Infinite Dreams

  “What you got, Len?”

  “Doesn’t feel like much.” He lifts it into the boat. It’s a speckled trout—a protected species—smaller than his hand, hooked harmlessly through the lip.

  “Not big enough to keep,” says Norm, while Leonard, disengages the hook. “They sure are pretty creatures.”

  Leonard grasps the fish firmly above the tail and cracks its head against the side of the boat.

  “For Chrissake, Shays!”

  He shrugs. “We might need bait later.”

  A large seminar room. Leonard’s favorite professor, Dr. Van Wyck, has just filled a third blackboard with equations and moves to a fourth, at his customary rapid pace.

  On the first board he made an error in sign. On the second board this error caused a mistake in double integration, two integrands having been wrongly consolidated. The third board, therefore, is gibberish and the fourth is utter gibberish. Van Wyck slows down.

  “Something’s screwy here,” he says, wiping a yellow streak of chalk dust across his forehead. He stares at the boards for several minutes. “Can anybody see what’s wrong?”

  Negative murmur from the class. Their heads are bobbing, looking back and forth from their notes to the board. Leonard sits smirking.

  “Mr. Shays, your Master’s thesis was on this topic. Can’t you see the error?”

  Leonard shakes his head and smiles.

  Leonard woke up awash with dull pain, mostly in the back of his skull and under the restraining straps. With great effort he tilted his head and saw that he was no longer strapped in; only fatigue was holding him down. Bright welts across his arms.

  Vague troubling memories; equations, fishing, Beirut, small child … Leonard wondered whether he had resisted as strongly with his mind as he obviously had with his body. He didn’t feel any different, only weak and hurting.

  A nurse appeared with a small hypodermic.

  “Wha?” His throat was too dry to talk. He swallowed, nothing.

  “Hypnotic,” she said.

  “Ah.” He tried to turn away, couldn’t even find strength to lift his shoulder. She was holding him down with a light touch, swabbing a place on his arm with coldness. “You want to get well, don’t you? It’s only so the doctor can …” sharp pricking and blackness.

  He woke up feeling better the second time. Dr. Verden handed him a glass of water. He drank half of it greedily, paused to wonder if it was drugged, then drank the rest anyway.

  Refilling the glass: “That was quite a performance, Leonard.”

  “You know what I was dreaming?”

  “We know what you remember having dreamt. You remember quite a lot, under hypnosis.”

  Leonard tried to sit up, felt faint, laid back down. “Did … am I still …”

  Dr. Verden put down the pitcher, leafed through some pages on a clipboard. “Yes. You have essentially the same behavioral profile you had when you came in.”

  “Good.”

  He shrugged. “It’s only a question of time. I think you were starting to respond to the therapy, toward the end. The State monitors recommended that I terminate before … actually, I had to agree with them. You aren’t in very good shape, Leonard.”

  “I know. Asymmetrical.”

  “Bad jokes aside. It just means you’ll have more sessions, of shorter duration. You’ll be here longer. Unless you decide to cooperate.”

  Leonard looked at the ceiling. “Better get used to my being around.”

  Salad has just been served at a formal dinner and Leonard is eating it with the wrong fork. The young lady across from him notices this, and looks away quickly with a prim smile. Leonard replaces the fork and finishes the salad with his fingers.

  Leonard and Scottie, newly married, are walking across the campus of the University of Florida, on a lovely spring day. She makes a sound between “Eek” and “Ack.”

  “It’s just a snake, Scottie.”

  “It’s not just a snake. It’s a coral snake.” And it is; red-touch-yella-bite-a-fella. “Leonard!”

  “I won’t hurt it.” Leonard is chasing after it and with some difficulty picks it up by the tail. The snake loops around and begins to gnaw on Leonard’s wrist. Scottie screams while Leonard watches the slow pulse of poison, holding on stoically even though the snake is hurting him.

  Leonard repeats the Beirut dream in almost every detail, but this time he tries not to look at the laser boobytrap before setting it off.

