Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The Dream as Later Reported

The news woke us, or the frequency of phone pulse approaching our own rose into our sleep. It was Ash’s voice, and his information seemed ancient and unreal. Another bomb, another secret rising from the drawing board — a device this time that knew what none had known before.

We felt still asleep, but in a future that followed from Ash’s brief report. Our new bomb was resolving a multistage executive tower so that I-beams and bricks, bolted-down furniture and solidly transparent walls condensed to nothing. A thousand people in recognizable attitudes, and as if on an infra-material photograph, were caught by our vision still distributed according to the now vanished grid of their building’s floor levels. This was a bomb that left people more or less alone.

The voice on the telephone-speaker came through so matter-of-fact that one thing equaled another. Was the nuclear device in question no more earth-shattering than the experimental motel where Jim Ash had stopped for the night? This passive-energy accommodation had been built from ground-level downward to take advantage of year-round moderate temperatures just below the surface, but Ash was phoning from a hilltop pay booth, private if exposed. His voice would recede for a second as if he were turning away from the receiver to keep an eye out. "You see, this thing discriminates between what’s living and what isn’t."

"It does what?" we asked.

He meant what he said. The miracle of the bomb was that it would destroy non-living structures ("resolve" them) while leaving anything alive unharmed. We asked Jim if anyone else had it. He didn’t know. We felt it was our bomb. We believed Ash when he said it didn’t make any noise.

In those days the men and women in the labs dreamed of the unified force field, but they got up in the morning and did their work. Economists ran their cost-benefit breakdowns, and we all took it one day at a time because that is the way the job gets done. We knew roughly what to expect. But a device that wiped out everything except life? A bomb that leveled buildings but left people very much alive? How alive we did not reckon at first; for who was prepared to understand what was happening in the colossal quiet of this uniquely silent weapon. People it left standing, Ash quipped grimly — a joke that took hold in those days of queues and informal marches.

Left standing, maybe, but not sitting. Unless you were sitting in a live tree or on a live horse or upon fertile areas of organically arable soil. For if you were within the bomb’s silent scope hearing the clink of an unbreakable coffee cup in its saucer or a random radio playing, you could not hope to go on sitting on anything inanimate or inorganic. It would be blown out from under you. If you were sitting on your porch across the domestic hinterlands of the continent or at your office desk, get ready to be inconvenienced. Porch and rocker were instantly gone, your desk in the city likewise demattered. Not to mention the building that housed the desk — three hundred desks. For this bomb liked structures made of steel and stone and the more transparent substances.

That night when Ash phoned, none of us knew how close we were to the strange advances in personal power and self-possession soon to occur in a large number of citizens who now seem legendary. We slept and dreamed a dream so natural it did not come back to us as the answer to our waking question until later when what we had dreamed happened. Happened again and again on the limited but vivid video footage available showing a building’s entire population of dark, luminous persons making their way to earth like sky divers before the chutes open. Which answered our first, waking question the morning after Ash called: how would survivors descend?

The silent bomb would not be hush-hush for long, Jim Ash had predicted. His opinion was soon matched by hard fact. The desert, like the sea, had always seemed beautifully right for tests of megaduty devices. This time some sites were ruled out as being too near one or more of the hexagonal dwellings called hogans owned and/or inhabited by the Navajo. Then a man named Babe who had never contributed a dollar to a presidential campaign offered his jojoba plantation. He hoped to dramatize the hardiness of that remarkable bush whose pod contains a waxy liquid that was already replacing whale oil and would eventually find uses in auto lubrication, scalp treatments, and cooking. But this desert entrepreneur hoped also to prove the scientists’ claim for their bomb; and to this end he volunteered his ranch and his jojoba-processing plant. If the thing went well and the buildings were leveled, the government would replace his home according to his wife’s own plans, and would import, lock, stock, and barrel, a whole new processing plant from the Orient as if he had bought himself a Saudi mosque or a Roman bridge. His loyal staff would stay on the job during the test, whatever the uncertainty about the bomb’s "discrimination profile." Anyway, it would be an experience.

At detonation, however, to the surprise of practically everyone, sections of the desert as well were suddenly not there; they had dropped away, swept by some local collapse of time or accelerated into silence by some unseen wind. The sandy, alkaline landscape had vanished around the blast, leaving gaps deeper than craters. Two men and two women raced out to take samples along the rims. The targeted buildings had been not just leveled, they were now nonexistent, leaving their occupants shaken up but grinning with some knowledge not quite yet theirs.

Religious leaders wanted proof of the bomb’s powers. Unfriendly continents demanded Washington share its bomb. Reaction in the financial community and the construction industry was mixed. Meanwhile, we needed to know in a hurry what happened with larger structures. People who worked in them at first preferred not to take part in the upcoming tests. But when a sensational test in a major seaport "resolved" a modern three-story outerwear factory, employees in other buildings came forward. This was a double development, for people were volunteering not only themselves but also the buildings they worked in. Our man Ash, having covered the first test, had now covered this second one where, after the detonation, the factory workers were seen descending so slowly from the vanished upper floors that it seemed to be against their will; so slowly that many escaped with the simplest bruises.

Ash checked on the survivors of the first blast. Where the narrow, deep gulfs had opened east of the jojoba groves, soil samples tested out devoid of life. Not even a jojoba bush would grow there. When Ash phoned to ask the planter Babe if he was really going to get a new house out of this, and what were the authorities doing to his employees during the follow-up examinations, Babe thought Ash knew more than he did, and divulged the location of the lab where survivors had been sequestered for debriefing. Jim Ash flew there. He posed as a hermit and met a woman he had seen at the desert test. She moved among hillside trees with a grace so centered that, as Jim was able only much later to express it, she might have been a continuum present elsewhere as well as here.

She wore a linen headband, and her name was Mara. Through her, JimAsh saw the grasses and the orchards as if he were on their far side looking back. Where were the fences? Wasn’t the place classified?

This was Biomorph Valley. The debriefing lab was in a bunker nearby. The survivors, most of them, were very much alive. Jim felt Mara saw through him, yet she seemed to tell the truth when she said it was natural for him to be a hermit now. Back at the lab it was important, she said, to seem to know less than she really did, in order not to disturb work going on. A friend had had all too much life in him, she said; he had died of his own very intensity yesterday at dawn. Only then had Mara found both a power of peace beyond attachment and a new connection with this friend. She loved him and Jim Ash too. She was one of the few women he had known who when they knew something did not ask him to guess what it was. He did not pass on to us what she had told him, or not until the late changes alluded to above were widespread. Tests went on apace.