The Long Sleep

XX

After that, it got worse.

He was subjected to a series of illusions more detailed than the first ones had been — although each fell apart faster than the one before it had done.

And now the periods of unconsciousness between the illusions were filled with dreams. The same dream. Over and over again, like a film loop. Each time, he woke before the dream was finished, but each time it progressed farther than it had previously. He was aware that there was some meaning in the dream, some solution to the mystery, and he almost welcomed the darkness between illusions, when he could continue with it.

Strangely, Galing, Richard, Gina, and the faceless man rarely made appearances in these new illusions. They left the whole act to Allison. Always, he started out with a deep affection for the woman, a need and desire to please that went beyond mere love. Always, however, he began to see that he was in another program; he remembered that she had betrayed him and could not be trusted. Always, he remained calm, not angered by her treachery, only saddened by it. And, always, she seemed as distraught as he, eager to have done with this impossible shifting world, this kaleidoscope of realities that formed one colorful pattern after another, as if it were all controlled by a child's whim.

He realized that his continuing love for her could only be sustained if he had enjoyed a long and close relationship with her in the distant past, before he had climbed out of that life support pod. He no longer trusted her. But he loved her, because he had been able to trust her in some other age.

Never, oddly enough, was she named Allison in these new illusions, although she was always the same woman in every particular, even down to the style of her clothes and the way she wore her lustrous black hair.

And the illusions came, kaleidoscopic:

“Well,” she said, leaning over him, her bare breasts tickling his chest, “I'm glad to see you're awake.”

He yawned and sat up, looked around the bridal suite which was costing him a hundred bucks a day. From the flame red wallpaper to the decadently mirrored ceiling it was meant to stir passions. And it stirred his now. He reached for her and pulled her down on top of him.

“Satyr,” she said.

“You know it.”

“Cool yourself, satyr. Breakfast has been sent up. We don't want the eggs to get cold.”

“Better the eggs than me.”

She laughed.

“Beautiful laugh,” he said.

An hour later they had breakfast.

The dawdled over each other throughout the long afternoon, talked very little, made slow and leisurely love. They moved well together, denying themselves completion until completion came in spite of their denials. And the day passed.

When Joel came out of the shower just after sunset and saw that dinner had been delivered while he was bathing, he reached for the room service phone, picked it up, waited for an answer.

Annie was suddenly frightened. “What do you want? We have everything we could need.”

Why was she so anxious on their honeymoon? What was she abruptly frightened about?

“May I help you?” asked a voice on the other end of the line.

Now ill-at-ease himself, he ordered a bottle of wine. Though he could not place it, the telephone voice was unpleasantly familiar. When the bellboy came, Joel had no trouble recognizing the source of his own uneasiness.

“Richard,” he said.

“Relax,” Annie-Allison said.

Richard hadn't brought any wine. He was wearing the hypodermic glove.

“You'll only be put to sleep for a short time, darling.”

“Stay away from me.”

They moved in on him.

“Who are you people?”

“Trust us,” Richard said.

“Relax,” the woman said.

He struck out at Richard. The blow connected — but so did the hypodermic glove.

“Please…” Joel said, slipping into the old dream again, that same dream:

He stood at the doorway of a private bath cubicle on the tenth level of the pyramid. The bath was white and yellow tile, mirrors, a shower stall, commode, and disposal pipe built into the wall. The only person in the cubicle was a raven-haired girl. She was squeezing a blue tablet from a plastic medicine coil. Her hands were trembling, and she was flushed.

“Do you really need that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I wish you wouldn't use it.”

She had it free now.

“If you do all your view duties sedated, you'll need two or three times as many tours to satisfy the psychologists.”

“I don't care.” Even now, her face drawn with fear, she was a stunningly beautiful woman. “I'd simply fall apart if I tried it unsedated.” She swallowed the pill.

He loved her so damned much, and he wished that there were something more for her than this dying world of theirs. A man — or woman, for she surely felt as he did — should be able to give his lover a future. He felt robbed by circumstances, cheated by fate. He was dying inside.

“Better?” he asked.

She waited a moment. Then: “Yes.”

“Good.”

“Let's go.”

“All right, Alicia.”

