THE DREAMING EARTH
John Brunner




The Heaven I have overpassed in greatness and this great Earth. Have I not drunk of the Soma?

Lo! I will put down this Earth here or yonder. Have I not drunk of the Soma?

Swiftly will I smite the Earth here or yonder. Have I not drunk of the Soma?

—Rigveda: Song of Indra





1
"The original plan was that he should change planes at Topeka, go to Pueblo, be at the Institute by two-thirty, get on a plane again at six and be back in New York the same night.

Only they cut the Topeka-Pueblo schedule directly after he left New York. They didn't say why, but anyone could guess. Most likely, some essential spare parts or even a cargo of fuel had been rerouted elsewhere on the continent to meet an emergency. There were always emergencies.

At Topeka, the local Transport Rationalization officer was a surly, irritable man whose job was getting him down. The best alternative route he could offer was a ride in a five-year-old car driven by a red-faced man called Mitchell, who had a farm somewhere in the area and consequently enjoyed vital-production privileges. But the car had a dozen different grinding noises in its works.

And, a few miles short of the Kansas-Colorado state border, it gave a huge reverberating bang and ground to a permanent halt.

Since the moment the air hostess had warned him he couldn't expect a plane out of Topeka, Nicholas Greville had felt a helpless, senseless rage, born of sheer frustration, mounting inside him. As though the bang of the car's engine had been the sound of a tamper being blown from the vent of an erupting volcano, he felt that rage exploding upward now.

The whole doubly-damned world was conspiring against him!

With no more comment than a sigh, Mitchell switched off the ignition and sat back, fumbling a cigarette from his pocket.

"Aren't you going to do anything?" Greville snapped.

"What?" said Mitchell wearily, and lit the cigarette.

"Hell and damnation!" was all Greville could find to reply. He threw open the door beside him and got out, trailing the official briefcase which was chained to his arm like a sort of plastic placenta.

There was no one to be seen in either direction along the sunny-hot road. No other vehicles were approaching. The only sign of movement—aside from the illusory wavering of the heat-haze—was the single plume of smoke crawling up behind a rise that marked the location of the last small town they had come through.

Sweat prickled on his face and inside the dark uniform shirt and pants he was wearing. The briefcase objectively weighed a few pounds; subjectively, as much as a steel ball. The cuff of the chain had chafed his wrist. The sun shimmered blindingly on his agent's shoulder badges, and he jerked violently as though to shrug off the burden of dazzling light The hell with everything.

He walked in front of the car and bent to look at the engine compartment. The fasteners on the hood had been broken and replaced with loops of twisted wire. By its appearance, the wire hadn't been disturbed since it was fitted.

Greville untwisted the loops with nervous fingers, compelled by the dragging briefcase and chain to work one-handed. In his last frantic haste he broke a fingernail and cursed his clumsiness as he shoved the hood back. The stay was broken too; he had to fetch a rock and jam it under the hinge before he could stop the hood falling on his head. Fumes rising from the engine choked and blinded him at first, and the whole mechanism proved to be covered with a thick black sludgy film of oil. Coughing, poking away the disguising sludge, he eventually established what must have happened. The oil in the main bearings must have been due for a change billions of revs ago. The housing of the front bearing had split open, and when he picked up a fingertip load of the oil which had escaped, he felt particles of metal in it gritty as sand. With the oil in that condition, the bearing would have worn, kerosene would have seeped through from the combustion chamber, and the explosion had been the announcement that this kerosene had hit flashpoint.

He jerked away the rock that was jamming the hinge, slammed the hood down without bothering to retwist the wires and hold it shut, and spun on his heel to throw the rock as far as he could. The meaningless act relieved his tension momentarily. He fumbled out his handkerchief and rubbed his hands on it.

"Find the trouble?" Mitchell said, not moving from behind the steering wheel.

"You need a new engine, is all," said Greville harshly. 

"Figured so," Mitchell agreed. He drew on his cigarette. 

"You figured so! Is that all you have to say?" 

"What else?" the farmer countered. "You think I can find a new engine by turning over rocks?"

Greville didn't answer. His burning eyes remained on Mitchell's face, but he wasn't really seeing the man. He was trying to figure out a course of action. It was after four in the afternoon now. He had to get to the Institute somehow, in order to get rid of the briefcase—its lock was person-keyed to Dr. Barriman. (The way things were going, it would likely turn out that Barriman had dropped dead this afternoon, and he'd have to wait for a locksmith before he was free of his burden.) So he couldn't just turn around and head for New York again. There still wasn't another car in sight. He would have to walk back to the last little town, find a phone, call the Institute and beg them to send out a 'copter for him—if one was available.

And then he would have to call Leda and tell her he wasn't going to be back in time for tomorrow after all. He wasn't looking forward to that.

The fury behind his eyes was sawing through Mitchell's affectation of calm. Now the farmer shifted in his seat and spoke in a defiant tone.

"Don't blame me, Greville!" he said. "I didn't ask to have you ride with me, remember—I just did like the law says and told the TR office in Topeka I was going this way today."

"You ought to have changed your bearing oil!" snapped Greville. "I'd have thought a car was worth looking after, these days!"

Mitchell sighed. "You UN agents just don't seem to be on the same planet as the rest of us. I've been waiting for lube oil for more'n a month, and not just for the car, either —for my harvester as well."

"I'm not blaming you," said Greville with an effort. He felt the heat of his rage subsiding slowly. "It's just that—hell, you know!"

"Yeah, we all know." Mitchell paused, the smoke of the cigarette wreathing into the hot, still air. He continued abruptly, "I didn't plan this! There are guys, I guess, who'd deliberately wreck a car for the fun of stranding a UN agent in the middle of nowhere and seeing him squirm. That type—why take away what's ours and give it to a bunch of lousy greasers? I don't feel that way. The Food and Agriculture man I work with is a good Joe, doing his best to make supplies go around. I put up with it when things go short. 'Bout time you learned to, 'pears to me."

Greville shifted to detach his shirt from the sticky skin on his shoulder blades. "Sorry," he said. "I wasn't getting mad at you. Just at the world in general." He lifted the wrist on which the case was chained. "I was supposed to deliver these documents to the UN Institute at Sandy Gulch at two-thirty this afternoon. It's after four, and here I am."

"If the job is urgent, why didn't you get the UN to lay on a plane for you direct?"

"Now who's living on a different planet?" Greville exclaimed. "Why do people think the UN is filthy rich when everyone else is short? We don't waste fuel and pilots' time on running little errands like this."

"Well, if it's a little errand, why are you so mad?" demanded Mitchell reasonably. Greville spread his hands.

"If you must know—tomorrow's my wedding anniversary, and I swore to my wife I'd be home tonight.

Mitchell grunted. "Ought to train your wife like mine. She's grown used to this kind of thing. . . . What are you going to do? Walk back to a phone?"

"Guess I'll have to."

"Uh-huh. Well, when you get to one, maybe you'd call my wife for me. Tell her I'll be back when I arrive." He took a slip of paper from the compartment in the dash and scribbled the number down.

"Sure, I'll do that for you," said Greville. He had been mechanically rubbing his hands, over and over again, with his handkerchief. Now he stuffed the oil-blackened cloth back in his pocket and took the paper Mitchell gave him.

"How about you?" he said, pocketing it.

"Me? I don't fancy walking in this heat. If someone comes by I'll hitch a ride to Pueblo—or somewhere. If not, then I'll walk down the road when it's cooler."

He tossed his spent cigarette out of the window. "What the hell!" he finished.

Greville hesitated. "But what about the car?"

"If someone comes by who can tow it, fine. If not, I'll have to leave it here till someone finds an engine for me. Which may be never."

The bitterness now coloring his tone drove Greville to persist. "Who's the FAO man you mentioned—the one you said was a good Joe? Maybe I could pass him the word when I get to the Institute."

Mitchell curled his lip. "I don't care to have private words put in for me, thanks all the same. Like I said, I try to keep my respect for the UN agencies. I know there's graft and influence in them, same as there is anywhere. But—"

"That's not what I meant," Greville interrupted. "I mean —well, say there's a farm-service team operating near here at the moment. Someone could get to you with a spare bearing. That would take you home, at least."

Mitchell grunted. "It's a point," he conceded. "Okay—do that. But I don't want to sit here after sundown waiting for someone who may never show."

"Leave the key in the ignition lock, then. No one could move this thing as it stands. I'll ask them to mail you the key when they've finished the repair. If there is a team around here, that is."

"I'll do that. My address is on file at the Institute, of course."

There was a moment of empty silence. "I'd better start walking," Greville muttered. "So long. Thanks for the ride."

"What there was of it," said Mitchell, blank-faced. "So long."





2
The heat was incredible. The plastic handle of the briefcase felt as though it was welding itself to his fingers; dust got up around his feet with every step he took, coating his shoes, and his legs almost to the knees, with a yellowish-gray film. The wavering plume of smoke beyond the rise, indicating his goal, seemed to get no nearer.

In an overcrowded world like this, it was almost insanely ridiculous to think of being stranded miles from anywhere. He tried to relieve his tense mind by considering the fact as an amusing paradox, and failed. He pictured the houseboats jostling out across the Great Lakes; he pictured the log cabins of squatters in Westchester County; he pictured the rabbit-warren developments of California cities, and then glanced at the square miles of emptiness surrounding him.

It wasn't a paradox. It was logical. It had always been that way. In the infernal rat-race against the population spiral it was always quicker to add to what one already had. There was never time or surplus productivity to allot to a place where one had to start from scratch.

Oh, attempts were made to break out of the trap, and indeed he could see proof of that not far away. A ruled-out square of green in the prevalent dusty landscape marked a pilot project for soil regeneration. There, a culture of anhydrous bacteria would have broken down caked dirt and bonded it against the wind; then other bacteria would have displaced them and a truckload of hygroscopic compounds would have been plowed in; lastly, when the concentration of ground water was high enough, cacti and other dry-earth plants had been sown. But the cacti weren't very useful yet, and in any case it was a couple of square miles in a vastness of scarcity.

The sign said:





ISOLATION, KANSAS----HEIGHT 2721----POP.

and someone had painted out the population figure, replacing it with a jagged line like a fever chart.

He had barely noticed the town when driving through it in Mitchell's car an hour earlier, except as an interruption to the monotony. Now he did see it consciously, he found there wasn't much of it, but what there was was crowded—like everywhere else. There were a lot of kids playing alongside the streets; schools here would presumably function on a relay system, as was general nowadays. The newer, post-turn-of-the-century houses and apartments on the way into the town were dusty and shabby and overcrowded. Right in the center things were worse still—patched, cracking, shifting buildings full of people. Eyes followed Greville as he walked. A bunch of kids piled out of an abandoned car at the roadside and followed him, shouting, "UN thief! UN thief!"

Well, you got used to that.

Maybe, Greville reflected, it would be better not to have uniforms for the UN agencies. And then, on the other hand, there was still the traditional association of a uniform with authority.

The hell with it.

He came to a drugstore not long after picking up the kids, and walked in. There was dust all over. The only cola bottles on show were old faded dummies, and the ice cream freezer was empty, its lid open to prove the fact. No one was serving, but when he dropped his briefcase on the counter the noise brought a response. A door behind the counter moved, and a head poked out—a middle-aged, graying head belonging to a drawn-faced man of average height

"Yeah?"

"A cold drink," Greville said. "And some phone tokens."

