Part 4 (1/2)

Fred was already out the door.

In many places the streets were almost blocked by smashed cars, but little had changed since Abernathy's last venture home, and he made good time. The suburbs were choking in haze that smelled like incinerator smoke. A gas station attendant holding a pump handle stared in astonishment as he drove by, then waved. Abernathy didn't wave back. On one of these expeditions he had seen a knifing, and now he didn't like to look.

He stopped the car at the curb before his house. The remains of his house. It was charred almost to the ground. The blackened chimney was all that stood over chest high.

He got out of his old Cortina and slowly crossed the lawn, which was marked by black footprints. In the distance a dog barked insistently.

Jill stood in the kitchen, humming to herself and moving black things from here to there. She looked up as Abernathy stopped in the side yard before her. Her eyes twitched from side to side. ”You're home,” she said cheerily. ”How was your day?”

”Jill, let's go out to dinner,” Abernathy said.

”But I'm already cooking!”

”I can see that.” He stepped over what had been the kitchen wall and took her arm. ”Don't worry about that. Let's go anyway.”

”My my,” Jill said, brus.h.i.+ng his face with a sooty hand. ”Aren't you romantic this evening.”

He stretched his lips wide. ”You bet. Come on.” He pulled her carefully out of the house and across the yard, and helped her into the Cortina. ”Such chivalry,” she remarked, eyes darting about in tandem.

Abernathy got in and started the engine. ”But Fred,” his wife said, ”what about Jeff and Fran?”

Abernathy looked out his window. ”They've got a babysitter,” he finally said.

Jill frowned, nodded, sat back in her seat. Her broad face was smudged. ”Ah,” she said, ”I do so like to dine out.”

”Yes,” Abernathy said, and yawned. He felt drowsy. ”Oh no,” he said. ”No!” He bit his lip, pinched the back of the hand on the wheel. Yawned again. ”No!” he cried. Jill jerked against her door in surprise. He swerved to avoid hitting an Oriental woman sitting in the middle of the road. ”I must get to the lab,” he shouted. He pulled down the Cortina's sun visor, took a pen from his coat pocket and scrawled To The Lab. To The Lab. Jill was staring at him. ”It wasn't my fault,” she whispered. Jill was staring at him. ”It wasn't my fault,” she whispered.

He drove them onto the freeway. All thirty lanes were clear, and he put his foot down on the accelerator. ”To the lab,” he sang, ”to the lab, to the lab.” A flying police vehicle landed on the highway ahead of them, folded its wings and sped off. Abernathy tried to follow it, but the freeway turned and narrowed, they were back on street level. He shouted with frustration, bit the flesh at the base of his thumb. Jill leaned back against her door, crying. Her eyes looked like small beings, a team trying to jerk its way free. ”I couldn't help it,” she said. ”He loved me, you know. And I loved him.”

Abernathy drove on. Some streets were burning. He wanted to go west, needed to go west. The car was behaving oddly. They were on a tree-lined avenue, out where there were few houses. A giant Boeing 747 lay across the road, its wings slewed forward. A high tunnel had been cut through it so traffic could pa.s.s. A cop with whistle and white gloves waved them through.

On the dashboard an emergency light blinked. To The Lab. To The Lab. Abernathy sobbed convulsively. ”I don't know how!” Abernathy sobbed convulsively. ”I don't know how!”

Jill, his sister, sat up straight. ”Turn left,” she said quietly. Abernathy threw the directional switch and their car rerouted itself onto the track that veered left. They came to other splits in the track, and each time Jill told him which way to go. The rear-view mirror bloomed with smoke.

Then he woke up. Winston was swabbing his arm with a wad of cotton, wiping off a droplet of blood.

”Amphetamines and pain,” Winston whispered.

They were in the lab. About a dozen lab techs, postdocs, and grad students were in there at their countertops, working with great speed. ”How's Jill?” Abernathy said.

”Fine, fine. She's sleeping right now. Listen, Fred. I've found a way to keep us awake for longer periods of time. Amphetamines and pain. Regular injections of benzedrine, plus a sharp burst of pain every hour or so, administered in whatever way you find most convenient. Metabolism stays too high for the mind to slip into the dreamwalking. I tried it and stayed fully awake and alert for six hours. Now we're all using the method.”

Abernathy watched the lab techs dash about. ”I can tell.” He could feel his heart's rapid emphatic thumping.

”Well let's get to it,” Winston said intently. ”Let's make use of this time.”

