Wine of the Dreamers (23 page)

Alert is flashed to interception points. Five more screens pick up the image and tie in the interception stations.
Rocket tubes, six hundred of them, ten at each interceptor station, are so tied in with the automatic track on the screens that they point, unerringly, at the proper interception point in the predicted track of the screen pip. If the pip had been shown as coming straight down, manual control of firing would have been automatically cut out. No human hand could have moved quickly enough.

At the master control station SW, outside El Paso, a hard-faced colonel cuts out all manual control at the interceptor points, and takes over the decision. There are six buttons under his fingers. Each one discharges one full ten-round from the designated interceptor point.

The mike is close to his lips. He watches the screen. “Course change,” he says in a flat tone. His words boom loudly in a small room in Washington. The small room is beginning to fill rapidly. “Velocity down one half. Target now heading straight up. Continuing loss of velocity. Either unmanned with defective controls, or manned incompetently.”

The speaker above the colonel’s head says, metallically, “Intercept when we get a predicted course toward any critical area.”

A major standing near the colonel says, “This will give the Kinsonians a bang.”

The colonel doesn’t answer. He is thinking of his son, of the eruption of crazy, bloody, irrational violence that had ruined his son’s life. His iron face does not change. He remembers the voice of Walter Howard Path.

“New direction north-northwest. Altitude three hundred thirty miles. Within range. Velocity down to five hundred miles per hour. Altitude three hundred, velocity four seventy.”

“Intercept,” the speaker says.

Taut fingers poise over the buttons.

“Intercept,” the speaker says. “Acknowledge.”

Twenty-five years of discipline balanced against the memory of the stunned, uncomprehending look on the face of a boy.

“Recommend stranger be permitted to land.”

He hears the major’s taut gasp, sees the major’s hand reaching to punch the buttons. He turns and smashes his fist against the major’s jaw.

Flat, emotionless voice. “Believe stranger preparing to land Muroc.”

Video in the lounge at Fonda Electric. Radio in the room where amphetamine is working its frantic magic in Atlanta. Music from the pocket pack in the broker’s pocket, faint against the hard roar of the wind as he tumbles over and over, down and down. Timber Mulloy, taking a breather, tuning in to hear one of his own records. Bedside radio in Grosse Point singing softly to something at the base of a full-length mirror. Radio playing soothingly on the desk of the floor nurse as a young psychiatrist walks toward the shock room, passing the desk …

“… We interrupt this program to inform America that, at this moment, a space ship of unknown origin is attempting a landing at Muroc. The ship answers the description given by Lane to Walter Howard Path in what was believed to be a hoax. Word has just been received that the first attempt at landing was unsuccessful. Further news will be reported as soon as received. We now return you to the network programs in process.”

Jord Orlan left the case of dreams and returned to his chambers. He had bitten through his lower lip and the taste of blood sickened him.

He sat alone and tried to rebuild something in which he could no longer believe. A structure had collapsed in his mind, and the shards of it were useless.

He saw, in memory, the great ship, its ancient hide pocked by space fragments, sitting on the surface of an alien world. Outside, where there had been six ships, there were now five.

He had slid into the mind of a spectator, and he had seen Raul and Leesa taken in a vehicle from the side of the ship to a distant building. He had seen them, in one of the dreams, thinner than they had been when they left. At one point he had moved close enough to hear Raul
speak, his voice thin with strain, yet exultant, speaking the Earth language awkwardly, clumsily because he was speaking from memory alone.

“The Doctor Inly and Doctor Lane. It is them we must see quickly.”

There was nothing left to believe. And he remembered the Law. Such travel meant an end to the dreams. He saw, ahead of him, the long empty years, full of nothing but the games that were now pointless.

He knew what he had to do. He found a heavy tool in the lowest level. By the time he had finished what he had to do, his hands were raw and blistered.

And he went down to his people to tell them that the dreams had come to an end.

NINETEEN

Sharan stood beside Bard Lane. They stood close together and looked through the glass wall of the studio. Raul and Leesa sat behind a table, the cameras focused on them, the interviewer at the end of the table. With the help of Bard and Sharan, Raul and Leesa had won the right to dress as the people around them, rather than in the conspicuous style of the Watcher colony.

“How long is this going to go on?” Sharan asked wearily.

“It will go on just as long as they are the only two outsiders on this planet. That sort of novelty will never wear off.”

“So you better hurry with Tempo Two, my friend, and go grab off some people from Marith and Ormazd. How is it going?”

“Good, now that the Pan-Asia group decided to come in on it. They’re still a little wary of our generosity in giving them access to the whole works.”

Sharan looked at Leesa through the glass. “She’s very patient, isn’t she?”

“She explained that to me. It’s a sort of … penance, you might say. For what she has done in the past, what her people have done. How do you like her English?”

“Not anywhere near as quaint as it was, at least.” Sharan giggled. “Know what I remember, Bard? The time you described her as probably being bald and built like a twelve-year-old child.”

Bard Lane remembered too. He looked at the slim, delicate, dark-haired girl. She met his glance and made a small shrug of patience. He said, “She told me that on her world she was considered some sort of a brute-woman. Here she’s just a pretty girl who looks a bit more fragile than the average. And your Raul could lose himself in any crowd.”

“He could not!”

Bard grinned. They listened to the closing minutes of the program. “Now, Mr. Kinson, you say that the Watchers have not contacted you or your sister in any way during the weeks you have been here with us.”

Raul frowned. “I do not understand that. I do not see why they have not done so. It would be so easy.”

“Now I have something that may come as a surprise to both of you. We have just received tabulated data from all law enforcement agencies covering the time you have been here. There has been an unprecedented drop in crimes of violence. Violence is still with us, of course. Until we learn the secrets of that other world you told us about, it will probably always be with us. But motiveless violence, inexplicable actions—they seem to have gone way down.”

