The Dreamfields

Chapter 1

Something had struck the earth and it wouldn’t stop ringing. Or so it seemed. Ralph Metric took another pull at the beer can sweating in his hand and watched the heat waves shimmer on the rocks and sand beyond the glass. Below the glaring window the air conditioner whined.

“I just think it’s kind of strange,” came Stimmitz’s voice again. It cut through the aural haze produced by Bach cantatas dribbling into the room at low volume. “Don’t you? Strange, a little?”

“Huh?” Ralph turned, from the window. A phantom desert in green and purple slowly ebbed from his vision, revealing Stimmitz sitting in the dark end of the room. On one of the bookshelves behind him the reels of his tape deck inexorably rotated.

“Strange.” The too-angular legs shifted their positions, like some part of a mantis flexing. “Don’t you think it is?”

Somehow I got lost here, thought Ralph. While I was looking out the window? I can’t even remember what we were talking about. “Strange?”

The word itself had gotten a little fuzzy from repetition, and beer. Bach, too. He discovered he was running his thumb around the top of the beer can at the same speed the tape reels were going around. He switched the beer to his other hand and slid the first into his pocket. “What’s strange?” he said.

“Oh. You know.” Stimmitz looked past Ralph towards the window.

“Operation Dreamwatch, the whole thing. The uniforms and the pretend-military bit. I mean, if they really want discipline so tight, why’d they hire people . . . like Glogolt, for Pete’s sake. That jerk’s been here longer than any of us and he still hasn’t learned how to do the regulation knot in his tie.” Stimmitz’s eyes shifted a fraction of an inch and refocused on Ralph.

“Glogolt’s got quite a stack, of deficiency notices.” Ralph interposed the beer can between Stimmitz’s eyes and his own and took another swallow.

“Yeah, but they don’t get rid of him. So they must have some kind of use for him, right? But what good is somebody like Glogolt? Or any of the people here, for that matter.”

Ralph laid the cool damp of the beer can against his cheek and said nothing. Stimmitz was poking at a group of thoughts that had been wadding up in Ralph’s gut for some time now. About the size of a basketball, thought Ralph glumly. That’s how they feel.

“I mean, this is an expensive set-up,” Stimmitz’s mouth moved again beneath his hardening eyes. “This all costs money, a lot of it. How come there’s so much Muehlenfeldt money being dumped into this project while there’s a war going on?”

“Muehlenfeldt money?” Through Ralph’s mind flashed a brief image of the distinguished Senator M. cranking a printing press in a dank basement.

“Of course. This whole thing’s bankrolled through their Ultimate Foundation.”

“So? Somebody’s got to pay for it.”

“Yeah, but why?” A slight increase in the volume of Stimmitz’s voice eclipsed the murmuring Bach cantata. “What’s the whole project doing here? What’s it for?”

“It’s for 125 dollars a week,” said Ralph with beer-laden profundity. “Plus room and board.”

“Come on.”

“Yeah, well, they told us what it’s for, didn’t they? Therapy, right? For all those messed-up little juvenile delinquents over there at the Thronsen Home.”

Stimmitz was quiet for a moment, then spoke very softly. “Do you believe that?”

A thin layer of Bach crept through the room for several seconds. “I guess so,” said Ralph finally. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“I went into Thronsen yesterday,” said Stimmitz. “Helga and I did. We cut a hole in the perimeter fence and went into the main building—”

“Hey, you’re not supposed to do that.”

Stimmitz looked annoyed, then shrugged. “Sometimes you have to do things you’re not supposed to.”

“So what’d you find?” Ralph’s curiosity had started to unfold a little.

From the tape came a soprano solo, then the chorus again, sounding as if from a great distance. “Maybe I’d better not tell you just now,” said Stimmitz. “Maybe later.”

“I hate that,” said Ralph in disgust. “I hate it when people do that. Teasing you with some crummy little secret, and then they won’t tell you.”

“You probably wouldn’t believe me, anyway. Not yet at least.” He seemed to be drawing away from the conversation. “You’re still operating out of a whole different universe.”

The last sounded like something Stimmitz had always talked about before, but to which Ralph had never paid attention. “Don’t start that.” He leaned over to deposit the beer can on a low table already crowded with empties. The can slid from his grasp and dropped the last inch to the table top. A few drops of warm fluid splashed out of the little opening and flecked his hand. “All this talk about universes—” He paused to hold down a belch, “—is just a way of avoiding the real problem.” Which is? mocked a portion of him that the beer hadn’t reached. He ignored it and headed for the bathroom. A couple more empty cans fell over on the floor as his feet hit them.

“Just remember,” said Stimmitz as Ralph crossed in front of him, “what went on today. While you were here.”

“Sure.” Ralph pushed open the door. “Remember this conversation always. Changed my whole life.”

“Seriously.” Stimmitz’s voice followed him into the smallest room of his apartment. “In case . . . uh, something happens. And I don’t get around to talking to you about this again.”

Ralph nodded and closed the door without saying anything. What was that all about? he wondered.

When he came out, the Bach cantatas tape had ended. The loose end of the tape fluttered as the take-up reel continued to spin. The chair in front of the bookshelves was empty.

Ralph went to the tape deck and switched it off. Small lights died and went out. “Stimmitz?” he said, turning around.

The room was silent except for the air conditioner. Outside the window the desert still vibrated with heat.

“Hey. Where are you? Hey, Stimmitz, where’d you go?” He pivoted slowly in the center of the room.

“What’s the matter?” Stimmitz came back into the room from the apartment’s miniscule balcony. He had been standing to one side where Ralph couldn’t see him. “What’s wrong?” he said, sliding the window shut behind himself.

“Nothing.” Ralph kneaded his forehead with one hand. Something during the last few seconds had dissipated the gassy alcoholic haze produced by the beer. Maybe his universe is catching up on me? “Just don’t—go around disappearing like that, OK?” From the floor he picked up his uniform coat with the green and gold Opwatch patch on the sleeve.

As he crossed the base, he was aware that to anybody watching from one of the apartment buildings, it would look as if he were now shimmering with heat waves, too.

That’s all right, thought Ralph. As long as you’re in phase. He trudged on towards the base’s Rec hall.

Through its door of dark glass he could see a few of the other watchers.

The sweat on his forehead and along his arms chilled as he pushed open the door and stepped into another air-conditioned area.

“What’s up, Ralph?” Slouched in one of the sagging, upholstered chairs, Kathy Foyle continued to gaze dispassionately at a section of newspaper. A bit of nail came loose from the rest and she took her forefinger away from her mouth. A lock of her dark hair straggled in front of one ear.

“Nothing much. About the same.” The exchange had become a ritual with them, a section of meaningless time that had formed into a loop and kept splicing itself in. There were other loops as well, Ralph knew, which were capable of multiplying into whole days.

The rest of the newspaper lay on the unused pool table in the middle of the room. The table’s felt had become gritty with the little bit of the Californian desert that came into the room every time the door was opened. Ralph’s fingertips left little marks as he picked up the L.A. Times’ front page.

Where was that? The name sounded Mexican to Ralph, though he hadn’t been aware that the fighting had spread that far north. Considering his only mild curiosity, the text below the headline looked too dense to penetrate. He laid down the paper, then headed along the hall’s main corridor to pick up his mail.

He peered into the little box set into the wall with all the others. There was nothing except an offer to join some record club—he got a lot of those; he was on somebody’s list somewhere—and his weekly copy of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party Agitant. A mimeographed note was stapled to the low-grade paper. It stated that if he didn’t send a couple more dollars, they would regretfully have to let his one-month trial subscription come to an end. The same note had been stapled to every issue he had received for the past six months.

He took a quick glance at the paper—SUPPORT SOCIALIST MARTYRS OF XIMENTO!—then dropped it and the record-club offer into a waste can and walked back to the main room.

Kathy was gone but Fred Goodell was now sprawled in one of the chairs, gazing out the glass door and scratching between the creases of his sweat-stained Opwatch dress shirt. His bored-ferret face looked up at Ralph. “You on tonight?”

“Yeah,” said Ralph. He lowered himself into one of the chairs. The tired upholstery sighed even under his thin frame. “This is my Monday.”

Goodell nodded. “Two more nights for me.” The watchers’ shifts were staggered through the week. “Then I’ll be off.” The conversation dissolved into silence.

I’d better go fix myself something to eat, thought Ralph vaguely. And then go to sleep for a while. Rest up for another eight hours on the dreamfield tonight. After half a year on this job, there were still times when spending the night wandering around in other people’s dreams seemed like an unnatural thing to do.