He woke at the memory of her name. He didn't want to wake up, for he felt that his dream had more reality to it than did Henry Galing's house. Alicia had existed. He'd seen her name on one of those locker doors next to the life support pod chamber on the bottom floor of the building.

An explosion shook the room in which he lay; dust settled down from the stone ceiling. It sifted onto his eyelids and his lips.

He sat up, frightened, his head aching, his heart beating too fast. His mouth was as dry as the dust around him.

Besides him, Allison said: “Another raid.”

“Was I asleep?”

“Yes.” She smiled. “I thought the sirens would wake you, but they didn't.”

She was wearing a dark blouse, dark slacks, no shoes. Her clothes were torn, and a spot of blood stained the collar of her blouse.

Suddenly, a chain of explosions shook them, an endless roar of thunder that made conversation impossible for quite some time. Indeed, it was impossible even to think in that holocaust. The room shook; dust fell; he sat hugging his knees beside her. All he could do was look stupidly around the room, which seemed oddly familiar. The walls and ceiling were constructed from huge blocks of stone, hand mortared. In the center of the floor, a drainage grill was half hidden in shadows. Near the heavy oak door, a candle guttered in a baking pan.

When the bombing ceased, Allison came into his arms. “I can't take much more of this.”

“Do you have any sedatives?”

She looked at him strangely. “Any what?”

“Sedatives.”

“No.”

“What happened to them?”

“I–I used them all.”

“I'll ask Henry to prescribe more for you.”

“Henry who?” she asked. She seemed to be genuinely bewildered. He thought, too, that there was a trace of apprehension behind that bewilderment.

“Your uncle,” he said.

“I don't have an uncle.”

“Sure. Henry Galing.” It was quite odd, Allison not remembering her own uncle…

“I really don't have an Uncle Henry.”

“Allison—”

“My name's Alice, not Allison,” she said. Then she sighed and said: “What the hell.” She patted his cheek. “You aren't keyed in to this one at all, are you?”

“Keyed in?” he asked.

“Well try again,” she said.

As if he had been listening on the other side, Richard opened the oak door and came in. He was wearing the hypodermic glove.

“Don't I know you?” Joel asked.

“I'm the sandman,” Richard said, putting Joel to sleep.

After Alicia took her sedative, they left their small apartment on the tenth level and rode the elevator to the top floor. Neither one of them spoke. This wasn't a time for small talk.

From the elevators, they walked down the corridor to the yellow doors, pushed through those, and went to the pressure hatch which led to the view chamber.

Joel did as it said.

He took her hand.

“I don't want to go in.”

“You have to,” he said.

The light turned green.

As he pulled open the door, she began to cry softly. He put his arm around her, although he could not offer her much support. He was every bit as frightened and demoralized as she was. This was one more thing taken from him by the incredible events of the last few years: his man's strength.

They walked reluctantly into the view chamber …

He woke in the pod chamber observation room. He was sitting in a command chair, staring through a porthole at a lazily swimming aquaman.

He turned to Henry Galing who occupied the chair on his right, and he said. “It won't work, you know.”

“The illusion.”

“What illusion?”

“Stop the game.”

Galing frowned, nodded slowly. “Very well. But do you know who you are, who the girl is, the whole story?”

“I'm Joel Amslow.”

“That's just a name.” *

“I know her name's not Allison. It's Alicia. But I won't tell you anything else.”

“Because you don't know anything else,” Galing said, smiling.

“Yes, I do.”

“You're lying.” He turned to someone behind Joel. “He hasn't doped it out yet. We'll have to go on with it.”

“No!” Joel said.

“Yes,” Galing said. “It's what you want me to do, you know. It really is.”

The faceless man loomed at Joel's right side. The needles of the hypodermic glove were icy…

Joel and Alicia crossed the dimly lighted view chamber and stopped before the window.

“Oh…” she said.

They looked out at the gray scene, grayed themselves by its reflection. The view was one of everlasting death, death without equal, death to stagger the mind, death beyond conception, death very nearly beyond endurance, death that was — in its own awful way — full of hideous movement and intelligence.

She shuddered but didn't run. She remained at his side, taking strength from him, unaware that he had gained his strength from her.

