Джон Макдональд: Wine of the Dreamers [= Planet of the Dreamers]

“I didn’t ask for a history of the Mars flights, Colonel. What happened to McBride?”

“Well, sir, when Gettysburg Three was done for, the head doctors said McBride had recovered and so we brought him to trial. Because he was an enlisted man, we were able to give him five years at hard labor, but as I see it, this Kornal doesn’t come under us.”

Sachson gave Powys a frigid glare. “Thank you, Colonel. Brief and to the point, as usual.”

Bard spoke to Kornal. “Bill, I think you’d better come back on the project. Want to try it?”

“Want to?” He held out his clever hands. “God, how I’d work! Adamson says four months lost. I could cut that down to less than three.”

Sachson said harshly, “Are you completely mad, Lane?”

Bard ignored him. “What do you think, Sharan?”

“If he can pass the original psycho-screening tests, I don’t see why not. We are using the best tests known. If he can pass them, he should be as acceptable as anyone who can pass them. Major Leeber can take them at the same time.”

“I go on record as objecting to this,” Sachson said.

“Me too,” Powys rumbled.

“Sorry, General,” Bard said. “Kornal is a highly trained man. We need him. If this was a temporary aberration, and not part of a repetitive pattern, he can help us undo the harm he did. I haven’t time for thinking about fitting punishment to crime. Bill will punish himself more than anyone else ever could.”

Sachson stood up. “It seems to be your baby. But it’s all in the minutes. When he loses another four months for you, Project Tempo will either be disbanded, or have a new director. Sergeant, Dr. Lane will give you the exact wording on his request for Major Leeber. Meeting adjourned. Take Leeber with you when you drive back.”

They stood in silence as the little general strode out of the room, favoring them all with a final bleak nod.

As soon as the door closed behind the general, Major Leeber said unctuously, “I know that you folks are thinking of me as a thorn in your side. It wasn’t my fault the Old Man pushed me down your throat. But, believe me, I’ll stay out of your way. Tommy Leeber can be a real happy guy. All the boy needs is that five o’clock jolt of firewater and a few shell-pink ears to whisper into. Couple of times a week I’ll mail the old man a double-talk report and we can all live happily together in the mountains.”

Leeber had a lazy grin on overly-full lips under the dark military moustache, but under sleepy lids his eyes were steady, cold, unwinking black.

“Happy to have you with us,” Bard said without warmth.

Sharan stood up. Leeber moved closer to her. “And how about you, Miss Inly? Are you glad to have me aboard?”

“Of course,” she said absently. “Bard, how soon are we starting back?”

“Better make it noon. That will give some time for a little sleep.”

The others left. The sergeant looked expectantly at Bard. Bard smiled at him. “You know your boss. Write it up in any way that will make him happy, just so long as the conditions I imposed are included. Do you have them down?”

“Yes sir. Want me to read them back?”

“No need of that.” He walked toward the door.

The sergeant said, “Uh... Doctor Lane.”

He turned. “Yes?”

“About Major Leeber. He’s very smart, Doctor. And he gets along fine in the Army. I think maybe someday he’ll be a general.”

“A worthy ambition, I suppose.”

“He likes to make a... good impression, where it counts most.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. Thanks very much.”

The sergeant grinned. “Mention it not, Doctor.”

Back in the room assigned him in the B.O.Q., Bard Lane lay awaiting the steep drop into exhausted sleep. He thought of what Kornal had said. Possession by devils. A devil that could invade the unwilling mind, use the reluctant body as a tool. Were the ancients closer to the truth than we, with our measurements and dials and ink blot tests? A man could not face the theory that there is a measure of built-in instability in the mind, that insanity can come with the next breath. Even a theory of devils is more comforting than that. Maybe, he thought, we share this planet, have always shared it. We are... things that the Others can use to amuse themselves. Maybe they can slip gently into the human mind and exercise their evil humor. Maybe they visit us from some far planet, a gaudy picnic for them, a stained excursion. And perhaps they laugh...

Raul Kinson’s world had walls. It was a world of rooms, of ramps, of corridors.

There was nothing else. Thought could not reach beyond the walls, beyond the furthest rooms. He had tried to thrust his thoughts through the walls, but thoughts cannot encompass the idea of nothingness, and so his thoughts curled back, repelled by a concept beyond the authority of the mind.

When he was ten years old he had found the opening in the wall. It was an opening you could not crawl through, because it was covered with something you could look through as you look through water. Yet the substance was hard to the touch.

He was not yet old enough then to be permitted to dream.

Dreaming was for the older ones, the ones who had grown big enough to join the mating games.

In the ancient micro-books he had found the word for that hole in the wall. Window. He said it over and over. No one else read the micro-books. No one else knew the word. It was a secret that was precious, because it was not a made-up secret. It existed. Later, of course, he found that in the dreams there are many windows. They could be touched, opened, looked through. But not with one’s own hands. That was the difference. In the dreams you had to use other hands, other bodies.

He would not forget the day he had found the window. The other children angered him. He had never liked the games they played. They laughed at him because he was not frail, as they were. His games, the muscle-stretching games, hurt them and made them cry out. On this day they had permitted him to play one of their games. The old game of statue dance, in one of the biggest rooms on the lowest level. One spindly girl held the two white blocks and as they danced the girl would unexpectedly clap the blocks together. At that signal everyone stopped as though turned to stone. But Raul had been off balance and when he tried to stop he crashed awkwardly into two of the frail boys, knocking them to the floor with shrill yelps of pain and pettish anger. They were angered but his anger surpassed theirs. The translucent floor glowed softly amber.

“You cannot play, Raul Kinson. You are rough. Go away, Raul. We won’t let you play.”

“I didn’t want to play anyway. This game is silly.”

He had left them and gone down the long hall that led through the maze of the power rooms where the air itself seemed to vibrate. He liked walking there as it gave him a strange but agreeable sensation in the pit of his stomach. Now, of course, he knew what the power rooms contained, and knew the name of the soft gray metal of the corridor walls in the power area. “Lead” it was called. Yet knowing what was in the power rooms had never decreased the pleasure he felt walking through the humming air, through a vibration below the range of audibility.

The day he walked away from their games he had wandered aimlessly. Memory was clear, though it had been fourteen years ago. He had been bored. The rooms where music played endlessly, had been playing since the beginning of time, and would play on forever, no longer pleased him. The grownups he saw ignored him, as was the custom.

Seeking some kind of excitement, he had stepped onto the moving track which carried him up through twenty levels to the place of the dreamers, where all children were forbidden to go. He had tiptoed down an empty silent corridor until he came to where the dreamers were, each in a thick glass case set into the wall.