Chapter 2

“All right, men.” Operations Chief Blenek paced back and forth in front of them with his clipboard held behind his back. “Straight through, tonight. No heroics. Just do everything by the manual, the Opwatch way. All right?”

“Oh, brother,” muttered Chuck Fletchum, and slouched lower in his folding metal chair next to Ralph. “They must be running those World War Two bomber squadron flicks on TV again.”

Ralph said nothing. He could recall the week that one of the local stations had scheduled a batch of 1940s’ spy movies, and the pudgy functionary had actually shown up at the pre-shift briefings wearing a belted trenchcoat.

Blenek had fallen silent and was now glaring at the two dozen men in front of him, his small eyes set to impale whomever he had heard talking; they fastened on Glogolt, who was a couple of chairs ahead of Ralph.

“What was that smart remark, Mr. Glogolt?”

“Didn’t say anything,” mumbled the accused. He shifted his sacklike bulk, a small mountain of flesh encased in a wrinkled jumpsuit.

“Look at those shoes,” snarled Blenek, pressing his case. “When was the last time you took a rag to them? And pull up your zipper—you’re a mess.”

Ralph leaned back and studied Glogolt—he was a mess. He always looked as if he were somehow disintegrating inside his clothes, as if the effort to retain human shape had become too much for him. It made one tired just to look at him. Stimmitz is right, thought Ralph. What good is there having somebody like that around!

He looked over at Stimmitz sitting with his chair pushed against the wall of the briefing room. The eyes in the impassive face focused somewhere beyond the room. Ralph wondered what he was thinking. One of Stimmitz’s hands gripped the edge of his chair, his knuckles tensed white.

The voice of one of the other watchers broke through Ralph’s attention.

“Come on, Blenek, get on with it.”

Blenek’s eyes swept over the group again, then narrowed. They became two thin gauges of the anger he obviously felt over the difference between Operation Dreamwatch as it was and his fantasies of it. Clashing universes, Ralph found himself thinking—a phrase picked up from Stimmitz.

“This just came over from the Thronsen Home,” said Blenek sullenly. “They’ve started a new pattern some of you guys might observe tonight. In it, the kid is accused of shoplifting a candy bar, kid denies it, shopkeeper hits kid and searches him, in doing so tears the new jacket the kid’s mother gave him, shopkeeper turns into kid’s mother, and then it segues into one of the ‘angry parent’ cycles. Got it?” Blenek had worked himself back into his original gung-ho mood. “Let’s keep an eye out for it and get some reports in on it. Show the brass we’re not just sleeping around here.”

He placed his clipboard under his arm and rocked back on his heels. His wide belly tautened his Opwatch uniform. “Okay, move out—time to get on the line.”

As they crossed the short open space between the briefing room and the line shack—the grounds of the base were lit blue by moonlight and the desert’s numerous stars—Ralph glanced over at the group of female watchers sauntering out of their own briefing room. In a few moments they would be on the dreamfield of the girls in the Thronsen Home.

At a distance of fifty meters or so, Ralph could just recognize Kathy.

She waved briefly to him, holding a lit cigarette. It didn’t appear to him as if she had combed her hair since she had woken up last—one of her regular shortcomings, Ralph conceded. He looked, but didn’t see Helga Warner in the group.

He turned away and followed the other men into the line shack. The building housing the PKD Laboratories’ Field Insertion Device wasn’t a shack at all, but the largest cubic pile of cinderblocks and concrete for miles around. “Shack,” Ralph had decided, was probably just more pseudo-military lingo.

As he stepped into the building’s doorway, a pair of distant screams sounded from the sky. He looked back and up. Two pale luminous jet trails were vanishing into the south. Another midnight terror-bomb run, probably, down to the Brazilian front. Maybe Blenek should put in for a job over at the Air Force base, thought Ralph. He pulled the door shut behind himself.

The towering banks of electronics were softly humming as he passed by them. The air inside the building was sharp with ozone. Blenek scowled at him and made a mark on his clipboard as Ralph stepped past him. The last vacant strap was at the end of the thick cable dangling from the lofty ceiling. He grabbed the leather loop and felt the cold metal contact point settle against his palm. The permeating electronic hum grew louder.

Blenek paced slowly alongside the line of watchers, who were hanging onto the line’s straps like bored subway passengers. He glanced from them to his clipboard and back again, until he seemed satisfied that everyone was there. Pivoting on his heel, he waved up at the control booth. “Okay, Benny, take ’em on out.”

Nothing happened. The man in the little glass booth several meters above their heads remained absorbed in a half-eaten sandwich and a paperback book. He had his feet up on the controls that would activate the line and send the watchers out onto the dreamfield.

“Hey, Benny, come on!” shouted Blenek. “What’re you doing up there?”

“What does it look like?” said Goodell, who was standing closest to Blenek. He took Blenek’s pencil out of his hand and flung it up at the glass booth. It ticked against the glass and fell back to the floor. Benny lowered his feet and looked down at them.

“Come on!” Blenek waved his clipboard, a stiff rectangular bat flapping around his reddened face. “Throw the switch, dummy!”

Benny’s mouth moved, forming words they couldn’t hear, but his hands travelled across the control board anyway. The electronic hum whooped up in pitch and held its new note. The fluorescent lights suspended from the ceiling dimmed, reminding Ralph of the electrocution scenes from old prison movies, then the entire building, Blenek, and Benny up in the control booth, faded into grayness.

The dreamfield faded in. The familiar sidewalks and storefronts of a semi-rural small town solidified around the watchers holding onto the line’s straps. From a blue sky the fields eternal midafternoon sun shone upon them, but they cast no shadows upon the street’s surface.

The humming noise from the shack’s electronics back in the real world faded and then ceased entirely. One by one, the watchers let go of the leather straps. The line hung motionless for a moment, then snaked upwards, gathering speed until it vanished in the limitless sky above them.

One of the watchers yawned and stretched his arms. “If I stand around here,” he announced, “I’ll cork off in about ten seconds. Let’s go.” He motioned to his observation partner, and the two of them slowly started away from the group.

The rest divided into pairs and headed off in different directions along the dreamfield’s sidewalks. They all moved at the same unhurried pace.

“Which way you want to go?” asked Stimmitz. It was the first time he had spoken to Ralph since that afternoon.

“Whichever way looks good to you.” Ralph glanced at his watch; for some reason, he and Stimmitz were the only watchers he had ever seen with time-pieces. Eleven-fifteen, he noted, and sighed. Seven and three-quarters hours until the line came dangling down out of the sky again.

They walked in silence past a small drugstore. Circular racks of sunglasses and the aisles of cosmetics and other merchandise could be seen through its window. The store, like the others on the block, was lit up inside but vacant—the dream sequences tended to show up farther away from wherever the watchers had been dropped by the line.

Idly, Ralph pushed his fingers through the drugstore window. After an initial resistance, his hand went into the glass as though it were a body of water somehow made vertical. The nature of objects on the dreamfield was described alternately as “cheesy insubstantiality” and “evanescent jello.” The mental orientation that kept the watchers on top of the sidewalks instead of sinking slowly through them also gave a slight surface-tension effect to everything in the dreamfield’s illusion of a small town. The glass actually felt like water rippling around Ralph’s moving hand.

He turned his head and looked behind. The other watchers were all out of sight. Beside him, Stimmitz slowly paced, silent and apparently lost in thought.

They reached the end of the block and crossed the street. On the other side were the same stores as they had just passed, but reversed as if they had walked through a mirror. The entire field was made up of infinite repetitions and reflections of the same small area. If the two of them continued walking down the street, the neon sign that spelled out DRUGSTORE would become EROTSGURD and then DRUGSTORE again . . . again and again, for as far as they went on the field.

The sound of voices broke the silence. They had come upon the first dream sequence of the night. “In there,” said Stimmitz, pointing to the restaurant in the middle of the block on the other side of the street. The voices grew louder as he and Ralph headed towards them. One voice, a child’s, cracked with emotion.

Peering through the restaurant’s door, they watched the scene, already well under way. “The old puppy-on-a-platter pattern,” said Stimmitz.

“Are they still doing this one?” Ralph shook his head in disgust. “I thought they had already gone through all the kids in Thronsen with it.”

“Maybe the therapists have started reruns.”

The dream continued through its sequence. The platter with the boy’s dead dog upon it had already been brought to the table. The boy, a pallid-faced teenager, had risen from his chair and, with tears coursing down his face, was shouting at the waiter. As Ralph and Stimmitz watched, the waiter’s face melted into that of a middle-aged woman, probably the boy’s mother. More shouting, a long, agonized scream from the boy, and he buried his face in his arms upon the table, sobbing beside the dog’s corpse. In a few seconds, the mother/waiter dissolved into nothing along with the dog, leaving the crying boy alone in the empty restaurant.

