The Lathe Of Heaven

“Yes, ” he said, morose but firm.   “It was  about the cabin, and the creek that’s in front of it. I don’t expect you to believe all this, Miss Lelache. I don’t think even Dr. Haber has really caught on to it yet; he won’t wait and get the feel of it. If he did, he might be more cautious about it. You see, it works like this. If he told me under hypnosis to dream that there was a pink dog in the room, I’d do it; but the dog couldn’t be there so long as pink dogs aren’t in the order of nature, aren’t part of reality. What would happen is, either I’d get a white poodle dyed pink, and some plausible reason for its being there, or, if he insisted that it be a genuine pink dog, then my dream would have to change the order of nature to include pink dogs. Everywhere.    Since   the   Pleistocene   or   whenever   dogs   first appeared. They would always have come black, brown, yellow, white, and pink. And one of the pink ones would have wandered in from the hall, or would be his collie, or his receptionist’s Pekinese, or something. Nothing miraculous. Nothing unnatural. Each dream covers its tracks completely. There would just be a normal everyday pink dog there when I woke up, with a perfectly good reason for being there. And nobody would be aware of anything new, except me—and him. I keep the two memories, of the two realities. So does Dr. Haber. He’s there at the moment of change, and knows what the dream’s about. He doesn’t admit that he knows, but I know he does. For everybody else, there have always been pink dogs. For me, and him, there have—and there haven’t. ”

“Dual time-tracks,   alternate universes, ”  Miss Lelache said. “Do you see a lot of old late-night TV shows? ”

“No, ” said the client, almost as dryly as she. “I don’t ask you to believe this. Certainly not without evidence. ”

“Well. Thank God! ”

He smiled, almost a laugh. He had a kind face; he looked, for some reason, as if he liked her.

“But look, Mr. Orr, how the hell can I get any evidence about your dreams? Particularly if you destroy all the evidence every time you dream by changing everything ever since the Pleistocene? ”

“Can you, ” he said, suddenly intense, as if hope had come to him, “can you, acting as my lawyer, ask to be present at one of my sessions with Dr. Haber—if you were willing? ”

“Well. Possibly. It could be managed, if there’s good cause. But look, calling in a lawyer as witness in the event of a possible privacy-infringement case is going to absolutely wreck your therapist-patient relationship. Not that it sounds like you’ve got a very good one going, but that’s hard to judge from outside. The fact is, you have to trust him, and also, you know, he has to trust you, in a way. If you throw a lawyer at him because you want to get him out of your head, well, what can he do? Presumably he’s trying to help you. ”

“Yes. But he’s using me for experimental—” Orr got no further: Miss Lelache had stiffened, the spider had seen, at last, her prey.

“Experimental purposes? Is he? What? This machine you talked about—is it experimental? Has it HEW approval? What have you signed, any releases, anything beyond the VTT forms and the hypnosis-consent form? Nothing? That sounds like you might have just cause for complaint, Mr. Orr. ”

“You might be able to come observe a session? ”

“Maybe. The line to follow would be civil rights, of course, not privacy. ”

“You do understand that I’m not trying to get Dr. Haber into trouble? ” he said, looking worried. “I don’t want to do that. I know he means well. It’s just that I want to be cured, not used. ”

“If his motives are good, and if he’s using an experimental device on a human subject, then he should take it quite as a matter of course, without resentment; if it’s on the level, he won’t get into any trouble. I’ve done jobs like this twice. Hired by HEW to do it. Watched a new hypnosis-inducer in practice up at the Med School, it didn’t work, and watched a demonstration of how to induce agoraphobia by suggestion, so people will be happy in crowds, out at the Institute in Forest Grove. That one worked but didn’t get approved, it came under the brainwashing laws, we decided. Now, I can probably get an HEW order to investigate this thingummy your doctor’s using. That lets you out of the picture. I don’t come on as your lawer at all. In fact maybe I don’t even know you. I’m an official accredited ACLU observer for HEW. Then, if we don’t get anywhere with this, that leaves you and him in the same relationship as before. The only catch is, I’ve got to get invited to one of your sessions. ”

“I’m the only psychiatric patient he’s using the Augmentor on, he told me so. He said he’s still working on it—perfecting it. ”

“It really is experimental, whatever he’s doing to you with it, then. Good. All right. I’ll see what I can do. It’ll take a week or more to get the forms through. ”

He looked distressed.

“You won’t dream me out of existence this week, Mr. Orr, ” she said, hearing her chitinous voice, clicking her mandibles.

“Not willingly, ” he said, with gratitude—no, by God, it wasn’t gratitude, it was liking. He liked her. He was a poor damn crazy psycho on drugs, he would like her. She liked him. She stuck out her brown hand, he met it with a white one, just like that damn button her mother always kept in the bottom of her bead box, SCNN or SNCC or something she’d belonged to way back in the middle of the last century, the Black hand and the White hand joined together. Christ!