Labor Supply

“They do what?” Dr. Vrees said, conscious of inanity.

His patient was a large young man. During the thorough physical checkup prior to this psychiatric questioning, Dr. Vrees had decided, with all the dolor of a spindly man, that this Robert Smith was a truly amazing physical specimen. He was muscled like a stereotype picture of a Viking, and with lean cow-hand hips. There were six feet four inches of him, and every inch in a perfect bloom of health.

Robert Smith seemed lost in some dismal private thought.

“They do what?” Dr. Vrees repeated.

“Huh? Oh, they go whoop, whoop, whoop. Sort of.”

“In your dreams do these... uh... whoops convey any meaning?”

“I guess I understand them all right. Or we understand them, you might say, because I... we... keep working. And all the Ruths, too.”

“All the Ruths,” Dr. Vrees repeated mechanically. Just one Ruth was almost too much to contemplate. Dr. Vrees was highly aware of her, out there in the waiting room. Ruth Jones was as dark as Robert Smith was fair, and she was built on the same heroic scale. At least six feet tall, and proud of it, moving like a ship under a full head of sail. Just to look at her tall beauty, sensing the ripeness of her, made Dr. Vrees unhappily aware of his yen for tall women, a yen which was successfully canceled out by his refusal to look ridiculous in public.

Dr. Vrees was also aware that these new patients irritated him. His attitude, he knew, was unprofessional. If their only possession had been their physical beauty, he could have taken refuge in his own sense of intellectual superiority. But Vrees had gone through a series of standard tests and found that both of them were as bright as he was, which was very bright indeed. Smith was a highly successful young civil engineer. Both of them had inherited money. Their marriage was being delayed until this matter of the recurrent dreams could be straightened out. And that, in itself, was an indication of thoughtful emotional stability.

“Recurrent dreams are not unusual,” Dr. Vrees said. “Most of them are the result of some physical disorder. The others, as evidences of emotional turmoil, are most often found in late childhood and early adolescence.”

Robert Smith inspected the big knuckles on his right hand. “You can see what we’re afraid of, Dr. Vrees. We’re afraid that... somehow... Ruth and I react on each other the wrong way. There must be some strain there, or we wouldn’t have these ridiculous dreams. We’re very deeply in love.”

“Neither of you has any physical ailment, Mr. Smith. I confess I’ve never examined a healthier pair. And your histories, too. Both from long-lived families who seem free of hereditary ailments. And both from very large families, too.”

Smith flushed. “We hope to have at least a dozen kids, Doctor.”

“I’m sure you will,” Vrees said hastily.

Smith went on, slowly. “We talked it over. Gosh, we’ve talked this dream stuff over a hundred times. I suppose you doctors are accustomed to dig down into people’s pasts and find out the root cause of... emotional trouble. Both Ruth and I had the happiest childhoods imaginable. And then, six months ago, these dreams started. I had them first. I told Ruth about them. Like a joke, you know. And then she started to have them.”

“That’s unusual, Robert, but not improbable. She began to worry about you. Out of sympathy, she duplicates your dreams.”

“There’s something pretty nasty about these dreams,” Robert said heavily.

Vrees made a few meaningless marks on his notebook. “Well, suppose you go out and send Ruth in and I’ll question her for a while.”

“Okay, doctor.” Smith got up, obviously glad that the interview was over. He held the door open for Ruth, closed it when she had entered the dimly lighted office.

Vrees was glad when she stopped towering over him and the desk and sat down. She seemed composed.

“Just tell me about these dreams in your own words, Miss Jones. I’ll interrupt with questions when any occur to me.”

She twisted her gloves, untwisted them. “There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to them, exactly. And they aren’t all really alike. Just the place is alike every time. So very hot, you know. And have you ever looked in one of those mirrors where you can duplicate yourself, so you see a whole line, and they’re all you?”

“Of course.”

“That’s the way it is. There are just hundreds and thousands of me, and of Robert too. And working so terribly hard. All naked and toiling. And crying, sometimes. There are corridors, and you have to walk down them all bent over. But the new corridors are better. You can stand up in those. We’re making them.”

“With what tools?”

“The tools are easy. Like gold pencils with two little clocks on one side. They cut the stone and the stone is all blue. Really blue. Cobalt, I guess. And the stones have to be put in baskets. Those baskets hang in the air and when you load them up they sink almost to the floor. When you pull the first one, all the others follow it like... animals. And we have to dump them down a dark place. You never hear them hit bottom.”

“You say you are duplicated almost endlessly. Do you always see things from the viewpoint of... any specific duplication of yourself?”

“No. It is always different, but still me, you understand. Sometimes it changes a lot of times in the same dream.”

“But you have to perform this labor?”

“Oh, yes. They won’t let you stop. If you stop, they have a flicking, stinging thing that you can’t even see them use. It hurts, terribly. I scream when they use it.”