The man came slowly through the door, pulling it shut behind him. He didn't say anything for a while, as he took in Greville's uniform. Then he glanced at the window.

He said, "Don't get me wrong, mister. But if I serve you in here, those kids are going to smash my windows. You know that, don't you?"

Greville looked around. Outside, the kids had lined up, watchful, waiting—and not only kids now, but teenagers with old hard faces, close to the dusty panes.

He passed a weary hand across his face, feeling the accumulated dust grit his skin like abrasive paper. From a throat as dry as Death Valley, he said, "The hell with the drink, then. Just the phone tokens."

The store owner hesitated. Then he said again, his voice pleading, "Don't get me wrong! But why don't you go to the UN agent's office and phone from there?"

Startled, Greville let his hand fall to his case. "Is there an agent here? I didn't know."

"Sure there is!" said the stole owner eagerly. "Almost directly opposite. Over what used to be a shoestore. Can't miss it!"

Greville picked up his case.

"Thanks, mister!" the store owner breathed. "I sure appreciate that. Don't get me wrong, but—"

"Nobody could get you wrong," said Greville acidly, and went out.

The grouped kids parted as he pushed the door back. They were boys and girls of fourteen to eighteen, thin, eyes surrounded with wrinkles as they screwed up their lids against the glare. Most of them wore faded shirts and jeans, some decorated defiantly with patches of contrasting material—red, sky-blue, yellow.

A whisper passed among them while Greville glanced over the street. Sure enough, there was a sign in a window— the glass was out, but the sign was still there: ISOLATION— FAO OFFICE.

While he paused, a decision had been taken among the group of kids. Now a girl stepped into his path as he made to move away: older than most of her companions, with faded brown hair clipped short, her adult breasts on her adolescent body tied into prominence by the knotting together of the tails of her shirt.

"Hey!" she said. "Hey, mister!"

Greville turned cold eyes on her and said nothing.

A snigger went around the watching group.

"Mister, we just want you to know, that's all. You robbed us blind. You took the kicks out of life—no Cokes, no candy, no cars any more. An' we just want you to know—we don't care."

Greville was at a loss for an answer, staring at the girl's tense, almost animal face, in which her brown eyes burned like brown fires. The muscles were taut on her bare midriff; her breasts rose and fell almost as though she was panting after a long, hard run.

"No?" she said, shaking her head. "You don't get it, huh?"

Greville shook his head, warily studying the girl's companions as well as herself. They didn't seem to be poised to do anything, but there was always a risk.

"Well, see here then!" said the girl with sudden vehemence, and thrust her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans, dragging open the snap fasteners at the sides and shoving the garment to the level of her knees. "The UN didn't give us this, mister, so what the hell is the good of the UN?"

Almost before his eyes had shifted downwards, Greville knew with sick certainty what it was he was going to see.

So it had come here too, had it? It had even reached as far as this.

And it was what he had expected. From the crease of the girl's thigh, where her threadbare briefs were gray-white on her tanned skin, to almost her knees, the pattern of small round scars repeated and repeated and repeated.

They were waiting for his reaction: a comment, an excuse. Something. He didn't give it to them. He stepped past the girl and strode across the street. He didn't look back.





The door of the UN agency office was locked, of course. He pressed the annunciator button and gave his rank and authority, and a man's voice answered, telling him to come in. The door slid back, paused for him to pass through, closed with a sucking sound behind him.

There had been subsidence here. There were small cracks in all the walls of the hallway, and when he tried the elevator door it was too stiff to move.

The same voice he had heard over the annunciator called down to him from a landing above. "You'll have to use the stairs! Elevator's out of order—the car's stuck between floors."

Greville acknowledged the advice and went slowly up the stairs. The man was waiting for him outside an office on the second floor. He was youthful, but his eyes were old. He wore the FAO uniform with junior-rank badges on the shoulders of the shirt, and patches of sweat discolored his armpits.

"I'm Lumberger, FAO rep here," he said, putting out his hand. "God, I feel marooned in this place! Good to see someone else in the business."

Greville shook his hand and followed him into the office. It was cramped and untidy.

"What on earth are you doing here, anyway?" Lumberger was saying. "I saw you come down the street—couldn't believe my eyes when I saw you go into the drugstore. Especially with those damned kids following you. Say, what was the strip-tease act for? Not going into the brothel business, are they?"

"She wasn't selling anything," Greville said, his voice strangely rough in his own ears. "Someone's selling it to her."

"Selling her what?" Lumberger indicated a chair, sat down, thrust a pack of cigarettes across the littered desk.

"Happy dreams, of course."

Lumberger stopped in mid-movement, the pack of cigarettes resting on his open palm. "Here?" he said incredulously.

"You mean you didn't know?" Greville's voice was sarcastic rather than incredulous.

"No! I swear it! This must be new! I—"

"New be damned," interrupted Greville violently. "That girl must have been on it for six months at least—she has scars all down both thighs. And from the way she was showing off, she's probably not the furthest gone of the bunch." He took a cigarette from Lumberger's pack and snatched a book of matches from the desk. "You're falling down on your job if you didn't know about it."

"Now see here!" Lumberger snapped, his face reddening. "It's all very well for someone like you to walk in and tell me I'm falling down on the job. But you just don't know what it's like in a place like this. 'UN' is a dirty word! I hardly dare go out on the street because the kids gang up on me; they throw rocks at my car when I go to check the patches of reclamation we have around here. They say it's my fault, the lack of sodas and the power cuts and all the rest of it, and what the hell can I do? Turn around and say they ought to be glad there's no candy to rot their teeth? Tell 'em it's thanks to people like me they can walk straight, haven't got bow legs from rickets, haven't got bellies bloated with pellagra—?"

"Stow it," said Greville wearily. "I'm sorry. It's the heat. That, and the fact that I'm with Narcotics Division in New York, so maybe it seems more important to me than it really is."

Lumberger's defiant manner changed to one of sullenness. "Oh, sure it's important," he said. "But my business is Food and Agriculture, and I don't see why someone from another department should tell me I'm falling down on the job."

"If you weren't expecting to be told just that, how come you leaped to your own defense so quickly?" demanded Greville.

"I'm saying it's not my fault!" Lumberger blazed. "The situation here is absolutely impossible!"

There was a whine on the edge of his raised voice, like the cry of an unoiled bearing in the heart of a noisy engine. The thought reminded Greville of Mitchell sitting stolidly in his broken-down car. He sighed and tapped the first ash from his cigarette.

"I didn't come here to abuse you," he said. "I just want to get the hell out. I was riding TR-style in a car that broke down the other side of the town, trying to make the Institute at Sandy Gulch."

"So?" said Lumberger.

Greville restrained his irritation by main force. He said, "First off, do you have a farm-service team working near here, that could get out to the guy's car and fit him a new turbine bearing?"

Lumberger shook his head. "There is a team working this area, but it has an eight-day backlog of emergency calls."

So much for Mitchell, then. Greville shrugged. "Then all I want is to use your phone and get out of your hair."

"Help yourself," said Lumberger, scowling, and thrust back his chair. "I'll be in the lab next door if you want me, finishing a soil test."

He opened and shut the door rapidly. It squealed in its grooves.





3
Greville licked his lips with a tongue that was almost too dry for him to taste the salty dust on his face. He ached to wash—better, to bathe, or plunge into a river. Later. Later. The picture of the girl's scarred thighs kept rising in front of his eyes.

He picked up the handset of the phone and moved to come fully into range of the camera. He dialed the Institute's interstate coding, waited till the attention signal sounded in his ear, then added the internal coding for Dr. Barriman's office. He saw the picture go up on the four-inch screen, shaky but clear.

"Greville here, Dr. Barriman," he said unnecessarily. "I'm stranded at a place called Isolation. Could you spare a helicopter to get me out of here?"

It was always incongruous to see the still picture on the phone's screen, changing at half-minute intervals like a slow dissolve in an old-fashioned movie, while hearing the voice of one's correspondent crackling on. Greville half closed his eyes and drew on his cigarette again.

"Where the hell have you been?" Barriman was saying frostily. "You were due here two and a half hours ago."

"They cut the planes between Topeka and Pueblo. Nothing till tomorrow. I had a ride laid on by the Topeka TR officer. The car stranded me before we crossed the state line."

"All right. Isolation, you said the place was called? I'll try and find a 'copter for you, but I can't promise anything till late tonight. This is a damnable nuisance. I suppose you know what you're carrying?"

"I can't forget what I'm carrying—it's chained to me!" Greville said harshly. Then, with an effort: "Sorry. No. I wasn't told. Documents, I imagine. But the lock is person-keyed to you."

"Documents! I wasn't expecting documents!" The picture on the phone was melting now, fixing a frown on Barriman's face which matched his tone of voice.

"I'm only a courier this trip," Greville said.

"Hah! Then someone at the New York end has made a fool of himself. What you're actually supposed to be carrying is half a pound of happy dreams."

A cold hand seemed to close on Greville's throat. Reflexively he slapped the briefcase to reassure himself it was still there.

"What?"

"What I said," Barriman returned irritably. "That's what I'm expecting, and that's what you've probably got. Mark you, to find that you haven't got it any longer wouldn't surprise me —addicts seem to be able to smell the stuff through lead casing, practically. Which is why you're bringing it and not the regular mail run."

"Jesus!" said Greville with alarm. "Well, if there is happy dreams in this case, doctor, you've just missed losing it and me by the narrowest of margins. I was stopped by a gang of anti-UN teenagers outside a drugstore a few minutes back. Addicts!"

Barriman didn't answer for a moment. Then he said in a strangled tone, "Addicts? Where did you say you are?"

"Yes, I know—it shook me too. But there isn't any doubt. One of the girls pulled her jeans down and showed me the marks on her legs."

The picture on the phone melted again. This time the expression which froze on the screen was one of dismay.

"Isolation!" Barriman said. "But FAO have an agent there, don't they? Why haven't we been told? Has this been going on long?"

"Six months at least, maybe more. I didn't stop to count the scars, but there were plenty of them." Greville drew on his cigarette and ground it out. "I'm talking from the FAO agent's office now. Man called Lumberger. Says it was news to him."

Barriman sighed. "So chalk up another area of incidence on the map," he said. "I'll get that 'copter to you as fast as I can, and a couple of fieldworkers as well if they can be spared. Any chance of finding the original focus?"

Greville considered. Finally he gave a nod, and his voice was brighter when he spoke again. "In a town like this—they've painted out the population figure, but it can only be a few thousand—it should be possible! If we can isolate the addicts from the non-addicts. If there are any non-addicts."

"Right," Barriman said. "See you when you get here."

The screen of the phone went blank. Greville sat looking at it, his dull spirits rising temporarily. That was a point Barriman had. Identifying the original focus of addiction might very well be possible in a small town like this, although—as Greville knew from bitter experience—in a big city it was invariably hopeless. He toyed with the idea for awhile.

Then he stirred reluctantly. Now he had to call Leda and— explain.

Only, of course, he did have one more chance to put it off for a few precious moments. He'd promised to call Mitchell's wife. The slip of paper with the number on it was in the pocket of his shirt. He pulled it out, seeing that sweat soaking through the fabric had smeared the writing, but it was still legible. He dialed.

"Yes?" A rather high, nervous voice; the screen showed a middle-aged woman, fading from superficial prettiness, with a discontented mouth. There was a likeness to Leda in the set of that mouth. Greville shivered despite the torrid heat.

