Dreamer's World

They wanted a world without war. The answer was simple: Stay in bed.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

A warning hum started somewhere down in the audoviso.

Greg stared. Perspiration crawled down his face. This was it. This was the end of the nightmare. This had to be Pat Nichols.

After seventy-two hours in which Greg had had to do without anesthesia! Seventy-two hours of reality! Seventy-two hours of consciousness! Consciousness. Reality.

Greg didn't know how he'd managed to remain sane.

It seemed incredible that a man who had advanced to Stage Five in the Dream Continuity Scale, and who had been in anesthesia most of the time, could suffer seventy-two hours of boring, drab, dreary and revolting reality. And still be sane.

Pat Nichols was the answer. Her body faded into slim and luscious focus on the three-dim screen. Her brooding eyes and wide mouth that curled so reprovingly.

She had gone psycho. Had fled from the Cowl into the dreadful Outside, seventy-two hours ago. Gone to join that fanatical group of Venusian Colonists, those outlaw schizoids who planned to start over on Venus.

"Pat!" Greg's hand reached as though she weren't just a three-dim image. "Listen, Pat! Thank the Codes, you haven't blasted yet. I've been crazy, waiting for this call. Pat, I can't even go into integrated anesthesia without you around. My dreams don't seem to focus right."

"That's too bad, Greg," she said.

He moistened his lips slowly. He slid his hand toward the warning button beneath the table. Her eyes didn't notice, never left his face. Accusative, sad eyes.

He felt sick. He pushed the button. Now! Now Drakeson up on the apartment roof would trace the point of her call. He'd chart her location with the rhodium tracker beams. Then the two of them would go and pick Pat up and prevent that insane, suicidal, one-way trip to Venus.

She might consider it a very unfair thing, but then she was psycho. She'd be glad of it, after she was brought back, brain-probed, and re-conditioned. The thought made Greg even more ill. Brain-probing and re-conditioning involved months of a kind of mental agony that no one could adequately describe. The words were enough to give anesthetic nightmares to any Citizen. But, it was for the good of the Cowls, and of the psychos.

Her voice was sad too, like her eyes. "I was hoping you would join me, Greg. Anyway, I called to tell you that in about five hours, we're blasting. This is goodby."

He said something. Anything. Keep her talking, listening. Give Drakeson a chance to employ the rhodium tracker, and spot her location.

A kind of panic got loose in Greg's brain. "Pat, don't you have any insight at all? Can't you see that this is advanced psychosis, that--"

She interrupted. "I've tried to explain to you before, Greg. But you've always preferred anesthesia. You loathe reality. But I'm part of reality."

Yes. He had dreams. The anesthetic cubicles, Stage Five where a man was master of thalamic introjection, dream imagery. A stage where any part of reality was supposed to have faded into utter inconsequence. But Pat Nichols had always been a part of his conditioned personality pattern. By taking her out of it, fate had struck him with an unbalance in psyche that disturbed the sole objective of life--to dream.

"But that's a suicide trip, Pat, and you'll never have a chance to be cured of your schizophrenia, even if you do get to Venus--"

Her interruption had weariness in it.

"Goodby, Greg. I'm sorry for you. That silly status quo, and futile dreaming. It will never let you realize what a fine man you are. You'll decay and die in some futile image. So goodby, Greg. And good dreaming."

She was gone from the screen. Maybe from earth, unless he got out there and stopped her before that suicide ship rocketed out from its hidden subterranean blast tube.