“Can you describe these... overseers?”

“This... sounds so terribly silly. They’re... gnomes. You know. Little gnarly men with squatty legs and lumpy red faces and hats that come to peaks and they wear soft green. I used to love fairy tales, and the gnomes were my favorites. Now... I hate them. I hate them!”

“Please, Miss Jones. Don’t let it excite you. We’ll find a way out of this.”

“Oh, I hope so.”

“These little... ah... men, they speak to you?”

“They make a funny sound.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Sort of whoop, whoop.”

“I see,” Vrees said. “Whoop, whoop.” The girl gave him a sharp look, and flushed, then began glove-twisting again.

Vrees said, “We mustn’t overlook the possibility of some sort of... ah... sexual connotation here. I mean, if both of you are rigorously sublimating your normal instincts toward each other...”

“In the dreams they herd us into a sleeping place. There’s a feeding place, where we eat something wet and gray, and then there’s a sleeping place. And in the sleeping place all those thousands of Roberts and the thousands of me, we all...” She covered her eyes, sat with her head bowed.

Vrees swallowed hard. “I was discussing the question of sublimation.”

She lifted her head in a regal way. “No. We aren’t sublimating anything.”

“Now, to go on to another point. You didn’t start having these dreams until Robert began telling you about them, in detail.”

“That is correct. But you see, I dreamed details which he hadn’t dreamed yet. Then later, he’d dream those same details. Like a place where three new corridors branch off, not far from the feeding place.”

“Ah, but you told him the new details and then he would dream them!”

“You mean, I influenced him by telling him? We wondered about that, too. So we started writing down new things we saw in the dreams, and not telling each other. Then we compared notes quite a while later. They matched, almost perfectly.”

Vrees smiled. “Of course, my dear. You see, you two people are very close. Some day we will be able to pin down more closely this business of thought transference. There is a channel between your mind and Robert’s. I think that is quite evident.”

The girl nodded, dubiously.

Vrees went on. “There are many cases on record. I try to keep an open mind. Often you will find that identical twins have that faculty to a higher degree than the rest of us. There is the classic case of the twin sister who was on the Lusitania, and her sister in New York dreamed the entire disaster in precise detail and it was such a shock to her that she wrote it all down the moment she awakened. Later it was found to match the eye-witness reports with astounding accuracy. If I were you, Miss Jones, I should not worry too much about your both dreaming the same thing. Our purpose here is to find out why Robert started having these dreams in the first place. Once we find that reason, and eliminate it, I am positive that you will both stop having the dreams.”

“We’ve worried so much about it.”

“They do sound ominously realistic, I grant you. Frightening.”

She straightened out her gloves. “I don’t know if this means anything, Dr. Vrees, but you see, I’ve been having the dreams for five months. With Robert, it’s nearly six. And... lately... well, maybe it isn’t important.”

“Please go on, my dear.”

She lifted her chin and said, almost defiantly, “In the dreams, all of my. . duplicates are quite obviously pregnant.”

Vrees closed his mouth after an unprofessional interval. He said, “A vague theory begins to present itself. Robert states that he had a happy childhood, that he enjoyed being a member of such a large family. Eleven children, weren’t there?”

“That’s correct.”

“Let us assume for a moment that, subconsciously, he did not like being a part of a large family at all, that he resented all the others for... diluting the love his parents could have given to him alone.”

“But Robert isn’t...”

“Just a moment. Let me follow through on this. He sees a horrid dream world where your love for him is diluted in a similar fashion. I do not yet understand the symbolism of all of the duplications of him, and of yourself, but I feel that our method of approach is through psychoanalysis. I can give him two afternoons a week, a two hour session each time. I shall try to uncover this childhood feeling of jealousy toward his brothers and sisters. You see how pregnancy comes in, don’t you? Each time he saw his mother heavy with child, he knew that there would be yet another dilution of the amount of love she had to give.”

“Yes, but...”

“Now I’ll ask Robert to come in and the three of us will talk this over.”

A month later, the analyst’s couch having failed, sodium pentathol having uncovered nothing but further details of the dreams, Vrees was beginning to speculate about bringing in a colleague who had had a certain amount of success with hypnosis.

One day at lunch at his professional club, Vrees happened to sit with Louisoln, the physicist, and Cramer, another psychoanalyst. Out of common courtesy, Vrees wanted to avoid shop talk in front of Louisoln, but Cramer, having heard a bit of the Smith-Jones case, was eager to hear the latest developments, if any. In spite of his good intentions, Vrees found himself discussing the “hypothetical” case’ with a confidence so precarious that he was certain Cramer could see through it.

“What is this... duplication?” Louisoln asked.

“Just a dream, Doctor,” Vrees explained. “A patient of mine has a recurring dream in which he sees himself endlessly duplicated, laboring in a sort of bondage to a bunch of gnomes.”

