Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  She crossed to the window. It was sunrise outside and a terrific noise was going on. The field was full of people. He understood that they were watching a comet which blazed in the sky. Attempts were being made to capture the comet in some way, in order to harness its energies for fuel.

  He said, “They are going to harvest its energies.”

  She said, “It is not time for the harvest yet.” He noticed that her husband was beside her, a small man standing behind some kind of flower arrangement.

  Someone was asking what time the harvest was.

  She came out from behind a rocking chair, smiling and saying that she had a record she wanted to play them over and over again.

  It was already playing. It brought them all happiness. He danced with someone in the room, but it was not her. The room vanished.

  They were outside, under the stars and a comet like a great biblical sheaf of wheat.

  The yellow buzzer sounded.

  * * * *

  Angsteed roused, staring around the familiar laboratory without raising his head from the pillow. He regularly used himself as his own guinea pig, and had determined to do so again directly after his evening with Rose-Jean.

  He reached out almost automatically for the microphone and began to record the details of his dream, after noting the time. Early, 1:56.

  He completed the report, added the words “Typical sigma dream, preoccupied with digesting the experiences of the day,” and settled his head back on the pillow. Then he sat upright.

  The interpretation of the dream flashed upon him. It had signaled itself as a special dream by the hint to begin with: the drawing of the curtains symbolized the closing of his eyes. And the rest. . . well, he needed to talk to someone about it. Rose-Jean! Why not? He had a pretext for visiting her at night.

  Going to the dressing room, he pulled on some clothes and slippers and shuffled out of the labs. He crossed to her block. Nobody was about, although a light shone here and there where a student hunched over a book or talked to or seduced another student. The moon shone. It was a perfect night. He could hear the continuous rumble of traffic from the freeway.

  Before Rose-Jean’s door, he hesitated, then tried the handle. The door opened—somewhat to his surprise, for warnings about theft were posted on every residential floor. He entered. This was the room in which he had kissed her only a few hours earlier. The experience came so freshly back to him that time seemed to be annihilated.

  Angsteed stood there, taking in the scents and impressions of the room before moving toward the bedroom door. Opening it, he called softly, “Rose-Jean, are you awake? It’s only me, Andrew?”

  He knew immediately from her tone that she had been awake. In her voice was a note almost of panic.

  “Andrew? You can’t come in here. It’s the middle of the night. What the hell do you want?”

  “I’ve had a dream. A revelation. I want to discuss it with you. I promise I’ll only talk. Can I put the light on?”

  “No! No, I forbid you to put the light on. Please go, Andrew—we can talk in the morning. I was asleep.”

  “But listen, darling—suddenly I’ve seen my way ahead, and you gave me the clue in a dream. There was a comet in the sky, and you said—”

  “Andrew, will you please get out of my room before I call the porter?”

  He went nearer to the bed and sat down on it, reaching for her hand. “Please attempt to listen to me. I didn’t come here to seduce you! This is something really important. You know how on medical reports it is now considered vital to record at what precise time drugs are administered? The time is recognized as being as important as the amount. Because the same dosage can have widely different effects at different times of day. You told me in my dream that you had a record which was played over and over. That refers to the record of all dreams kept by the unit. We have always entered the time of waking in the sleep records, but we have not applied the time in the classificatory data. Don’t you see that we can check back over the last fifteen years’ records and we should be able to turn up the new factor?”

  She was still angry. “You’re babbling, Andrew! What new factor?”

  “Didn’t I say that? Look, we’ve studied times of dreams only as part of how long after the commencement of sleep they occur. But we need to study them as against body-time. The dreams come at certain regular intervals after the onset of sleep, but what we may have missed is that the content of the dreams may well be influenced by the subject’s body-time! We can check on that. And my dream suggests that the answer will be epoch-making—hence, the comet. We may well discover that the different sorts of dreams come from different time-flows. In other words, it may be possible in the future to key in to whatever level of personality we require—and of course with that new understanding, we shall be able to chart an entirely new picture of consciousness!”

  He leaned forward in his excitement to embrace her. The curtains were drawn together in the room. He could only vaguely discern the pale outline of her face. As he reached toward it, another face materialized next to it, and a rough male hand thrust itself into his face.

  “You leave my wife alone!” a voice told him.

  * * * *

  Next morning, Rose-Jean went to see Angsteed. She apologized for last night.

  “We’d better forget it,” he said. “And obviously you will want your name removed from the dream roster.”

  “Don’t be so stuffy, Andrew. I know you sleep around a fair bit, or used to. My friends told me. Don’t start being unkind to me just because I have my husband in my bed once in a while. If you must know, I didn’t even invite him in last night. I thought he was hundreds of miles away, but he dropped in on me.”

  “I don’t want to know about your personal affairs.”

