Dream thief

3

… THE OLD HEAD CAME up slowly. Lizard-like. The large oval yellow eyes gazed outward from under half-closed lids. Yellowed skin, the color and texture of ancient parchment, stretched tautly over a smooth, flat skull and hung in folds around the sagging neck. Not a hair remained in the scalp; not a whisker, not an eyelash.

A thin, slightly rounded band stretched across the smooth brow. This circlet pulsed with a purplish light of its own, throbbing as waves of energy flashed and dimmed.

Hocking could see him as if wreathed in smoke-clearly in the center of his field of vision, but shimmering and indistinct on the periphery. The face regarded him with a steady glare, the expression beyond contempt or malice though traces of both were there, beyond weariness or simple age. Cold. Reptilian. It was an expression utterly alien to any assignable human emotion.

In a lesser being the face and its mysterious scowl would have created at least a sense of dread, if not outright fear, but Hocking was used to it.

"Ortu." He said the name softly, distinctly. "We are ready to proceed with the final experiment. I have found a subject especially receptive to the stimulus." Hocking licked his lips and waited for a reply.

For a moment he doubted whether the image before him had heard, but he knew it had. The reply would come in time.

"Proceed, then, as I have instructed." The words were spoken evenly, but with an unusual coloring-the faintest suggestion of a foreign accent, but indecipherable.

"I thought you would be pleased, Ortu. We can begin at last." Hocking's upper lip twitched enthusiastically. "At long last…"

"Pleased? For what reason should I be pleased? Oh, there are so many." There was no mistaking the venom in the voice. "Pleased that it has taken so long? That even my inexhaustible patience has been tried time and time again to no result? That my plans should rest on the feeble efforts of a creature too stupid to comprehend the smallest fraction of the work?" The circlet on his forehead flashed brightly.

Hocking endured the sarcasm bravely. "I have been particularly careful in my choice of a subject this time. He is a sleep scientist named Reston, and he's quite malleable. We will not be disappointed again, I assure you."

"Very well, begin at once." Ortu closed his eyes and his ancient head sank once more.

"It shall be done." Hocking, too, closed his eyes and when he opened them again the glimmering image had vanished. He sat in his chair in the center of his darkened quarters. The whisper of a smile flitted across his skeletal features. Now, at last, all was ready. The final test could begin. …

SPENCE STEPPED FROM HIS sanibooth actually whistling. He felt better than he had in weeks. Rested, alert, and happy. He had slept the whole night long, the sleep of the dead. And not one dream had intruded upon his slumber-at least not the dreams he had learned to fear of late: those without color, without form, which seemed born of some alien, sterile intelligence, which came into his mind and left him shaking and drained, but without memory.

Whatever had been bothering him was now gone, or so he hoped. Perhaps it had only been the strain of adapting to the confines of the station. GM was the largest of the orbiting advancement centers; it was also the highest. Actually, it was the world's first self-sustaining space colony, maintaining an orbit three hundred and twenty thousand kilometers above the earth around a point astrophysicists called libration five. That distance, or rather the thought of that distance, sometimes had a strange effect on newcomers. Some experienced symptoms of claustrophobia; others became nervous and irritable and had difficulty sleeping, or had bad dreams. Often these problems were not immediately apparent; they developed slowly over the first weeks and months of the rookie jumpyear and had very little in common with the allied problem of space fatigue, which only seasoned veteransthose in their fifth or sixth jumpyear-seemed to contract. That was something else entirely.

So Spence, feeling very pleased with himself that he had weathered the worst and had come through, rubbed his body with a hot, moist towel to remove the fine, blue powder of the personal sanitizer and then tossed the towel into the laundry port. He dressed in a fresh blue and gold jumpsuit and made his way into the lab to reweave the dangling threads of his project.

He slipped into the lab quietly and found Dr. Tickler hunched over a worktable with an array of electronic gear and testing equipment spread out around him.

"Good morning," said Spence amiably. There was no real day or night, but the Gothamites maintained the illusion, and the station flipped slowly over on its axis on a twelve-hour cycle to help in the deception.

"Oh, there you are! Yes, good morning." Tickler bent his head around to observe Spence closely. He wore a magnifying hood which made his eyes bug out absurdly, like two glassy doorknobs splotched with paint.

"Anything serious?"

"One of the scanners is fritzing. Nothing serious. I thought I would take the opportunity to set it in order."

Spence detected a slight rebuff in Tickler's clipped tone. Then he remembered he had missed the work assignment he made for last night.

"I'm sorry. I-I wasn't feeling very well yesterday." That was true enough. "I fell asleep. I should have let you know."

"And the days before that?" Tickler tilted his head forward and raised the hood to look at him sharply. Before Spence could think of a suitable reply, his assistant shrugged and said, "It makes no difference to me, Dr. Reston. I can always get another assignment-not with so prestigious a colleague, perhaps, but one where my services will be taken seriously.

"You, on the other hand, I suspect, would find it somewhat difficult to secure an assistant at this late date. You would be forced to postpone your project, would you not?"

Spence nodded mutely.

"Yes, I thought so. Well, the choice is yours, but I will put up with no more of this. I respect your work, Dr. Reston, and I will have mine so respected. Now"-he smiled a stiff little smile devoid of any warmth-"now that we understand one another I am sure there will be no further problems."

"You are correct," returned Spence woodenly. He felt like a schoolboy who had been tardy once too often and now had been properly scolded. That was bad enough, but he hated being reminded that he was only on GM by way of a generous grant and could not chart his own course beyond the narrowly defined limits of the grant. He had no money of his own, at least not the kind needed to pay for a berth aboard even the smallest space lab, let alone GM. By sheer brainpower alone he was here; that and the goodwill of the GM Advancement Board.