"I'm Nicholas Greville," he said. "Your husband—you are Mrs. Mitchell, I suppose?"

"Yes, I am. What about my husband?"

"His car broke down near Isolation on the way to Pueblo. He asked me to call you and say he'd be home as soon as he could."

"But he promised—!" Mrs. Mitchell wailed, and then her voice dropped into a sigh. "Oh, well . . . What's wrong with the car?"

"Main bearing split. Engine seized up."

"I told him it would! I told him to get that oil when it was offered. Well, anyway . . ." She checked herself. "Thanks for calling, Mr.—Mr.—?"

"United Nations Narcotics Department Agent Nicholas Greville, ma'am," said Greville formally. The picture on the screen shifted, just in time to catch and freeze Mrs. Mitchell in the act of putting a horrified hand over her mouth. "And you don't have to worry about where your husband wasn't supposed to get oil from. He didn't, and he was right. In spite of everything."

The horrified expression was still there when Mrs. Mitchell hastily broke the connection.

Was there anything at all he could do for Mitchell? Greville checked the possibilities and discarded them all. The farmer would have to do as he'd originally said.

So now there was no further reason to postpone that call to Leda.

He dialed the interstate coding of his home and waited for the attention signal. Instead, there was a sharp click and a woman's voice came on the line without a picture.

"Transcontinental supervisor," said the voice wearily. "There is a delay of up to four hours on calls to points east of Chicago —I'm sorry." She didn't sound at all sorry.

"Check your line," said Greville harshly. He didn't like to use UN priorities for private calls; nonetheless, the consequences of not calling Leda at all would be worse even than what he could look forward to if he did speak to her.

"What do you mean?" asked the supervisor blankly.

"I mean I'm calling from the United Nations agency office at Isolation, Kansas—Food and Agriculture Organization. And I'm United Nations Narcotics Agent Nicholas Greville. I want crash priority—and you shouldn't have to be told that calls from a UN agent's office are entitled to it!"

"Oh," said the supervisor in an unenthusiastic tone. "All right, I'll see what can be done."

Behind him Greville heard a sardonic chuckle. "I should have told you," Lumberger said. Somehow he had contrived to open the door of the adjacent lab without making it squeak. "That's one of the things they've done to me here—deleted my number from the priority list. Did it three months ago. I sometimes have to wait two days for outgoing calls."

"Who deleted the number?" Greville demanded.

"God knows," Lumberger said, and shrugged. "Someone in the local exchange. Can't find out who. I've complained a dozen times and nothing's been done."

Before Greville could answer, the supervisor was back. "I can get you crash priority in about seven minutes," she said casually. "Every available line is full right now. I'll call you back."

"Do that little thing," said Greville ironically, and cut the connection.

Lumberger sat down behind the desk, wiped his hands on a tissue, and took a cigarette. "Don't know how some people manage to keep going," he said, shaking his head. "I guess I'd make out better if I weren't here on my own so much. I've done four months of a six-month tour, and sometimes I feel I'll go crazy if I have to serve out the rest of it."

"What are you doing in a UN job if you don't like the work?"

"I didn't say that," Lumberger corrected, raising a hand as though to ward off a blow. "Sure I like the work—I'm doing soil development, specialized bacterioculture, all the work I trained to do. But hell! It's like being in jail! There's not a girl in town who'd dare be seen in my company—not that there are many whose company I'd enjoy, I guess, but you get my meaning. I hardly dare leave the office except to go out to the experimental sites, which I have to do, because I had that window smashed by someone trying to break in, and God knows what would happen if I was away for more than a couple of hours. I was thinking, how can you blame those kids for taking to happy dreams, stuck in a hole like this? I mean, I'm from a small town myself, so I know what it's like. But it wasn't so bad ten years ago. There were more cars on the roads—I had a couple of rods I'd done over myself when I was their age. There were a lot more luxuries. There were more—oh, just about everything."

"Except people," said Greville grimly.

"Yeah. Except people," agreed Lumberger, frowning. He appeared to be coming to a decision; now he made it, and leaned forward with a confidential air.

"Say—uh—I couldn't help hearing what you were saying to the guy at the Institute. Don't feel bad about my not having reported that happy dreams was circulating here. I can't make contacts with the local people, and anyway I don't know much about this stuff. I mean, most of it is in big cities, isn't it?"

"I'd have said so, till I saw that girl's legs just now."

"Well, what I mean—" Lumberger broke off, started over. "What I mean is this: you tell me about it, and I'll try and keep my eyes open in the future."

"Barriman said he'd try and get a couple of trained field-workers out here tonight."

"Well—uh—yes, but surely they'd be working under cover, wouldn't they? I mean, they'd try not to be associated with me—"

"Not everyone is ashamed of working for the UN," Greville said stonily. Lumberger threw up his hands.

"There you go again!" he said in an injured tone. "Did I say I was ashamed of it? Did I?"

Greville looked at him, wondering how much he was influenced by the idea that here was a way to get back at the local people for the petty humiliations and ostracism of the past four months. But if he voiced that view, he'd have a real row on his hands. He glanced at the wall clock. Still almost five minutes until his call was ready.

"All right," he said, looking down at the briefcase in front of him. (Half a pound of the stuff in there! He'd never before been so close to so much of it.) "What they call 'happy dreams' is a dark brown powder, very fine, very hygroscopic—so it has to be kept in a sealed jar; it dissolves readily in water. It's a very complex organic compound. It combines with other compounds in the central nervous system to form still another compound, and it's this one which does the work. It's effect is to distort one's apperception of reality, first with vivid dreams; later, as the dreams become so dominating that they're better called visions, real life becomes meaningless and futile to the victim."

"Habit-forming, I suppose?" suggested Lumberger.

"Almost worse than that. Oh, it is habit-forming in the ordinary sense. But after long use, the compound which results from taking happy dreams seems to deposit out in the central nervous system, replacing the constituents of certain nerve cells. And when you get to that stage—" He shrugged. "Apparently you contrive to disappear."

A mixture of incredulity and awe colored Lumberger's tone as he asked, "You mean there's something in these stories one hears?"

At a loss, Greville hesitated. "What? What stories?" he demanded.

Lumberger made a vague gesture. "You know! There's this character Holmes, isn't there? And people write letters in the papers—"

"Oh!" Greville gave a brittle laugh. At the department he had grown so used to discounting Holmesites automatically that for a moment he hadn't known what Lumberger was talking about. "You mean this century's fashionable foolishness, I guess. You can forget about Holmes. He's capitalizing on the tenseness of people's nerves, same as the people who claimed to have met visitors from other planets used to. When I say advanced addicts disappear, I mean it, but not in the same way."

"Into thin air?" Lumberger said sarcastically.

Greville ignored the jab. "Into the teeming millions of the cities, which is just as bad. Very occasionally we get a lead suggesting that one of them has been seen a long way from home some time later, but those leads generally break down. We lost track of the population long ago—it just outran the capacity of computers to handle it—so it's easy enough to hide yourself if you want to. Most likely, extreme addicts kill themselves; just possibly, they eke out a beggar's existence in a tenement where no one asks any questions. And as I said, toward the end they stop being interested in real life, so they wouldn't attract attention to themselves."

"But that could hardly happen in a town the size of this one," Lumberger said shrewdly.

"Exactly." Greville stared thoughtfully at the wall of the room. "That may make this problem very interesting."

"Who peddles the stuff, anyway?" pursued Lumberger. "Is it marketed conventionally, like ordinary narcotics?"

"No," Greville said. "But don't ask me how it is peddled, because even though we've been aware of it for more than two years, we have practically no data to go on. We've managed to seize a few small batches of the drug, but only from addicts we knew about already, and who were generally past the point of taking much interest in their surroundings. A whole mythology has grown up in those two years. Ever hear of Johnny Happydreams, for instance?" 

Lumberger shook his head. "An addict? A peddler?" 

"A mythical super-peddler, you might say. The name's a play on Johnny Appleseed, of course. He's supposed to have gone around the world planting happy dreams trees everywhere he went, ensuring an inexhaustible supply for anyone who wants it. Sometimes I'm tempted to believe the story— if the stuff doesn't grow on trees, God alone knows how there can be so much of it! And about the only other thing we know is even more extraordinary. It's sold at a fixed price—five dollars for the first shot and two dollars for subsequent shots." An expression of astonishment came to Lumberger's face, and he would have said something further, but at that moment the phone buzzed and Greville forgot the other's existence.





4
"Your crash priority call," said the transcontinental supervisor. "The circuit has sound only—sorry!"

The screen stayed blank. The attention signal went on sounding. Damnation, thought Greville. All this screwing up of tensions, all those rehearsals of what I was going to say . . . He was expecting the flat recorded tones of his answering machine; it startled him when at length, after more than twenty buzzes, Leda's voice did come through.

"Leda Greville," she said. "Who is it? I'm not getting a picture, you know."

"Hullo, darling. No picture on this circuit, I'm afraid."

"Oh, it's you." A snowstorm breathed in the words, cold and distant. "Where are you? At the Institute, I hope! According to what you told me you're due aboard your return plane in about ten minutes."

Here it comes. Greville tried to swallow, but his mouth was parched. He said with an effort, "I'm calling from a town near the Kansas-Colorado state line. I got stranded. They cut the schedules out of Topeka."

"Don't tell me the rest of it. You won't be back tonight."

"I'm afraid not," said Greville. He was expecting almost anything bar what he got by way of reply—anger, pleading, even possibly tears. Instead, Leda laughed: a little tinkling laugh like breaking glass.

"I thought as much," she said. "You haven't kept a promise to me in months. You're always letting yourself get stranded and held up and kept working late. Now you call up on a circuit without a picture, so I can't even see where you're speaking from. Well, wherever it is I hope you're having a grand time!" Sudden venom poured into her voice. "So get this! This time I've made the right kind of arrangements! When it pleases your high-and-mightiness to return to the arms of his loving wife, that loving wife is going to be out on the town having the highest time you can still find in this filthy, squalid, poverty-stricken world!"

And the connection broke.

"Give me some water, would you?" said Greville, not looking at Lumberger.

"Sure, that I can find you," Lumberger answered, getting to his feet. "But I haven't been able to lay hands on a decent drink for a month. They won't sell me anything but basics in that stinking store down the road. Can't even get coffee most of the time. It's a hell of a way to treat a UN agent—"

"One more complaint about the way they treat you and I'll push your teeth in," said Greville—factually, not with violence. "Who do you think you're talking to?"

Lumberger looked suddenly frightened. "I'm sorry," he forced out. "It's so seldom I meet anyone else in the same position—" He held out a cup of water, his hand shaking. "Here!"

It was warm, but it was water. Greville drank carefully, feeling almost that the inside of his mouth was absorbing the liquid rather than that he was swallowing it. He gave the cup back and muttered a word of thanks.

Uncertainly, Lumberger sat down again. "Uh—how long before that 'copter gets here?" he ventured.

"I don't know," Greville said. He felt the snake-shaped coolness of the water inside him coiling down into his belly. "I'd like to wash up, if I can—and maybe stretch out for a while?"

"Sure! There's a room through there—my bedroom, the rest of the premises. This is my home sweet home. All of it"





The stream of water was minimal; it took minutes for the flow to fill the sink. As soon as there was enough to cover his hands Greville cupped it up and sluiced his face. The dust on his skin became a kind of thin, slimy mud.

Leda ...