  “Of course you do. Why sulk? Listen, Andrew, I like you a lot. I have this thing about my husband, but sooner or later I reckon I have to shake him out of my system. You can help me, if you really wish. I’m just in no mood for—oh, forget it!”

  He stood against her and took her hand. “I’m sorry, Rose-Jean. Of course I’m peeved about last night, peeved with you and with him—and jealous, of course—and most peeved with myself. I’ll get over it. Let’s be friends. I need you. Think what my life has been, stuck in dreary research institutes— before I was here, I was studying dying flies and making moth pupae abort in order to learn about circadian mechanisms. A life for science! Well, it’s been a living death. Your dreams have revived me, given me new imaginative insight. I really think I’m on the brink of a major breakthrough, and I’d like you to get some of the excitement too.”

  She kissed him then.

  “How’s that for excitement?”

  “Great. There are things which have never been done before, but they have no power to alter the essence of things.”

  “I don’t quite see what you mean.”

  He looked at her in puzzlement. “Have I said that before? Your dreams have altered something in my essence, brought me to life in some inner way.”

  “I find that hard to believe; I’m so unimportant. Yet, why not? I feel refreshed by my dreams myself, as maybe I told you. Maybe the essence of one human life is cyclic in nature, and a new season is about to dawn in both our psyches, if that isn’t too fanciful!”

  “And a new comet in both our skies!”

  At last he had broken the spell. He took her powerfully into his arms. Their mouths met. After a moment they settled down on Angsteed’s plum-colored sofa.

  * * * *

  The yellow buzzer woke Rose-Jean Dempson at 2:11 a.m., activated by her REMs.

  Pulling the microphone toward her, she said, “Two-eleven. There was an earthquake, and the university was in ruins. Everyone else seemed to have gone. It was night, and I wasn’t at all frightened.

  “I ran out across the field. The layout of everything was different. I saw a broken clock lying on the ground. It had stopped at. . .I believe it was ten minutes past six. Evidently it ha
d fallen off a ruined tower.

  “I went toward the line of poplars. The sky was curiously bright and there seemed to be creatures running about near me. One of the poplars had fallen over. I appeared to climb along its horizontal trunk. Then I was looking down at its roots, which were earthy and dangling in the air. I could see something gleaming in the hole. It was a gold casket, but when I lifted it out it had blood on it, so I gave it to someone who was beside me.

  “Then it seemed that I was riding a horse. I was very excited. Maybe there was another earth tremor. It sounds silly, but the whole landscape was coming along with us. The horse started galloping around in circles.

  “Reindeer were running nearby, beautiful creatures, brown and white, with terrific antlers. They ran with their heads down, breath pouring like steam from their nostrils.

  “I was full of delight because in the morning the world was going to begin anew. I guess it all sounds like a typical ypsilon dream, I’m afraid.”

  Rose-Jean looked about the laboratory, thick with the dusk of shaded lights and the caterpillar sounds of machines. Her eyelids closed, shutting it all away. Her head went back on the pillow and she slept. Ninety-five minutes later, the yellow buzzer roused her again.

  * * * *

  In the morning, Rose-Jean went to see her closest friend on the faculty, Alice Butley. Alice was head of the philosophy department, a stringy woman in her mid-fifties with a lot of life and humor in her. Rose-Jean had liked her from their first meeting, although Alice was almost twice Rose-Jean’s age.

  “Care for a drink, Rose-Jean?”

  “Just a Coke, maybe.”

  “It’s three quarters of an hour before the time for my first martini, but I guess I could run forty-five minutes ahead of schedule for once. Though ‘for once’ is certainly not the phrase I should use there. Drinking early is getting to be a repetitive event. ... I can stand just so much of this place. . . . You aren’t coming to tell me you’re quitting?”

  Rose-Jean laughed. “Far from it. I’m just getting interested. But I guess I was wanting to talk to you about a repetitive event.”

  “Go ahead! This dump is stocked with nothing else but. .

  “Alice, you’ll laugh when I tell you.”

  “Try me.”

  “I think I’m falling in love with Andrew Angsteed, the head of the Dream Research Unit. Now—I know your opinion of him is mixed, and he surely does seem a bit dull at first, but when you get to know him better, why, he’s just great. He’s so understanding, and the work he’s doing is just fascinating.”

  Alice brought over the drink. “It’s not the work in your man’s life, it’s the man in your life’s work that counts. Andrew’s nearer my age than yours. Still, when could one ever say that and expect a hearing?”

  “He really is tremendous, Alice. He’s had a dull life, but now he feels that everything is going to change. I feel just the same way. Really new things are about to happen!”

  Raising her glass, sipping, Alice said, “Well, there are things which have never been done before, events that have never taken place, but they have no power to alter the essence of things. You may or may not resent that, according to temperament.”

  “I don’t follow you. You’re saying the essence of things is repetitive?”

