“I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
There was a slight pause, and when Haber answered his tone was no longer genial, reassuring, or encouraging. It was quite neutral and verged, just detectably, on contempt.
“You’re of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied the Eastern mysticisms, George?” The last question, with its obvious answer, was an open sneer.
“No. I don’t know anything about them. I do know that it’s wrong to force the pattern of things. It won’t do. It’s been our mistake for a hundred years. Don’t you—don’t you see what happened yesterday?”
The opaque, dark eyes met his, straight on.
“What happened yesterday, George?”
No way. No way out.
Haber was using sodium pentothal on him now, to lower his resistance to hypnotic procedures. He submitted to the shot, watching the needle slip with only a moment of pain into the vein of his arm. This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.
Haber went off somewhere to run something while the drug took effect; but he was back promptly in fifteen minutes, gusty, jovial, and indifferent. “All right! Let’s get on with it, George!”
Orr knew, with dreary clarity, what he would get on with today: the war. The papers were full of it, even Orr’s news-resistant mind had been full of it, coming here. The growing war in the Near East. Haber would end it. And no doubt the killings in Africa. For Haber was a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. Orr lay back on the couch and shut his eyes. The hand touched his throat, “You will enter the hypnotic state now, George,” said Haber’s deep voice. “You are... ”
...dark.
In the dark.
Not quite night yet: late twilight on the fields. Clumps of trees looked black and moist. The road he was walking on picked up the faint, last light from the sky; it ran long and straight, an old country highway, cracked blacktop. A goose was walking ahead of him, about fifteen feet in advance and visible only as a white, bobbing blur. Now and then it hissed a little.
The stars were coming out, white as daisies. A big one was blooming just to the right of the road, low over the dark country, tremulously white. When he looked up at it again it had already become larger and brighter. It’s enhuging, he thought. It seemed to grow reddish as it brightened. It enreddenhuged. The eyes swam. Small blue-green streaks zipped about it zigzagging Brownian round-ianroundian. A vast and creamy halo pulsated about big star and tiny zips, fainter, clearer, pulsing. Oh no no no! he said as the big star brightened hugendly BURST blinding. He fell to the ground, covering his head with his arms as the sky burst into streaks of bright death, but could not turn onto his face, must behold and witness. The ground swung up and down, great trembling wrinkles passing through the skin of Earth. “Let be, let be!” he screamed aloud with his face against the sky, and woke on the leather couch.
He sat up, and put his face in his sweaty, shaking hands.
Presently he felt Haber’s hand heavy on his shoulder. “Bad time again? Damn, I thought I’d let you off easy. Told you to have a dream about peace.”
“I did.”
“But it was disturbing to you?”
“I was watching a battle in space.”
“Watching it? From where?”
“Earth.” He recounted the dream briefly, omitting the goose. “I don’t know whether they got one of ours or we got one of theirs.”
Haber laughed. “I wish we could see what goes on out there! We’d feel more involved. But of course those encounters take place at speeds and distances that human vision simply isn’t equipped to keep up with. Your version’s a lot more picturesque than the actuality, no doubt. Sounds like a good science-fiction movie from the seventies. Used to go to those when I was a kid.... But why do you think you dreamed up a battle scene when the suggestion was peace?”
“Just peace? Dream about peace—that’s all you said?”
Haber did not answer at once. He occupied himself with the controls of the Augmentor.
“O.K.,” he said at last. “This once, experimentally, let’s let you compare the suggestion with the dream. Perhaps we’ll find out why it came out negative. I said—no, let’s run the tape.” He went over to a panel in the wall.
“You tape the whole session?”
“Sure. Standard psychiatric practice. Didn’t you know?”
How could I know if it’s hidden, makes no noise signal, and you didn’t tell me, Orr thought; but he said nothing. Maybe it was standard practice, maybe it was Haber’s personal arrogance; but in either case he couldn’t do much about it.
“Here we are, it ought to be about here. The hypnotic state now, George. You are—Here! Don’t go under, George!” The tape hissed. Orr shook his head and blinked. The last fragments of sentences had been Haber’s voice on the tape, of course; and he was still full of the hypnosis-inducing drug.
“I’ll have to skip a bit. All right.” Now it was his voice on the tape again, saying, “—peace. No more mass killing of humans by other humans. No fighting in Iran and Arabia and Israel. No more genocides in Africa. No stockpiles of nuclear and biological weapons, ready to use against other nations. No more research on ways and means of killing people. A world at peace with itself. Peace as a universal life-style on Earth. You will dream of that world at peace with itself. Now you’re going to sleep. When I say—” He stopped the tape abruptly, lest he put Orr to sleep with the key word.
Orr rubbed his forehead. “Well,” he said, “I followed instructions.”
“Hardly. To dream of a battle in cislunar space—” Haber stopped as abruptly as the tape.
“Cislunar,” Orr said, feeling a little sorry for Haber. “We weren’t using that word, when I went to sleep. How are things in Isragypt?”
The made-up word from the old reality had a curiously shocking effect, spoken in this reality: like surrealism, it seemed to make sense and didn’t, or seemed not to make sense and did.
Haber walked up and down the long, handsome room. Once he passed his hand over his red-brown, curly beard. The gesture was a calculated one and familiar to Orr, but when he spoke Orr felt that he was seeking and choosing his words carefully, not trusting, for once, to his inexhaustible fund of improvisation. “It’s curious that you used the Defense of Earth as a symbol or metaphor of peace, of the end of warfare. Yet it’s not unfitting. Only very subtle. Dreams are endlessly subtle. Endlessly. For in fact it was that threat, that immediate peril of invasion by noncommunicating, reasonlessly hostile aliens, which forced us to stop fighting among ourselves, to turn our aggressive-defensive energies outward, to extend the territorial drive to include all humanity, to combine our weapons against a common foe. If the Aliens hadn’t struck, who knows? We might, actually, still be fighting in the Near East.”
“Out of the frying pan into the fire,” Orr said. “Don’t you see, Dr. Haber, that that’s all you’ll ever get from me? Look, it’s not that I want to block you, to frustrate your plans. Ending the war was a good idea, I agree with it totally. I even voted Isolationist last election because Harris promised to pull us out of the Near East. But I guess I can’t, or my subconscious can’t, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you’re trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it’s easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you’re handling something outside reason. You’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn’t suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”