Джон Макдональд - Labor Supply

“They do what?” Dr. Vrees said, conscious of inanity.

His patient was a large young man. During the thorough physical checkup prior to this psychiatric questioning, Dr. Vrees had decided, with all the dolor of a spindly man, that this Robert Smith was a truly amazing physical specimen. He was muscled like a stereotype picture of a Viking, and with lean cow-hand hips. There were six feet four inches of him, and every inch in a perfect bloom of health.

Robert Smith seemed lost in some dismal private thought.

“They do what?” Dr. Vrees repeated.

“Huh? Oh, they go whoop, whoop, whoop. Sort of.”

“In your dreams do these... uh... whoops convey any meaning?”

“I guess I understand them all right. Or we understand them, you might say, because I... we... keep working. And all the Ruths, too.”

“All the Ruths,” Dr. Vrees repeated mechanically. Just one Ruth was almost too much to contemplate. Dr. Vrees was highly aware of her, out there in the waiting room. Ruth Jones was as dark as Robert Smith was fair, and she was built on the same heroic scale. At least six feet tall, and proud of it, moving like a ship under a full head of sail. Just to look at her tall beauty, sensing the ripeness of her, made Dr. Vrees unhappily aware of his yen for tall women, a yen which was successfully canceled out by his refusal to look ridiculous in public.

Dr. Vrees was also aware that these new patients irritated him. His attitude, he knew, was unprofessional. If their only possession had been their physical beauty, he could have taken refuge in his own sense of intellectual superiority. But Vrees had gone through a series of standard tests and found that both of them were as bright as he was, which was very bright indeed. Smith was a highly successful young civil engineer. Both of them had inherited money. Their marriage was being delayed until this matter of the recurrent dreams could be straightened out. And that, in itself, was an indication of thoughtful emotional stability.

“Recurrent dreams are not unusual,” Dr. Vrees said. “Most of them are the result of some physical disorder. The others, as evidences of emotional turmoil, are most often found in late childhood and early adolescence.”

Robert Smith inspected the big knuckles on his right hand. “You can see what we’re afraid of, Dr. Vrees. We’re afraid that... somehow... Ruth and I react on each other the wrong way. There must be some strain there, or we wouldn’t have these ridiculous dreams. We’re very deeply in love.”

“Neither of you has any physical ailment, Mr. Smith. I confess I’ve never examined a healthier pair. And your histories, too. Both from long-lived families who seem free of hereditary ailments. And both from very large families, too.”

Smith flushed. “We hope to have at least a dozen kids, Doctor.”

“I’m sure you will,” Vrees said hastily.

Smith went on, slowly. “We talked it over. Gosh, we’ve talked this dream stuff over a hundred times. I suppose you doctors are accustomed to dig down into people’s pasts and find out the root cause of... emotional trouble. Both Ruth and I had the happiest childhoods imaginable. And then, six months ago, these dreams started. I had them first. I told Ruth about them. Like a joke, you know. And then she started to have them.”

“That’s unusual, Robert, but not improbable. She began to worry about you. Out of sympathy, she duplicates your dreams.”

“There’s something pretty nasty about these dreams,” Robert said heavily.

Vrees made a few meaningless marks on his notebook. “Well, suppose you go out and send Ruth in and I’ll question her for a while.”

“Okay, doctor.” Smith got up, obviously glad that the interview was over. He held the door open for Ruth, closed it when she had entered the dimly lighted office.

Vrees was glad when she stopped towering over him and the desk and sat down. She seemed composed.

“Just tell me about these dreams in your own words, Miss Jones. I’ll interrupt with questions when any occur to me.”

She twisted her gloves, untwisted them. “There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to them, exactly. And they aren’t all really alike. Just the place is alike every time. So very hot, you know. And have you ever looked in one of those mirrors where you can duplicate yourself, so you see a whole line, and they’re all you?”

“Of course.”

“That’s the way it is. There are just hundreds and thousands of me, and of Robert too. And working so terribly hard. All naked and toiling. And crying, sometimes. There are corridors, and you have to walk down them all bent over. But the new corridors are better. You can stand up in those. We’re making them.”

“With what tools?”

“The tools are easy. Like gold pencils with two little clocks on one side. They cut the stone and the stone is all blue. Really blue. Cobalt, I guess. And the stones have to be put in baskets. Those baskets hang in the air and when you load them up they sink almost to the floor. When you pull the first one, all the others follow it like... animals. And we have to dump them down a dark place. You never hear them hit bottom.”

“You say you are duplicated almost endlessly. Do you always see things from the viewpoint of... any specific duplication of yourself?”

“No. It is always different, but still me, you understand. Sometimes it changes a lot of times in the same dream.”

“But you have to perform this labor?”

“Oh, yes. They won’t let you stop. If you stop, they have a flicking, stinging thing that you can’t even see them use. It hurts, terribly. I scream when they use it.”

“Can you describe these... overseers?”

“This... sounds so terribly silly. They’re... gnomes. You know. Little gnarly men with squatty legs and lumpy red faces and hats that come to peaks and they wear soft green. I used to love fairy tales, and the gnomes were my favorites. Now... I hate them. I hate them!”

“Please, Miss Jones. Don’t let it excite you. We’ll find a way out of this.”

“Oh, I hope so.”

“These little... ah... men, they speak to you?”

“They make a funny sound.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Sort of whoop, whoop.”

“I see,” Vrees said. “Whoop, whoop.” The girl gave him a sharp look, and flushed, then began glove-twisting again.

Vrees said, “We mustn’t overlook the possibility of some sort of... ah... sexual connotation here. I mean, if both of you are rigorously sublimating your normal instincts toward each other...”

“In the dreams they herd us into a sleeping place. There’s a feeding place, where we eat something wet and gray, and then there’s a sleeping place. And in the sleeping place all those thousands of Roberts and the thousands of me, we all...” She covered her eyes, sat with her head bowed.

Vrees swallowed hard. “I was discussing the question of sublimation.”

She lifted her head in a regal way. “No. We aren’t sublimating anything.”

“Now, to go on to another point. You didn’t start having these dreams until Robert began telling you about them, in detail.”

“That is correct. But you see, I dreamed details which he hadn’t dreamed yet. Then later, he’d dream those same details. Like a place where three new corridors branch off, not far from the feeding place.”

“Ah, but you told him the new details and then he would dream them!”

“You mean, I influenced him by telling him? We wondered about that, too. So we started writing down new things we saw in the dreams, and not telling each other. Then we compared notes quite a while later. They matched, almost perfectly.”