Well, there wasn't much point in worrying about that any longer.

Tomorrow would be their sixth anniversary. He'd been away on a job for the third, the fourth and the fifth. And each time, trying to make up for it afterward wasn't the same.

The dust was in his hair, under his nails, all over. Absently, he rubbed it away, rinsed, rubbed again.

How much of it is my fault?

Because it wasn't just the missing of anniversaries. It was the whole complex problem of being married to a UN agent. In the beginning it was romantic, as marrying an army officer had been last century. And of course, as Leda would stoutly maintain, the UN was wonderful, the only thing that was keeping the world from falling to bits!

(Was it keeping the world from falling to bits?)

Then, after the first year, when she had begun to hear the whispers she had formerly shut her ears to: "But Nick is with the Narcotics Department! You can't say that's the same as —as the rest of them!"

(But it was the same. In its principles, at least.) And now, when things were bad, Leda was breaking. Greville knew it was no good blaming himself. The real fault was in her. Romance was no protection against the strain of being married to a UN agent. But she preferred to cling to romance rather than to him.





The water gurgled away from the sink, leaving a rim of gray. He wiped the rim with a finger, rinsed the finger, dried off sketchily on a towel. Then he slipped off his shoes and lay down on the thrown-together bed.

Once, people blamed the government when things went wrong. They said, "They ought—or oughtn't—to do such-and such."

So it was nothing new. Now, people simply blamed the UN because it was doing the unpopular things governments used to do, and doing more of them more often.

Greville lit another cigarette, staring at the ceiling. If only the governments hadn't hung on so long! If only the UN hadn't been faced with an impossible task from the outset!

He traced the deadly curve of the population graph with the tip of the cigarette. It seemed to float burning in the air. Alongside that curve he drew others. He knew them by heart —wall charts of them hung in every UN center, serving as a deadly mental whip to the flagging efforts of overtired workers.

Housing.

Known sources of raw material in millions of tons.

Food production.

Falling short. Always, falling short.

It had been a long time before the curves for North America cut. When they did so, a few years ago, people said, "Well, it'll only be for a while. Tighten our belts!"

Then they said, "Other people are worse off than we are."

And now they said, "Those UN thieves!"

"What's the alternative?" Greville quoted under his. breath. "Legalize cannibalism, of course!"

That was from Secretary-General Zafiq's last state-of-the-planet report to the plenary session of the UN in New York. And—as Greville had seen, watching on the internal television system of the UN building—his face suggested that he didn't mean it as a joke.

Well, there were palliatives. There were directives about the use of fuel, power, essential raw materials. You don't light your furnace with oil that could be driving a train of one hundred flatcars. You don't watch Romance of the Old West with power that could be pushing steel strip through a rolling mill. You don't build a theater with concrete which could erect another apartment block.

And then it had to become: you don't drive with an empty seat in your car if there's someone else going your way. You don't sleep with two empty rooms in your apartment if there are applicants on the city housing list.

Blockage. Spate. Flood. And no storm drains.

Before, there was always room to maneuver. So there was a shortage of employment: so you directed industries to the area. People got their jobs, got their wages, found there were things to buy with the wages. There was a surplus.

There was still a surplus. Only it was much smaller, and many, many more people had claims on it. In theory, so long as there remained a certain minimum of ground per person, the world would be rich. The trouble was—invariably—distribution.

For too long the situation had been patched up by crude ad hoc measures. No more burning of bumper wheat harvests. No more firing locomotives with coffee beans.

But then what did you get? A population of two and a half thousand million in the mid-twentieth century; six and a half thousand million at the century's turn; more than eight thousand million at the present day. Every moment, thousands of new mouths screaming for food! Thousands of new bodies needing to be clothed! Thousands of new minds demanding education, information, entertainment!

Oh, it could have been done! thought Greville grayly, lying on the untidy bed. If the governments hadn't hung on to their local sovereignties until they were already desperate; if they hadn't panicked and tried to freeze technical progress in the eighties; if they'd spent one per cent of their arms budgets on planning for this explosion ...

Only they hadn't. After all, those arms were potentially so efficient at reversing the population growth.

It could have been done! The work Lumberger was doing here—one man, a lab, and half a dozen test sites—could have been done before 1970, and by now the world's deserts would have been halved. As it was, they were still growing. A properly directed research program in the seventies would have led to true sea-farming, conserving resources of fish and plankton instead of drawing on them like a bottomless bank account, which was the traditional—disastrous—way.

And what happens? They hang on right into the nineties and then yell for Doctor United Nations to come and cure a patient who's been made sicker by quack remedies than by the actual disease.

No wonder, with the paper shortage and the power shortage and the shortage of luxury items like ice cream and sodas and the need to build plows and harvesters and trawlers rather than cars and jukeboxes, no wonder people were giving up hope. No wonder there were drug addicts.

He turned his head, his eyes following the shiny links of the chain that bound him to the briefcase. Half a pound of happy dreams. God!

He remembered the expression that had come to Lumberger's face when the fixed price of the drug was mentioned. What was he going on to say when the phone sounded? Most likely: "But I thought the cost of shots of any drug was pushed up and up by the peddlers, as the victims grew more dependent."

True. But not true of happy dreams. Who fixed that price? Who could say? In the two years since establishing happy dreamers in a class apart from other addicts and getting their hands on their first pure sample of the stuff, Narcotics Department hadn't found out. The price was something people seemed to know about without having to be told. And addicts didn't disobey the rule.

Meantime, the effects showed. Often, the victims who disappeared were key men in important jobs; still more often, they were enterprising people held back by circumstances, frustrated, despairing. And usually they were young.

But before the Narcotics Department had done more than establish that the pattern of addiction was unique, it became clear that there were too many addicts to cope with. Life hadn't much better to offer them, anyway. The emphasis shifted when it became clear that someone, somewhere, must control fantastic production capacity for complex organic compounds—and be using it to make happy dreams.

Greville remembered how hard it had been to believe Al Speed when the latter briefed him on the situation, months before.

"Barriman's reaction when he saw the figures," Al Speed reported, "was to do some figuring of his own. With that much plant, he says, you could handle the entire antibiotic requirements of the Western Hemisphere."

"Impossible!" was Greville's shocked response.

"All right, then explain this. Central Conservation has been trying to popularize short-shorts instead of Bermudas for summer wear, to cut fabric requirements. The major market— the teens and twenties—won't look at them in any big city of America or Europe. Why?"

"You tell me," Greville countered, sick anticipation rising in his throat. 

"Because short-shorts expose the scars on the inside of the thighs where happy dreamers load themselves up."

"You mean there are that many addicts among young people?"

Deliberately, emphasizing each point with a rap on his desk, Al said, "A quarter of the population, between ages fifteen and twenty-five, in ninety per cent of all cities in America and Europe with over a half million population, is a conservative estimate of the incidence of happy dreaming. Looks like it's going to be as common this century as smoking tobacco was in the last"





5
Greville sent the butt of his cigarette flying across the room into the sink, which had already dried so completely that the butt went on smoldering quietly. As common as smoking tobacco in the last century! A terrifying thought. Greville had caught the smoking habit young, and it had stuck, but it had lost its social connotations around the turn of the century, and the incidence was declining sharply. Mitchell's age-group would mostly be smokers; his own group—the mid-thirties— ran about fifty-fifty; you found individuals in their late twenties who smoked, like Lumberger. But the odds were that one or two at most of that bunch of teenagers across the street were smokers.

An appalling idea struck him. Was happy dreaming literally supplanting smoking? Had it in fact roots running back ten, twenty years or more?

With that thought in the forefront of his mind, he dozed off and dreamed fitfully. He was in front of the drugstore again, surrounded by the same gang of kids. Again the girl thrust her thumbs in the waist of her jeans, again exposed the scars patterning her thighs. Only this time he couldn't tear his gaze away from her legs—not at once. And it seemed that her lean, muscular limbs were filling out, lightening under their tan becoming rounder, softer, more adult.

When he looked back at her face, it was not hers but Leda's, oval, framed with fair hair, smirking in triumph.





He awoke with a groan, to hear a 'copter engine droning in the distance. For a moment he didn't place the sound, but then he remembered where he was and what had happened, and dropped his feet to the floor just as Lumberger opened the door and peered in.

"Sounds like your transport, Greville," he said.

"Yeah, thanks. I'll be out in a moment."

"I looked in before to see if you wanted a bite to eat," Lumberger went on. "Wasn't much, but you were welcome to what there was—anyway, you were asleep, so I left you be."

"Good," grunted Greville, running his hands through his hair. He reached for his shoes and put them on, the chain of his briefcase clinking as he tied he laces. God, but he was going to be glad to get rid of this incubus.

"Uh—sorry I couldn't do more for you," Lumberger ventured. The droning of the 'copter died, and Greville advised himself absently that it would have landed somewhere near the outskirts of town. He glanced at the window. It was pretty dark.

Case in hand, he started for the door. "Don't let it worry you," he said. "You don't get issued a red carpet to roll out in an office like this one."

He met the two fieldworkers from the Institute when he had gone about a quarter-mile toward the point where the 'copter had set down. The straight line of Main Street led toward the lights which glimmered like grounded stars on its undercarriage.

The fieldworkers paused as he came up to them. They were in plain clothes, but even in the half-darkness it could be seen that they had the typical UN agent's expression—a look of patient endurance—like a brand.

"You're Greville?" asked the taller of the two. Greville nodded. "I'm Vassily Marek—that's Peter Rice. Is it bad here?"

"They don't like us," said Greville, conscious of making a vacuous understatement. "You're going to the FAO office?"

"Guess so. If they don't like us, where else should we go?"

"Then watch yourself with this young man Lumberger. He's hard to take for more than a few minutes at a time."

Marek gave a mirthless grin. "Aren't we all?" he said. "Well, better not make you keep the pilot waiting. Thanks for the tip."

"Same department," said Greville. The two fieldworkers gave him a parting nod and trudged on toward the town.

As he approached the waiting 'copter, Greville found himself wondering whether it was here in this town of limited population that the department was finally going to follow a trail all the way to its end; whether those two he had just met were going to be the men who did it

He was seized by the urge to call after them and wish them luck, but when he glanced back he saw that they were probably out of earshot, and he didn't want to startle them and make them come hurrying back to hear something of no consequence.





The post office address of the Institute was Sandy Gulch, Colorado. Sandy Gulch had been a mining town in the nineteenth century, but by the time the Institute was set up the address was about all there was left of it. In the haphazard jumble of the landscape the checkerboard layout of the new buildings crashed like a screaming discord.

At the edge of the landing field Barriman stood impatiently waiting, a stolid figure in shorts and a loose jacket whose pockets bulged with odds and ends.

"About time, Greville!" he barked up at the door of the 'copter. "I burned the ears off New York for letting you get in a mess like this. Why didn't you call us from Topeka when there was no plane? We could have fetched you in from there."

Greville clambered stiffly to the ground. "I'm going to do some ear-burning on my own account," he answered. "If they'd told me what I was carrying, I'd have done that. It'd have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble."

Stop kidding yourself about Leda, he added under his breath. The last thing she wanted was for you to show up on time...

He choked off the train of thought, and thrust the briefcase into Barriman's hands.

"Ah!" Barriman said, thumbing the lock expertly. "This is it! I guess they thought you might attract too much attention if they let it get around what they were sending—this stuff is more valuable than gold right now...."

