Ursula Le Guin - The Lathe Of Heaven

The only thing left of that terrible first of April, in fact, seemed to be the return of Mount Hood to active-volcano status. No bomb had hit it, for no bombs had fallen, this time. It had simply waked up. A long, gray-brown plume of smoke drifted northward from it now. Zigzag and Rhododendron had gone the way of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A fumarole had opened up recently near the tiny, old crater in Mount Tabor Park, well within the city limits. People in the Mount Tabor area were moving out to the thriving new suburbs of West Eastmont, Chestnut Hills Estates, and Sunny Slopes Subdivision. They could live with Mount Hood fuming softly on the horizon, but an eruption just up the street was too much.

Orr bought a tasteless plateful of fish and chips with African peanut sauce at a crowded counter-restaurant; while he ate it he thought sorrowfully, well, once I stood her up at Dave’s, and now she’s stood me up.

He could not face his grief, his bereavement. Dream-grief. The loss of a woman who had never existed. He tried to taste his food, to watch other people. But the food had no taste and the people were all gray.

Outside the glass doors of the restaurant the crowds were thickening: people streaming toward the Portland Palace of Sport, a huge and lavish coliseum down on the river, for the afternoon show. People didn’t sit home and watch TV much any more; Fed-peep television was on only two hours a day. The modern way of life was togetherness. This was Thursday; it would be the hand-to-hands, the biggest attraction of the week except for Saturday night football. More athletes actually got killed in the hand-to-hands, but they lacked the dramatic, cathartic aspects of football, the sheer carnage when 144 men were involved at once, the drenching of the arena stands with blood. The skill of the single fighters was fine, but lacked the splendid abreactive release of mass killing.

No more war, Orr said to himself, giving up on the last soggy splinters of potato. He went out into the crowd. Ain’t gonna... war no more.... There had been a song. Once. An old song. Ain’t gonna... What was the verb? Not fight, it didn’t scan. Ain’t gonna ... war no more ....

He walked straight into a Citizen’s Arrest. A tall man with a long, wrinkled, gray face seized a short man with a round, shiny, gray face, grabbing him by the front of his tunic. The crowd bumped around the pair, some stopping to watch, others pressing on toward the Palace of Sport. “This is a Citizen’s Arrest, passersby please take notice!” the tall man was saying in a piercing, nervous tenor. “This man, Harvey T. Gonno, is ill with an incurable malignant abdominal cancer but has concealed his whereabouts from the authorities and continues to live with his wife. My name is Ernest Ringo Marin, of 2624287 South West Eastwood Drive, Sunny Slopes Subdivision, Greater Portland. Are there ten witnesses?” One of the witnesses helped hold the feebly struggling criminal, while Ernest Ringo Marin counted heads. Orr escaped, pushing head-down through the crowd, before Marin administered euthanasia with the hypodermic gun worn by all adult citizens who had earned their Civic Responsibility Certificate. He himself wore one. It was a legal obligation. His, at the moment, was not loaded; its charge had been removed when he became a psychiatric patient under PWC; but they had left him the weapon so that his temporary lapse of status should not be a public humiliation to him. A mental illness such as he was being treated for, they had explained to him, must not be confused with a punishable crime such as a serious communicable or hereditary disease. He was not to feel that he was in any way a danger to the Race or a second-class citizen, and his weapon would be reloaded as soon as Dr. Haber discharged him as cured.

A tumor, a tumor... Hadn’t the carcinomic Plague, by killing off all those liable to cancer, either during the Crash or at infancy, left the survivors free of the scourge? It had, in another dream. Not in this one. Cancer had evidently broken out again, like Mount Tabor and Mount Hood.

Study. That’s it. Ain’t gonna study war no more....

He got onto the funicular at Fourth and Alder; and swooped up over the gray-green city to the HURAD Tower which crowned the west hills, on the site of the old Pittock mansion high in Washington Park.

It overlooked everything—the city, the rivers, the hazy valleys westward, the great dark hills of Forest Park stretching north. Over the pillared portico, incised in white concrete in the straight Roman capitals whose proportions lend nobility to any phrase whatsoever, was the legend: THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER.

Indoors the immense black-marble foyer, modeled after the Pantheon in Rome, bore a smaller inscription picked out in gold around the drum of the central dome: THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN- A. POPE-1688- 1744.

The building was larger in ground area, Orr had been told, than the British Museum, and five stories taller. It was also earthquake-proof.. It was not bombproof, for there were no bombs. What nuclear stockpiles remained after the Cislunar War had been taken off and exploded in a series of interesting experiments out in the Asteroid Belt. This building could stand up to anything left on Earth, except perhaps Mount Hood. Or a bad dream.

He took the walkbelt to the West Wing, and the broad helical escalator to the top floor.

Dr. Haber still kept his analyst’s couch in his office, a kind of ostentatiously humble reminder of his beginnings as a private practitioner, when he dealt with people by ones not by millions. But it took a while to get to the couch, for his suite covered about half an acre and included seven different rooms. Orr announced himself to the autoreceptionist at the door of the waiting room, then went on past Miss Crouch, who was feeding her computer, and past the official office, a stately room just lacking a throne, where the Director received ambassadors, delegations, and Nobel Prize winners, until at last he came to the smaller office with the wall-to-ceiling window, and the couch. There the antique redwood panels of one entire wall were slid back, exposing a magnificent array of research machinery: Haber was halfway into the exposed entrails of the Augmentor. “Hullo, George!” he boomed from within, not looking around. “Just hooking a new ergismatch into Baby’s hormocouple. Half a mo. I think we’ll have a session without hypnosis today. Sit down, I’ll be a while at this, I’ve been doing a bit of tinkering again. .. . Listen. You remember that battery of tests they gave you, when you first showed up down at the Med School? Personality inventories, IQ, Rorschach, and so on and so on. Then I gave you the TAT and some simulated encounter situations, about your third session here. Remember? Ever wonder how you did on ‘em?”

Haber’s face, gray, framed by curly black hair and beard, appeared suddenly above the pulled-out chassis of the Augmentor. His eyes, as he gazed at Orr, reflected the light of the wall-sized window.

“I guess so,” Orr said; actually he had never given it a thought.

“I believe it’s time for you to know that, within the frame of reference of those standardized but extremely subtle and useful tests, you are so sane as to be an anomaly. Of course, I’m using the lay word ‘sane,’ which has no precise objective meaning; in quantifiable terms, you’re median. Your extraversion/introversion score, for instance, was 49.1. That is, you’re more introverted than extraverted by .9 of a degree. That’s not unusual; what is, is the emergence of the same damn pattern everywhere, right across the board. If you put them all onto the same graph you sit smack in the middle at 50. Dominance, for example; I think you were 48.8 on that. Neither dominant nor submissive. Independence/dependence—same thing.