Doomsday Warrior 18 - American Dream Machine (19 page)

In a moment they learned that the police weren’t after them—there was a rebellion going on. It had started as a general strike, and spread on the news of Kitra Broomak’s “attempted correction.” Broomak had been rescued by rebels. The radio report blamed “the antiphilosophy of the Earthman, Niles Rockson” lot starting the trouble. He was called an “evil dreamer.”

Rock said, “Shit is hitting the fan!”

“Yes, everybody suddenly wants to be a rebel, like you,” Kimetta smiled, kissing his cheek. “It was bound to happen.”

“I can’t believe that,” Rock said. “Esmerelda was in existence for a long time before I came along, and nobody ever acted up before, I’m told. At least not
en masse!
There’s got to be more to it than reaction to what I did.”

“There is!” Kimetta said. “Don’t you see? We know it’s just a dream, so the dream is falling apart! We’re doing it!”

Rock nodded. “Not everybody has flipped out because of my philosophy! I’m sure of that!”

Just then their car automatically braked as a mob ran across their path, shouting that they were
free!
Shouting: “Rock, Rockson, Rock, Rockson! Rock, Rockson!” A light pole vanished, a building rocked and faded away into nothingness.

“This asteroid is finished,” Kimetta said, “I think it will fade away soon! It’s not real. It’s—my dream, or
your
dream, but it’s just the stuff dreams are made of—let’s get away before we fade too! Unless what’s happening is put under control very quickly, somehow. You wanted to escape, and now it’s time to do so. Please, I don’t want to—to evaporate.”

Once the crowd passed they roared on toward the spaceport. Half a dozen men in one-piece gladiator outfits were running toward them almost as soon as Rock opened a door of the car, which he halted near the ten-story-tall, gleaming rocket ship called
Earth-Mother.

“We’re free, we’re on our own,” they shouted. “No more games.”

The men crowded around him, recognizing the Earthman.

“We owe it all to you, Rockson,” one man said enthusiastically. “You’re the one who got us free, aren’t you, Rock Rockson!”

“Yes, that’s right, I guess. Now if you’d let me and Kimetta pass . . .”

The men didn’t. They were a solid wall of glee.

“The rebel guards told us that there will be a celebration on account of you, that we’re going to be free from now on, and first we’ll have fun!”

One man, who’d been holding himself away from the others, said grimly, “As soon as the celebration is over, they’ll catch us again, I’m afraid. Then—” he drew a finger across his throat, “no more freedom.”

“At least we damn well are going to get what fun we can, for as long as we can,” one of the other men retorted. He was shaking Rock’s hand. “What’s with you? You are our hero, but you look like you just bit into a sour lemna melon. Why?”

“Because,” Rock said to the man, “You aren’t
real!
I’m
Ted
Rockson, and this is Kim, President Langford’s daughter. We are real, and
you’re
not!” He pushed a hand
through
the fading man. “Quick, Kim, up the rocket’s staircase,” he shouted.

But Kimetta was fading too. Her voice, faint and echoing, said, “Good-bye my love, good luck.
I’m a dream too!”

Rock reached for her, and his hands clutched just air. She was gone. With a lump in his throat and adrenaline in his heart, he turned and started climbing up into the planetary patrol, high-boost, single-seater fighter rocket.
It
seemed real enough! He slammed the airlock, and pressed the emergency boost button.

Twenty-Six

T
he twin-seat rocket took off in the emergency takeoff mode, with all engines firing. Almost immediately, Rockson was crushed back into the brown leatherette cushioning. The G-force was like being hit in the stomach with a baseball bat. And as the super-powerful rocket ship kept rising from the surface, the weight of his body quadrupled and then quadrupled again. Rock was soon near to blacking out, almost unable to draw a breath. He watched the meters before his blurred vision spin around like pinwheels. Klaxons and buzzers were sounding, denoting the strain on the rocket’s life-support systems. Soon, the craft would disintegrate!

“Have . . . to . . . cut engines,” he thought, and reached for the cut-off lever—or at least what he thought was that lever.

His hand barely cleared the couch, and then fell back. The acceleration was too great to move even an
inch.
He’d just have to hope he’d run out of fuel before he died.

