it segues into one of the ‘angry parent’ cycles. Got it?” Blenek had worked himself back into his original gung-ho mood. “Let’s keep an eye out for it and get some reports in on it. Show the brass we’re not just sleeping around here.”
He placed his clipboard under his arm and rocked back on his heels. His wide belly tautened his Opwatch uniform. “Okay, move out—time to get on the line.”
As they crossed the short open space between the briefing room and the line shack—the grounds of the base were lit blue by moonlight and the desert’s numerous stars—Ralph glanced over at the group of female watchers sauntering out of their own briefing room. In a few moments they would be on the dreamfield of the girls in the Thronsen Home.
At a distance of fifty meters or so, Ralph could just recognize Kathy.
She waved briefly to him, holding a lit cigarette. It didn’t appear to him as if she had combed her hair since she had woken up last—one of her regular shortcomings, Ralph conceded. He looked, but didn’t see Helga Warner in the group.
He turned away and followed the other men into the line shack. The building housing the PKD Laboratories’ Field Insertion Device wasn’t a shack at all, but the largest cubic pile of cinderblocks and concrete for miles around. “Shack,” Ralph had decided, was probably just more pseudo-military lingo.
As he stepped into the building’s doorway, a pair of distant screams sounded from the sky. He looked back and up. Two pale luminous jet trails were vanishing into the south. Another midnight terror-bomb run, probably, down to the Brazilian front. Maybe Blenek should put in for a job over at the Air Force base, thought Ralph. He pulled the door shut behind himself.
The towering banks of electronics were softly humming as he passed by them. The air inside the building was sharp with ozone. Blenek scowled at him and made a mark on his clipboard as Ralph stepped past him. The last vacant strap was at the end of the thick cable dangling from the lofty ceiling. He grabbed the leather loop and felt the cold metal contact point settle against his palm. The permeating electronic hum grew louder.