Abernathy stood. Winston called a little meeting. Feeling the gazes fixed on him, Abernathy collected his thoughts. ”The mind consists of electrochemical action. Since we're all suffering the effects of this, it seems to me we can ignore the chemical and concentrate on the electrical. If the ambient fields have changed... Anyone know how many gauss the magnetic field is now? Or what the cosmic ray count is?”

They stared at him.

”We can tune in to the s.p.a.ce station's monitor,” he said. ”And do the rest here.”

So he worked, and they worked with him. Every hour a grinning Winston came around with hypodermics in hand, singing ”Speed, speed, spee-ud!” He convinced Abernathy to let droplets of hydrochloric acid fall on the inside of his forearm.

It kept Abernathy awake better than it did the others. For a whole day, then two, he worked without pause, eating crackers and drinking water as he worked, giving himself the injections when Winston wasn't there.

After the first few hours his a.s.sistants began slipping back into dreamwalking, despite the injections and acid splas.h.i.+ngs. a.s.signments he gave were never completed. One of his techs presented him with a successful experiment: the two rats, grafted together at the leg. Vainly Abernathy tried to pummel the man back to wakefulness.

In the end he did all the work himself. It took days. As his techs collapsed or wandered off he s.h.i.+fted from counter to counter, squinting sand-filled eyes to read oscilloscope and computer screen. He had never felt so exhausted in his life. It was like taking tests in a subject he didn't understand, in which he was severely r.e.t.a.r.ded.

Still he kept working. The EEGs showed oscillation between wakefulness and REM sleep, in a pattern he had never seen. And there were correlations between the EEGs and fluctuations in the magnetic field.

Some of the men's flickering eyes were open, and they sat on the floors talking to each other or to him. Once he had to calm Winston, who was on the floor weeping and saying, ”We'll never stop dreaming, Fred, we'll never stop.” Abernathy gave him an injection, but it didn't have any effect.

He kept working. He sat at a crowded table at his high school reunion, and found he could work anyway. He gave himself an injection whenever he remembered. He got very, very tired.

Eventually he felt he understood as much as he was going to. Everyone else was lying in the cot room with Jill, or was slumped on the floors. Eyes and eyelids were twitching.

”We move through s.p.a.ce filled with dust and gas and fields of force. Now all the constants have changed. The read-outs from the s.p.a.ce station show that, show signs of a strong electromagnetic field we've apparently moved into. More dust, cosmic rays, gravitational flux. Perhaps it's the shockwave of a supernova, something nearby that we're just seeing now. Anyone looked up into the sky lately? Anyway. Something. The altered field has thrown the electrical patterns of our brains into something like what we call the REM state. Our brains rebel and struggle towards consciousness as much as they can, but this field forces them back. So we oscillate.” He laughed weakly, and crawled up onto one of the countertops to get some sleep.

He woke and brushed the dust off his lab coat, which had served him as a blanket. The dirt road he had been sleeping on was empty. He walked. It was cloudy, and nearly dark.

He pa.s.sed a small group of shacks, built in a tropical style with open walls and palm thatch roofs. They were empty. Dark light filled the sky.

Then he was at the sea's edge. Before him extended a low promontory, composed of thousands of wooden chairs, all crushed and piled together. At the point of the promontory there was a human figure, seated in a big chair that still had seat and back and one arm.

Abernathy stepped out carefully, onto slats and lathed cylinders of wood, from a chair arm to the plywood bottom of a chair seat. Around him the gray ocean was strangely calm; gla.s.sy swells rose and fell over the slick wood at waterline without a sound. Insubstantial clouds of fog, the lowest parts of a solid cloud cover, floated slowly onsh.o.r.e. The air was salty and wet. Abernathy s.h.i.+vered, stepped down to the next fragment of weathered gray wood.

The seated man turned to look at him. It was Winston. ”Fred,” he called, loud in the silence of the dawn. Abernathy approached him, picked up a chair back, placed it carefully, sat.

”How are you?” Winston said.

Abernathy nodded. ”Okay.” Down close to the water he could hear the small slaps and sucking of the sea's rise and fall. The swells looked a bit larger, and he could see thin smoky mist rising from them as they approached the sh.o.r.e.

”Winston,” he croaked, and cleared his throat. ”What's happened?”

”We're dreaming.”

”But what does that mean?”

Winston laughed wildly. ”Emergent stage one sleep, transitional sleep, rapid sleep, rhombencephalic sleep, pontine sleep, activated sleep, paradoxical sleep.” He grinned ironically. ”No one knows what it is.”

”But all those studies.”