Tomorrow was Saturday. A long session with Haber, four o’clock until six or longer. No way out.
It was time to eat, but Orr wasn’t hungry. He had not turned on the lights in his high, twilit bedroom, or in the living room which he had never got around to furnishing in the three years he’d lived here. He wandered in there now. The windows looked out on lights and the river, the air smelled of dust and early spring. There was a woodframe fireplace, an old upright piano with eight ivories missing, a pile of carpeting mill ends by the hearth, and a decrepit Japanese bamboo table ten inches high. Darkness lay softly on the bare pine floor, unpolished, unswept.
George Orr lay down in that mild darkness, full length, face down, the small of the dusty wooden floor in his nostrils, the hardness of it upholding his body. He lay still, not asleep; somewhere else than sleep, farther on, father out, a place where there are no dreams. It was not the first time he had been there.
When he got up, it was to take a chlorpromazine tablet and go to bed. Haber had tried him with phenothiazines this week; they seemed to work well, to let him enter the d-state at need but to weaken the intensity of the dreams so that they never rose to the effective level. That was fine, but Haber said that the effect would lessen, just as with all the other drugs, until there was no effect at all. Nothing will keep a man from dreaming, he had said, but death.
This night, at least, he slept deep, and if he dreamed the dreams were fleeting, without weight. He didn’t wake until nearly noon on Saturday. He went to his refrigerator and look in it; he stood contemplating it a while. There was more food in it than he had ever seen in a private refrigerator in his life. In his other life. The one lived among seven billion others, where the food, such as it was, was never enough. Where an egg was the luxury of the month —”Today we ovulate!” his halfwife had used to say when she bought their egg ration.... Curious, in this life they hadn’t had a trial marriage, he and Donna. There was no such thing, legally speaking, in the post-Plague years. There was full marriage only. In Utah, since the birth rate was still lower than the death rate, they were even trying to reinstitute polygamous marriage, for religious and patriotic reasons. But he and Donna hadn’t had any kind of marriage this time, they had just lived together. But still it hadn’t lasted. His attention returned to the food in the refrigerator.
He was not the thin, sharp-boned man he had been in the world of the seven billion; he was quite solid, in fact. But he ate a starving man’s meal, an enormous meal— hard-boiled eggs, buttered toast, anchovies, jerky, celery, cheese, walnuts, a piece of cold halibut spread with mayonnaise, lettuce, pickled beets, chocolate cookies—anything he found on his shelves. After this orgy he felt physically a great deal better. He thought of something, as he drank some genuine nonersatz coffee, that actually made him grin. He thought: In that life, yesterday, I dreamed an effective dream, which obliterated six billion lives and changed the entire history of humankind for the past quarter century. But in this life, which I then created, I did not dream an effective dream. I was in Haber’s office, all right, and I dreamed; but it didn’t change anything. It’s been this way all along, and I merely had a bad dream about the Plague Years. There’s nothing wrong with me; I don’t need therapy.
He had never looked at it this way before, and it amused him enough that he grinned, but not particularly happily.
He knew he would dream again.
It was already past two. He washed up, found his raincoat (real cotton, a luxury in the other life), and set off on foot to the Institute, a couple of miles’ walk, up past the Medical School and then farther up, into Washington Park. He could have got there by the trolleys, of course, but they were sporadic and roundabout, and anyhow there was no rush. It was pleasant, passing through the warm March rain, the unbustling streets; the trees were leafing out, the chestnuts ready to light their candles.
The Crash, the carcinomic plague which had reduced human population by five billion in five years, and another billion in the next ten, had shaken the civilizations of the world to their roots and yet left them, in the end, intact. If had not changed anything radically: only quantitatively.
The air was still profoundly and irremediably polluted: that pollution predated the Crash by decades, indeed was its direct cause. It didn’t harm anybody much now, except the newborn. The Plague, in its leukemoid variety, still selectively, thoughtfully as it were, picked off one out of four babies born and killed it within six months. Those who survived were virtually cancer-resistant. But there are other griefs.
No factories spewed smoke, down by the river. No cars ran fouling the air with exhaust; what few there were, were steamers or battery-powered.
There were no songbirds any more, either.
The effects of the Plague were visible in everything, it was itself still endemic, and yet it hadn’t prevented war from breaking out. In fact the fighting in the Near East was more savage than it had been in the more crowded world. The U.S. was heavily committed to the Israeli-Egyptian side in weapons, munitions, planes, and “military advisers” by the regiment. China was in equally deep on the Iraq-Iran side, though she hadn’t yet sent in Chinese soldiers, only Tibetans, North Koreans, Vietnamese, and Mongolians. Russia and India were holding uneasily aloof; but now that Afghanistan and Brazil were going in with the Iranians, Pakistan might jump in on the Isragypt side. India would then panic and line up with China, which might scare the USSR enough to push her in on the U.S. side. This gave a line-up of twelve Nuclear Powers in all, six to a side. So went the speculations. Meanwhile Jerusalem was rubble, and in Saudi Arabia and Iraq the civilian population was living in burrows in the ground while tanks and planes sprayed fire in the air and cholera in the water, and babies crawled out of the burrows blinded by napalm.
They were still massacring whites in Johannesburg, Orr noticed on a headline at a corner newspaper stand. Years now since the Uprising, and there were still whites to massacre in South Africa! People are tough....
The rain fell warm, polluted, gentle on his bare head as he climbed the gray hills of Portland.
In the office with the great corner window that looked out into the rain, he said, “Please, stop using my dreams to improve things, Dr. Haber. It won’t work. It’s wrong. I want to be cured.”
“That’s the one essential prerequisite to your cure, George! Wanting it.”
“You’re not answering me.”
But the big man was like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him. Nowhere that he ever stopped, had to stop, had to say Here I stay! No being, only layers.
“You’re using my effective dreams to change the world. You won’t admit to me that you’re doing it. Why not?”
“George, you must realize that you ask questions which from your point of view may seem reasonable, but which from my point of view are literally unanswerable. We don’t see reality the same way.”
“Near enough the same to be able to talk.”
“Yes. Fortunately. But not always to be able to ask and answer. Not yet.”
“I can answer your questions, and I do.... But anyway: look. You can’t go on changing things, trying to run things.”
“You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative.” He looked at Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. “But in fact, isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?”
“No!”
“What is his purpose, then?”