The lock yielded. In the light of the pole-mounted floods which streamed across the landing field, he lifted the lid and gave a sigh of relief. Inside the case a plastic liner glistened wetly. It was distorted, as though it was half full of liquid, or very fine powder. It held very fine powder. It held half a pound of happy dreams.

Greville licked dry lips, thinking of dynamite and A-bombs and other risky things. A risk was part of the job, but not to know its nature was different. He said huskily, "I suppose that's the batch that was found the other day."

He remembered belatedly that, now the lock was open, he could unscrew the cuff around his wrist to which the chain was secured and not ensure the destruction of the case and contents. His numb fingers sought the knob and began to turn it mechanically.

Barriman waited till he had finished, then closed the case and picked it up with a smile. "You must be hungry," he said. "And thirsty, I bet, on a night like this. I have snacks and beer being sent over to my quarters for you. But if you don't mind, I'd like to call at the biology labs on the way and announce the good news."

Greville shrugged. Nothing made much difference right now.

From the landing field their route took them past most of the divisions of the Institute—FAO, Health, Conservation, Pure Research, Fuel and Power, in all of which lighted windows showed work proceeding late. There was the click-hum of computers at work, a snatch of music from a radio or TV set, a burst of laughter from the relaxation center. But for most of the way they went in silence.

"I'm sorry about the detour," Barriman said finally, fumbling a key one-handed from his shirt to thrust it in the door of the biology labs. "But we're panting for this stuff. If you'd been delayed even overnight it would have wrecked one of our most crucial experiments."

The door opened. Greville had expected the usual dampish smell of rats and rabbits which he associated with biology labs; instead, there was an airlock beyond the door. He said, "Uh—sterile labs? Would you rather I wait outside?"

"Doesn't matter," Barriman said, shaking his head. "We aren't running sterile at the moment. We're using this block for reasons of security. Generally it's allotted to FAO or Health, but for once Narcotics has a worse problem than they have."

The airlock cycled with Greville and Barriman pressed hard against each other in its narrow embrasure; then the far door slid back and there was at once a stink of monkeys, more penetrating even than the odor of mice. Dim overhead lights flush with the ceiling revealed a hundred feet of ranked cages; at the far end of the room someone in a white lab coat was bending over some task.

Normally Greville would have expected the monkeys to chatter with excitement at the presence of strangers. Instead, as he and Barriman walked between the cages, the monkeys ignored them, perched on their artificial branches. Mostly they were rhesus macaques; there were a few spider monkeys, and in the cage at which the white-coated worker was bending down there was a solitary chimpanzee.

"Kathy!" Barriman called out. "The stuff got here!"

The wearer of the lab coat straightened and turned. She was short, rather plump, but very graceful as she moved, with a round face, flat Amerind cheekbones, full, naturally red lips. In her dark, glossy hair, chestnut highlights showed. Across her wide-nostriled nose, underlining her green eyes, there was a dusting of freckles. Greville found himself suddenly thinking: what a pity she looks so tired!

There was weariness in her mellow voice, too, when she answered Barriman's call.

"That's good—but Mike, there's definitely been a complete change in Tootsie's nature since this morning."

Barriman thrust the briefcase into Greville's hands and strode forward to the ape's cage. Greville repressed a lunatic impulse to put the chain and cuff back on his wrist, and followed slowly.

The chimpanzee, a handsome female perhaps twelve years old, squatted cross-legged on the floor, her back against a dead tree stump worn smooth with much rubbing, her eyes closed, her mouth slack. Except for her breathing, she might have been stuffed in a museum.

"Tootsie!" said Barriman sharply. He rapped on the bars of the cage, and there was a metallic ringing sound that died slowly, as though retreating to a great distance. "Toots!"

"I can't get any response at all," said the girl, and passed her hand wearily over her forehead.

"It's progressed incredibly quickly, hasn't it?" said Barriman cryptically. "You have the recording setup ready?"

"Everything but the high-speed infrared film. There's none available until tomorrow. We'll have to rely on the meters."

Barriman nodded, bent down and slid back a panel below the front of the cage. A group of half a dozen dials and a miniature tape recorder were revealed. Greville saw that there were similar sliding panels on all the cages.

"Was she eating and drinking normally?" Barriman asked.

"Until today she's been drinking within her normal pattern of variation. But she wouldn't eat at noon. I told you, didn't I?"

"So you did," agreed Barriman, straightening up. "And I promised to come down and look at her. Then I heard that the happy dreams consignment was held up, and I'm afraid everything else slipped my mind."

The girl closed her eyes, placed the tips of her fingers close together on the point between her eyebrows, and drew her hands slowly apart as though wringing tension out of her forehead muscles. "Yes," she said, opening her eyes again. "I hear you spent the whole afternoon trying to locate it. Didn't you say just now it had arrived?"

"It's in that case," Barriman answered, half turning and gesturing toward Greville. "This is Nick Greville, by the way—Narcotics, working out of New York. You haven't met, have you? This is Dr. Pascoe, from World Health, seconded to us to supervise these experiments."

The girl acknowledged Greville with a tired smile. She said, "I hear you had trouble getting here."

"I damned near turned around and went home," said Greville. "I gather it's as well that I didn't."

"I guess it is." Kathy Pascoe nodded at the motionless chimpanzee. "Poor Tootsie here, and all the rest of them come to that, are happy dreamers through no fault of their own. We hadn't run any tests on apes or monkeys before this series, and we were a bit too ambitious. We committed ourselves to a dosage rate—spread over all these animals— which was higher than the available supply. If your people hadn't finally got their hands on the batch you've brought in, we'd have been out months of work and a whole string of test animals."

It wasn't reproachful, but Greville flinched a little. Barriman gave a last frowning glance at the meters in the compartment below Tootsie's cage and slid the panel shut. "Ye-es," he said musingly. "Without actually complaining, I must say I don't see how New York can expect us to do a proper job without more material to work on. I wish you'd locate a few more batches of happy dreams. . . . There's a hell of a lot of it. Must be."

Greville couldn't think of anything to say which didn't sound like an excuse for incompetence, so he remained silent.

"Finished, Kathy?" Barriman added in a brisker tone.

"Just about."

"Come and have a bite with us, then—and a beer. Tell me what's been happening to Tootsie this evening. Or are you too tired?"

"No, love to. I won't be able to sleep with my mind churning the way it is. Hang on while I close the lab for the night; then I'll be right with you."





6
They waited in the narrow porch outside the airlock while she extinguished lights, turned switches on the ventilation and alarm systems, made sure everything was in order. The air was very still; overhead the stars burned down like peepholes into the heart of the celestial furnace whose heat was baking North America.

The door opened, and she came out. "Sorry to be so long," she said. "Had to call the watch house, tell them to set the night alarm. All finished—let's go." She shrugged off her lab coat as they turned and began to walk. Under it she wore —as most of the Institute's female staff did in this weather —only her uniform skirt and a bra. Her shoulders glistened in the light from windows of buildings where work was still going on.

The weight of the briefcase tugged at Greville's arm. He caught Barriman's attention.

"What are you going to do with this stuff overnight?"

Barriman grunted. "Keep it in my quarters, I guess. It should be safe enough—there are no happy dreamers here that we're aware of. By the way, Kathy, did you hear about the new patch of addiction Nick discovered today?"

The girl shook her head. She was walking with eyes downcast, her hands clasped in front of her with the lab coat draped over them.

"In a tiny place called Isolation, just over the Kansas state line," Barriman said. "How many would you say, and how bad?" he added with a glance at Greville.

"You'll have to wait for the field report," Greville said. "All I saw was a group of kids—a dozen or so. They may be the only ones, or they may not."

Kathy Pascoe made a noncommittal sound by way of comment, and they fell silent again until they were in Barriman's apartment. This had two rooms, with its own bathroom, a privilege of status not enjoyed by most of the staff. Like a military camp, the Institute had communal bath houses, communal lounges, communal kitchens. Had to.

"There's beer," Barriman said, switching on the light. "I told the canteen to send across some salads or something— yes, there it is. Are you two hungry?"

Kathy Pascoe dropped her lab coat across the back of the nearest armchair, then fell into it, almost as limp as the discarded coat. "Beer would be fine," she said. "But I'm not hungry, thanks."

Barriman nodded and began to open beer cans with expertise. "Help yourself," he added to Greville, indicating the dishes of salad on the table. Greville had not thought he was hungry, either, but the sight of food made it clear that only apathy had masked his appetite. He loaded himself a plateful of lettuce, tomatoes, cole slaw and cottage cheese topped with chopped dates.

"All hydroponic stuff, I'm afraid," Barriman said. "Even the dates. FAO is trying it on the dog again. But it tastes all right" He turned to put a can of beer on the arm of Kathy's chair; she had her eyes closed, but when the beer was set beside her she smiled like a Cheshire cat and put her hand caressingly around the cool side of the can.

"Better have one of these with your salad—the hydroponic stuff is slightly vitamin-deficient," Barriman said, and put a dry biscuit on Greville's plate. "I'll fix a room for you overnight, arrange transport to the airport for you in the morning —fix everything as soon as you've eaten."

Fix everything? thought Greville, and remembered the breaking-glass sound of Leda's laughter.

"The change in Tootsie," said Kathy meditatively, sipping her beer. "It's incredible, you know? But thinking back, I believe the first sign was yesterday, when she didn't object as she usually does to the test of her spinal fluid."

"Last week she kicked up merry hell," Barriman said, indicating a seat for Greville in an armchair facing Kathy's. He took an upright chair for himself and continued around a mouthful of salad, "and this evening, she isn't interested in anything any longer."

"Is this what happens to human addicts in the end?" Greville said. Kathy looked at him.

"I'd have thought you see more human addicts than we do," she said.

"Maybe I do." Greville's voice was harsher than he had intended. "I'm still asking!"

"Sorry," Kathy said after a pause. "You have your troubles, we have ours. Presumably the answer is yes. We can't see any reason why happy dreams should affect human nervous systems differently from those of other highly organized mammals." She put down her beer and folded her hands on her lap, closing her eyes again.

"Is this the first series of experiments you've carried clear to the crisis point?" Greville pursued. Barriman gave a sarcastic laugh.

"Not exactly. Didn't you hear about the first series?"

"I don't think so."

"It was weird," Kathy said in a musing voice, keeping her eyes shut. "We lost the subjects. All of them. It was—oh— about four or five months ago. We were using rats. Selected ones, of course, bred for genius as genius goes among rats."

"You lost them? You mean they all died?"

"Died, hell!" Barriman said. "Someone turned them out of their cages. One morning Kathy went down to the lab, and they weren't there." 

"Who would do a thing like that?" Greville wondered.

Barriman shrugged. "If it happened now, I'd say it was a Holmesite publicity stunt. Then, we'd hardly heard of Holmes. We never did find out who was responsible, nor why it was done, but—uh—well, we arranged for somebody to be transferred to the West Coast, and we haven't lost any animals since. . . . That's why we're running this series of tests in the sterile labs, not because they're sterile but because they have alarms that work both ways—inside to outside and vice versa."

"But surely that wasn't the only other series of tests you've run.”

"Oh, but it is. And that's your fault, blast you." Barriman's voice was neutral, belying bis words. "I mean it's the fault of your people in New York and elsewhere. There must be— oh, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say literally tons of happy dreams in circulation all the time. And this lot you brought is the first we've been given to work with in several months. Mark you, it's a good big batch, as big as the previous ones put together. But hardly adequate for extensive research, you know."