“That’s always been one of my least favorite ones,” said Ralph as they walked away from the restaurant. “There’s something really tacky about it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I was talking about before. You know?”

Stimmitz gestured around them at the dreamfield. “Don’t you start to wonder if the therapists over at Thronsen really know what they’re doing? Or if they do know, do we?”

“Aw, come on.” Ralph kicked at a pebble on the sidewalk, the toe of his shoe going right through it. “Don’t start mystery-mongering again. Give me a little more to go on this time, all right? If you know so much, come on, show and tell time.”

Stimmitz glanced at him, then barely smiled. “Maybe what I know isn’t a mystery,” he said. “Maybe I just know the same things as you and everybody else, but I think about them differently.”

Ralph stopped in front of another of the field’s drugstores and faced Stimmitz. “You know you know more than I do. You sneaked into Thronsen with Helga Warner.”

“Think about that.” Stimmitz tilted his head to one side.

“Think about what?” He was beginning to feel a little irritated.

“Why’d I have to sneak into Thronsen.”

“Because . . .” Because there’s something they don’t want us to see. The pieces fell together in Ralph’s mind, perfectly formed, like a smooth black stone. Because they’re hiding something. He felt the weight of Stimmitz’s eyes upon himself. “I never thought about that.”

“Most people think nothing of everything.” Stimmitz turned and walked away.

Ralph stood for a moment in thought, then started after him. “Maybe they have a good reason for not wanting us in there.”

“Exactly,” said Stimmitz without bothering to even look around.

“Well, what about the dreams?” said Ralph as they crossed the street and entered another repetition of the small town. “What’s so mysterious about them?”

“Look. There aren’t any dreams here. These sequences they put these kids through every night aren’t dreams; they’re nightmares. That one we just saw—” Stimmitz jerked his thumb behind them, “—the dog-on-a-platter bit, the girlfriend-into-father-into-cop one, all of the ‘angry parent’ routines. Man, those are the worst kind of nightmares. Those are epics of humiliation and frustration and fear.”

“Well—” started Ralph.

“Shut up a minute. Now, when you were recruited for Operation Dreamwatch, how did they explain it to you? Therapy program, right? A hundred hard-core recidivist juvenile delinquents, already been through every correctional program in the state, and they’ve got ’em all over there at the Thronsen Home now. And the therapists in charge of the program put the kids into a common, shared dream state every night and that creates this dreamfield, right? The therapists control the setting, control everything that happens to the kids when they’re dreaming—all the different sequences, which are designed to get to the kids’ psychological problems when their psychic defenses are lowest, catharsize their traumas and everything. And over here at the base, the watchers—us—are projected onto the field through the line shack, so we can observe and report on the kids’ reactions to the dream sequences. Isn’t that how it was explained to you?”

Ralph nodded. “Pretty much.”

“Okay, do you still believe it, then?” Stimmitz’s face darkened. “Do you really think these dreams are helping these kids? Putting them through the same kind of crap they’ve probably gone through all their lives while they were awake, only worse, because here it’s intensified, cut right down to the symbols—this is therapy? The real-life counterparts to these dreams messed them up before, what are these doing to them now?”

“How should I know?” Ralph shrugged, wilting under Stimmitz’s outburst. “I don’t know anything about psychology.”

“Psychology, fake-ology.” Stimmitz thrust his hands into the pockets of his jumpsuit and continued walking. “There’s a point where psychology has to meet with what you know about the world already. And if this is therapy, then the people in charge have missed that point.”

“Hey, maybe it’s not therapy—it’s anti-therapy.” Ralph laughed weakly. “They’re not changing delinquents into normal kids. They’re changing normals into delinquents.”

Stimmitz said nothing, leaving Ralph to his own thoughts for the next couple of hours.

“Look over there.” Ralph pointed ahead of them along the sidewalk. “It’s ol’ Slither.”

“Really?” Stimmitz snorted. “I thought maybe they’d finally gotten rid of that thing.”

“Wanna go see what it’s up to?”

“Yeah, why not?” said Stimmitz, yawning. “That oughta kill a little time.”

Ralph glanced at his watch. Two more hours until the end of the shift when the line would come down out of the sky for all the watchers. He and Stimmitz had gone through a couple of dozen of the field’s endless segments of small town, and observed half that many dream sequences.

Ralph used to jot them down in a little notebook, but all the patterns become too familiar for that to be necessary any longer. There were rarely any dreams to be seen in the last quarter of the shift. On most nights—it took an effort to remember it was still dark in the real world, crawling towards dawn—nothing broke the monotony of pacing the silent, empty streets and waiting for the line.

Except for the slithergadee, thought Ralph. He and Stimmitz hurried toward the corner where they had seen its tail disappear. The psychologist who thought up that thing must have some imagination.

They rounded the end of the block and saw the slithergadee squatting malevolently in the middle of the road. Its corroded-brass scales rattled as its flanks bellowed in and put with its breathing.

Repulsed, Ralph watched the creature. He remembered the poem, one of the classic Shel Silverstein children’s-rhyme parodies that one of the watchers had come up with when the thing was first spotted.

And it ended right there. The name had stuck to the dreamfield’s resident monstrosity.

It saw them coming toward it and opened its mouth in a gaping hiss.

Its retractable fangs slid out of their sockets, double rows of glistening-wet crescents. Of all the field’s illusions, it was the only one that seemed to be able to see the watchers. It was harmless, though, being as insubstantial as everything else.

“You know,” said Stimmitz as they halted a few yards from the slithergadee’s brooding face, “if they really wanted Operation Dreamwatch to be a therapy program, they’d take those kids over in Thronsen, give ’em our jobs, and let ’em come out here to take a few swipes at this thing.

“There’s really an enormous satisfaction in kicking this godawful thing and having your foot go right through it. It’s as if it were the embodiment of all the bogeymen that scared you when you were a child. And then you find out that it’s not even real; there never was really anything to be afraid of at all.”

Ralph nodded. Whenever it was sighted, about once a week, the slithergadee always afforded a few moments of pleasure to the watchers who had come across it. Ralph stepped forward and brought his foot down upon the thick tip of its tail lying in front of them. The thing hissed through its saucer-wide nostrils and jerked its immaterial tail away.

“Watch this.” A boyish excitement had brightened Stimmitz’s mood. Of all the watchers he seemed to most enjoy fooling around with the slithergadee. “I’m going to zip one right through its nose.” He walked up to its face, then arced his foot through a waist-high swinging kick. The slithergadee clattered its scales in seeming frustration at not being able to snatch the shoe going in and out of its face as though it were a cloud.

“Hey,” said Ralph. “With all your snooping around, you didn’t happen to find out what this thing is for, did you?”

“No.” Stimmitz stood back a few feet and gazed at its swollen bulk. “To be honest, I didn’t. I’m really beginning to think the therapists designed it into the field for some reason, and then forgot they had it here. It never does anything in any of the kids’ dreams—just lurks around the fringes every once in a while.”

Ralph yawned and scratched the side of his face. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s leave the poor thing alone. Even if it is just an illusion.”

“One more time.” Stimmitz pivoted on one foot and aimed another kick at its head. The slithergadee opened its mouth, its teeth sliding forward into place, and tore off Stimmitz’s leg.

“Good Lord!” Ralph fell backwards onto the sidewalk as the slithergadee reared up in the air, its roar mingling with Stimmitz’s agonized cry. There was an enormous gust of wind that smelled like blood and decayed meat, and the sky darkened. The slithergadee plunged back down and sank its fangs into the now silent body of Stimmitz.

Rolling onto his side, Ralph tried to pull his legs beneath him, but they refused to function. A glance over his shoulder revealed the slithergadee shredding the corpse pinned to the ground by its claws. His heart racing, Ralph pushed himself up against the building at the edge of the sidewalk.

It resisted for a moment, then yielded and he fell through the wall.

Suddenly, there were no sounds from out in the dream-field’s street.

Ralph crouched on the building’s floor and listened. The slithergadee’s roaring had stopped.

He waited a few seconds, then got to his knees. The building he had fallen into was one of the field’s restaurants. He crawled over to its front window and cautiously peered out.

The slithergadee was gone. But a mangled pile of flesh and clothing remained, slowly reddening the street.

Ralph stepped through the window glass and slowly walked towards the corpse. Every organ in his own body knotted in hysteria as he looked at what was left of Stimmitz. A small moan of fear slid from Ralph’s lips.

