When at last he turned the machines off and began to detach the electrodes, the serenity Orr had felt did not lapse, like the induced mood of a drug or alcohol. It remained. Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, “Dr. Haber, I can’t let you use my effective dreams any more.”
“Eh?” Haber said, his mind still on Orr’s brain, not on Orr.
“I can’t let you use my dreams any more.”
“‘Use’ them?”
“Use them.”
“Call it what you like,” Haber said. He had straightened up and towered over Orr, who was still sitting down. He was gray, large, broad, curly bearded, deep-chested, frowning. Your God is a jealous God. “I’m sorry, George, but you’re not in a position to say that.”
Orr’s gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.
“Yet I do say it,” he replied mildly.
Haber looked down at him, really looked at him for a moment, and saw him. He seemed to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a granite door. He crossed the room. He sat down behind his desk. Orr now stood up and stretched a little.
Haber stroked his black beard with a big, gray hand.
“I am on the verge—no, I’m in the midst—of a breakthrough,” he said, his deep voice not booming or jovial but dark, powerful. “Using your brain patterns in a feedback-elimination-replication-augmentation routine, I am programming the Augmentor to reproduce the EEG rhythms that obtain during effective dreaming. I call these e-state rhythms. When I have them sufficiently generalized, I will be able to superimpose them on the d-state rhythms of another brain, and after a period of synchronization they will, I believe, induce effective dreaming in that brain. Do you understand what that means? I’ll be able to induce the e-state in a properly selected and trained brain, as easily as a psychologist using ESB induces rage in a cat, or tranquillity in a psychotic human—more easily, for I can stimulate without implanting contacts or chemicals. I am within a few days, perhaps a few hours, of accomplishing this goal. Once I do, you’re off the hook. You will be unnecessary. I don’t like working with an unwilling subject, and progress will be much faster with a suitably equipped and oriented subject. But until I’m ready, I need you. This research must be finished. It is probably the most important piece of scientific research that has ever been done. I need you to the extent that—if your sense of obligation to me as a friend, and to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the welfare of all humanity, isn’t sufficient to keep you here—then I’m willing to compel you to serve a higher cause. If necessary, I’ll obtain an order of Obligatory Ther— of Personal Welfare Constraint. If necessary, I’ll use drugs, as if you were a violent psychotic. Your refusal to help in a matter of this importance is, of course, psychotic. Needless to say, however, I would infinitely rather have your free, voluntary help, without legal or psychic coercion. It would make all the difference to me.”
“It really wouldn’t make any difference to you,” Orr said, without belligerence.
“Why are you fighting me—now? Why now, George? When you’ve contributed so much, and we’re so near the goal?” Your God is a reproachful God. But guilt was not the way to get at George Orr; if he had been a man much given to guilt feelings he would not have lived to thirty.
“Because the longer you go on the worse it gets. And now, instead of preventing me from having effective dreams, you’re going to start having them yourself. I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live in yours.”
“What do you mean by that: ‘the worse it gets’? Look here, George.” Man to man. Reason will prevail. If only we sit down and talk things over.... “In the few weeks that we’ve worked together, this is what we’ve done. Eliminated overpopulation; restored the quality of urban life and the ecological balance of the planet. Eliminated cancer as a major killer.” He began to bend his strong, gray fingers down, enumerating. “Eliminated the color problem, racial hatred. Eliminated war. Eliminated the risk of species deterioration and the fostering of deleterious gene stocks. Eliminated—no, say in process of eliminating—poverty, economic inequality, the class war, all over the world. What else? Mental illness, maladjustment to reality: that’ll take a while, but we’ve made the first steps already. Under HURAD direction, the reduction of human misery, physical and psychic, and the constant increase of valid individual self-expression, is an ongoing thing, a constant progress. Progress, George! We’ve made more progress in six weeks than humanity made in six hundred thousand years!”
Orr felt that all these arguments should be answered. He began, “But where’s democratic government got to? People can’t choose anything at all any more for themselves. Why is everything so shoddy, why is everybody so joyless? You can’t even tell people apart—and the younger they are the more that’s so. This business of World State bringing up all the children in those Centers—”
But Haber interrupted, really angry. “The Child Centers were your invention, not mine! I simply outlined the desiderata to you among the suggestions for a dream, as I always do; I tried to suggest how to implement some of them, but those suggestions never seem to take hold, or they get twisted out of all recognition by your damned primary-process thinking. You don’t have to tell me that you resist and resent everything I’m trying to accomplish for humanity, you know—that’s been obvious from the start. Every step forward that I force you to take, you cancel, you cripple with the deviousness or stupidity of the means your dream takes to realize it. You try, each time, to take a step backward. Your own drives are totally negative. If you weren’t under strong hypnotic compulsion when you dream, you’d have reduced the world to ashes, weeks ago! Look what you almost did, that one night when you ran off with that woman lawyer—”
“She’s dead,” Orr said.
“Good. She was a destructive influence on you. Irresponsible. You have no social conscience, no altruism. You’re a moral jellyfish. I have to instill social responsibility in you hypnotically, every time. And every time it’s thwarted, spoiled. That’s what happened with the Child Centers. I suggested that the nuclear family being the prime shaper of neurotic personality structures, there were certain ways in which it might, in an ideal society, be modified. Your dream simply grabbed at the crudest interpretation of these, mixed it up with cheap Utopian concepts, or cynical anti-utopian concepts perhaps, and produced the Centers. Which, all the same, are better than what they replaced! There is very little schizophrenia in this world—did you know that? It’s a rare disease!” Haber’s dark eyes shone, his lips grinned.
“Things are better than they—than they were once,” Orr said, abandoning hope of discussion. “But as you go on they get worse. I’m not trying to thwart you, it’s that you’re trying to do something that can’t be done. I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it. To use it only when I must. When there is no other alternative. There are alternatives now. I’ve got to stop.”
“We can’t stop—we’ve just begun! We’re just beginning to get any control at all over this power of yours. I’m within sight of doing so, and I will do so. No personal fears can stand in the way of the good that can be done for all men with this new capacity of the human brain!”