"When are you going to be able to synthesize it?" Greville said.

"Pure Research is working on the job. But it would be quicker to find some ready-made."

Greville felt he had better shift the subject a little; he was very sensitive, like all narcotics agents, about the lack of success in locating happy dreams in quantity. He said, "Well— what do your tests aim at? Cure, I suppose."

"Ultimately we are looking for a way to break the habit, yes. But before we reach that stage, we have to get complete details of its action on the living metabolism. You saw the setup we have for those monkeys in the lab—we analyze all their excretions and secretions, we take weekly blood and spinal fluid samples, we run encephalograph tests, and the theory says we also film the activity-pattern just before the crisis point." He frowned. "Tootsie really caught us short there! We banked on using ultra-fast infrared film to avoid disturbing the night environment unnecessarily, and it's in hellish short supply."

A gentle snore followed his last word. They glanced at Kathy, and saw that she had fallen fast asleep in her chair. Barriman chuckled.

"As usual!" he said, putting down his empty plate and removing the beer can from the arm of Kathy's chair. "She's been getting about four hours' sleep a night for the past few weeks, poor kid."

"Shall I help you take her to her quarters?" Greville suggested.

"Why disturb her before we have to?" shrugged Barriman. "More beer?"

"Thanks, I will." Greville accepted a second can, and Barriman poured the rest of Kathy's into his own.

"Shame to waste it," he said thoughtfully. "Shame to waste anything, isn't it?"

There was a moment of silence. Greville, desperate for any words in which he could feign interest, to avoid having to think of tomorrow, cast around for something to say.

"Uh—you were saying there's been difficulty in trying to synthesize happy dreams," he recalled.

"That's right. In fact, we're coming around to the conclusion that it's probably a naturally occurring compound. Its extraordinary degree of purity led us at first to assume it must be synthetic, but where on this small planet would you hide a factory big enough to produce such quantities? A refinery could be kept secret more easily than a vast synthetics plant." Barriman shifted on his chair. "The chain of compounds which leads to happy dreams includes several hundreds of others which are statistically more likely. A living process seems the simplest way of concentrating it."

"Where would it occur in nature? Could it be concentrated by—well, a bacterium, perhaps?"

"I doubt it." Barriman spoke flatly. "This is a compound so specialized that its range of possible biological functions is extremely limited. It's electrochemically active in the nervous system, of course, but it's very readily broken down, and we think that only about a tenth of what's injected into the thigh by an addict ever reaches the brain. We give it to our experimental animals through the orbit of the eye, to economize, but even so a lot is destroyed before it affects the brain. That's how we came to judge the dose rate wrong, as Kathy mentioned. We assumed that eighty per cent of the orbital injection would affect the brain; in fact, the amount is closer to forty or fifty per cent."

Real interest beginning to perfuse his original for-God's-sake-talk feeling, Greville stared at the other. He said, "Then where would you find such a compound in nature? I'm sorry to ask so many questions, but I'm just a policeman when it comes to happy dreams."

"All right," Barriman said after a pause. "There seems to be only one place where you'd expect happy dreams to occur. And that's in the central nervous system of a highly organized mammal, such as an ape, or a whale, or a man."

"But—"

"I'll go further than that," Barriman continued inexorably. "I'll say that the only function it seems ideally suited to perform in nature is what it does when it combines with cephaline to form nöetine in the cells of the brain. It's specifically and uniquely fitted to serve as cell material for the forebrain of highly organized mammals."

He gave a sour little grin and drained his can of beer.

"If that's the case," Greville said slowly, looking at nothing, "then it's hardly surprising there are so many wild stories being told about it"

"Believe me, from a strictly scientific point of view, none of what the Holmesites claim is half so extraordinary as the actual facts." He checked his watch and started to get to his feet

"I'd better fix accommodation for you before it's too late. Don't you have any baggage, by the way?"

"I was expecting to be back in New York tonight" Greville said. The words reminded him of the vision he had had while dozing on Lumberger's bed—of Leda with her white thighs scarred from happy dreams injections.

Barriman nodded. "I'll get you toilet things, then. And you can draw a fresh shirt from stock in the morning. I'll check the times of planes for you, too; they'll be crowded after today's cancellations, but I can manage a priority reservation if you want to get back in a hurry."

"Don't put yourself out," said Greville. Barriman shot him a shrewd glance.

“Trouble?"

"I was supposed to be home tonight, because I promised my wife we'd celebrate our anniversary tomorrow in style. Only—well, from the way things have turned out it wouldn't have been much of a celebration anyway."

"I'm sorry,” said Barriman, sounding genuinely concerned. "It's hard on UN agents when they marry outside the business, isn't it? Well, I'll make that call."

He went into the minuscule bedroom adjacent, leaving the door ajar. The phone was there, presumably, in case he was needed in the middle of the night. Sounds of dialing, and then blurred words, reached Greville's ears.

"No," he said to the air. "It wouldn't have been much of a celebration. There isn't a lot left to celebrate."

As though the words had broken through her slumber, Kathy Pascoe moved in her chair with a sigh. She slid forward an inch or two and let her right arm fall over the side of the chair.

The movement caused her skirt to ride up her legs. From where Greville was sitting he could see her bare thighs plainly. He had been staring for what seemed like a long time when he realized with a shock that he hadn't just been looking with ordinary masculine interest at the legs of a pretty girl. He had been looking for happy dreams scars.

Why did they always do it in the thighs, anyway? Only because the thighs were usually covered? Or because children were often taught nowadays how to use an injector for vitamin supplements, and the thighs were easily accessible for a self-administered injection?

Why was there a rigid code among happy dreamers, which maintained an impossible fixed price?

Why, with tons of the stuff in circulation, could the best efforts of the police forces and the UN agencies in every country on Earth not combine to seize more than an occasional small batch of it?

Why were people so ready to accept the fantastic tales the Holmesites told, about astral projection, teleportation, and the link between happy dreams and the "flying ointments" used by witches to take them to their sabbaths?

And where did the stuff come from, anyway?

Well, if experts of Barriman's class were defeated by such questions, he wasn't likely to be able to answer them. When Barriman came back from the phone saying something about the times of planes in the morning, Greville—very tired and suddenly acutely depressed—was glad to be taken to his room.





7
The insistent buzzing of a phone brought him out of the nightmare. The single sheet which was the only covering he had been able to bear had tangled itself around his legs; he came awake enough to kick himself free of it, reached for the phone, and turned off the camera in case his caller was a woman.

It was Barriman, and his picture froze on the screen in an expression of dismay.

"Greville, can you get over to the sterile lab right away?" he said harshly.

Blinking, Greville said, "Yes, sure. But what's wrong?"

"The chimpanzee's gone—Tootsie, the one you saw last night—and we're trying to find out how the hell anyone could get her out of the lab past all our locks and alarms."

Greville came fully awake. He said, "Good God! But—what help can I give you? I'm a stranger here."

A voice from someone not in picture said something Greville didn't catch, and Barriman answered sharply, "Of course! I'm doing that now!" He went on, "Greville?"

"Yes, I'm here."

"Look, the only motive we can think of for what's happened is that an addict—maybe a Holmesite—got at the lab. And that's definitely your province."

"I guess," Greville agreed. "Right, I'm on my way."

He cut the connection and got off the bed. The fresh shirt Barriman had promised had not yet been delivered, and the one he had worn yesterday was still clammy. He dragged it on regardless, zipped up his pants, shoved his feet into his shoes and hurried outside. He was still too close to sleep to he able to think very coherently before he arrived at the sterile lab.

A lot of people seemed to have got there before him. He walked between two UN-yellow cars parked in front of the building and came upon Barriman and Kathy Pascoe shouting at one another and at two men, one of whom he recognized, standing with them. They had to shout because the doors of the lab were both open while technicians checked the alarm circuits; every few moments an alarm sounded as its circuits tested out, and the shrilling startled the experimental monkeys into high chattering cries of complaint.

Barriman broke off from his discussion and swung around. "Greville!" he said with some relief. "Maybe you can get some sense out of this. Do you know Dr. Desmond?" He glanced at the man Greville had already recognized from pictures; there was no mistaking the famous and photogenic cockatoo-crest of white hair belonging to the Director-in-Chief of the Institute. Desmond was looking extremely unhappy, but that was hardly surprising.

"And Joe Martinez, our Security chief," Barriman added, gesturing at the other member of the group, a tall, tanned man of forty in agent's uniform with the crossed-key insignia on his shirt collar.

Martinez put out a hard-palmed hand to Greville and smiled with a flash of bright teeth in his brown face. "Sorry to drag you from bed, but we badly need ideas from somewhere."

"I don't yet know what's happened," Greville said. "Except that the chimpanzee has gone."

"Right," said Kathy, thrusting back untidy hair from her forehead. She had obviously come direct from bed to the lab; she was wearing a knee-length kimono and loafers. "Gone. Out of a locked cage of stainless steel bars, out of a sterile lab with no windows. Without tripping any of the alarms, which seem to be in perfect working order." She gave Martinez a glare. "Fair enough, Joe?"

"Fair enough," said the Security chief. "My technicians have already been over the circuits once, but they're double-checking. If the alarms are working, we're compelled to assume that someone used correct keys to gain access to the lab, took Tootsie from her cage, locked the cage and the lab behind him, and got away without anyone noticing."

"I don't believe it!" said Barriman vehemently. "There are two keys to the sterile lab—mine and Kathy's—not counting one kept in the watch house for use in case of fire. My key is on my ring, and I found it this morning by my bed where I left it last night."

"And here's mine," said Kathy, drawing up a fine gold chain she wore around her neck. Greville had noticed the chain last night, but the end had been tucked inside her bra and he had assumed there was a small pendant on it. Instead, there were three keys. "Believe me," Kathy continued, "I'd have known if anyone tried to get at my lab key! I don't even take this chain off in the shower."

"Mike's idea," said Martinez after a pause, "is that it may have been a Holmesite who burgled the lab last night, as a publicity stunt."

"That's why I called you over, Nick," Barriman put in. "I told you on the phone, didn't I?"

For no good reason that he could think of, Greville remembered what Barriman had said last night about the similar occurrence involving rats, which had terminated the first experimental series here. He'd said, as though presciently, that if the same thing happened now he'd suspect a Holmesite publicity stunt. Well, here it was.

Before he could comment, though, Dr. Desmond cleared his throat. With peculiar uncertainty—considering his status here—he said, "I'm afraid I'm a little confused. Would you explain yourself, Mike?" He glanced at Barriman.

Sighing, as though forcing himself to be patient, Barriman said, "Greville, I'd rather you dealt with that point."

Taken aback, Greville looked at Desmond. "Sure," he said. "Though I thought—well, never mind." He could hardly say to the Director-in-Chief that he thought everyone had heard of the Holmesites by now.

"Let's get away from the racket!" Kathy suggested abruptly, and they accepted the idea, walking slowly for twenty or thirty paces as Greville ordered his words.

"The Holmesite idea fits pretty well, I must say," he mused. "And I imagine you know, a considerable mythology has developed around happy dreams. Some of it, like the Johnny Happydreams story, is for laughing. Some of it is propounded seriously. We're forever getting wild reports in the New York office, for instance, that people have physically vanished. Now, we seldom bother to check up on them, we've had so many. When we do, we invariably find that the missing person is a happy dreamer who's either concealed the fact from his friends or is moving in a circle—like this group I found at Isolation yesterday—where it's taken as a matter of course." He passed his hand over his forehead. "One of the terrifying things about happy dreaming is just that: the way it's accepted by so many people as a perfectly normal thing to do.