“Hey,” he said, barely making a sound from his constricted throat.

Then he shouted it. “Hey! Anybody! Come here! Quick!” His voice rang through the empty streets, and he kept shouting until the other watchers came.

First was Goodell and his observation partner. “What’s all the shouting about?” said Goodell. He paled when he saw what Ralph was standing near.

The rest came from all different directions. They listened to Ralph’s few words of explanation. Without speaking, they drew away and huddled together a few yards from the body, and waited for the shift to end. It seemed like a long time until the line dropped out of the sky for them.

Chapter 3

I am amazed at how fast my hands can move. Really amazed. Ralph clung to that thought desperately, knowing that if his mind wandered, he would see Stimmitz’s crumpled body again. His hands continued their work, rapidly extracting the clothing from his closet and filling the suitcase laid open on the bed.

The last of the civilian shirts was wadded up and thrown in with the pants, underwear, and socks. The Opwatch base uniforms were left hanging or scattered on the floor where he had dropped them; he had been unbuttoning his shirt and pulling off the clothing as soon as he had made it inside the door of his apartment.

His hands brought the suitcase lid down and his thumbs pressed the latches into place. Carrying the suitcase into the front room of the apartment, he set it by the door, then turned around, scanning the apartment for anything else he wanted to take with him. There wasn’t much. Objects had never seemed to accumulate around him here. Only trash remained—brown paper grocery bags in the kitchen and empty beer cans that had rolled too far under the bed to reach. After pausing for a few seconds, he went into the bathroom and slipped his toothbrush into his pants’ pocket.

Is that it? he thought as he strode back into the front room. Somewhere he had a bus schedule, if he could find it. Greyhounds passed through Norden, the little town within walking distance of the base. He bent down to look through the old newspapers stacked beside the couch. When someone knocked at the door, his hand clenched, crumpling a page of outdated headlines.

He stood up and stepped towards the door, then stopped as his hand touched the knob. “Who it is?” he said.

“It’s me—Fred,” came Goodell’s voice.

“What do you want?” Ralph still did not open the door.

“What? Hey, are you okay?” Goodell rattled the knob.

“Just tell me what you want.”

“Hey, man, are you all right?”

He snatched the door open. “What do you mean, all right?” he shouted into Goodell’s startled face. “You stupid schmuck, you saw what happened on the field. I’m supposed to be all right after that?”

Goodell hastily backed up a few feet into the building’s hallway. “That’s what I came to tell you.” He spread his hands as though to fend off an attack. “The base commander wants to see you. Stiles told the rest of us something about what happened to Stimmitz.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Ralph’s anger was simmering just below its peak.

He felt as if his veins were taut with pressure after months of being half-empty.

“Go get it from him,” said Goodell. “He’s the one who should tell you.”

He turned and hurried down the hallway, glancing nervously over his shoulder at Ralph.

Stiles wants to see me, thought Ralph as he closed the door and turned to face the silent room. What did he tell the others? His watch read seven-thirty. He had walked out of the line shack as soon as they were all back from the dream field, leaving the others to relate second-hand what had happened to Stimmitz. His own words, he had decided, were going to be saved for the police back in L.A., or the FBI or something.

Outside his apartment window, the base and the desert beyond it were starting to wash gold with the morning light. Ralph picked up his suitcase, then dropped it and chewed the edge of his thumbnail. If I try to leave now, he thought, they’ll catch me. And then what? He took his hand away from his mouth and wiped his suddenly sweaty palms on his pants. Maybe Stiles told the other watchers that I killed Stimmitz. The conjecture took root in Ralph’s mind and blossomed like an explosion. Maybe that’s what he told them, and he’ll have me shot when I go to his office, and then tell everybody that I tried to escape. And that it’s okay because I was a homicidal maniac anyway.

He sat down on the couch and leaned forward, concentrating. It seemed as if he had inherited Stimmitz’s universe upon the other’s death. Except, thought Ralph grimly, that he knew something about what was going on around here.

Suddenly, another thought entered his head, like a ray of light. They might not kill me if they didn’t think they had to. If they thought I didn’t suspect anything. He stood up and paced the length of the small room. If Commander Stiles’s suspicions could be put off for a while, there might be a chance of getting away later—even today, possibly. It was just a matter of playing dumb for now.

All right, thought Ralph, halting in the middle of the room. If they—Stiles and whoever’s above him somewhere—haven’t already decided to get rid of me, then that’s my only chance. He resisted a powerful urge to curl up into a ball in the corner of the room and close his eyes until they came for him. After several deep breaths, he opened the apartment door and started down the hallway.

“Just close the door behind you, won’t you, Metric?” Commander Stiles waved vaguely with one hand, scattering ashes from his cigarette on his desk. “Have a seat.”

Ralph sat down. A wad of saliva had formed in his mouth but he didn’t swallow, trying to conceal his nervousness.

Behind the desk, the gray-haired base commander swivelled from side to side in his imitation leather chair. “I see you’re out of base uniform,” he remarked mildly.

Hell, thought Ralph, forgot about that. The ball in his mouth grew bigger, and he had to swallow before he could speak. “Uh . . . yeah. I guess I am.”

“That’s all right.” The cigarette described a figure in the air. “I understand how you feel.” He exhaled a small cloud between them.

“Thinking about cutting out of here, weren’t you?”

“That’s right.” Ralph felt as though his mind were racing completely free of all connections. “Actually I’ve been, uh, thinking about it for some time now. Before today, I mean.”

“Nonsense.” Stiles took a fresh cigarette from the box on his desk and lit it from the stub of his old one. “You’re scared because of what you saw last night. This morning, I mean—about five a.m. or so, wasn’t it?”

Ralph silently studied the older man’s heavily grained face. “Scared?” he asked finally.

“Come on. Don’t diddle with me, Metric. I imagine what you saw on the field was pretty upsetting. You must’ve thought something pretty big had gone wrong someplace, for something like that to happen. With Stimmitz, I mean, and the—what do you men call it?—slithergadee.”

He said nothing. The air in the room felt as though it were tensing and becoming brittle around him: any word or motion might shatter it.

“What if I told you,” said Stiles, swivelling around to gaze out the window behind him, “that what you saw didn’t happen?”

“Sir?” Ralph’s eyes jerked to the back of the imitation-leather chair.

Stiles swung back around to face him. “It didn’t happen, Metric. It was an illusion. That stupid jerk Stimmitz sneaked into the Thronsen Home the other day. We know all about it. Those kids live in a very controlled environment over there; it’s part of the treatment, and the therapists are very careful about what they’re allowed to see. Because what they see during the day is incorporated into their dreams at night. That’s how the sequences are programmed. Several of the kids saw Stimmitz when he was snooping around. We didn’t find out about it until just before all of you watchers were starting your shift last night. We pulled Stimmitz off the line just as it was being activated.”

“But Stimmitz was on the field last night—”

Stiles gestured impatiently. “That was an illusion. What you saw was the image of Stimmitz that got mixed in with the kids’ dreams. You expected him to be there on the field with you, and so your subconscious filled in the details of the image’s movements, talking and so on.”

“But he was there,” said Ralph. “I saw the slithergadee attack him, and—”

“No. We pulled the real Stimmitz off the line and fired him for breaking Opwatch regulations. He was over in Norden waiting for a bus out of here when the image you saw of him got ripped up. The stimulus of the new image—this is what the therapists over at Thronsen told me—triggered a hostility-release sequence that’s programmed around the slithergadee. It’s supposed to be used later on in the program.”

So this is what he told the others, thought Ralph. “Stimmitz isn’t dead, then? The real one, I mean.”

“No. He deserved it though.” Stiles tilted back in his chair and watched him.

Now what? Ralph avoided the other’s eyes. If what Stiles had told him was the truth, then there was nothing to worry about. But if it wasn’t, if something was still being hidden . . . He suddenly felt his universe become vague and insubstantial, like the dreamfield itself. It had been so clear and solid, if dangerous, only a few moments ago. Foggy knives, he thought, the odd image creeping through his mind.

“Not convinced, eh?” Stiles lifted his hand. “No, that’s okay, I understand, Metric. You were the one who saw it, you’re the one who should insist on proof.” He reached down and lifted a large plastic bag from behind the desk, then dumped its contents on top of the papers. “Go ahead. Take a look.”

It was a wadded-up Opwatch jumpsuit, the kind worn by the watchers during their shifts on the dreamfield.

Ralph picked it up and looked inside the collar. His own initials, RDM, were stamped inside.

