It was a boxed reel of tape. Bach cantatas, on a European import label.
He turned it over in his hands and saw the inscription in felt pen. Give to Ralph Metric After I Leave. Below that was Stimmitz’s signature.
“Thanks,” muttered Ralph, holding the box. Damn, he thought, I don’t even have a tape recorder to play this on. Stimmitz knew that. Maybe he really was—or is—flipped out, or something. “Thanks.” He walked slowly down the hallway, then turned and walked back to the doorway of Stimmitz’s apartment. “Where’s all this stuff being sent to?”
“We’re just storing it,” said the mover. “Until the guy comes and picks it up.”
“Oh.” Ralph nodded and started down the hallway again.
Inside the door of his own apartment, he opened the tape box. There was nothing but the clear plastic spool wound about with the tape and a little booklet with the words to the cantatas in three languages. He paged quickly through the booklet—there were the tiny black letters and odd-looking photos of the soloists. Some of the tape uncoiled from the reel as he threw the entire package onto his sofa in a fit of frustration and disgust.
There was a tape recorder in the Rec hall, he knew, on which he could listen to the tape. Later, he thought. Not now— I’m too tired. A depressing premonition sapped at him. Somehow he felt sure there would be no messages for him on the tape.
Perhaps there would never be any messages for him. He pulled a chair up to the window, sat down and gazed out over the base. The last of that other universe, where things had seemed to be connecting up at last, was draining from him like blood. Welcome back, he thought grimly. This is just like the old Juvenile Hall all over again. The memory, an old wound, came sliding back.
Over a year ago he had been working the graveyard shift at the Juvenile Hall in one of the counties below L.A. From eleven at night until seven in the morning, the same hours as the shifts on the dreamfield, he had been responsible for one of the “living units,” as each group of rooms housing twenty or so kids had been called. They were nearly always asleep when he got there. Every half hour he was supposed to walk down the unit’s long hallway with a flashlight and peek through the little window set in each room’s locked door—to make sure none of the kids being detained there had decided to kill himself with his bedsheet knotted around his neck, or had managed to escape by somehow dicing himself through the tough steel grating over the outside windows. None of the kids had tried to do either while he had been working there.
The rest of the time he was supposed to sit at a desk in the unit’s day room, just be available: a good job, he had been told when he applied for it, for somebody going to college or with something of their own to do.
After a short walk every half hour for exercise, he could spend the rest of the time studying or whatever. Ralph hadn’t been in college then but he had been working on a novel. He would spread his notebooks out upon the desk top as soon as he had arrived.
The book never got written. The same thing happened to him that he had seen happening to everyone else who worked there at night, but no one had ever seemed to talk about it. Like a nerve disease edging along the spine and out into the arms and legs, a paralysis of the will set in. Every night he would sit there, the hours crawling past, the blank pages in front of him. But the things he had wanted to do had swollen into obstacles of crushing size and weight.
The world of the graveyard shift had become gradually stranger and stranger. Every half hour he would make his room checks, going with his flashlight from one small window to the next. The kids had slept on, wrapped in whatever dreams were theirs alone.
In the Juvenile Hall the kids had been mainly passively delinquent, their offenses often something to do with being stoned too often and too publicly. The violent ones, the ones with psyches corkscrewed into a hard, sick knot were quickly sorted out and dispatched to special state facilities; from these juveniles, the hardest would end up at Thronsen Home and Operation Dreamwatch. The ones in the Hall had weightless lives, content for the most part to be pushed along by the current of the adult world they might someday inherit by default.
Sometimes, as he had looked in on their slack faces, it had seemed as if their mild dreams and nightmares had somehow seeped out from under the doors of their rooms like an invisible gas, and poisoned all of the night staff. Most of those who had taken the job in order to study wound up flunking their classes and dropping out of college. Ralph would go home in the morning, feeling as if something had been drained out of him.
Then he received a form letter from the Operation Dreamwatch recruiting office in L.A. He had wound up applying—drifted into it, really—and had found himself here, in this desert that always seemed as vacant as the space that had grown inside him.
Ralph gazed out his apartment window at the Opwatch base.
Now what? The sun was setting—he had lost the last several hours somehow.
As though he were back at Juvenile Hall, fluid time had leaked away and evaporated again. He rose and picked the tape up from the couch.
As he entered the Rec hall, one of the watchers lounging in the chairs signalled to him with a beer can. “Hey,” called the watcher. “No shift tonight. Blenek just told us we’ve got the night off.”
Ralph nodded and walked on. It wasn’t unusual, the most frequent explanation was that the field insertion device needed adjusting.
In the Rec hall’s small, scarcely-used library, he let himself into the booth containing the tape recorder. After a moment studying the directions fastened to the front of the machine, he snapped the tape into place and threaded it through the rollers. He slipped on the headphones and pressed the Play button.
The tape was nearly two hours long. He listened to it all. There were no messages on it, nothing had been added on top of the Bach cantatas.
When it was done he gently touched the empty reel to stop its spinning.
He sat in front of the machine for a long time. The silence spread around him.
Chapter 4
The clock beside his bed read eight a.m. when Ralph awoke. He shook away the last vestiges of a dream about teeth sliding in a scaled mouth.
The room was already bright with the desert sun filtering through the curtains. He sat up and stared at his knees beneath the sheet as though what he was thinking was printed there.
Helga, he said to himself. Of course, you ass. Why not go talk to Helga Warner? She’s the one who went into Thronsen with Stimmitz—she should know something about what’s going on. Ralph swung his legs over the edge of the bed and reached for the clothes he had dropped on the floor the night before.
On the pathway to the other apartment building, he ran into Kathy.
“Hello, Ralph,” she yawned, idly scratching below the blue and gold Opwatch emblem on the sleeve of her blouse. “What’s up?”
“Huh?” He stopped and looked at her so intensely that she took a step backwards. “What did you say?”
She returned his stare. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Never mind. Nothing.” He stepped past her and hurried on towards the other building.
Helga’s apartment was on the third floor. He had never been inside—of all the watchers, she had always been the least sociable—but he remembered seeing her unlock her door once while he had been talking to Kathy in the hallway. Upon finding the right door he knocked, waited, then knocked again.