Bard saw Leesa and Raul stare at each other, say a few swift words in their own tongue.

Leesa said, “It would seem then, that either they know and understand now, or they are not using the dream machines. We do not know which. We will only know when someone goes … back.”

“Would you like to go back?”

She turned her head slowly so that she looked directly at Bard. Her chin lifted a bit and her eyes softened. “In my life, sir, I go nowhere without the Doctor Lane.”

Sharan said, “My, my! How you can blush!”

“Hush.”

“And you, Mr. Kinson? Will you go back if you have a chance?”

Raul frowned. “I do not know if I can say this well. It is a plan, and a part of the big Plan I told you about. Now the dreamers are not destroying. The three planets my ancestors colonized can join together. This Earth can give Marith much. But Earth and Marith can get most from Ormazd. We are three children, going different ways, now grown to strength with which each can help all.

“Now with my plan, and I mean for me as a person, as you know I have taken to wife the Doctor Inly in line with your customs, the same as my sister and Doctor Lane in that ceremony you made us do before cameras so all could see. Now I am saying too blunt, which goes against your custom. None of you watching this can know each other, in your hearts. Even now I do not know well the Doctor Inly, though married. Not as well as when, with the dream machines, I entered her mind to know it as my own. It is the same with my sister. We have talked. We are not as happy as we could be, because of the barrier between us.

“In dreams of Ormazd I learned that they can use the minds at close range the way the dream machines did over vast distances. It is there that I would go and my sister would go, with the two we have married. And there Ormazd can teach us this thing which is necessary if a person is not to be … forever a little apart and a little bit lonely.

“When it is learned by the four of us, we wish to come back and teach others. That way the rest of that violence which you told me can be also taken away from this planet. It is … a dream and a good one this time. For a long time the three planets of the children of the Leaders
of long ago have waited for the time of reuniting, for the time of progress that is to come.

“All of this will be slow, I think. The biggest changes will not come in the life of any of us who are here or you who listen. But for myself, I want that small change which gives mind freedom to enter mind as soon as I can have. See, I do not speak well yet.

“To have this come about, I wish to be with my wife. I wish to work with the Doctor Lane. There are things I can learn and things I can do. I wish no longer to be an animal to be looked at with those camera things. My sister does not like this camera thing either. Now we wish to go to work on that very great ship which, we hope, will carry part of the name of a man who was good and wise and very brave.”

He smiled into Sharan’s eyes.

“That ship, it is to be called Pathfinder,” he said softly.

Afterword

I wrote
Wine of the Dreamers
in 1950 and
Ballroom of the Skies
the following year.

When Knox Burger, who edits my work at Fawcett Publications, suggested we resurrect these two books, the only science fiction novels I have ever published, I read them for the first time since the obligatory reading in galley proofs nearly twenty years ago.

It would be a meretricious idiocy for any writer with any respect and consideration for his following to foist upon them the creative mistakes of the early years. I have closets full of previously published stories which will never see print again, regardless of whether I am on the scene or off in that limbo which I suspect is reserved for all novelists—where we are condemned to lie for half of eternity in tiny rooms with the creatures of our own devising.

Though it may be merely one more symptom of the writer’s flawed objectivity, I found both these novels to be more cohesive and provocative than I had expected.

I have not revised them. I ached to doctor much stilted conversation, but to do so would have been to cheat, as somehow the pretentious and overly grammatic speeches made by the actors are touchingly typical of the genre.

They are both more accurately categorized as science fantasy than as science fiction, in that they are neither
space-adventure, nor mad-scientist, nor doom-machine epics.

The two novels are companion pieces in that they provide two congruent methods of accounting for all the random madness and unmotivated violence in our known world, and two quite different answers as to why, with all our technology, we seem unable to move a fraction of an inch toward bettering the human condition and making of life a universally more rewarding experience.

This, for the writer, is the charm of such novels, as they enable him to step up onto a small shaky soapbox and say something, without ever lecturing the reader, about the moral and emotional furniture of our lives. Books of this sort have a functional relationship to the world’s religions, in that they also make a sober attempt to explain the inexplicable, account for the unaccountable.

I confess to being particularly jolted by finding in
Wine of the Dreamers
that the Paris Peace Talks were still going on in 1975, that the Asians were quarreling with Russia about the orbits for snooper satellites, and that a substance was being advertised and sold to millions of Americans as a non-alcoholic, non-habit-forming beverage which would heighten the sensory response to such stimuli as a kiss or a sunset. I wish I could have equivalent prescience in personal matters.

To those of my reader-friends who are turned off completely by these organized speculations and term them “silly,” I extend apologies. I am glad to have these back in print. I suspect, however, that those who cruise vicariously aboard
The Busted Flush
with one T. McGee—as do I—will find things in these books which will reward and amuse.

Herein there are no bug-eyed monsters, except the ones forever resident in the human heart. There are no lovelies being rescued by space explorers from giant insects who talk in clicks and carry distintegrators. No
methane atmospheres. Nothing emerging from the evil swamps. Not even a single dutiful robot, harboring either electronic love or the cross-wired circuitry of rebellion. Because of these omissions I may well be responsible, also, for turning off the hard-core aficionado of science fiction who, because these are more about people than things, might also term them “silly.”

My most signal satisfaction in rereading these two novels, and in authorizing their reappearance, was to discover that I had not, as I had suspected, sacrificed story to message. They move right along. It had been so long since I had written them that my recall was fogged by fifty intervening novels. And so I had much ironic amusement in finding myself, for the first time, reading my own work with considerable curiosity as to what would happen next.