“It’s yours,” said Stiles. “It’s the one you were wearing last night. We took it out of the locker room after you had gone back to your apartment.

“Now, if the slithergadee’s attack was as vicious as you described it to the other watchers, and if that had been the real Stimmitz on the field last night, then surely some of his blood would have gotten on you. Right?

“Well, go ahead, take a look. Not a spot on it.”

Carefully, Ralph inspected the jumpsuit. He could remember the blood spraying toward him after the slithergadee’s first lunge at Stimmitz. The warm fluid from the severed leg had been like some nightmare fountain, pulsing in time with Ralph’s own heartbeat.

There were no bloodstains on the jumpsuit. Ralph laid it down upon the commander’s desk.

“That’s the way it is,” said Stiles. “It was too bad that Stimmitz had to go and be so stupid, cause so much trouble for us and so much worry for you. But you’re a good man, Metric, and we don’t want to lose you. That’s the bottom line of it all. Tell you what; you’ve been here long enough to qualify for a week’s vacation. Get your mind off what you saw on the field.”

He gestured expansively with his cigarette.

“Maybe,” said Ralph. It felt as though a hollow cylinder had formed inside him. Dimly, he wondered if this was the same way he had always felt before. “Maybe I’ll do that. I’ll let you know.”

“Sure, sure. Anytime will do. Close the door after you, will you? Dust gets on everything.”

The thought struck him as Ralph closed the door and stepped away from the commander’s office. They could have switched jumpsuits. They could have taken one of my others from the laundry bin and showed me that. They could have gotten rid of the one with the blood on it. It would have been simple.

“Do you really believe it?”

“Well, sure, Ralph.” Kathy brushed her unkempt hair from her shoulders. “Don’t you?”

Goodell leaned forward in his Rec hall chair and wiped a line of beer from his upper lip. “Come on,” he said. “Do you have a better explanation for what happened?”

“What didn’t happen,” corrected Ralph vaguely. He looked around at the twenty or so watchers, male and female, gathered in the Rec hall’s main room. Some unspoken need had made them seek each other’s company. Even Glogolt was there, slouched down in one of the chairs with a beer can perched on his stomach. Some of them look a little vexed, noted Ralph. The ripples from the stone that fell in their shallow waters haven’t quite gone away yet.

“Well? Do you?” said Goodell.

“No,” said Ralph. His fingers slowly blurred a trickle of sweat on his forehead. “They told us their story, and nobody can tell one any different, so what Stiles and the others said must be the truth.”

“Ralph, don’t be so creepy.” Kathy looked annoyed at the trace of sarcasm she had detected in his voice. “You’re just imagining things.”

“Did anybody see Stimmitz leave?” Ralph felt his own desperation, trying to connect the last amorphous bit of suspicion with something solid. “How come he left all of his stuff back in his apartment?”

“I’d want to cut out before anybody saw me, too,” said Goodell, “if I’d pulled anything so stupid. Sneaking into Thronsen . . . what a jerk.”

“You mean you’re not curious? You don’t wonder about what might be going on over there?”

“Why should I be?”

Ralph looked from Goodell’s face to those of the other watchers. They all had the same expression around the eyes. He got up without speaking, pushed past their outstretched legs and then out through the dark glass door.

Outside, his shoulders bore the weight of the noon sun. Through the glare he could see the hills and desert beyond the base’s grounds; the rocks and sand dunes resembled the other watchers’ eyes—flat, solid, objects rather than human. Looking away, he walked on towards the apartment building.

Two men were busily working in Stimmitz’s old second-floor apartment. They were loading the books and other things into large cartons. As Ralph looked in through the open doorway he saw the words Zenith Van and Storage on the backs of their gray overalls.

“Howdy,” said one of the men, turning and spotting him in the doorway. “Hey, do you know somebody around here named—what was it—hey, who was that package for?”

“Ralph Metric,” said the other mover, lifting Stimmitz’s tape deck from the bookshelves.

“That’s me.”

“Here,” said the first mover. “This guy left this behind for you.” He picked up a flat square object from the floor and handed it to Ralph.

It was a boxed reel of tape. Bach cantatas, on a European import label.

He turned it over in his hands and saw the inscription in felt pen. Give to Ralph Metric After I Leave. Below that was Stimmitz’s signature.

“Thanks,” muttered Ralph, holding the box. Damn, he thought, I don’t even have a tape recorder to play this on. Stimmitz knew that. Maybe he really was—or is—flipped out, or something. “Thanks.” He walked slowly down the hallway, then turned and walked back to the doorway of Stimmitz’s apartment. “Where’s all this stuff being sent to?”

“We’re just storing it,” said the mover. “Until the guy comes and picks it up.”

“Oh.” Ralph nodded and started down the hallway again.

Inside the door of his own apartment, he opened the tape box. There was nothing but the clear plastic spool wound about with the tape and a little booklet with the words to the cantatas in three languages. He paged quickly through the booklet—there were the tiny black letters and odd-looking photos of the soloists. Some of the tape uncoiled from the reel as he threw the entire package onto his sofa in a fit of frustration and disgust.

There was a tape recorder in the Rec hall, he knew, on which he could listen to the tape. Later, he thought. Not now— I’m too tired. A depressing premonition sapped at him. Somehow he felt sure there would be no messages for him on the tape.

Perhaps there would never be any messages for him. He pulled a chair up to the window, sat down and gazed out over the base. The last of that other universe, where things had seemed to be connecting up at last, was draining from him like blood. Welcome back, he thought grimly. This is just like the old Juvenile Hall all over again. The memory, an old wound, came sliding back.

Over a year ago he had been working the graveyard shift at the Juvenile Hall in one of the counties below L.A. From eleven at night until seven in the morning, the same hours as the shifts on the dreamfield, he had been responsible for one of the “living units,” as each group of rooms housing twenty or so kids had been called. They were nearly always asleep when he got there. Every half hour he was supposed to walk down the unit’s long hallway with a flashlight and peek through the little window set in each room’s locked door—to make sure none of the kids being detained there had decided to kill himself with his bedsheet knotted around his neck, or had managed to escape by somehow dicing himself through the tough steel grating over the outside windows. None of the kids had tried to do either while he had been working there.

The rest of the time he was supposed to sit at a desk in the unit’s day room, just be available: a good job, he had been told when he applied for it, for somebody going to college or with something of their own to do.

After a short walk every half hour for exercise, he could spend the rest of the time studying or whatever. Ralph hadn’t been in college then but he had been working on a novel. He would spread his notebooks out upon the desk top as soon as he had arrived.

The book never got written. The same thing happened to him that he had seen happening to everyone else who worked there at night, but no one had ever seemed to talk about it. Like a nerve disease edging along the spine and out into the arms and legs, a paralysis of the will set in. Every night he would sit there, the hours crawling past, the blank pages in front of him. But the things he had wanted to do had swollen into obstacles of crushing size and weight.

The world of the graveyard shift had become gradually stranger and stranger. Every half hour he would make his room checks, going with his flashlight from one small window to the next. The kids had slept on, wrapped in whatever dreams were theirs alone.

In the Juvenile Hall the kids had been mainly passively delinquent, their offenses often something to do with being stoned too often and too publicly. The violent ones, the ones with psyches corkscrewed into a hard, sick knot were quickly sorted out and dispatched to special state facilities; from these juveniles, the hardest would end up at Thronsen Home and Operation Dreamwatch. The ones in the Hall had weightless lives, content for the most part to be pushed along by the current of the adult world they might someday inherit by default.

Sometimes, as he had looked in on their slack faces, it had seemed as if their mild dreams and nightmares had somehow seeped out from under the doors of their rooms like an invisible gas, and poisoned all of the night staff. Most of those who had taken the job in order to study wound up flunking their classes and dropping out of college. Ralph would go home in the morning, feeling as if something had been drained out of him.

Then he received a form letter from the Operation Dreamwatch recruiting office in L.A. He had wound up applying—drifted into it, really—and had found himself here, in this desert that always seemed as vacant as the space that had grown inside him.

Ralph gazed out his apartment window at the Opwatch base.

Now what? The sun was setting—he had lost the last several hours somehow.

As though he were back at Juvenile Hall, fluid time had leaked away and evaporated again. He rose and picked the tape up from the couch.

As he entered the Rec hall, one of the watchers lounging in the chairs signalled to him with a beer can. “Hey,” called the watcher. “No shift tonight. Blenek just told us we’ve got the night off.”

Ralph nodded and walked on. It wasn’t unusual, the most frequent explanation was that the field insertion device needed adjusting.