  “No, but the essence of human life experience is largely a matter of repetition—or cyclic in nature, let’s say, since generations do not differ in that respect, suffering the same miseries and pleasures, the same emotions, the same realities of birth, death, love, and so on. . . . Not forgetting boredom —it’s a worser killer than death, as my old pop used to say.”

  Her phone warbled. She walked over to the desk and cut it off.

  Perching on the edge of a chair, Rose-Jean said, “But these cycles—they aren’t concentric, are they? I mean, otherwise the same events would happen over and over again, without the participants being aware of it.”

  “Well, don’t they, damnit!”

  Rose-Jean’s gaze dropped to the floor. Then she laughed. “Maybe, I guess. At least—oh, I don’t know. You’re the philosopher, Alice. You see, I did want to talk to you about a repetitive event. You know the last place I was in, the University of Catrota, well, I also fell in love with a man there. He was very intelligent but sort of a hippie. No, not a hippie, but at least a potential dropout from society. He didn’t accept the way society was run, any more than Andy does, in a different way. His name was Allan Dempson. We got married. I told you about it.”

  “Sure. You told me it didn’t work out.”

  “Oh, we tried, but it was just impossible. He was gorgeous, but so tyrannical. Andrew’s quite different I had to leave Allan and Catrota. He’s given up his job there too. He’s working as a long-distance truck driver, when he works at all.”

  “Now you’re afraid you’re going to make a mess of things all over again with Andrew Angsteed?”

  “I don’t know. You said it yourself, the major events of life occur over and over again. Still, Allan and Andrew are so different. I guess Allan just had one major obsession, the state of society.”

  Alice looked at the younger woman meditatively. “I’d say that hit off Andy pretty accurately, too. He’s obsessive, if ever I saw it.”

  “Oh—I don’t know ... I just find him so fascinating. . . .”

  Alice took her arm. “Honey, you spend too long on that dream machine. You’re still married to Allan, right? So you can’t marry Andrew. That takes care of that.”

  “But I can divorce Allan. He said I could.”

  “In order to marry Andrew? Maybe your trouble is that you are pursuing archetypes, not real people. That’s when the going really gets difficult and events really start to repeat themselves. Let me lend you Anna Kavan’s Ice to read; then you’ll understand what I mean by pursuit of archetypes. You are seeing Andrew generically when you should view him as an individual. Let’s talk again about this—I must go and see old Birkett. We’ve got a deal of trouble regarding the appropriations fund.”

  “You’ve nothing against Andrew?”

  Alice looked away. “No. I’m very fond of Andrew.”

  * * * *

  Angsteed shut himself in his office and played back to himself the casette on which he had recorded Rose-Jean’s dream from the master tape. The master tape was university property; the casette was his property. He now had records of 174 dreams dreamed by Rose-Jean Dempson. In the work files of his department, all dreams contributed to the bank by all volunteers were anonymous, and elaborately cross-filed in the computer according to dream-type, content, key-symbol, and so on. Now they were all being additionally classified according to time of dream.

  All that was impersonal, and routine. Angsteed’s private collection of Rose-Jean’s dreams was both private and personal.

  He let his mind wander as her sleepy voice reached him through the earphone in his ear. Her dream territory had become more and more familiar to him. He, possibly more than any other man alive, was able to chart that territory. In every dream he could tell his whereabouts in her psyche, in which quadrant, how deep he was. He knew the colorations, he had come to recognize various meta-continents, in each of which certain archetypal emotion events prevailed. All was cloudy, ever-changing, but he no longer went in fear of losing his orientation. As his knowledge and sensibility increased, he grew to comprehend something about the different time-flows of the different meta-continents.

  Gradually, and without being aware of it, he was coming nearer to the Heartland, that interior which no conscious thought—not even Rose-Jean’s—had ever penetrated. The interior was beset with mystery and guarded with barricades, the greatest of which was the attenuation of consciousness into sleep. The effect came like an enchantment as one approached, and the brainwaves which it radiated served as tsetse fly in maintaining the territory intact and virginal. But Angsteed was learning to move in ever deeper.

  During the lunch hour, he retired to his room, taking the casette to add to his
growing collection. He moved slowly and somnambulistically, often ignoring the greetings of his fellows.

  He had plans for writing a ballet, for making a film, for painting a picture, which would embody the inner world of which he was the sole explorer. As yet only a few notes and diagrams existed. Sometimes Angsteed sat before his typewriter, sometimes he sat with his gouaches on the desk before him. Rarely did he do more than gaze into perspectives of which only he was aware.

  When his phone warbled he picked it up and spoke inattentively.

  It was Rose-Jean.

  At once he became more alert.

  “We both have the night free of the lab. Let me drive you into Goadstown and we’ll have a meal together. You might even remind me how to dance. How’s about it?”

  “Why, that would be fine, Andrew, but—”