Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (8 page)

At the office he was met by his secretary who handed a memo to him. Meeting for nine sharp. The Secretary would be present. End. He crumpled it and nodded to Jeanne. It was 8:45.

“Coffee?” he asked.

The girl nodded as he started through the doorway to his inner office, a cubicle ten by ten. “I poured a cup, and there’s more in the pot,” Jeanne said. “Shall I start on the mail?”

“Sure, honey. And, Jeanne, try to winnow it way down, huh?

She smiled sympathetically and he started on the coffee. He tried not to look at his desk, which Jeanne had cleaned up as much as possible, but which still was a jumble of plans, memos, doodles, slide rules, schematics… The coffee was blistering hot, strong, black. The day began to seem less infernal. When he left for the conference in ten minutes he was carrying his third coffee with him. He grinned at Jeanne, and his stride was purposeful and his back straight.

There were fifteen men at the conference that morning, and all of them looked as bad as Thornton, or worse. They had all been driving on twelve-to-eighteen-hour days for seven months now, and the end was not in sight Thornton could almost envy the union-protected maintenance men. He nodded to others and there were low greetings and hurried conversations in the shorthand that passed for talk. He thought, one bomb right here, right now, and poof, there goes the Special Institute for Applied Research.

He saw that the Secretary was already in the room, cloistered by several bodies near the window, speaking in his low monotone to Halvern, the Director of the Institute. The clock chimed softly and Halvern moved toward the long table, the Secretary following, still talking, like a priest mumbling incomprehensible prayers.

Introductions were unnecessary since the Secretary had been there before. Thornton thought of his bomb and enlarged it a bit in his mind, still not The Bomb, of course, but slightly bigger than the one he had contemplated earlier. Would the war stop then? He knew it would not, but there would be those on the outside who would sanctify him. He grinned at the thought, and for a moment he was afraid the grin had reached the outside of his face. But there were no looks askance, and deliberately he turned his thoughts from that line and became attentive to what the Secretary was saying:

“…imperative that we solve this final problem before negotiations are finalized. When the talks begin, our activities in the field will be curtailed…”

Thornton added:
and we have stalled the Secretary-General about as long as possible.

“Naturally we are trying to bring about peace talks as rapidly as possible
on the surface anyway where we can point to our efforts
, but it is difficult to negotiate with an enemy that is so xenophobic.
You mean he hates our guts, with reason, and he doesn’t believe a word we say
. I repeat, the President has informed me that it is imperative that we complete our plans for the Phalanx and try it out under battle conditions so that we will better be able to assess its potential in the event we are faced with a major land war…”

Thornton turned him off then, letting his gaze slide from the Secretary’s hand-tooled-leather face to the window that framed a vista of Tennessee hills touched with early spring. Dogwoods and redbuds were in bloom, and a strong wind whipped them unmercifully. Kite wind. Sailing wind. Sailing… He smiled inside and wished he could go sailing along the coast on the curious flat-bottomed skiff Gregory had picked up somewhere in the distant, almost forgotten past. Twenty-five years ago, by God! For a moment the thought of his boyhood friend stirred something, and his hand toying with a pencil tightened its grip painfully.

He wrenched his attention back to the Secretary who had left the familiar rah, rah, team talk, and was on something new finally. “I am scheduling the first simulated battle test for one month from today, and the first actual battle test for sixty days subsequent to that date.” There was more of it, but Thornton perversely blocked it out. So they should all work for twenty hours a day instead of eighteen. He shrugged inwardly and decided that he didn’t care. With wow-zooie pills and coffee they would all stay on their feet until they collapsed, and it didn’t matter what shape they would be in when the year was over. One year in the Institute, one year off resting, then back to the university to pick up the threads of classwork, lectures on Advanced Programming Theory, and his own small quiet lab. And back to his family, of course.

Thornton returned to his office after the meeting and was confronted with the meaningless garble from other departments that he had to translate into a program. Very deliberately he didn’t try to understand most of the problems that he worked with. He didn’t want to know what the Phalanx would be able to do and what it would not.