  “You’re weakening, Dr. Shays. Why don’t you just give in, cooperate?” Dr. Verden said this into the clipboard, a few pages thicker this time, and then favored his patient with a cool stare.

  Leonard yawned elaborately. “It occurred to me this morning that I won’t have to resist indefinitely. Only until Scotty’s father gets tired of paying.”

  Without hesitating: “He paid in advance, on contract.”

  “You’re a good liar, Doctor. Facile.”

  “And you’re a lousy patient, Doctor. But challenging.”

  Scottie came in for a few minutes and stood at the other end of the bed while Leonard delivered a nonstop monologue, full of bitterness but surprisingly free of profanity, about her failure as a wife and as a human being. During her stay she said only “Hello, Leonard” and “Good-bye.”

  The doctor did not come back in after Scottie left. Leonard sat and tried to think about the whole thing dispassionately.

  If Scottie gave up on him, surely the old man would too. There was only a month to go before their marriage contract ran out. If Scottie let it lapse, he would probably be released immediately. He resolved to be even nastier to her if she visited again.

  But could he last a month? Despite what Verden said, he had felt as much in control this session as he had before. And it seemed to have hurt less. Whether he could last another dozen sessions, though … well, he really had no way of telling.

  Leonard never paid any attention to the soap operas and he made it a point of pride not to read best-sellers. He only had a sketchy, cocktail-party idea of what people thought went on in your head during overlay therapy. Supposedly, you resisted with your “will”—the term seeming to Leonard reasonably accurate but trivial—and a strong-willed person thus could defend his identity better than a weak person could. But there were limits, popular wisdom said, dark limits of stress that would break the most obstinate.

  In fiction, people often escaped therapy by refusing to come out of one of the induced dreams—a pleasant dream always coming around at just the right time—by some application of existential machismo that was never too well explained. Pure poppycock, of course. Leonard always knew what was going on during a scenario, and he could control its progress to a certain extent, but when the pivotal moment came he had to take some action (even inaction was a decision) and then the dream would fade, to be replaced by the next one. To decide to stay in one dream was as meaningful as making up your mind to stay on a moving escalator, by effort of will, after it had reached the top.

  Physical escape out of the question, it looked to Leonard as if his only hope was to keep plugging away at it. The monitors kept Verden from exhausting Leonard or drugging him; such measures could only be taken in rehabilitating a felon or a “dangerously violent” patient. Ironically, Leonard had been against the idea of the monitors when federal law had created them to enforce “mental civil rights.” It had seemed like a sop thrown to an hysterical electorate after Paindreamer. But maybe the government had been right, just this once.

  Fake a cure? Impossible unless you were a consummate actor and a psychometrics expert. And Verden checked your behavioral profile under hypnosis.

  For a few moments Leonard considered the possibility that Verden and Scottie were right, that he was actually coming loose from his moorings. He decided that, although it might be true, it was an unproductive angle of attack.

  He supposed that a technician—maybe even Verden himself—might be bribed, but the money he had gotten for his piano was inaccessible and p
robably not enough anyhow.

  Best to just stick it out.

  Leonard is in an unfamiliar uniform, seated at a complicated console. He sits in front of a wall-sized backlit map of the world; North America and Europe covered with blue dots and Asia covered with red dots. Central to the console is a prominent keyhole, and a matching key dangles lightly on a chain around his neck. His left side is weighed down by a heavy pistol in a shoulder holster. A plate on the console winks every thirty seconds: NO GO. There is an identical console to his right, with another man identically accoutered, who is apparently quite absorbed in reading a book.

  So they are the two men who will set in motion the vengeance of the Free World in case of enemy attack. Or adverse executive decision.

  The plate blinks GO, in red, stroboscopically. A teletype behind them starts to chatter.

  The other man takes his key and hesitates, looks at Leonard. Says a simple word.