In the Rec hall’s small, scarcely-used library, he let himself into the booth containing the tape recorder. After a moment studying the directions fastened to the front of the machine, he snapped the tape into place and threaded it through the rollers. He slipped on the headphones and pressed the Play button.

The tape was nearly two hours long. He listened to it all. There were no messages on it, nothing had been added on top of the Bach cantatas.

When it was done he gently touched the empty reel to stop its spinning.

He sat in front of the machine for a long time. The silence spread around him.

Chapter 4

The clock beside his bed read eight a.m. when Ralph awoke. He shook away the last vestiges of a dream about teeth sliding in a scaled mouth.

The room was already bright with the desert sun filtering through the curtains. He sat up and stared at his knees beneath the sheet as though what he was thinking was printed there.

Helga, he said to himself. Of course, you ass. Why not go talk to Helga Warner? She’s the one who went into Thronsen with Stimmitz—she should know something about what’s going on. Ralph swung his legs over the edge of the bed and reached for the clothes he had dropped on the floor the night before.

On the pathway to the other apartment building, he ran into Kathy.

“Hello, Ralph,” she yawned, idly scratching below the blue and gold Opwatch emblem on the sleeve of her blouse. “What’s up?”

“Huh?” He stopped and looked at her so intensely that she took a step backwards. “What did you say?”

She returned his stare. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Never mind. Nothing.” He stepped past her and hurried on towards the other building.

Helga’s apartment was on the third floor. He had never been inside—of all the watchers, she had always been the least sociable—but he remembered seeing her unlock her door once while he had been talking to Kathy in the hallway. Upon finding the right door he knocked, waited, then knocked again.

“Who’s there?” Helga’s voice came through the still closed door.

“It’s Ralph. Ralph Metric. I want to talk to you.”

A few seconds of silence. “What about?” Her voice slowed with a strange caution.

“Well—can I come in? It’s important.”

There was no answer. “It’s about Stimmitz,” he said.

The door opened a few inches, revealing a section of Helga’s wide face.

She looked Ralph over, then glanced past him into the hallway. Without speaking, she pulled the door open and stood back.

As Ralph stepped past her into the apartment he felt her watching him.

He turned and met her eyes with his own, then looked quickly away. Wow, he thought, she looks like she’s about to bite my head off. He stared out her window at the harsh desertscape.

“So?” said Helga. “What did you want to say?”

He looked around at her. She studied him with the same hostile bearing, her arms folded in front of her short, square torso. “Actually,” said Ralph, “I really wanted to ask you some things—”

“Like what?” she snapped.

“Well, about what you and Stimmitz saw when you sneaked into the Thronsen Home, and—”

“You didn’t make that part of your deal, then. Too bad.”

“Huh?” Ralph looked at her in puzzlement. “Deal?”

Her expression didn’t change. “If you’re so curious about what’s going on over there you should have asked for some information along with whatever they did pay you.”

“Pay me? What are you talking about?”

One corner of her mouth curled in disgust. “Come on. I told Stimmitz I didn’t think he should tell you anything. That you couldn’t be trusted. But he went ahead. His last mistake.”

“What?” Ralph spun around and faced her. “You think I finked on Stimmitz or something?”

“You were the only one he told about going into Thronsen. You were the only one who knew.”

“Hey, that doesn’t mean I said anything to anybody about it. Why would I want to get him in trouble?”

She said nothing, only continued her hard, level gaze at him.

Ralph felt a surge of anger, like a heat in his chest. “How much do you think they paid me?” he said bitterly.

“You’re so stupid you probably did it for nothing.”

“Forget it.” He walked to the door and put his hand on the knob. “I didn’t set Stimmitz up and nobody’s letting me in on anything.”

“Get out,” said Helga flatly.

He opened the door and stepped into the hallway. He turned to say something more but the door closed in his face. From inside he could hear the small metal noises of the lock clicking into place.

Ralph cradled the back of his head in his hands and gazed up at the featureless white ceiling over his bed.

I don’t know what’s going on around here.

Stimmitz was gone, of that much he was sure. There had been no blood on the jumpsuit, but that didn’t prove anything, one way or the other. So what else is there? he thought, staring at the ceiling. Helga was acting crazy—but then he had always felt she was kind of strange. Perhaps her own universe had finally snapped shut around her like a trap.

Give up, Ralph told himself disgustedly. Accept what Stiles told you. Go drink a beer with the others. He took his hands from behind his head and saw that they had clenched into fists, the nails digging into the flesh of his palms. Convulsively, he got up from the bed and stalked into the living room.

The morning sun came through the window in a shaft, bleaching out the color of everything in the apartment. Ralph looked from the couch to the walls, as though some message could have been written there, then across the door and back to the couch. Stupid-looking couch, he thought, feeling something going sour in his stomach as he turned and gazed out the window.

If only there was something solid, he thought, that I had brought back with me from the dreamfield. So that I’d know for sure. Something like—shoes! He swivelled around toward his bedroom door. The shoes he had been wearing that shift were under his bed—he hadn’t left them in the locker room with his jumpsuit.

Crouching on his knees beside the bed, he pulled out the shoes. He hurriedly examined them, turning each one around and studying it from all sides. After a couple of minutes he sat down heavily on the bed. Still nowhere, he thought. There had been no spots of blood anywhere on the shoes. His disappointment had a sense of finality.

Come on, he thought. Why can’t you accept it? Nothing happened. Stimmitz is probably in L.A., looking in the want ads for another job. He tilted one of the shoes and poured a small hill of sand into his palm. For several seconds he stared at the tiny bit of desert before the realization hit him.

That’s impossible, he thought. The base is all paved or landscaped. There’s no sand between here and the line shack. There’s no way I could have gotten any in my shoes—but it’s here somehow.

He reached for the other shoe and tilted it over his palm. There was even more sand in that one, making a gritty fistful in all. Carefully, he stood up and carried it into the other room.

Standing at the window, he looked from the sand to the desert beyond the base and back again. I don’t get it, he thought, baffled. The sand was something tangible, disturbing in its inexplicable way, but the connection between it and everything else that disturbed him seemed tenuous.

Maybe it’s a sign. He studied the multi-faceted grains. Go to the source, or something like that. He went over by the couch and tore a sheet of newspaper free from the stack beside it. In the center of the paper he placed the sand and then folded it into a makeshift envelope. While stuffing it in his back pocket, he headed for the door. Then again, he thought, it might be just sand.

When he reached the top of one of the low hills surrounding the base, Ralph turned and looked back at it, shading his eyes from the sun with his hand. From where he was, standing between two large clumps of the desert’s dry, prickly brush, he could see all of the base’s buildings, the paths linking them, and the fence circling the space.

Turning ninety degrees, his feet crunching against the hill’s pebbles and sand, he could see part of the high security fence that surrounded the Thronsen Home. The complex itself was out of sight beyond the chain-link mesh, which was topped with barbed wire and laced with cables for the electronic alarm devices. Somewhere inside there were the kids whose nightly dreams had been merged and formed into the field. If, thought Ralph, that’s really what’s in there. He headed down the side of the hill away from the base.

A flat gully, deep enough to be still shaded from the sun, lay at the foot of the hill. Ralph looked in either direction along its path, then started walking toward the east. He wondered if he would recognize what he was looking for when he came across it. From atop a small rock, a dust-colored lizard squirted its tongue at him, then vanished.

This is ridiculous, thought Ralph after walking for a few minutes along the gully. There’s nothing out here but dirt and rocks and— He froze.

From somewhere in the desert’s total silence he had heard a tiny, metallic click. After a few seconds of intent listening, he heard it again. The noise, so slight it would have been undetectable anywhere else but in a desert, came from somewhere above the gully.

As carefully and silently as he could, he mounted the gully’s sloping wall. Lying flat among the stones near the top, he peeked over the edge.

Several meters away a woman appeared to be photographing something on the ground in front of her. Though her back was turned to him, Ralph knew that he had never seen her before. She was dressed in jeans and a faded blue shirt, with her hair pulled back into a golden curve along her neck. The camera she held in her hands was some battered but functional-looking antique, the size of a small ham—it was no wonder that the ancient mechanism of its shutter made so much noise.

Her body blocked the view of whatever she was photographing. She moved a few steps and clicked off another shot from a different angle.

Ralph pushed himself a little higher above the gully’s edge, trying to see what was on the ground before her. His foot brushed a few small rocks and sent them clattering down the slope.

The woman quickly lowered the camera from her eye and half-turned her head at the noise. Ralph caught a glimpse of her precise-featured profile against the sky before he had slipped out of sight below the rim of the gully.

