The Lathe Of Heaven

“Worthy, ” said the Alien, and took a short, checked step toward the couch, as if longing to look. “The individual-person is iahklu’. The recording machine records this perhaps. Is all your species capable of iahklu’?

“Idon’t—don’t know the term, can you describe—”

The figure whirred a little, raised its left elbow over its head (which, turtle-like, hardly protruded above the great sloped shoulders of the carapace), and said, “Please excuse. Incommunicable by communication-machine invented hastily in very-recent-past. Please excuse. It is necessary that all we proceed in very-near-future rapidly toward other responsible individual-persons engaged in panic and capable of destroying selves and others. Thank you very much. ” And it crawled back into the nose of the ship.

Haber watched the great, round soles of its feet disappear into the dark cavity.

The nose cone jumped up from the floor and twirled itself smartly into place: Haber had a vivid impression that it was not acting mechanically, but temporally, repeating its previous actions in reverse, precisely like a film run backward. The Alien ship, jarring the office and tearing out the rest of the window frame with a hideous noise, withdrew, and vanished into the lurid murk outside.

The crescendo of explosions, Haber now realized, had ceased; in fact it was fairly quiet. Everything trembled a little, but that would be the mountain, not the bombs. Sirens whooped, far and desolate, across the river.

George Orr lay inert on the couch, breathing irregularly, the cuts and swellings on his face looking ugly on his pallor. Cinders and fumes still drifted in the chill, choking air through the smashed window. Nothing had been changed. He had undone nothing. Had he done anything yet? There was a slight eye movement under the closed lids; he was still dreaming; he could not do otherwise, with the Augmentor overriding the impulses of his own brain. Why didn’t he change continuums, why didn’t he get them into a peaceful world, as Haber had told him to do? The hypnotic suggestion hadn’t been clear or strong enough. They must start all over. Haber switched off the Augmentor, and spoke Orr’s name thrice.

“Don’t sit up, the Augmentor hookup’s still on you. What did you dream? ”

Orr spoke huskily and slowly, not fully awakened. “The. .. an Alien was here. In here. In the office. It came out of the nose of one of their hopping ships. In the window. You and it were talking together. ”

“But that’s not a dream! That happened! Goddamn, we’ll have to do this over again. That might have been an atomic blast a few minutes ago, we’ve got to get into another continuum, we may all be dead of radiation exposure already—”

“Oh, not this time, ” Orr said, sitting up and combing off electrodes as if they were dead lice. “Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber. ”

Haber stared at him.

“I suppose your Augmentor increased the. immediacy of it for you, ” Orr said, still with extraordinary calmness. He appeared to ponder for a little. “Listen, couldn’t you call Washington? ”

“What for? ”

“Well, a famous scientist right here in the middle of it all might get listened to. They’ll be looking for explanations. Is there somebody in the government you know, that you might call? Maybe the HEW Minister? You could tell him that the whole thing’s a misunderstanding, the Aliens aren’t invading or attacking. They simply didn’t realize until they landed that humans depend on verbal communication. They didn’t even know we thought we were at war with them. .. . If you could tell somebody who can get the President’s ear. The sooner Washington can call off the military, the fewer people will be killed here. It’s only civilians getting killed. The Aliens aren’t hurting the soldiers, they aren’t even armed, and I have the impression that they’re indestructible, in those suits. But if somebody doesn’t stop the Air Force, they’ll blow up the whole city. Give it a try, Dr. Haber. They might listen to you. ”

Haber felt that Orr was right. There was no reason to it, it was the logic of insanity, but there it was: his chance. Orr spoke with the incontrovertible conviction of dream, in which there is no free will: do this, you must do it, it is to be done.

Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use, even to obey, the weak tool? This went through his mind, not for the first time, but even as he thought it he was going over to the desk, to the telephone. He sat down and dialed direct-distance to the HEW offices in Washington. The call, handled through the Federal Telephone switchboards in Utah, went straight through.

While he was waiting to be put through to the Minister of Health, Education, and Welfare, whom he knew fairly well, he said to Orr, “Why didn’t you put us over in another continuum where this mess simply never happened? It would be a lot easier. And nobody would be dead. Why didn’t you simply get rid of the Aliens? ”

“I don’t choose, ” Orr said. “Don’t you see that yet? I follow. ”

“You follow my hypnotic suggestions, yes, but never fully, never directly and simply—”

“I didn’t mean those, ” Orr said, but Rantow’s personal secretary was now on the line. While Haber was talking Orr slipped away, downstairs, no doubt, to see about the woman. That was all right. As he talked to the secretary and then to the Minister himself, Haber began to feel convinced that things were going to be all right now, that the Aliens were in fact totally unaggressive, and that he would be able to make Rantow believe this, and, through Rantow, the President and his Generals. Orr was no longer necessary. Haber saw what must be done, and would lead his country out of the mess.