  Which is the wrong way to act? Leonard wonders. If he shoots the man, he saves half the world. If they both insert their keys, the enemies of democracy die. But maybe by the logic of the dream they are supposed to die.

  Leonard takes the key from his neck and puts it in the hole, turns it counterclockwise. The other does the same. The plate stops flashing.

  Leonard unholsters his pistol and shoots the other man in the chest, then in the head. Then, fading, he shoots himself, for good measure.

  Then there are four dreams offering less and less clear-cut alternatives.

  Finally, Leonard is sitting alone in front of a fireplace, reading a book. He reads twenty pages, about Toltec influence on Mayan sculpture, while nothing happens.

  He decides not to read for a while and stares into the fire. Still nothing happens. He strips pages from the book and burns them. He burns the dust-jacket and the end boards. Nothing.

  He sits down, unstraps one leg and throws it into the fire. The prosthetic foot follows. He watches them melt without burning.

  After a couple of hours he falls asleep.

  Dr. Verden did not come to him after this session was over. He woke up, the nurse gave him a hypnotic, he woke up again later. Then he spent a day leafing through magazines, watching the cube, wondering.

  Was Verden trying to trick him in some way? Or did the ambiguity of the dreams mean that the therapy was succeeding? The nurse didn’t know anything, or just wasn’t talking.

  As far as he could test himself, Leonard didn’t feel any differently. He was still full of rage at Scottie and Verden, still quite willing to sell his mathematics when money got low—and didn’t regret having sold the piano—still felt that imprinting a person who was manifestly sane was a gross violation of privacy and civil rights.

  Leonard has another session, of seven dreams. In the first three the result of his action is ambiguous. In the next two, it is trivial. In the sixth it is obscure. In the seventh, Leonard is a catatonic lying motionless, for a long time, in a hospital ward full of motionless catatonics.

  This time Verden appeared without white smock or clipboard. Leonard was surprised that seeing him in a plain business suit, stripped of symbols of authority, should make such a difference. He decided that it was a conscious masquerade.

  “The last two sessions have been very alarming,” Verden said, rocking on his heels, hands behind his back.

  “Boring, at any rate.”

  “I’ll be frank with you.” Leonard reflected that that was one of the least trust-inspiring phrases in the language. Surely the doctor knew that. In trying to figure out why he’d said it, Leonard almost missed the frankness.

  “What?”

  “Please pay attention. This is very important. I said you are in grave danger of permanently harming your own mind.”

  “By resisting your efforts.”

  “By resisting therapy too … successfully, if you want to put it that way. It’s a rare syndrome and I didn’t recognize it, but one of the monitors—”

  “He had a patient just like me, back in ’93.”

  “No. He recalled a journal article.” Verden took a folded sheaf of paper out of an inside pocket, handed it to Leonard. “Read this and tell me it doesn’t describe what’s happening to you.”

  It looked very convincing, a ’stat of an article from the July 2017 number of The American Journal of Behavior Modification Techniques. The title of the article was “The Paranoid Looping Defense: a Cybernetic Analogue.” It was full of jargon, charts and the kind of vague mathematics that social scientists admire.

  Leonard handed it back. “This and two hundred bucks will get you the services of a typesetter, Doctor. Nice try.”

  “You think …” He shook his head slowly, ran his finger along the paper’s crease and returned it to his pocket. “Of course you think that I’m lying to you.” He smiled. “That’s consistent with the syndrome.”

  He took the paper out again and set it on the table next to Leonard’s bed. “You may want to read this, if only for amusement.” Leaving, standing theatrically in the door: “You may as well know that there will be an extra monitor for your therapy tomorrow. A representative of the Florida Medical Ethics Board. He will give me permission to accelerate your treatment with drugs.”

  “Then I’ll try to be very cooperative tomorrow.” He smiled at the doctor’s back and then laughed. He had expected something like this. But he was surprised that Verden hadn’t been more subtle.

  “You can’t kid a kidder,” he said aloud, folding the paper into fourths, eighths, sixteenths. He tossed it into the bedpan and turned on the cube.