He waited several seconds, then cautiously raised his head. The girl with the camera was gone. He scrambled up and went to where she had been standing. A quick glance over the barren spot of desert showed nothing but rocks, scruffy brown brush and sand.

What was she taking pictures of? he wondered. Maybe I should have just gone up and asked her. That was the trouble with paranoia—complications multiplied until their source became perfectly insulated from the world. But then, he thought, she did take off when she heard me. How come?

The sun was now almost directly overhead. Ralph, a little dazed with heat, wiped the sweat from his neck and walked away from the spot.

Whatever he was looking for didn’t seem to be here. He wondered if he would ever see the girl again.

Several minutes later he came to the Thronsen Home security fence.

Well over ten feet tall, its intertwined wire diamonds shone in the sunlight like a radiant net stretching across the desert. The black cables of the alarm system snaked their way through the mesh.

Ralph walked slowly along the fence, until he could at last see a corner of one of the Thronsen Home buildings. Avoiding the thin, black cables, he stopped and examined the fence. The rigid metal wire was nearly as thick in diameter as his thumb. It would have taken some doing to have cut through very many of the links, in addition to not setting off the alarms.

So how did Stimmitz and Helga do it? thought Ralph.

As he puzzled over the newest additions to the questions circling in his head, he continued walking beside the fence. A few meters farther on the questions grew even more numerous.

A small, neat square was missing from near the bottom of the fence.

The hole was just large enough for a person to crawl through. When Ralph bent down to examine it, he saw that the ends of the severed links were smooth, as though they had been melted through by some kind of torch.

Attached to each segment of the alarm cables were small alligator clips with wires leading to a small metal box lying on the ground—a bypass device, he assumed.

He stood up and backed a few steps away from the fence. The whole set-up was more sophisticated than he could have anticipated. Maybe, he thought, there was more to Stimmitz, than he let on.

Nervously, he glanced around the area. No one was visible on either side of the fence. The coast is clear, he found himself thinking. He stepped up to the fence and touched the cut wires. As he hesitated, his eyes scanned the distant Thronsen House complex.

If he sneaked in, found nothing sinister, didn’t get caught-—then he’d be able to forget all this stuff and go back to his old life, for what it was worth. If he got caught, then he’d be canned. But that was preferable to straddling the two universes until he split up the middle.

Yeah, he told himself, but what if there is something going on in there and I do get caught? Then whatever happened to Stimmitz will happen to me, too. And it won’t be just getting fired, either. He shook his head, dislodging a few lines of sweat down into his collar, and started to turn away from the fence.

But what if I don’t find out what they’re doing in there? And it’s something— dangerous? The thought halted him for a few seconds. Then he went back to the fence and knelt down in front of the hole. I don’t see what good this is going to do anyway, he thought grudgingly as he crawled through.

Once on the other side, he crouched and ran, veering from one clump of dry brush to another. He suddenly felt ridiculous, as though he were fumbling through an antique grade B combat picture. If only Blenek could see me now.

He covered the last few meters to the nearest building in a burst of speed. Panting, he pressed his back to the gray concrete wall and listened.

He hadn’t seen or heard anyone yet. Cautiously, he sidled along the wall.

He came to the corner of the building, hesitated, then peeked around. A metal door was propped open with a folding chair. A large electric fan had been placed in the opening and was whirring softly to itself.

In a few more seconds he was alongside the open doorway. He peered into the dark interior, then stepped around the electric fan and inside the building.

The air smelled of ozone, just as the line shack did back at the base. To one side of the door was an unoccupied desk. Its lamp cast a small circle of light on the floor of the dark, cavernous space.

Ralph froze—he had heard someone breathing. The sound changed into a gurgling snore, and he relaxed. As silently as possible, he crossed over to the desk and looked around it. On the other side a man was sleeping on a low cot, his head resting on his arm. The same laxness in security from the unmended hole in the fence showed here as well. Maybe, thought Ralph, some of them weren’t really expecting anyone ever to try to get in here.

It must have been Stimmitz’s bad luck to have been seen by someone.

Still cautious, Ralph walked farther into the building. As the ozone smell grew stronger, a luminous blue rectangle seemed to be floating in the distance in front of him: a small window set into a door. He looked through the glass and noted a corridor lined with banks and panels of electronic equipment, illuminated by fluorescent lights overhead.

The door yielded to his touch and he stepped into a long corridor, lined with equipment panels. There was the same manufacturer’s insignia—PKD Laboratories—as on the electronics boards in the base’s line shack, but this assemblage was much bigger. The corridor went on for some distance, the banks of equipment towering over Ralph’s head as he walked past them.

Another door opened into a dark L-shaped passageway. He stepped into it, then heard footsteps approaching from the other direction.

Pressing himself into the corner of the L, he saw the corridor’s other door open, momentarily framing a man carrying a clipboard. In the darkness of the passageway the man didn’t see Ralph, but let the door close behind him and walked past, leaving by the other door. Ralph let out his breath.

The passageway’s other door opened onto a much larger space. A few rows of dim fluorescent lights dangling on cables from the ceiling produced a semi-twilight in the space. Ralph sensed that he was alone here, too, until he heard the sound.

Breathing. Slow, shallow breathing. A muffled sighing, like wind in the distance.

He looked around the space, his vision growing sharper in the dim light. The breathing came from all sides, from some kind of open bins that were stacked in tiers against the walls. He walked over to the nearest group and looked inside a bin that came as high as his chest.

It held a sleeping teenage boy. A plastic tube had been inserted through the boy’s nose and taped to his face. Another piece of surgical tape ran across his forehead with a series of numbers scrawled in black ink. At other points on the boy’s body different tubes and wires were attached.

One black cable ran into a metal plate that seemed to be sutured to the side of his head.

The boy didn’t awaken as Ralph looked at him. The breathing was so slow and shallow as to barely raise the boy’s bare chest.

Ralph backed away, the skin on his shoulders and neck stiffening. There was a bin below the one in which he had looked, and two above. His eyes circled the room, counting the tiers. It came to an even hundred bins, each with its tube and cables running in and fastened onto its occupant. A hundred children suspended in something deeper than sleep, suspended above death by the plastic tubes that nourished them.

He felt something sink and go cold within him. So this is what Stimmitz found, he thought. There’s something wrong, they lied to us, they’re doing something here—

He clenched his fists to keep his hands from trembling. Get out, he told himself, I’ve got to get out of here. They’ll kill me if they find out I’ve seen this.

Fear cramped inside him as he spun around, looking for the door. He spotted it at last and headed for it. His breath swelled in his constricted throat when he pushed the door open and saw another dimly lit space, outlined by the same tiers with tubes and wires dipping into the bins.

For a dismaying span of seconds it seemed as if he were caught in a line of mirror images, like the dream field’s repeating sections of a small town.

But here it would be an infinity of dark rooms, stale air thickening with the slow breathing of the sleeping children . . .

Convulsively, Ralph spun away from the door. He saw now that he had lost his bearings in the dim light—the door by which he had come in was on the other side of the room. He hurriedly crossed the space towards the door and collided with a large object set in the middle of the floor.

It was a metal filing cabinet. Gasping to catch his breath, Ralph pushed himself away from its side. The top drawer rattled out as he took his hand away. What he could see of the cabinet’s contents produced a chill of recognition.

The stiff manila folders filling the drawer were delinquent children’s personal histories. He had seen hundreds of them when he had been working at the Juvenile Hall to the south of L.A. The folders were soiled and battered-looking from too many hands, thick with each child’s accumulated court papers, therapist and probation officer comments, booking slips, and other records—troubled lives compressed into dry ink and paper.

The personal history folders travelled with each child to every institution to which he was sent. Now the folders were here, stored close to the unconscious youths. On impulse, Ralph pulled out two of the folders from the drawer and stuck them under his arm. He crossed to the right door and hurried out of the room’s semi-darkness.

The man who had passed him in the passageway was nowhere to be seen, and the one on the cot behind the desk was still asleep as Ralph cautiously went by him. In a few seconds he was out of the building, around the corner and running with the two folders clamped to his chest towards the nearest clump of brush in the open desert.

Sliding the folders ahead of him on the sand, Ralph crawled through the opening in the fence. He stood up on the other side and brushed the grit from his pants. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the edge of one of the Thronsen Home buildings wavering in the noon heat, the unsuspected pools of darkness inside them hidden from sight again. He picked up the folders from the ground and headed back to the base.

When he came to the spot above the gully where the woman with the camera had been, he halted. The light had changed its angle and now he could see distinctly what she had been photographing. As if something had been butchered on the spot and the earth had soaked up the blood, the ground itself was discolored with an irregular, reddish-brown stain.