He divided his day into thirds: the first third, from 8:45 until 1:00, he worked on the advanced programming that was his to do; after lunch, 1:30 until 5:30, he went over the papers prepared by others, sometimes accepting them, often sending them back; from 7:30 until exhaustion stopped him he worked with the computer searching for errors. Then dream-laden sleep until 7:30 the next morning. At 5:30, three days a week, he spent half an hour with his analyst, and it was to him that he reported any interesting ideas that had come to him during his dreams, awake or asleep. His analyst, Dr. Feldman, believed implicitly in the creative ability of the unconscious to serve up workable ideas which generally were brushed aside because they were far afield of the patient’s area of interest. Now that he was aware of the sort of things that Feldman was looking for, Thornton also searched his dreams and his reveries for those ideas, and was surprised to find how many of them there were. Surprised and excited. This was something that he planned to take from the Institute with him when he left. Most of it he planned, swore he would leave behind him forever.

He told Feldman the dream without consulting his notes: “I was in the cabin of a spaceship, carrying cryo-passengers to a distant star system. I was responsible for them. Everything was functioning smoothly.” He told in detail how he had prepared his breakfast, and then went on to the book incident. “It was a variation of the microfilm process, I suppose, simplified somewhat. I read the title the way you would read the label on a spool of thread; it even had the feel and texture of a spool of thread. I dropped it, though, and woke up then. My clock went off.

Feldman didn’t interrupt him, simply nodded when Thornton came to the end of it. When Thornton pulled out his notebook and read from his notes, he was chagrined to find that he had omitted parts of the dream.

Feldman said, “The dream that you remember, what kind of a dream was it?”

“Kind? Oh, I see. I think it was black-and-white. I don’t remember any color. I didn’t feel it particularly, I don’t think.”

“Yes. Could you come out of it at any time? Did you realize that you were dreaming?”

“I don’t think so. I have done that, and noted it afterward, but not this time.”

Feldman worked on the dream within a dream, but Thornton couldn’t remember if there had been one or not. Short of hypnosis, Feldman decided, it would stay repressed for the time being. Thornton and Feldman had discussed dreams in the past, and he knew that Feldman believed there were three major types of dreams: the hypnagogic dreams that float in and out of awareness on falling asleep, and on awakening, the kind that fade in and out of a short nap when you know you are dreaming and even take a hand in directing the dream sometimes. Then there was the next stage where the dreamer had no control, but was really more an observer than a participant, although he could be both at the same time, watching himself from a distance. The third kind was the sort that Thornton rarely had, or if he had, seldom remembered: the dream that is a reality in itself, the dream that can result in a heart attack if it is a nightmare, or in orgasm if it is sexual, the dream that exists, that can change the dreamer just as a living experience can.

Feldman was smiling happily when Thornton looked at him at the end of the questioning, and Thornton knew that finally he was proving interesting to the psychiatrist. After seven months of unshakable normalcy, he had done something interesting. He felt a stab of fear and wished he hadn’t told the dream completely, had let it go at the remembered version, but even as he thought it, he knew that it would have been impossible. Feldman would have known, and resistance would have delighted him even more than mere repression. For a moment he hated the smiling man, but it passed, and he grinned back briefly.

“You think I’m going to earn my keep after all?” he asked.

“When you have something come up after this length of time, I must assume that there is the possibility that it can be connected with the work here, yes. We shall see. I am scheduling you for an hour tomorrow, starting at five. Is that convenient?”

The question was rhetorical.

“You should give thought to the spool of thread that you tried to rid yourself of,” Feldman said. “As you fall asleep, think to yourself, spool of thread, spool of thread. Who knows, perhaps it will come to you.” He held open the door and Thornton left.

Thornton knew that early in their dealings Feldman had had him in deep hypnosis, that he hid few secrets from the man, that probably Feldman had left him with some posthypnotic cues, and he wondered if it had been a suggestion, or an order, that he should think of a spool of thread, and even as he wondered about it, he knew that coming from Feldman a suggestion could have the force of an order given at gunpoint. His smile was without mirth as he remembered what Feldman had said once when asked why he didn’t merely hypnotize all his patients and have them recite their dreams and fears to him.

