The Lathe Of Heaven

“Depend on what? ”

“Well. .. I don’t know. If reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes home and murders six people in the village. I know you’d give her the serum, because you have it, and feel sorry for her. But you don’t know whether what you’re doing is good or evil or both. .. .”

“O. K. ! Granted! I know what snakebite serum does, but I don’t know what I’m doing—O. K. , I’ll buy it on those terms, gladly. And say what’s the difference? I freely admit that I don’t know, about 85 per cent of the time, what the hell I’m doing with this screwball brain of yours, and you don’t either, but we’re doing it—so, can we get on with it? ” His virile, genial vigor was overwhelming; he laughed, and Orr found a weak smile on his lips.

While the electrodes were being applied, however, he ‘ made one last effort to communicate with Haber. “I saw a Citizen’s Arrest for euthanasia on the way here, ” he said.

“What for? ”

“Eugenics. Cancer. ”

Haber nodded, alert. “No wonder you’re depressed. You haven’t yet fully accepted the use of controlled violence for the good of the community; you may never be able to. This is a tough-minded world we’ve got going here, George. A realistic one. But as I said, life can’t be safe. This society is tough-minded, and getting tougher yearly: the future will justify it. We need health. We simply have no room for the incurables, the gene-damaged who degrade the species; we have no time for wasted, useless suffering. ” He spoke with an enthusiasm that rang hollower than usual; Orr wondered how well, in fact, Haber liked this world he had indubitably made. “Now just sit like that, I. don’t want you going to sleep from force of habit. O. K. , great. You may get bored. I want you just to sit for a while. Keep your eyes open, think about anything you like. I’ll be fiddling with Baby’s guts, here. Now, here we go: bingo. ” He pressed the white ON button in the wall panel to the right of the Augmentor, by the head of the couch.

A passing Alien jostled Orr slightly in the crowd on the mall; it raised its left elbow to apologize, and Orr muttered, “Sorry. ” It stopped, half blocking his way: and he too halted, startled and impressed by its nine-foot, greenish, armored impassivity. It was grotesque to the point of being funny; like a sea turtle, and yet like a sea turtle it possessed a strange, large beauty, a serener beauty than that of any dweller, in sunlight, any walker on the earth.

From the still-lifted left elbow the voice issued flatly: “Jor Jor, ” it said.

After a moment Orr recognized his own name in this Barsoomian bisyllable, and said with some embarrassment, “Yes, I’m Orr. ”

“Please forgive warranted interruption. You are human capable of iahklu’ as previously noted. This troubles self. ”

“I don’t—I think—”

“We also have been variously disturbed. Concepts cross in mist. Perception is difficult. Volcanoes emit fire. Help is offered: refusably. Snakebite serum is not prescribed for all. Before following directions leading in wrong directions, auxiliary forces may be summoned, in immediate-following fashion: Er’ perrehnne! ”

“Er’ perrehnne, ”Orr repeated automatically, his whole mind intent on trying to understand what the Alien was telling him.

“If desired. Speech is silver, silence is gold. Self is universe. Please forgive interruption, crossing in mist. ” The Alien, though neckless and waistless, gave an impression of bowing, and passed on, huge and greenish above the gray-faced crowd. Orr stood staring after him until Haber said, “George! ”

“What? ” He looked stupidly around at the room, the desk, the window.

“What the hell did you do? ”

“Nothing, ” Orr said. He was still sitting on the couch, his hair full of electrodes. Haber had pushed the OFF button of the Augmentor and had come around in front of the couch, staring first at Orr and then at the EEG screen.

He opened the machine and checked the permanent record inside it, recorded by pens on paper tape. “Thought I’d misread the screen, ” he said, and gave a peculiar laugh, a very clipped version of his usual full-throated roar. “Queer stuff going on in your cortex there, and I wasn’t even feeding your cortex at all with the Augmentor, I’d just begun a slight stimulus to the pons, nothing specific. .. . What’s this. .. . Christ, that must be 150 mv there. ” He turned suddenly to Orr. “What were you thinking? Reconstruct it. ”

An extreme reluctance possessed Orr, amounting to a sense of threat, of danger.

“I thought—I was thinking about the Aliens. ”

“The Aldebaranians? Well? ”

“I just thought of one I saw on the street, coming here. ”

“And that reminded you, consciously or unconsciously, of the euthanasia you saw performed. Right? O. K. That might explain the funny business here down in the emotive centers, the Augmentor picked it up and exaggerated it.

You must have felt that—something special, unusual going on in your mind? ”

“No, ” Orr said, truthfully. It had not felt unusual.

“O. K. Now look, in case my reactions worried you there, you should know that I’ve had this Augmentor hooked up to my own brain several hundred times, and on lab subjects, some forty-five different subjects in fact. It’s not going to hurt you any more than it did them. But that reading was a very unusual one for an adult subject, and I simply wanted to check with you to see if you felt it subjectively. ”

Haber was reassuring himself, not Orr, but it didn’t matter. Orr was past reassurance.

“O. K. Here we go again. ” Haber restarted the EEG, and approached the ON button of the Augmentor. Orr set his teeth and faced Chaos and Old Night.