"I can assure you that there will be no further misunderstandings. Now, we will begin where we should have last evening."

As they worked together, readying the lab for the next battery of experiments, the happy inner glow rekindled Spence's spirits. He did feel better than he had in weeks. And, after all, it could have been worse for him: Tickler could have requested reassignment. That would have really bollixed up the works and made him look bad before the Board.

In the end he came around to feeling fairly grateful to Tickler for the reprimand. He had it coming, maybe even needed it to settle his mind on his work once more. And he felt a little sorry for Tickler-an older man, himself a C-level Ph.D., reduced to playing lab assistant and watching younger men advance in his place. One had to feel sorry.

As he passed by the control booth with its huge reading board he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection of the halfsilvered window. He saw a young man leaving his twenties, lean, slightly above average in height, straight of limb and steady of hand. Large dark eyes looked out from under a brown thatch of hair which, no matter how it was combed, always appeared rebellious. The face showed a quick intelligence and by the thrust of a firm jaw a decisive resolve almost bordering on stubbornness. It was a face which did not easily show emotion, but one which was saved from being completely cold and aloof by a full, sensitive mouth perched above a deeply cleft chin. …

THE SHIFT WORE AWAY and by the end of it he was ready to begin the next round of sleep experiments. He celebrated the return of his will to work by treating himself to an hour in Gotham's arcade playing Rat Race, his favorite hologame. It was one of the latest generation of hologames featuring a biofeedback variable that homed in on the player's mental and emotional reflexes. In his present good spirits Spence racked up half-a-million points before the rats caught him and he turned the game over to a group of impatient cadets. He left the noisy arcade and was soon strolling idly along his favorite path among the great green ferns of Central Park.

He had stopped to steep himself in the damp, earthy atmosphere of the place-eyes closed, face tilted upward to receive shield-reflected sunlight, drawing great gulps of air deep into his lungs-when he heard a rustle behind him. Reluctantly he turned to allow the other to pass, and as he opened his eyes discovered himself blinking into two liquid orbs of china blue fringed with long dark lashes.

"You!" Spence jumped back involuntarily.

The disarming intruder laughed and replied gaily, "I thought it was you; I see I was right. I never forget a face."

"You startled me. I didn't mean to shout at you."

"You are forgiven. I've been following you. You certainly wander around an awful' lot. I almost lost you several times."

"You were following me?"

"How else was I going to apologize? I happened to see you in the concourse-I always come down to the park, every day."

"Apologize?" Spence kicked himself for babbling like an imbecile. "For what?" he added.

"For my shocking behavior yesterday. I'm sorry, really. I had no right to treat you that way. Very unprofessional of me."

"Oh, that's all right," he muttered.

The young lady chattered on. "It's just that it was close to the end of the shift and I was getting a little giddy. I do that when I get tired. And anyway, Daddy has been gone so long I'm afraid I've kind of let the decorum of his office disintegrate."

"Daddy?" Another inner kick.

"Oh, there I go again. I'm always getting ahead of myself somehow."

"You mean your father is the director of GM?"

"Yes-the colony, not the corporation."

"Then you're his daughter…" Buffoon! What are you saying?

"That's right," she laughed. "It makes it nice that way."

"You work for him? I mean…"

"No, not really. I was just helping out because both he and his assistant are gone. I didn't have anything else to do. They've been gone all week setting up some sort of field trip or something."

"That sounds interesting." Spence was dying for something half-intelligent to say. At least he had passed imbecile and was now merely moronic.

"Does it? I suppose so, to a scientist, I mean. I have no desire to go tramping around on Mars or anywhere else. I didn't even like the jump up here very much."

Spence had heard about such "field trips," as she called them; at least once a session various cadets would be chosen to take a trip to one of the extra-terrestrial bases to see firsthand the work going on there. Mars was without doubt the deluxe trip. Anyone who made that one would add an appreciable amount of prestige to his credentials.

"When is the-ah, field trip supposed to take place? I hope you don't mind my asking. Would you like to walk for a while? My name is Spencer. Spence."

"I know. I looked it up in your file, Dr. Reston." To his look of mild surprise she added, "Oh, it wasn't hard. I told you I never forget a face. And I remembered the bar code on your jumpsuit."

"Right." They began to walk slowly among the ferns and leafy trees. Now, however, Spence was aware of a new scent among the musky odors of the tropical garden. A fresh clean scent: lemons, he decided.

"I'm Ari. It's short for Ariadne, only if you ever call me that I'll never speak to you again."

For an instant Spence considered that would be an extremely unfortunate event, but then realized he hardly knew the girl at all. "Hmmm." He screwed up his face into a contemplative scowl. "Ariadne-that's Greek mythology. She was the daughter of King Minos of Crete. She gave her lover Theseus a ball of twine which he used to escape the labyrinth of the minotaur."

"Very good!" She laughed and clapped her hands. "Not one person in a thousand remembers that."

"Oh, I regard myself something of a classicist," remarked Spence with a mock-serious air. "Ari. It's a nice name. I like it."

"I like yours, too." They stopped walking. As Spence turned to look at her he could feel his nerve evaporating. "Well, it's been nice talking to you," she said. "I do have to go now. Maybe we'll run into each other again sometime." She hesitated. "Bye."

She turned quickly and ducked under a large frond and Spence watched her dart away like a deer, her long blonde hair flagging behind as she disappeared among the green shadows. He stood perplexed by the strange mix of emotions which assailed him. He was sorry to see her go; and yet he told himself that he could not feel that way, that he had never seen her before yesterday, that she was just like every other girl he had ever met. Still, a vague sense of loss settled on him as he continued to walk the garden paths.