Louisoln chuckled. “Duplication of matter. A pretty solution to the labor problem, no? Of course, if matter could be duplicated, the demand for labor would not be high, except for the most menial sort of work. For example, duplication of matter would be no good, if one wished a ditch dug.”

Vrees laughed, a bit flatly, “You sound, Dr. Louisoln, as though duplication of matter was a possibility. To me the idea is quite shocking.”

Louisoln raised one matted gray eyebrow. “Shocking? My boy, you are living with it, each day. I shall not go into the quantum theory.”

“Please don’t,” Cramer said, softening rudeness with a smile.

“But please, gentlemen, consider a phonograph record. Say the music, as such, is a substance. Using an electrical theory of matter, it is a substance. And it can be duplicated endlessly, by merely reproducing the same circumstances, a needle in a wax groove imparting an electrical impulse. With your kinescope the shadows of two dimensional television stars are also endlessly duplicated. So why should it be at all shocking to you, gentlemen, to fit your minds around the idea that if the electrical charges in the basic building blocks of matter can be precisely duplicated, the matter itself will be duplicated? It would take vast energy, of course, to work the mass-energy formula backwards, but inconceivable? No. Not at all.” He gave them a leonine glare and delved back into his cheese cake.

It was then that Vrees began to live in mild fantasy. Louisoln’s matter-of-fact statements gave idiotic credence to the Smith-Jones recurrent dream.

That afternoon, while listening to a well-upholstered matron relate, in doze-producing detail, an account of how, at the age of eleven, her half-sister had shoved her out of a cherry tree, breaking her collarbone, Vrees found himself playing the childhood game of “supposing.”

Suppose the legends of gnomes have a basis in fact. Suppose they are underworld or otherworld creatures, far more advanced than man. Aren’t there tales of humans being taken as slaves by them? Supposing these gnomes need more labor. A bigger supply. It would upset mankind too much to have a rash of thousands of disappearances. And then, of course, there would be the problem of selection of healthy specimens, good breeding stock, possessed of sufficient intelligence. Now if they could merely select two specimens with all the requirements, create endless duplicates, set them to work, wouldn’t it be possible that some extrasensory thread might connect the souls of those duplicated and their hard-laboring counterparts who were underworld or, perhaps, otherworld. It could well be otherworld. There had been a rash of things in the sky. And where, even in the bowels of the earth, could you find cobalt blue rock?

“What do you think, Doctor? I’m still waiting?”

“Perhaps I can detect something significant, Madame, in the way you rephrase the question.”

“I see. I’ll ask it this way. Do you think there’s any significance in the fact that it was a cherry tree I was pushed out of?”

Vrees groaned inwardly. “We have not yet reached the stage where we can discuss symbolism, Madame. If you would please continue.”

A few days later Mr. Smith and Miss Jones sat in the doctor’s office. They had come at once when myriad Doctors Vrees had appeared in their dreams.

And Dr. Vrees had been expecting their call.

Although it was now dusk, he didn’t turn on the lights. Mr. Smith and Miss Jones held hands. Tightly. Vrees had talked until his voice was husky. The avoidance of madness, he had found, was like working your way around and around the outside of a tall building, with your fingernails scratching the cornice.

Everything had been said, including the impossibility of trying to tell anyone else in the world.

They sat in silence. At last Vrees said, “I guess they decided they needed me to assist in the... ah... multiple births.”

“And take care of the children, afterward, perhaps,” Miss Jones said dreamily.

Vrees flinched inwardly. He smiled at all children, patted their heads and gave them gum. He detested them.

“Then there’s nothing we can do, is there?” Robert asked.

“Nothing,” Vrees said. “Perhaps, in time, as that... uh... regimentation causes an emotional and intellectual deviation from... our norms, the contact will gradually be broken.”

Robert stood up. He said, “I guess Ruth and I better go ahead with the wedding. Will you come, Doctor?”

Again he winced inwardly. “Ah... I’ve a pretty full schedule.”

“Of course,” Ruth said. “We should all get together now and then, though, to sort of... check up.”

“I’m prescribing sedatives for myself,” Vrees said. “I intend to stop dreaming.”

He walked them to the door. He could not help considering them his enemies. They had gotten him into this horror. And besides, they towered over him.

But he had to make some gesture.

At the door he said softly, so softly that they both had to bend down a little to hear him. “That sound they make. You... uh... were right. It’s definitely whoop, whoop.”

He sat alone in the dark after they had gone. He was an honest and objective man. Yet it took him an hour to isolate that final reason for his sense of bitterness. He realized it at last. Somewhere 1000 Drs. Vrees attended 10,000 Ruths. Yet, through an irony of selection, they were all as unattainable as the original Ruth was to the original Vrees. Anyway, they’d all be too busy with the children.