“Ah, but the associations, the meanings would be lost then, perhaps. Why do you repress this and not that? This is what is interesting, not what you repress particularly, although it can be. No, I might nudge you from time to time, but I want you to bring them out with the proper associations, the associations that only you can make.”

Spool of thread, spool of thread…

He remembered, dreamed, of losing his first tooth, and the thread his mother had tied around it, her gentle insistence that he pull it himself, and her promise, after a look of surprise and amusement that, yes, they would send it to his father. He drifted out of the dream-reverie and was wide awake thinking about his father who had been a good man, kind and wise, a colonel in the army. He got out of bed and paced his tiny room smoking furiously, but the image of his father naked and bruised, shaved clean, dragging one foot, being pulled hobbling down a street crowded with Oriental faces that were grimaces of hate, the image remained, just as he had watched it on television. A good man, he repeated soberly. But he might have done the things they accused him of doing. He might have.

He swallowed a pill and returned to bed and found himself repeating: spool of thread, spool of thread. He wanted to get up again, but the pill was quick and he felt lethargy stealing over him. He would be achy in the morning, always was achy when he resorted to sleeping pills. Spool of thread…

He dreamed discordant, meaningless dreams, fantasies without basis in reality. And slept deeper, and was less restless on the single bed.

We walk through the museum arm in arm and it is Paula who is leading us, although she is in the middle. Her steps are light and quick, and she talks incessantly. She pauses before the paintings of the new artist, Stern, and she squints and cocks her head this way and that, then she pulls us on to the next one. She is changed now, her hair still long and straight, but shining clean, and she has done something to her face, something so subtle that I can’t decide what it is. I find myself staring at her again and again, and she smiles at me, and for an instant I find the wild girl who lived for the ocean only five years ago. Then it is gone and she is saying, “It’s such a joke! He’s wonderful! Don’t you see it?” There are fifty paintings, arranged in aisles that meet and interconnect so that it is hard not to repeat an aisle. There is no arrow pointing this way, no numbers on the paintings, but Paula has led us through them to the end, and she is laughing with delight. The artist is there, regarding Paula with deep and penetrating interest. She runs to him and kisses him on his bearded cheek and says, “Thank you. I won’t tell.” And she doesn’t tell. Gregory goes back to the beginning and works his way slowly to us once more, and when he comes back, his eyes share her mirth, but he won’t tell either. I know that he can explain it although she can’t, but he needed her to tell him there was something to explain. I return later and study the paintings alone for a long time, and I don’t know what they found. I am lost there. The paintings are grotesque, hideous and meaningless, and the arrangement is meant to befuddle, not to enlighten.

Paula loves the city as she loved the beaches. She runs and dances through the streets joyously, tasting what no one else tastes, smelling what no one else smells, seeing what is not there for my eyes to see. She sings in the city like a fresh breeze from the ocean.

Paula plans to leave school in the spring. She wants… she doesn’t know what she wants, but it is not in school. She will travel, perhaps marry. I feel tightness in my throat and I ask if she will marry me and she stops, frozen, and finally after a long time she says no. I am angry with her and stalk away. Gregory says that she is like a bird now, she must fly here and there before she stops and love would stop her. I hate them both, their closeness, their awareness of each other. I want to kill them both. Especially Paula. My hands are fists when she comes near me and the smothering waves of love-hate immobilize me at a place where the pain is unendurable.

She knows. Paula is like a spring wind then, gentle and soothing, and I am filled with her presence. For two weeks we are together and she is in every cell of me, deep in me where she can never escape now. Then she is gone. Gregory knows where, I think, but he doesn’t tell me. He plods with his books, getting every detail of every subject letter-perfect, but he never originates anything, never offers anything and he is like a shadow without the wind. I know his loss is greater than my own, but I don’t care about that. I return to California where I am still in school, and the jet is my scream of anguish that I cannot utter for myself. I want her out of my life. I want never to see her again. I want her dead so that no one else can have her.