"What seems to have happened is that there's a—a fad. It's been a commonplace of police work for probably more than a century that whenever a spectacular, genuine case of amnesia happens, it's followed by a spate of false ones— either someone seizing on this excuse to get away anonymously for a while, or a hysterical wife or relation failing to hear from someone and leaping to the conclusion that he's lost his memory.

"Same sort of thing is operating here. The crazy rumors of people disappearing have reached the point where, when a happy dreamer decides he can't bother with real life any more and fades out of his job, his family and all his other normal ties, somebody imagines he's literally vanished. The current high suicide rate makes matters even more confused—lots of people will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that a child, a parent or a friend of theirs would kill himself."

They reached a spot where the noise from the labs was distant enough for ordinary conversation; Greville paused, and the others grouped around him, nodding for him to go on. Desmond, he noticed was still looking unhappy.

"Well, when you get an atmosphere of anxiety like this, with rumors flying around, sooner or later someone is bound to capitalize on it The parallel I usually quote is with the UFO craze last century. People were seeing things in the sky which they couldn't explain, and jumped to the conclusion they must be alien spaceships. So very shortly opportunists were claiming that they had proof of this. So many mutually contradictory stories about the state of affairs on Mars or Venus were spread around that you'd have thought anyone with his wits would have got suspicious. But an amazing number of people swallowed all the stories regardless of consistency.

"The expert in this field is a man called Holmes, who showed up in Los Angeles a year or so ago, with a ready-made theory to account for these disappearance stories. He invoked parallels with the 'flying ointments' used by witches to carry them to their sabbaths—it's been shown that the flying sensation was an illusion due to hallucinogenic ingredients in the ointments, but why should he care? And he piled on this a lot of doubletalk about astral projection and physical transference and heaven knows what, and proceeded to spread this garbled gospel to anyone who would listen.

"He climaxed the story by arranging a disappearance for himself, leaving his loyal disciples to argue that he'd achieved his apotheosis and that the way was open for them to do the same. For my money, he's living anonymously somewhere on the profits, because like any cult leader he didn't object to donations from believers, and laughing his head off at the world's stupidity. But it's given us the devil's own headache in our department, because the blind acceptance which so many otherwise level-headed people accord to the Holmes story leads them to become happy dreamers themselves. In fact, the best theory we have to account for the distribution of the drug is that it must travel by an undercover chain of Holmesites."

"Why do you call that your 'best theory'?" Kathy Pascoe cut in.

Greville winced. He said, "Frankly, because that's all it is—theory. We've watched Holmesites till we're sick of it, and we've never yet managed to prove that they traffic in happy dreams. We've turned up plenty of Holmesite addicts, but we know of just as many who aren't professed Holmesites, and by now there are far too many addicts for us to bother coping with them. We need to find the supply chain, and so far we haven't done so."

He wiped his face again. "Sorry to have gone on talking so long," he finished abruptly.

"No, that was a very good and clear account," Barriman said.

"Yes! Yes, it was," Desmond confirmed. He turned to Barriman. "But, Mike, I'm afraid I don't see the direct connection. . . ." He broke off, running his fingers through his splendid crest of hair.

"Look," Barriman said patiently. "From a Holmesite point of view, Tootsie's disappearance—getting her out of the lab this way—would be doubly useful. The longer we are prevented from completing our study of happy dreams, the longer run the Holmesite mythos is going to get. And second, there are bound to be credulous fools who, when they hear about this, will say that it's proof absolute of Holmes's theories."

Desmond dropped his hands to his sides, squared his shoulders, put his head back. He looked suddenly authoritative. "I see! Martinez, what's your view?"

The Security man said slowly, "It fits. But there's a snag —no, two snags. We lost a previous bunch of experimental animals. You heard about that?" he interpolated with a glance at Greville, who nodded. "We thought we knew who was responsible, but either we were wrong, and the same person has brought off the trick again, or we have a successor to him. Snag two is that such a person presumably would be a happy dreamer himself, and I'm sure almost beyond doubt that we have none among the staff. True, there's a thousand of us. But I'd still bet on it."

"How do you spot a happy dreamer?" Barriman asked Greville.

"A dope peddler isn't usually addicted himself," Greville said. "But let that pass—happy dreams isn't ordinary dope. Well, aside from actually stumbling across his supply of the drug, the only way I know to identify a happy dreamer is by the scar patterns on the inside of the thighs. The drug causes a slight local irritation—like a pimple. You find parallel lines of scar tissue dots, then old scabs, then new ones. A confirmed addict who's been on the stuff for a year or so— they don't seem to last much longer than that on average—at the regular rate of a shot every three days, will have started on the first thigh a second time."

As he spoke, he could recall the scarred thighs of the girl in Isolation. He had guessed randomly at six months' addiction; now, so vivid was the recollection, he could almost count the dots on her skin. Not six months—more like ten. There were marks on both her legs.

Martinez bit his lip. He said, "I don't see how the scars could be kept secret here. This summer has been so hot practically everyone has been using the pool; I go there myself all the time. I guess I could check on those who don't, and make 'em parade in my office with their pants down. Excuse me, Kathy."

"The use of thigh-injection seems to be accidental," Greville said. "Most kids nowadays are taught to use an injector on themselves—for vitamins, chiefly, when the diet is poor— and the thigh is convenient. It just seems to be habit."

"It also seems to be just a habit to swim raw in the pool here," Martinez said. "We all do it. But I don't keep tabs on the personal habits of a thousand people in my head. I'll certainly check."

One of the technicians who had been working on the lab doors came up to them, and Martinez swung around. "Finished?"

"Finished," the technician said. He looked dispirited. "The alarms are in perfect working order, Chief. They haven't been touched since the last quarterly inspection. And that includes the night alarm."

"But—" began Martinez, and broke off, biting his lip again. It seemed to be a nervous habit with him. "I'd been assuming it wasn't connected. Kathy, were you very tired last night? Could you have forgotten to switch in the night alarm when you were locking up?"

Barriman said tartly, "I was here when she called the duty watchman to tell him to turn his switch in the watch house. Could he have neglected that?"

Before Martinez could snap back, Kathy cut in. "No, I didn't forget and he didn't. I called the watch house when I woke up to say I was coming to the lab and would they switch off the alarm there. If it wasn't operative, they'd have noticed."

"This night alarm—what is it?" Greville said.

"A circuit running through the actual lock of the door," said Martinez. "Whoever is last out of the lab—that's usually Kathy Pascoe here—calls up the watchman and tells him to close another switch his end. This means that even if the door is opened with a key the night alarm sounds. And if you don't have a key, you sound four alarms."

Much more of this, Greville felt, and he was going to start thinking the Holmesites had something.

Apparently so was Desmond. Turning to Barriman, he said, "And how about the man you suspected before, that you asked me to have transferred to Los Angeles?"

Barriman looked uncomfortable. Martinez, with a glance at him as though apologizing, said, "He's out of the question, Dr. Desmond."

"Who was this?" Greville said.

There was a moment's silence. Then Kathy said with a trace of old anger, "A man called Franz Wald. He had a disagreement with Mike. He had a theory about the action of happy dreams on the brain, and Mike was afraid he took his theory seriously."

"That's unfair," Barriman said. "Damn it, Kathy, he was more interested in making happy dreams generally available than in studying the effects."

"Was he addicted himself?" Greville asked.

"Nobody ever proved anything about him." Martinez gave an expressive shrug. "He was transferred to the Coast, though, and he hasn't been back." He broke off, struck by a sudden thought. "Mike, what happened to that consignment of happy dreams that was brought in yesterday? Is it safe?"

Barriman went pale. "I hope so! It's in a person-keyed case, so at worst it's gone up in smoke, but I'd better go make sure."

"You do that!" Martinez snapped. "And get it to the safe in the watch house! If there's any risk at all of an addict on the Institute staff, that stuff stays under lock and key and you can draw on it when you need it"

Barriman nodded and thrust his way between them. Desmond cleared his throat and looked at his watch. "Well, my breakfast is waiting for me," he said in an important voice. "Let me know what developments there are, won't you?"

Martinez nodded, and Desmond smiled at the others and walked toward the parked cars. He got into the larger one and started it up.

"You don't seem to be very impressed with our Director-in-Chief," Kathy said to Greville in a low voice. It came to Greville that it was still early enough to be cold; he found himself shivering.

Tensing, he said, "Is the ivory-tower pose genuine?"

"The hair's genuine," Martinez answered wryly, in a leave-it-at-that tone. Greville shrugged.

"Well, anyway," he said, "it looks as though you have a straightforward security problem here. I'm sorry I can't tell you an easy way to catch happy dreamers, but they aren't like ordinary addicts. They seldom do anything more anti-social than retreat into isolation, shortly before they disappear. . . . "—and his mind glossed the words, ridiculously: Isolation, Kansas, and disappear, from a burglar-proof building.

Martinez frowned. "I'm surprised you're so unsuccessful. I'd assumed this big consignment of dust you brought—half a pound, isn't it?—was taken from a peddler."

"Not at all," said Greville bitterly. "One of our New York men found it in his daughter's bedroom. The kid wasn't badly hooked, thank God, but they don't know when she'll be out of the sanatorium."

"How about those people, then? I mean, new addicts who get cut off from their supply."

"I'm only a dogcatcher," Greville said. "But the way I hear it, after one or two shots the habit breaks easily—not that we've had many such cases, and some of those have relapsed. After a half a dozen shots it breaks painfully, and you have to keep the victim in sedation, sometimes for weeks on end. After twenty more shots, there's little hope for the addict's sanity." 

"A cure worse than the disease," Kathy said. 

"You can call it that."

"And how many shots does it take before they lose track and abandon their homes and families, as you were saying?" Martinez pursued.

"More than a hundred, wouldn't you say?" Kathy suggested, with a glance at Greville.

"Yes, roughly. I suppose the half-pound I brought in would be enough to take one addict through the whole course."

"That's assuming thigh-injection," Kathy commented. "I'm surprised they don't proceed to direct injection into, the carotid artery—it would seem a logical way to get more kicks for your money."

"That's another of the crazy things about happy dreaming," Greville said. "Not only is there an apparently unlimited supply of dust—there's none of the ordinary economic pressure on an addict to drive him to steal so he can buy more. The price has remained constant since we first ran into it, at a level anyone can afford."

"I'll tell you something odder still," said Kathy after a pause. "Assuming that happy dreams occurs in nature and you only have to refine it, a conservative guess at the cost of preparing it ninety-nine per cent pure would be five or six thousand dollars an ounce. And synthesizing it would cost twice that. Who makes a profit on it at two dollars a shot?" 

"Nobody," Greville said sourly. "It grows on the trees that Johnny Happydreams planted as a public service. That's the only reasonable explanation."





8
Five or six thousand dollars an ounce—if all you have to do is extract it from some natural source, purify it and dry it to powder. And the cost to the customer, assuming a hundred shots from half a pound at two dollars a shot, is about twenty-five dollars an ounce. Kathy was right. It added up to crazy.

From what "natural source," anyway? If Barriman said such a compound would occur in nature only in the fore-brain of a highly organized mammal, he wasn't guessing; he was one of the dozen finest biochemists on Earth, and in his own specialty of the chemistry of the nervous system no one could touch him.