Ralph paced slowly around the dried mark. Something in its outlines, or its color, pushed back the memory of the Thronsen Home’s dark interior for a moment.

A thought crept into his head. He looked away from the stain and towards the base. The concrete cube of the line shack was visible in the distance. With careful precision he tried to recall the different directions he and Stimmitz had taken during the last shift on the field. The adrenaline in his system had sharpened his memory. The line, he thought, runs east and west inside the building. When we got to the field we turned . . . right, I think . . . He closed his eyes and pictured the section of small town. It was close to being firmer in his mind than the real world.

We turned right. In his mind Ralph saw the two of them moving slowly through the dreamfield sections, stopping occasionaly to watch a sequence or to rest, then finally turning the corner to follow the slithergadee—

He opened his eyes and laid the line he had constructed in his head down on the ground between himself and the distant line shack, and suddenly felt cold beneath the desert’s noon sun. If his calculations were right, then it was the same distance from where they had let go of the line to where the slithergadee had attacked Stimmitz, as it was from the line shack to this blood-colored spot.

He looked from the gray building, small in the distance, to the brownish red mark on the ground. His thoughts seemed to have frozen in his head. There was the stain, the building, and all the desert in between, but the connection was still elusive. The more Stimmitz’s universe coalesced around Ralph again, the darker things got. He squeezed the manila folders in his hands and walked quickly, then broke into a run away from the spot.

Chapter 5

The six o’clock news was on the television in Goodell’s apartment.

Groups of blurred soldiers were directing great block-long gushes of flame into a blackening jungle. The jungle sagged and crackled. Unseen jets could be heard wailing mournfully somewhere. Ralph put his index finger under a beer can’s tab and lifted.

A newsman’s rouged face came on, all the way from some studio in L.A., but Ralph didn’t hear what he was saying. Little stars lit up on a pink and green map of South America behind the newsman.

Ralph didn’t hear the other watchers slouching in the apartment’s chairs either. He sipped at the first cold, sharp edge of the beer, and let his mind pace slowly among his thoughts.

The two folders he had stolen from the Thronsen Home were hidden beneath the cushions of the couch in his own apartment. He had glanced quickly through them but had found nothing to throw any light on what he had witnessed on the other side of the fence.

He imagined the spot out on the desert. Its outlines reformed, throbbing, inside his head, fading into the memory of the sand in the shoes, then into the woman he had seen with the camera. Was the Bach tape Stimmitz had left for him part of the mystery also? He sipped again at the beer. Who knows, he thought.

After all—a group of sullen-looking South American Indians with machine guns were trooping across the television screen—it could still be all right. So what if the kids in the Thronsen Home are wired asleep? Ralph asked himself. Maybe that’s just part of the therapy that they don’t tell anyone about. For appearance’ sake. Another pull, and the beer can was half-empty.

There were explanations for everything. All he had to do was to accept them. Or if necessary, invent them. The real world felt like a tide, pressuring him to accept what everyone else in the world believed to be true. Except weirdos like Stimmitz and Helga, he thought.

“Hey,” he said, turning in his chair to see the others. They had all come to Goodell’s apartment because the Rec hall was getting its monthly floor-polishing by an outside squad of janitors. “Anybody seen Helga recently?” For some reason he felt like trying to talk to her again.

“Didn’t you hear?” Kathy yawned and scratched. “She got canned.”

Ralph lowered the beer can from his lips and looked at her. “What for?” he said finally.

Goodell looked disgusted. “Same thing that idiot Stimmitz got it for,” he said. “They found out that she had sneaked into Thronsen with him.” A couple of the other watchers nodded, a silent chorus.

“Did anybody . . . see her go?” Ralph squeezed the cold cylinder in his hands.

“Naw,” said Goodell. “She took off without saying anything to anybody. Wouldn’t you if you got caught doing something that stupid?”

“She must’ve really been in a hurry to get packed and out of here,” said Kathy, and giggled. “I peeked in her apartment before Blenek came and locked it up, and it was all torn-up looking.”

“Like somebody had been fighting there?” asked Ralph dully.

“Yeah, like that.” She giggled again.

Ralph stared at her while he sipped the flat remnants left in the can.

Maybe Helga was in a hurry, he thought. It’s more likely than all that other stuff. He noticed that the top button of Kathy’s Opwatch blouse was missing, revealing a small triangle of skin below her throat. It was pale white, like the rest of her slender body. The skin of the girl with the camera had been golden. But if that wasn’t in another universe, it was far enough away in this one to be not worth thinking about.

He turned and looked past the television and out the window. The sunset was melting the desert. Maybe, he thought, she was some kind of nature buff, taking pictures of the spot where some desert animal killed and ate another one. Maybe that’s the explanation. He drained the can, stood up, and went past the others into the apartment’s kitchen.

There was a small mountain of empty cans on one of the counters—he added his own to it. Sometimes, he thought, it drops inside you without even making a splash. He opened the refrigerator for another.

Inside were four sixpacks of two different brands; one whole shelf was stacked with them. It looked like every other refrigerator he had ever seen on the base, including his own. He pulled one can apart from the rest and closed the door.

As he opened the can, it suddenly struck him as funny that, considering how lazy all the watchers were, they had spent so much energy carrying all that beer all the way from the little store in Norden where they bought their groceries. A question of values, he decided. He brought the can to his lips, then took it away, and stared at it.

He had never seen any of them bring any beer back from the town. The realization hit him like a wave. Right now, there were sixpacks of beer in the refrigerator of his own apartment that he hadn’t put there. There were always fresh sixpacks, yet he never bought any. And neither, as far as he knew, did any of the others.

Damn, thought Ralph. He opened Goodell’s refrigerator, looked inside, closed it again. The beer was still there, mute and solid, covered with moisture not much colder than that now springing out on Ralph’s skin.

This has been going on all the time, he thought, and nobody’s ever noticed. None so blind, right? As those who will not see— until it tears out their throats. He felt ill—his universe was crumbling for good, dissolving at last to reveal the one, the true one, underneath.

That bloodstain, he thought. There’s no animal in this part of the desert big enough to have made that. And the base commander’s explanation of what happened with Stimmitz and the slithergadee—that’s crap, too. If the kids are all unconscious, how could they see Stimmitz and incorporate him into their dreams! It was clear to him that Stimmitz had been right all along and had died because of it. There was something wrong about Operation Dreamwatch—something that killed to hide itself.

And the beer. His hand trembled as he looked at the can he held. Who knows what they put in it. Or what it’s doing to us. He stepped to the sink and started to pour it out.

“Hey,” said Goodell from the doorway. “What’re you doing?” He looked from the last golden drops falling into the sink to Ralph’s face. “Are you feeling okay? You look terrible.”

Ralph set the can down on the counter. “I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“You’d better go back to your place and lie down.” Goodell put his hand on Ralph’s shoulder. “So you’ll be ready to go out on the field tonight.”

“The field?” echoed Ralph. He stared at Goodell. Some part inside himself clenched with the realization of what might be waiting for him there.

Commander Stiles was just leaving his office when Ralph caught him.

“Hello,” said the older man as he locked the door with his key. “What’s the hurry?”

Ralph gasped, trying to catch his breath. He had run all the way from Goodell’s apartment. “I just wanted to see,” he managed to speak, “if I could go ahead and take that week off.”

“Sure,” said Stiles. “I don’t see why not. Be good for you. I’ll have the forms ready tomorrow so you can take off right after your shift if you want.”

“Uhh . . . would there be any way I could leave tonight?”

The base commander frowned, his leathery skin bunching around his lower lip. “No, I don’t think so. Not according to the Opwatch manual, you know.” His eyes sharpened on Ralph. “Was there some particular reason you wanted to leave so soon?”

Careful, Ralph told himself. Don’t let him suspect what you know.

“No,” he shrugged. “Just a spur of the moment decision, that’s all.”

“Come by in the morning, then.” Stiles pocketed his key and started down the hallway. “No need to be impatient.”

Ralph watched the broad uniformed back receding from him, then slowly followed after it toward the exit.

Nothing happened on the dreamfield that night, except for the usual sequences to be observed. As the line came snaking down out of the field’s blue sky, Ralph’s observation partner remarked on how nervous he had seemed all through the shift. Ralph only nodded, watching the descending line. It looked wonderful, a linear angel.

By nine a.m., he was standing on the one small section of sidewalk in Norden with a single canvas bag in his hand, even though he knew the Greyhound to L.A. didn’t come through until eleven-thirty.