Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

“I found it on the floor; it fell off Giesey’s desk.”

There was no need of lying any longer, of lying or pretending. There was no further need of anything; the old pride and loyalty were gone. Even as Norman Blaine thought about it, the bitterness sank deeper into his soul; the futility of all the years was a torture grate that rasped across raw flesh.

Farris chuckled. “You’re all right,” he said. “You could have kept your mouth shut and made it stick. It takes guts to do a thing like that. We can work together.”

“It still is sticking,” Blaine told him sharply. “Take it away from me if you think you can.”

This was sheer bravado and bitterness, a feeble hitting back, and Blaine wondered why he did it, for the job meant nothing now.

“Take it easy,” Farris said. “You’re keeping it. I’m glad it worked out as it did. I didn’t think you had it in you, Blaine; I guess that I misjudged you.”

He reached for the bottle. “Hand me another glass.”

Blaine handed him another glass and Farris filled both. “How much do you know?”

Blaine shook his head. “Not too much. This business of the dream substitution …”

“You hit it on the head,” said Farris; “that’s the core of it. We’d had to fill you in before too long, so I might as well fill you in right now.”

He settled back comfortably in his chair. “It started long ago, and it has been carried on with tight security for more than seven hundred years. It had to be a long-range project, you understand, for few dreams last less than a hundred years and many last much longer. At first, the work was carried on slowly and very cautiously; in those days, the men in charge had to feel their way along. But in the last few hundred years it has been safe to speed it up. We’ve worked through the greater part of the program first laid out, and are taking care of some of the supplementary angles that have been added since. Less than another hundred years and we will be ready—we could be ready any time, but we’d like to wait another hundred years. We have worked up techniques from what we’ve already done that are plain impossible to believe. But they’ll work; we have firsthand evidence that they are workable.”

Blaine was cold inside, cold with the shock of disillusion.

“All the years,” he said.

Farris laughed. “You’re right. All the years. And all the others thought that we were lily pure. We were at pains to make them think we were; such quiet people. We were quiet from the very start, while the others bunched their muscles, shouted. One by one they learned the lesson we had known from the very first—that you keep your mouth shut, that you do not show your strength. You wait until the proper time.”

“The others learned, eventually. They took their lessons hard, but they finally learned the facts of politics—too late. Even before there was a Central Union, Dreams saw what was coming and planned. We sat quietly in the corner and kept our hands neatly folded in our laps; we bowed our heads a little and kept our eyes half closed—a pose of utter meekness. Most of the time, the others didn’t even know that we were around. We are so small and quiet, you see. Everyone is watching Communications or Transportation or Food or Fabrication, because they are the big boys. But they should be watching Dreams, for Dreams is the one that has it.”

“Just one thing,” said Blaine. “Two things, maybe. How do you know the substitute dreams run true? All the genuine ones we make are pure fantasy; they couldn’t really happen the way we fabricate them.”

“That,” Farris told him, “is the one thing that has us on the ropes. When we can explain that one, we’ll have everything. Back at the beginning there were experiments. Dreams tried it out on their own personnel—ones who volunteered, for short periods, five years or ten. And the dreams didn’t come out the way they were put in.

“When you give a dream a logical basis, instead of wish-fulfillment factors, it follows the lines of logic. When you juggle cultural factors, the patterns run true—well, maybe not true, but different than you thought they would. When you feed in illogic, you get a jumble of illogic; but when you feed in logic, the logic takes over and it shapes the dream. Our study of logic dreams leads us to believe that they follow lines of true development. Unforeseen trends show up, governed by laws and circumstances we could not have guessed—and those trends work out to logical conclusions.”

There was fear in the man—a fear that must have lain deep in the minds of many men throughout seven hundred years. “Is it just pretend? Or do those dreams actually exist? Are there such other worlds somewhere? And if they are, do we create them? Or do we merely tap them?”

“How do you know about the dreams?” asked Blaine. “The Sleepers wouldn’t tell you; if they did, you couldn’t believe …”

Farris laughed. “That’s the easy part. We have a two-way helmet. A feed-in to establish the pattern and to set up the factors, a sort of introduction to set the dream going. It operates for a brief period, then cuts out and the dream is on its own. But we have a feed-back built into the helmet, and the dream is put on tape. We study it as it comes in; we don’t have to wait. We have stacks of tape. We have at our fingertips the billions of factors that go into many thousand different cultures. We have a history of the never-was, and of the might-have-been, and perhaps the yet-to-come.”

Dreams is the one that has it, he had said. They had stacks of tape from seven hundred years of dreams. They had millions of man-hours experience—first-hand experience—in cultural patterns that had never happened. Some of them could not have happened; others of them might have come within a hair-breadth of happening—and there were many of them, perhaps, that could be made to happen.

From those tapes they had learned lessons outside the curriculum of human experience. Economics, politics, sociology, philosophy, psychology—in all facets of human effort they held all the trumps. They could pull out economic dazzlers to blind the people; they could employ political theory that would be sure to win hands down; they had psychological tricks that would stop all the other unions dead.

They’d played dumb for years sitting meekly in the corner, hands folded in their lap, being very quiet. And all the time they had been fashioning a weapon for use at its proper time.

And the dedication, Blaine thought, the human dedication. The pride and comfort of a job well done. The warmth of accomplishment and service—the close human fellowship.

For years the tapes had rolled, recording the feed-back, while men and women—who had come in trusting confidence to seek fairylands of their imagination—plodded drearily through logic dreams that were utterly fantastic.

Farris’ voice had gone on and on and now it came back to him.

“ … Giesey was going soft on us. He wanted to replace Roemer with someone who would see it his way. And he picked you, Blaine—of all men, he picked you.”

He laughed again, uproariously. “It does beat hell how mistaken one can be.”

“Yes, it does,” agreed Blaine.

“So we had to kill him before the appointment could go through; but you beat us to it, Blaine. You’re a fast man on your feet. How did you know about it? How did you know what to do?”

“Never mind.”

“The timing,” said Farris. “The timing was perfect.”

“You’ve got it all doped out.”

Farris nodded. “I talked to Andrews. He’ll go along; he doesn’t like it, of course, but there’s nothing he can do.”

“You’re taking a long chance, Farris, telling me all this.”