  It was the first time he’d ever enjoyed watching a quiz show.

  As Leonard goes under the anesthesia he is very happy. He has a plan.

  He will cooperate with the doctor, choose all the right alternatives, allow himself to be cured. But only temporarily.

  Once released, he will go to a skills transfer agency and hock his mathematics. He will bring the money to Verden, who has his original personality on file—and buy himself back! Audacious!

  He awaits the first dream situation with smug composure.

  Leonard is going under the anesthesia, very happy because he has a plan. He will cooperate with the doctor, choose all the right alternatives and allow himself to be cured, but only temporarily. Once released he will hock his mathematics at a skills transfer agency and bring the money to Verden, who has his original personality on file and buy himself back! Audaciously and with smug composure he awaits the first dream.

  Happily going under because he has a plan to be cured temporarily and sell his mathematics to get money to buy himself back from Verden, Leonard waits to dream.

  Happy under plan cure himself dream.

  All The Universe in a Mason Jar

  This is a lark of a story, that I wrote to entertain myself after finishing a novel. The fact that you can always sell humorous science fiction had nothing to do with it.

  I like the local-color humorists of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen a science fiction local-color story. Perhaps because it’s basically a silly idea. At any rate, I was stuck in another damned Iowa winter, feeling homesick for Florida, and so I wrote this.

  Sent a copy of it to a friend who is a sensitive poet with many degrees and an accent you could slice and serve up with red-eye gravy, asking him whether the dialect rang true. He wrote back that he thought my family must have had a Southerner in the woodpile. Whether that’s a yes, or no, or a sometimes, I’m not sure.

  New Homestead, Florida: 1990.

  John Taylor Taylor, retired professor of mathematics, lived just over two kilometers out of town, in a three-room efficiency module tucked in an isolated corner of a citrus grove. Books and old furniture and no neighbors, which was the way John liked it. He only had a few years left on this Earth, and he preferred to spend them with his oldest and most valued friend: himself.

  But this story isn’t about John Taylor Taylor. It’s about his moonshiner
, Lester Gilbert. And some five billion others.

  This day the weather was fine, so the professor took his stick and walked into town to pick up the week’s mail. A thick cylinder of journals and letters was wedged into his box; he had to ask the clerk to remove them from the other side. He tucked the mail under his arm without looking at it, and wandered next door to the bar.

  “Howdy, Professor.”

  “Good afternoon, Leroy.” He and the bartender were the only ones in the place, not unusual this late in the month. “I’ll take a boilermaker today, please.” He threaded his way through a maze of flypaper strips and eased himself into a booth of chipped, weathered plastic.

  He sorted his mail into four piles: junk, bills, letters, and journals. Quite a bit of junk, two bills, a letter that turned out to be another bill, and three journals—Nature, Communications of the American Society of Mathematics, and a collection of papers delivered at an ASM symposium on topology. He scanned the contributors lists and, as usual, saw none of his old colleagues represented.

  “Here y’go.” Leroy sat a cold beer and a shot glass of whiskey between Communications and the phone bill. John paid him with a five and lit his pipe carefully before taking a sip. He folded Nature back at the letters column and began reading.

  The screen door slapped shut loudly behind a burly man in wrinkled clean work clothes. John recognized him with a nod; he returned a left-handed V-sign and mounted a bar stool.

  “How ’bout a red-eye, Leroy?” Mixture of beer and tomato juice with a dash of Louisiana, hangover cure.

  Leroy mixed it. “Rough night, Isaac?”

  “Shoo. You don’ know.” He downed half the concoction in a gulp, and shuddered. He turned to John. “Hey, Professor. What you know about them flyin’ saucers?”

  “Lot of them around a few years ago,” he said tactfully. “Never saw one myself.”

  “Me neither. Wouldn’t give you a nickel for one. Not until last night.” He slurped the red-eye and wiped his mouth.