In the rear-mirror viewer above the shaking, smoking control panel, he watched Esmerelda become a marble and then a dot, and then wink out. Nothing but stars, unfamiliar patterns of stars, were out there. The meter, the one that counted off millions of miles traveled (the other meters changed too fast to read) indicated that he was already ten million miles out from the prison-world. The fuel meter read half gone. And so was he.

Rockson couldn’t breathe. Even his eyeballs hurt. They felt like lead ball bearings, boring back down into his brain. His vision narrowed, reddened.

“Have to do it,” he mumbled, and even that mumble gurgled back into his throat, his saliva choking him. Steeling his mighty-thewed legs, he gave it one more try, attempting this time to
drop-kick
the control lever. And with one mighty double thrust, his toe just touched the lever—enough to cut power, part way. The invisible pair of elephants on his chest became just a pair of donkeys. He was now able to reach up with his hand and pull the lever to the completely off position.

Suddenly there was total silence, total lack of the teeth-grinding vibration. All the klaxons and emergency buzzers kept ringing for a moment, and then they too cut off. Automatic systems must have begun repairing the damage he had done.

Rock hadn’t strapped in, and now, when he craned his neck up to see the array of dials, he floated weightless off the couch. He breathed easily, moved freely.

He twisted in the air, like a trapeze artist. He felt positively giddy due to the lack of oxygen all those minutes he had been accelerating. He checked the dials, hoping to find some indication of his course. He was no astronavigator, but as near as he could figure it, he was set on a course for the Earth’s planetary system. Evidently this baby had been programmed for its return trip before he’d boarded. Thank God for that. He’d have to coast most of the way, and then avoid scan-radar back at Earth.

He was exhausted. There was nothing to do for several hours now. He decided to get back down on the couch, strap down, and get some shut-eye.

But when he twisted in midair and started toward the couch, he drew in a sharp, icy breath of air—for he was
already
on the couch! Rockson saw his own body lying there!

Was he dead?

Fear as icy as a frozen icepick jerked into his heart, but he tried to look more carefully. Something was different. There was something wrong with this picture of himself! His body, below his face, was under some sort of covering—a sparkly blanket? No, a metallic chamber. He was seeing not the couch but some sort of iron lung-like capsule. His gaunt, dead face was staring up at him through the ugly metallic capsule’s face plate, his eyes open and staring in death, his mouth frozen in the last breath. Then he saw the boulder that had fallen and smashed the—the
what?

The dream machine.
He was inside something called the dream machine. And the machine was not in a spacecraft, but rather in some sort of huge, dark cave.

He just floated there, trying to control himself, trying to keep his mind away from total freak-out. He was on the brink of total screaming insanity, but he controlled, controlled. And Rockson tried to think logically—if a ghost can think, that is.

“I can think,” he thought, “therefore I am real. A real
ghost?
Let’s be reasonable. If I died, and I’m a ghost floating out of my own body, why the hell is my body in a capsule? Where is the spaceship? Conclusion: You might
not
be dead . . .”

His pounding heart slowed to a mere marathon-race rate. He spun his arm so that his floating body twisted about, drawing his horrified eyes up and away from his own dead frozen stare. The ghost Rockson looked around. It was a dark, huge cave, lit by a few emergency cannister lights. Under him was a stone tile floor scattered with broken pieces of equipment, some bloodstains . . . and other bodies of small men in red tunics, some holding sharp aluminum-looking cylinders—guns?—in their decaying hands.

Where the hell was this? This was something from a dream!

There were ethereal whispers now all around him. Rockson had visitors:

“Where are you?” he called. And
they
floated toward him—other ghosts. Floating about him, smiling, mocking.

A pale, semitransparent, naked Kimetta shook her finger at him. “You shouldn’t . . . be here,” she whispered like a hiss on the dark wind, as she floated alongside him.

“Where
is
here?” he shouted back, but his voice too was like a ghostly ice-whisper.

She just laughed and faded away.

Then Dovine’s fat form drifted past. Dovine was laughing like the ghost of Christmas present in the Dickens novel. And then came Kimetta’s father, chewing on grapes and wearing his laurel-leaf crown. The images, all as ghostly as his own airborne body, floated all around him, swirling out at him and laughing.

“Where am I?” he shouted again. “Tell me where I am!”

And this time Kimetta, Dovine, Warden Langdon, Ronette, all of them said in unison, “In a dream, Rockson. You’re in a dream, in a dream, in a dream.”

