Warren Murphy: Sweet Dreams

"Do you have any idea what you could do for our nation? The Dreamocizer would eliminate hate. Aggression."

"You mean why go out and kill niggers when you can do it at home on your own television?" Wooley asked.

"That's crude, Dr. Wooley, but that's more or less the idea, yes. Imagine its application in prisons, in mental hospitals," Smith said.

"You see, Dr. Smith, that's the problem. I don't want to imagine its use in any limited application. I think my invention should go to the public to use as it sees fit."

Smith tried simple avarice.

"I'll match any financial offer you receive," he said.

"Too late," Wooley said. "I've already given my handshake on a deal, and so that's that."

"You know," Smith said, "that there are people who will try to kill you for the Dreamocizer."

"I know that and I want to thank you for sending your two men here last night to protect me and Leen Forth. But I'm no longer afraid."

"There's a man here from New York. His name is Grassione," said Smith.

"Never heard of him."

"He's working for a man in St. Louis. Don Salv-"

"Come on, Doctor," Wooley interrupted. "I'm really not interested in all these horror stories, so if you'll just excuse me, I've got a class to teach today."

"Have it your own way," Smith said, rising from the table. "You're making a mistake, though."

"At least it'll be my mistake."

"One last thing. You don't keep the Dreamocizer in the house here, do you?"

Wooley shook his head.

"Good," said Smith. "And I'd suggest that you and your daughter no longer sleep here either."

"Thank you. I've arranged that."

Wooley watched as Smith left the kitchen and mumbled to himself, "Don't forget your soapbox next time."

Wooley waited until Smith, Remo, and Chiun had left through a back door before he stepped out on his front porch. Eighteen people were waiting for him.

"I'm sorry," Wooley said, "but I have reached a commercial agreement concerning the Dreamocizer. Therefore I will not be able to meet with you. I thank you for your interest and apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused you."

The eighteen persons were still groaning when Wooley stepped back inside the door of his house and locked the door from the inside.

"Leen Forth," he yelled, "I've got a class. I'm going to wash up."

"Terrific," came her voice from upstairs. "Knock 'em dead." She said something else but her voice was swallowed up by the roar of a super-loud stereo.

Wooley peeled off his shirt while walking into his bedroom in the back of the house. He opened the bathroom door and a blonde woman with big purple tinted glasses was rummaging through his medicine cabinet.

"Don't you have any aspirin in this place?" Patti Shea said.

Wooley stared at the twin peaks of her large breasts that poked through the coarse fabric of her bright shirt. Flesh that gleamed so brightly it appeared to have been shined peeked from the V-shaped gap of her unbuttoned shirt top. Wooley closed the door behind him.

"No aspirin," he said. His voice caught in his throat.

"Oh, take it easy, Tarzan," Patti Shea said. "Let me do my speech and take off. I've got a migraine you wouldn't believe."

Her baby beautiful features pinched together behind her glasses and she pushed the palms of her hands against her forehead. "I’ve been standing out there for two hours," she said. "Now wait a minute, will you?"

Wooley sat on the yellow laundry hamper beside the door.

Patti Shea leaned against the sink and took a well-practiced deep breath. Her pain-wracked face turned, almost as if on cue, into an automatic smile.

"Yeah, I've got it now. Television has been around for almost four decades now and has advanced at nothing less than a phenomenal rate. Amazing, isn't it? A little box turning into a multi-billion-dollar industry. That's right. Billions. But it isn't really amazing, not when you consider the hard work, knowledge, and experience of the men and women involved in the television art."

She became even more earnest at this point, leaning in, threatening to attack him with her cleavage.

"All this can be yours," she said.

Wooley's head snapped up, but her eyes held only blank boredom.

"The whole world of television can be yours," she said. "Who better than television to handle your television device?"

Wooley sighed wistfully, then looked at her breasts again.

"Only we would have the background to know how best to produce, distribute, and sell your invention. Go with the best. Go with experience. Go with television! Now here's how to order."

She stopped short as if trying to call back the last sentence which was her peroration of a five-minute commercial she had filmed for an album of "Music That Made History."

Finally she shrugged. "To hell with it. You sure you've got no aspirin?"

"No aspirin," Wooley said.

"Okay. Where do you keep the Dreamocizer?"

"Hidden where no one can get at it."

"Who have you sold it to?"

"I'll release the details in a few days."

"You know I can go on the air and label your device a fraud, don't you?" Patti Shea said. She was no longer smiling or breathing deep.

"When it comes on the market, you'll be a laughing stock."

"I suppose you're right," she said. "You know the chances are you're going to be killed for your machine?"

"People keep telling me that. If that's so, why does everyone want it?"

"Want it? We want it to bury it. You realize what the Dreamocizer's going to do to commercial TV? To me?"

"Yes, I suppose it will. I hope you'll excuse me, I've got to shower," Wooley said.

"You need your back washed?" Patti Shea said, rubbing her index finger across his bare chest.

Wooley only smiled, afraid to hope, afraid to speak.

Patty Shea laughed. "If you live, you'll be rich enough to afford a valet. He'll wash your back. Toodle-oo."

She brushed by him and out of the bathroom. He heard her heavy wooden clogs clumping across the living-room floor, then he heard the front door open and slam.

By the time he had stripped and stepped into the shower, Wooley was glad that he had made his half-million-dollar deal with Mr. Massello. He was already tired of the bargaining and the badgering that masqueraded as business negotiations. No more. He trusted Massello and that was enough.

When Wooley left his home for the slow stroll across the campus to Fayerweather Hall where his morning lecture was being given, he was followed by Big Vince Marino.

Dr. Smith saw the big hulking man lumbering along behind Dr. Wooley, and turned to Remo and Chiun who sat next to him on a concrete slab bench.

"The man is insufferably stupid," Smith said. "But I think you and Chiun ought to protect him anyway. If we keep him alive long enough, maybe he'll change his mind."

Remo grunted. Chiun watched birds fly overhead.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Patti Shea didn't need this crap.

Ever since she had parlayed seven weeks of newspaper experience and a set of limber hips into a career as a TV journalist, she had been fighting a continuous case of jet lag. The back-and-forths across the continent, across the oceans, had put her out of sync with whatever world she was living in, and she paid the price with non-stop migraine headaches that she could relieve only by popping pills like a Harvard law student the night before a big exam.

And the crummy assignments didn't help.

She suspected that she got every traveling job that came up in the network because her boss was jealous of her talent and fearful of his job and wanted her out of town. The fact was, though, that she got those jobs because her boss knew that the more annoyed she was, the nastier and more insulting her reporting would be and the public lapped up the image of Patti Shea, media's Grand Bitch.