The required minutes ticked past…

The overhead speakers crackled and produced a lecture the subject of which was the scene they were required to observe. Each word on the tape had been carefully chosen by the community's psychologists and semanticists; no propaganda had ever been so meticulously constructed. “This,” the speaker said, “is what you have done and what you can never undo, even until the ends of your days.”

Others watched from viewpoints along the thick glass, but no one spoke. The scene was its own comment. It needed no analysis, no interpretation, produced no gossip. The scene was—

The bridal suite had flame red wallpaper and a mirrored ceiling, and it was costing him a hundred bucks a day.

He knew immediately that it was not real. He had not yet been able to break down the wall of amnesia to discover who he was and why he was here, but at least he could no longer be deceived by a lot of fancy props in a hypno-structured illusion. He knew that if he opened the door of the honeymoon suite, he would find Henry Galing's house beyond it, rather than a hotel.

His first impulse was to wake Allison and question her. Even if she called for help, and even if her call were quickly answered, he should be able to force her to tell him…

But that was no good. He would not be able to force her to tell him anything. Even though she had betrayed him, he would not be able to hurt her or even threaten her; he cared for her too much. His love was based on some relationship they had enjoyed when she was called Alicia, back on the other side of the amnesic wall, in those days when he had been totally familiar with the purpose of the pyramid. Now, regardless of her behavior, he knew that she loved him as he did her.

Besides, even if he could learn something from her he would gain no edge from the knowledge. He would be put to sleep again. And the next time he woke up they might take more care with the illusion so that he would not recognize it, immediately, for what it was.

And ever since this nightmare had begun, he'd been afraid that he would be put to sleep and never brought back again, or not for a long, long time, anyway. He was afraid he'd sleep for years and then regain consciousness in a life support pod — and have to start all over from scratch. He remembered that note he'd found on the porch of that fake house, the note he had left for himself. He had been through this before, the note said; well, he didn't want to go through it again.

So… What next?

Lying on the edge of the king-size bed, staring at his reflection in the ceiling mirrors, he decided that his best bet was to appear to be fooled, lull them into thinking that he was so dumb he didn't suspect a thing. They could be tricked. He'd proven that already. Now it was time to trick them again, though more subtly than he had done the other times. He would put them off balance, take his time, then make a move when they were least expecting it.

The only thing he needed was a hypodermic glove. He'd have to take it from them. With that, he could sedate all of them and have plenty of time to probe more deeply into the background of their game.

Two days…

In two days he'd make his move and become master of the house. He saw now that escape was not enough. Galing and the others must become his prisoners. Whereas he wouldn't have harmed Allison, he had no compunctions against torturing Galing to extract the information he needed.

Beyond the room's single window, skyscrapers thrust at an overcast sky. Distant traffic noises rose against the window.

He knew that he could open that window and smash the hologram scene to bits. But he would not.

Not yet.

But soon. “Soon,” he said softly.

Allison rolled over and blinked at him. She covered a yawn with the back of her hand. “Did you say something?”

“No.”

“No?”

“That's right.”

She sat up and brushed her long hair out of her face, tucked it behind her ears. “I thought for sure I heard you say something.” She was wary.

He pointed to the mirrors overhead and smiled at her. “Just talking to myself.”

“Nice place for mirrors, huh?” She grinned at him, then broke into another yawn.

“Sleepyhead,” he said.

“Narcissist.”

“I was only looking at myself because you were all covered up with sheets.”

“Likely story.”

He grabbed for her.

She playfully fended him off. But behind the playfulness, there was a look of uncertainty.

He kissed her, caressed her breasts, let his hands slide down her slim flanks, cupped her buttocks and kneaded them gently. “Old sleepyhead.”

She smiled, slipping back into her role now, sure of him now. “Sex fiend,” she said.

“Better than a narcissist.”

“Oh, you're still a narcissist.”

“A narcissist sex fiend,” he said. “I guess that means I shouldn't be in a room alone with myself.”

She laughed and pushed him back and rolled atop him, and she began to plant kisses all over his chest and stomach. He didn't mind at all when they began to add a dash of verisimilitude to the phony honeymoon setting.