The Long Sleep

XVI

He trotted up the empty street to the intersection, turned the corner, and saw the wrecked fan shuttle. It was upside-down, on its roof as he remembered it, crumpled against the big willow tree. A smashed picket fence lay across the road like the vertebrae of a reptilian fossil. Four or five quarts of oil had leaked out of the shuttle and now lay in thick pools on the pavement, congealing like blood.

He stood with his hands on his hips for a few minutes, taking it all in, and then he walked down to have a closer look. He leaned in the open driver's door and had an immediate, vivid flash of the accident.

Here was irrefutable proof that the illusions had not been illusions at all — unless, of course, he was now in the same dream he had suffered through before.

He turned away from the car, angry with himself. What in the hell was the matter with him? Was he a moron or something? He was, at long last, uncovering the truth behind the stage settings, and he should have begun to make sense of it. Not much, maybe. But a little bit, anyway. Obviously, he was still in the windowless building where he had originally awakened from the life support pod. It was an enormous place, and it had been dressed up to fool him. But the dressings were very shabby duds, capable of deceiving only a man who wanted to be deceived. Why all this trouble to confuse him? He could not get a handle on it no matter how hard he tried, and he became angrier and angrier as the answer continued to elude him like a darting fish.

Looking down this second avenue, he saw a duplication of the first street: quaint houses, mown lawns, clipped hedges, a few fan shuttles parked at the curb, darkness except for the mercury vapor streetlamps, quiet. A long way off, a traffic light winked one amber eye; a long low car pulled up on the cross street where the light would be blinking red, paused, then drove through the intersection and passed out of sight.

If they had not wrecked here, where would they have ended? How far did this grand deception continue?

He walked down the avenue toward that distant traffic light. His footsteps rebounded from the fronts of the fake houses and the cement wall between them. Seventy yards later he confronted another wall upon which a hologram film of the rest of the street was projected. The redlight and the moving car and the rest of the pretty suburb were all features of a cleverly made background film, nothing more.

Therefore, Galing had never meant for him and Allison to come this far. They would have plowed into the wall at sixty or seventy miles an hour; they would have been killed if they hadn't crashed back at the intersection. As violent as it had been, the fan shuttle accident was nothing more than another scene in the play, a carefully set-up drama that had been programmed to occur even before Joel had climbed into the car.

Why?…

Unable to cope with the complexity of the deception, he went back to find the hologram projectors that were responsible for this facet of the illusion.

On the porch of the last house he discovered a projector concealed from the street by the banisters. He kicked it apart and brought darkness to one half of the corridor wall.

Across the street, on another porch, tucked in behind a big outdoor chaise lounge, another projector was thrumming softly as the hologram cube whirled and whirled inside of it. He picked it up and threw it down. He kicked it into the wall of the house, kicked it again, stomped on it with his heel. He went out onto the lawn and picked up a child's tricycle which was turned on its side by a hedge, and he brought the tricycle back onto the porch, and he used the cycle like a hammer, flailing away at the projector with all of his strength. He enjoyed the destruction, even though he wasn't gaining a whole hell of a lot from it.

He pretended that he was pounding on Henry Galing, the faceless man, and Richard.

When there was nothing more for him to smash, when the machine lay in total ruin, when the sweat was dripping steadily into his eyes and dribbling in salty rivulets over his lips, Joel dropped the tricycle and staggered backwards and sat down heavily on the chaise lounge. He let his chin rest on his chest, and he breathed in slowly and evenly as his head began to clear. He was ashamed of himself for losing control like that; rage had accomplished nothing, and it might have lost him most of what he'd gained in the last hour. If Galing hadn't known he was out here, the old bastard might have gotten the idea from all the racket if it carried as far as the mansion. He'd been through a lot, of course; but this was thoughtless, childish, the last thing he—

It was then that Joel noticed the neatly folded sheet of dark paper which had lain beneath the now demolished hologram projector. It was partly concealed by the bent housing of the machine, and it looked as if it had been put there for him to find.

“Galing?” he asked, staring out at the street, searching for movement.

But he was alone.

“Okay,” he said hoarsely. “I'll play along with you, Galing. What have I got to lose?”

He slid off the lounge, hunkered down, and picked up the paper. It was yellowed with age, and the creases in it were so dry that they cracked when he disturbed them. Flakes of paper speckled his trembling hands. The sheet fell into three separate pieces as he opened it.

He went to the porch stoop where the light from the streetlamps was bright enough to read by, and he sat on the top step. Fitting the fragments together like pieces of a puzzle, he looked disbelievingly at the message. He read it three times:

Dear Joel:

Nothing is as it seems to be. Yet everything is what you suspect it is. Don't despair. You've been this way before — and you might even be this way again. Yet you're sane and alive. Sane and alive. Just remember that.

The note had been written with a dull pencil.

It had been written in haste.

And the handwritting was his own.