“Come back to us,” Kimetta’s ghostly voice pleaded. “Stay here, in reality. You don’t want to be
dead
do you?”

And then Rockson remembered. This
cave
wasn’t the dream. Esmerelda, and all those on that hateful asteroid, were the dream. “NO!” Rockson shouted. “I am not dreaming NOW. I won’t come back.”

Masked Ronette placed an ethereal kiss on his nonface. “What is dreaming?” she asked. “How do you know what is dreaming and what is real?”

“I know!” Rockson shouted, and they all faded away—screaming. He was alone again. Alone, and once more staring down at his body.

“I’m not dead,” he whispered, “not dead . . . yet.”

“Save yourself,” Kimetta’s voice whispered from the darkness. “Save yourself.”

“Save myself?” How could he?—YES! He managed to think
heavy
and his ghost body gained weight. Eventually ghost Rockson stood on the floor. He leaned over the capsule, holding down sheer terror. He looked inside the face plate. The Rockson inside was
not
dead. He was breathing with difficulty. He looked emaciated, near death. The capsule was dented, cracked at chest level; a large rock must have fallen from the cavern ceiling and smashed it, damaged it. Somehow Rockson the ghost knew that these capsules had life-support systems, and that this one’s system had been damaged by the falling rocks that now littered the floor near the capsule. That’s what had happened to the man—to the dreamer Rockson inside the capsule! He’s hurt.

“Maybe . . . so now what? What do I do?”

The ethereal-wind voice of Kimetta came again: “What would you do if it was somebody
else
in there?”

“Open the capsule. Open the capsule—can a ghost do these things,” he wondered. He touched his blue-white fingers to the latches and felt the metal, and he found that, ghost or not, he could exert some pressure on the latches. Better than that, he felt superstrong. He merely thought to unlatch the snaps and they came up, spraying hot, dry air out of the capsule. He reached in and lifted the body—his own body—up in his arms. “Oh my God,” he said, “what now?” He shook the sleeping Rockson.

“Wake up,” he said. “Please—wake up, so that I can wake up too!” Nothing. It was light, like a thin and dry rag doll, but it was still warm and breathing shallowly. Sobbing in confusion and fear, Rockson the ghost carried Rockson the nearly dead man over to a table, and placed him on top.

“What now?” he addressed the lingering ghosts above.

“What would you do,” whispered an ethereal Kimetta from the darkness, “if it was somebody else?”

“I KNOW!” he shouted. And the ghost Rockson immediately started to give himself, the dying Rockson, a careful
examination.
The wound in his chest looked bad. The ghost Rockson ripped apart the man’s tunic, revealing his bare and bloody chest. He gasped—if ghosts can gasp. It sounded faint, hollow.

The man’s ribs,
his
ribs, were actually caved in. His ribs were broken, bloody ribbons—not bones. SO WHAT? He couldn’t do anything about that now. He was no surgeon.

“Just keep him breathing. Someone is coming,” whispered dream Kimetta.

It seemed hopeless but he put his mouth to his own other mouth, and began CPR. In and out. In and out.

The other Rockson responded after a time, coughing out blood and bits of bone. Choking but strong breaths began to come more steadily.

Ghost Rockson felt relieved. For a moment he felt dizzy. Can ghosts feel dizzy? It was as if . . . as if . . .
yes!
He was actually getting thinner, paler. He realized that he was fading away. He was becoming some sort of spiral in the air, a spiral of pure energy. Life energy. The man on the table breathed more easily, each breath stronger than the last. With the man Rockson’s every breath drawing in life energy, the ghost Rockson was losing his being. The ghost Rockson was being dragged into that now-breathing blue-white body. Into pain.

“Help!” he yelled. “No! I don’t want to—I don’t want to feel that man’s pain! It’s better to be a ghost! NO! I don’t want to . . .”

But it was no use. He was spinning, turning on a shiny silver cord, like bathwater going down a drain. He was slowly but surely being sucked into that body.

Pain! Oh Agony; awful excruciating pain at every breath. And noises, huge thundering blasts. The cave wall was shaking.

And a sharp light to the left as rock wall fell away. Figures clambered through the blasted-in opening.

“Rockson! Get Rockson out of the capsule! There may still be a chance,” someone ordered. Flashlight beams cut through the darkness and fell on the man lying on the table. “For the love of God!” someone exclaimed. “He’s gotten himself out of the capsule!”