He spread out his hands and looked at them, then sank his face into them; it was wet with tears. Oh hell, hell, he thought bitterly, what kind of man am I? Tears in my beard? No wonder Haber uses me. How could he help it? I haven’t any strength, I haven’t any character, I’m a born tool. I haven’t any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.
I must get away from Haber, he thought, trying to be firm and decisive, but even as he thought it he knew he wouldn’t. Haber had him hooked, and with more than one hook.
A dream configuration so unusual, indeed unique, Haber had said, was invaluable to research: Orr’s contribution to human knowledge was going to prove immense. Orr believed that Haber meant this and knew what he was talking about. The scientific aspect of it all was in fact the only hopeful one, to his mind; it seemed to him that perhaps science might wring some good out of his peculiar and terrible gift, put it to some good ends, compensating a little for the enormous harm it had done.
The murder of six billion nonexistent people.
Orr’s head ached fit to split. He ran cold water in the deep, cracked washbasin, and dunked his whole face in for half a minute at a time, coming up red, blind, and wet as a newborn baby.
Haber had a moral line on him, then, but where he really had him caught was on the legal hook. If Orr quit Voluntary Therapy, he became liable to prosecution for obtaining drugs illegally and would be sent to jail or the nut hatch. No way out there. And if he didn’t quit, but merely cut sessions and failed to cooperate, Haber had an effective instrument of coercion: the dream-suppressing drugs, which Orr could obtain only on his prescription. He was more uneasy than ever at the idea of dreaming spontaneously, without control, now. In the state he was in, and having been conditioned to dream effectively every time in the laboratory, he did not like to think what might happen if he dreamed effectively without the rational restraints imposed by hypnosis. It would be a nightmare, a worse nightmare than the one he had just had in Haber’s office; of that he was sure, and he dared not let it happen. He must take the dream suppressants. That was the one thing he knew he must do, the thing that must be done. But he could do it only so long as Haber let him, and therefore he must cooperate with Haber. He was caught. Rat in a trap. Running a maze for the mad scientist, and no way out. No way, no way.
Be he’s not a mad scientist, Orr thought dully, he’s a pretty sane one, or he was. It’s the chance of power that my dreams give him that twists him around. He keeps acting a part, and this gives him such an awfully big part to play. So that now he’s using even his science as a means, not an end.... But his ends are good, aren’t they? He wants to improve life for humanity. Is that wrong?
His head was aching again. He was underwater when the telephone rang. He hastily tried to rub his face and hair dry, and returned to the dark bedroom, groping. “Hello, Orr here.”
“This is Heather Lelache,” said a soft, suspicious alto.
An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind. “Hello,” he said again.
“Do you want to meet me some time to talk about this?”
“Yes. Certaintly.”
“Well. I don’t want you thinking that there’s any case to be made using that machine thing, the Augmentor. That seems to be perfectly in line. It’s had extensive laboratory trial, and he’s had all the proper checks and gone through the proper channels, and now it’s registered with HEW.
He’s a real pro, of course. I didn’t realize who he was when you first talked to me. A man doesn’t get to that sort of position unless he’s awfully good.”
“What position?”
“Well. The directorship of a Government-sponsored research institute!”
He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory “well.” She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the void. She had courage, great courage.
“Oh, yes, I see,” he said vaguely. Dr. Haber had got his directorship the day after Orr had got his cabin. The cabin dream had been during the one all-night session they had had; they never tried another. Hypnotic suggestion of dream content was insufficient to a night’s dreaming, and at 3 A.M. Haber had at last given up and, hooking Orr to the Augmentor, had fed him deep-sleep patterns the rest of the night, so that they could both relax. But the next afternoon they had had a session, and the dream Orr had dreamed during it had been so long, so confused and complicated, that he had never been altogether sure of what he had changed, what good works Haber had been accomplishing that time. He had gone to sleep in the old office and had wakened in the O.O.I, office: Haber had got himself a promotion. But there had been more to it than that—the weather was a little less rainy, it seemed, since that dream; perhaps other things had changed. He was not sure. He had protested against doing so much effective dreaming in so short a time. Haber had at once agreed not to push him so fast, and had let him go without a session for five days. Haber was, after all, a benevolent man. And besides, he didn’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
The goose. Precisely. That describes me perfectly, Orr thought. A damned white vapid stupid goose. He had lost a bit of what Miss Lelache was saying. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I missed something. I’m kind of thick-headed just now, I think.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine. Just sort of tired.”
“You had an upsetting dream, about the Plague, didn’t you. You looked awful after it. Do these sessions leave you this way every time?”
“No, not always. This was a bad one. I guess you could see that. Were you arranging for us to meet?”
“Yes. Monday for lunch, I said. You work downtown, don’t you, at Bradford Industries?”
To his mild wonder he realized that he did. The great water projects of Bonneville-Umatilla did not exist, to bring water to the giant cities of John Day and French Glen, which did not exist. There were no big cities in Oregon, except Portland. He was not a draftsman for the District, but for a private tools firm downtown; he worked in the Stark Street office. Of course. “Yes,” he said. “I’m off from one to two. We could meet at Dave’s, on Ankeny.”
“One to two is fine. So’s Dave’s. I’ll see you there Monday.”
“Wait,” he said. “Listen. Will you—would you mind telling me what Dr. Haber said, I mean, what he told me to dream when I was hypnotized? You heard all that, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t do that, I’d be interfering in his treatment. If he wanted you to know he’d tell you. It would be unethical, I can’t.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. Monday, then?”
“Goodby,” he said, suddenly overwhelmed with depression and foreboding, and put the receiver back without hearing her say goodby. She couldn’t help him. She was courageous and strong, but not that strong. Perhaps she had seen or sensed the change, but she had put it away from her, refused it. Why not? It was a heavy load to bear, that double memory, and she had no reason to undertake it, no motive for believing even for a moment a driveling psycho who claimed that his dreams came true.