The crescendo of explosions, Haber now realized, had ceased; in fact it was fairly quiet. Everything trembled a little, but that would be the mountain, not the bombs. Sirens whooped, far and desolate, across the river.
George Orr lay inert on the couch, breathing irregularly, the cuts and swellings on his face looking ugly on his pallor. Cinders and fumes still drifted in the chill, choking air through the smashed window. Nothing had been changed. He had undone nothing. Had he done anything yet? There was a slight eye movement under the closed lids; he was still dreaming; he could not do otherwise, with the Augmentor overriding the impulses of his own brain. Why didn’t he change continuums, why didn’t he get them into a peaceful world, as Haber had told him to do? The hypnotic suggestion hadn’t been clear or strong enough. They must start all over. Haber switched off the Augmentor, and spoke Orr’s name thrice.
“Don’t sit up, the Augmentor hookup’s still on you. What did you dream?”
Orr spoke huskily and slowly, not fully awakened. “The ... an Alien was here. In here. In the office. It came out of the nose of one of their hopping ships. In the window. You and it were talking together.”
“But that’s not a dream! That happened! Goddamn, we’ll have to do this over again. That might have been an atomic blast a few minutes ago, we’ve got to get into another continuum, we may all be dead of radiation exposure already—”
“Oh, not this time,” Orr said, sitting up and combing off electrodes as if they were dead lice. “Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber.”
Haber stared at him.
“I suppose your Augmentor increased the.immediacy of it for you,” Orr said, still with extraordinary calmness. He appeared to ponder for a little. “Listen, couldn’t you call Washington?”
“What for?”
“Well, a famous scientist right here in the middle of it all might get listened to. They’ll be looking for explanations. Is there somebody in the government you know, that you might call? Maybe the HEW Minister? You could tell him that the whole thing’s a misunderstanding, the Aliens aren’t invading or attacking. They simply didn’t realize until they landed that humans depend on verbal communication. They didn’t even know we thought we were at war with them. ... If you could tell somebody who can get the President’s ear. The sooner Washington can call off the military, the fewer people will be killed here. It’s only civilians getting killed. The Aliens aren’t hurting the soldiers, they aren’t even armed, and I have the impression that they’re indestructible, in those suits. But if somebody doesn’t stop the Air Force, they’ll blow up the whole city. Give it a try, Dr. Haber. They might listen to you.”
Haber felt that Orr was right. There was no reason to it, it was the logic of insanity, but there it was: his chance. Orr spoke with the incontrovertible conviction of dream, in which there is no free wilclass="underline" do this, you must do it, it is to be done.
Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use, even to obey, the weak tool? This went through his mind, not for the first time, but even as he thought it he was going over to the desk, to the telephone. He sat down and dialed direct-distance to the HEW offices in Washington. The call, handled through the Federal Telephone switchboards in Utah, went straight through.
While he was waiting to be put through to the Minister of Health, Education, and Welfare, whom he knew fairly well, he said to Orr, “Why didn’t you put us over in another continuum where this mess simply never happened? It would be a lot easier. And nobody would be dead. Why didn’t you simply get rid of the Aliens?”
“I don’t choose,” Orr said. “Don’t you see that yet? I follow.”
“You follow my hypnotic suggestions, yes, but never fully, never directly and simply—”
“I didn’t mean those,” Orr said, but Rantow’s personal secretary was now on the line. While Haber was talking Orr slipped away, downstairs, no doubt, to see about the woman. That was all right. As he talked to the secretary and then to the Minister himself, Haber began to feel convinced that things were going to be all right now, that the Aliens were in fact totally unaggressive, and that he would be able to make Rantow believe this, and, through Rantow, the President and his Generals. Orr was no longer necessary. Haber saw what must be done, and would lead his country out of the mess.
9
Those who dream of feasting wake to lamendation.
It was the third week in April. Orr had made a date, last week, to meet Heather Lelache at Dave’s for lunch on Thursday, but as soon as he started out from his office he knew it wouldn’t work.
There were by now so many different memories, so many skeins of life experience, jostling in his head, that he scarcely tried to remember anything. He took it as it came. He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.
His office was on the third floor of the Civil Planning Bureau; his position was more impressive than any he had had before: he was in charge of the South-East Suburban Parks section of the City Planning Commission. He did not like the job and never had.
He had always managed to remain some kind of draftsman, up until the dream last Monday that had, in juggling the Federal and State Governments around to suit some plan of Haber’s, so thoroughly rearranged the whole social system that he had ended up as a City bureaucrat. He had never held a job, in any of his lives, which was quite up his alley; what he knew he was best at was design, the realization of proper and fitting shape and form for things, and this talent had not been in demand in any of his various existences. But this job, which he had (now) held and disliked for five years, was way out of line. That worried him.
Until this week there had been an essential continuity, a coherence, among all the existences resultant from his dreams. He had always been some kind of draftsman, had always lived on Corbett Avenue. Even in the life that had ended on the concrete steps of a burnt-out house in a dying city in a ruined world, even in that life, up until there were no more jobs and no more homes, those continuities had held. And throughout all the subsequent dreams or lives, many more important things had also remained constant. He had improved the local climate a little, but not much, and the Greenhouse Effect remained, a permanent legacy of the middle of the last century. Geography remained perfectly steady: the continents were where they were. So did national boundaries, and human nature, and so forth. If Haber had suggested that he dream up a nobler race of men, he had failed to do so.
But Haber was learning how to run his dreams better. These last two sessions had changed things quite radically. He still had his flat on Corbett Avenue, the same three rooms, faintly scented with the manager’s marijuana; but he worked as a bureaucrat in a huge building downtown, and downtown was changed out of all recognition. It was almost as impressive and skyscraping as it had been when there had been no population crash, and it was much more durable and handsome. Things were being managed very differently, now.
Curiously enough, Albert M. Merdle was still President of the United States. He, like the shapes of continents, appeared to be unchangeable. But the United States was not the power it had been, nor was any single country.
Portland was now the home of the World Planning Center, the chief agency of the supranational Federation of Peoples. Portland was, as the souvenir post cards said, the Capital of the Planet. Its population was two million. The whole downtown area was full of giant WPC buildings, none more than twelve years old, all carefully planned, surrounded by green parks and tree-lined malls. Thousands of people, most of them Fed-peep or WPC employees, fitted those malls; parties of tourists from Ulan Bator and Santiago de Chile filed past, heads tilted back, listening to their ear-button guides. It was a lively and imposing spectacle—the great, handsome buildings, the tended lawns, the well-dressed crowds. It looked, to George Orr, quite futuristic.