That natural source—could it be somewhere off Earth? Greville turned the idea over. But surely someone else had thought of that. It wouldn't be from Mars; the Fifth Mars Expedition, on its return last year, had brought nothing but supplementary details to add to the records of the previous trips. Mars was a moribund world. The Second Venus Expedition was still in orbit around the planet, radar-mapping the surface below the clouds. And the highest form of life on the moon was the staff of Tycho Observatory—

As his plane's jets swung down to the landing position, and the pilot waited for a clear drop to the field below, Greville's mind was a chaotic jumble of visualizations. Tootsie. The girl in Isolation, defiantly showing off her scarred legs. Kathy Pascoe, sleeping like a child in Barriman's chair.

And Leda. Six years ago. Glad—proud—to be the wife of a UN agent.

He was carrying a confidential report from Barriman on the disappearance of the ape. Thinking of the way his empty apartment would greet him—he didn't doubt that Leda would keep her promise and go out on the town—he had consented to deliver the report even though he was officially on leave today. Now, when it was too late to draw back, thoughts gnawed at his mind.

Suppose she is at home after all? Waiting!

That was six years ago. She got tired of waiting.

Just suppose, though. . ..

Impossible!

The impossible happens. You've seen the proof today.

But he would not let himself even hope. His skin crawling with the summer heat—it was far worse in New York, muggy and close like a Turkish bath with twenty million patrons—he drove himself to endure the pressure of the evening crowds in the subway, the veiled, insulting glances at his uniform, the occasional loud obscenity which smarted on the raw wound of his pride, although there had been hundreds before and would be hundreds afterwards.

The Narcotics Department was in Queens, within tolerable walking distance of the UN housing development where Greville lived, but a long way in crowded streets and subways from everywhere else. Or it seemed so. Maybe that was an illusion. Maybe it came from the crushing awareness that a line drawn at random to the west or northwest of here would pass through a thousand human beings before leaving the state.

Ants' nest! said Greville under his breath, bobbing like a cork on the human stream that cascaded from the exit of the subway station.

When he had delivered the report, he decided to walk home. He told himself he could not face another subway crowd today, but he knew that was rationalization. He was using the decision as a hair shirt for himself, a refusal to yield to hope, a determination to expect the worst and not be disappointed.

She wasn't waiting.

The apartment was dark when he let himself in. The air conditioning was off, and the place was like an oven. When he pressed the switch the lights came on, but the air conditioner didn't. Power cut. God, what a world! But the circuit on which the refrigerator ran was still getting current, he took a cold beer, too fast, so that gas distended his guts, and then had a lukewarm shower. The water pressure was poor.

He couldn't face putting clothes on his body when he had toweled down, but walked around the apartment checking which of the electric circuits still had power in them. All these apartments had ten circuits, each with a different number of cycles per second; ingenious fuses in the various appliances compelled them to be used on one particular circuit and no other. Tonight he—and everyone else—had a refrigerator but no air conditioning, TV but no phonograph, overhead lighting but not wall lighting. The electric clock was on the overhead lighting circuit, and was working. It mocked him from its place on the wall.

So also the full-color solido of himself and Leda on their wedding day mocked him. Leda had taken it down from its usual shelf and set it on a low table. He picked it up, half hoping there might be a note underneath. There wasn't. He put it back in its old place automatically.

Where had it gone in six short years?

He called down to the kitchens and ordered supper to be delivered. Supper for one. When it arrived he couldn't eat it; he took another beer instead and sat down in an armchair.

Where had his marriage gone? Where had that chimpanzee gone? He tried to seize on the general problem and not the personal one and herded his thoughts back to the same question whenever they strayed. A sort of anesthetic. He began to murmur the key words under his breath.

Escaped? But teams of volunteers had scoured the countryside before he left to catch the plane from Pueblo; the whole Institute had been searched already. All the staff were accounted for. All the alarm systems were in order.

Into thin air? (He could almost hear Lumberger's sarcastic tone.) Had the ape shrunk to molecular size and slithered away between the crystals of the walls like a migrating electron?

The recording devices had functioned perfectly all night According to them, Tootsie had been present until 0018. From then on, there was nothing but circuit noise. For the meters, Tootsie had simply ceased to exist.

I wish I could cease to exist.

If Barriman was right, and this was a Holmesite coup, it was a brilliant one. Nothing could more convincingly bolster the cult's wild fantasies than something of this kind. By now, doubtless, the rumors would be going out to be seized on hungrily by the credulous and retailed as concrete evidence. Not that the cult's disciples were the worst problem; it was the uncounted millions who half believed that caused the difficulties. One man would write a book, as about flying saucers; twenty or a hundred would worship him; a hundred thousand or more might read the book, or read about it, and be tempted to the verge of acceptance. So now with Holmesites.

He didn't like to think what the situation would be if all these half-convinced people were to become full-fledged converts. To fight the shadowy web of happy dreamers was bad enough. To fight a million-strong nut-cult fanatically dedicated to the cause would be impossible.

You couldn't outlaw the Holmesites. Not simply because they believed that a man had achieved apotheosis. Maybe if they could be proved to traffic in happy dreams ...

His mind wandered. The mocking clock ticked away ten P.M., then eleven, then midnight. Some time after that gray clouds rolled over Greville's mind, and he fell asleep in the chair.





Power ... ?

No, in a place like this there would be no power for the time being. It would come: solar power, maybe, or water power. But there were plenty of natural resources (not unlimited!—that was to be remembered). Fire was the key to them, and they could be got by the savage's method, with the firestick of hard wood twirled between the hands in a piece of punk from a rotten stump.

After fire, logically, came pottery. A suitable clay occurred along the river banks. Naturally, there were fish in the river —good eating, though monotonous. Meat was harder to come by; fish could be caught in a trap of rushes, but to trap an animal of decent size would involve a deadfall or a pit in a game trail, and that would be hard work without adequate tools. As for hunting, there could be spears, of course, but there was great risk involved. Bows and arrows would be better, but so far bowstrings weren't to be had. The creepers broke too readily; proper cord involved spinning. Still, that would come. There was plenty of time.

Arrowheads would be no trouble. Copper was the first metal; shaping it called for mere hard work and patience, using rocks as hammer and anvil. But there would be proper forges eventually, and furnaces to smelt metal with charcoal, and then with coal; there would be specialists with specialized techniques, and a division of labor. In the meantime, the weather was good, there was adequate food, adequate shelter, adequate water. Men could live like this.

Somewhere at the back of Greville's mind a spark of clear consciousness burned like a firefly. In the front of his mind there was a kind of panorama of landscape, to which the words formed a commentary. The rotten stump. The clay. The water of the river, with rocks breaking its flow. The veins of copper in the shattered rocks.

And there would be luxuries as well as basics, and for some of them one wouldn't have to wait. There were the fairy-flowers, for example, growing in clusters all along the river. They were unmistakable. Their blossoms were bright varm.

The shock was incredible. It jolted him from sleep, but he kept his eyes closed to try and hang on to the fading instant of vision. Varm! A color neither red nor blue nor yellow nor —nor anything!

A new color!

"Well, Mister High-and-Mighty United Nations Narcotics Department Agent Nicholas Greville?" said a taunting, rising voice from somewhere beyond his eyelids. "Well?"

Desperately he struggled to ignore the words, ignore the ties drawing him back to a world where varm did not exist. But varm was a meaningless noise, and the colors inside his eyelids were ordinary commonplace colors. He opened his eyes.

Leda sat opposite him, grinning. She was naked—not casually naked as though she had come from the shower without dressing, but deliberately naked like a strip-tease dancer, her face made up, still wearing a necklace, bracelets on each wrist, chrome-plated shoes with high glass heels. She had dipped one sweeping tress of her fair hair in bright green glorydust, and the light came back green from the sparkling granules. Her finger— and toenails were glory-dusted as well.

Greville shook his head and forced himself to a more upright posture. Leda's humorless grin remained on her face, as though painted there when she was making herself up. He thought of a hundred things to say to her. None of them seemed to mean anything of any importance.

She waited for him to speak, a malicious twinkle in her eyes. After a silence that lasted a small eternity, she said with false brightness, "Did you enjoy it? I did!"

"Enjoy it!" said Greville violently. He glanced up at the clock on the wall and saw that it was nearly seven o'clock. His eyes felt sore, as though he hadn't slept for a week.

"Enjoy it!" he said again. "Enjoy what? Being stranded miles from anywhere, in baking heat, unable to get back as I promised I would—oh, sure, I had a swell time!"

He tried to meet her eyes. Somehow he failed, and found himself instead staring at the clothes she had discarded on the floor by her chair: a white and gold evening shirt, a calf-length white sheath skirt, a custom-molded bra.

"If you're looking for my briefs," Leda said lightly, "I didn't have any on."

A kind of dizzying sickness flooded through Greville's mind. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and buried his face in his hands.

"Oh, don't hide your eyes!" Leda said, a note of triumph filled her voice. "I have something to show you, Narcotics Agent Greville. Look here! What do you think of that?"

A hand slapped his. Sharp-nailed fingers clawed his palms away from his eyes. Leda had leaped from her chair and was standing before him, one leg thrown out to the side. She was panting with a violent excitement.

"Look!" she forced through clenched teeth, and thrust one finger down to mark a spot on her thigh.

For a moment the universe reeled around Greville, spinning as though that spot was the center of all things and alone remained still. Out of the chaos Greville managed to claw the one essential, horrible truth.

"Oh, God!" he said very slowly, almost moaning the words. "You? You too?"

"What do you mean—you too'?" said Leda, and stood up straight so that the little round stab-mark was hidden. "You, Mister Narcotics Agent Greville, owe me five bucks, which I hear is the regulation fee. That's why I asked if you enjoyed it."

She threw back her head and laughed—artificially, dreadfully. With the manic sound in his ears, Greville found his gaze drifting downward, as though of its own accord. His thigh passed into his field of vision. His own thigh. Bearing a little round mark.

Just one. But as deadly as the first scab on the skin of a newly infected leper.





9
"Well?" Leda said after a pause, an edge of disappointment on her voice. "Well, aren't you going to act like a good little narcotics agent and turn me in?"

She put her hands on her hips, throwing back her shoulders to raise her bust, and stared down at him almost menacingly.

"Where did you get it?" Greville asked wearily.

Leda laughed mirthlessly, spun on the toes of one foot and walked humming across the room to take a cigarette from a box there and light it. "That's my affair!" she said, and chuckled throatily. "Yes, darling—that's literally my affair. I had to celebrate our anniversary with somebody, didn't I? Oh, we laughed ourselves sick thinking about you, stuck out West somewhere. And we laughed a whole lot more when we thought about your being a narcotics agent."

The turmoil in Greville's mind was dying down. He said in a voice like the lash of a whip, "I suppose it was your boyfriend's idea to dose me as well?"

"Not at all." Leda turned, sat back on the edge of the table bearing the cigarette box, and smiled like a beautiful devil. The pale curve of her bottom reflected in the polished surface of the table. 'That was my idea. All mine."

"Give me a cigarette," said Greville. He pulled himself to his feet. Now that he was aware of the stab on his thigh, he could feel it aching just a little, like a prick from a pin.

Leda shook her head. "No—come and get it yourself, damn you."

Greville didn't attempt to argue. He reached past her as though she didn't exist, took the cigarette, put it to his lips and reached for the table lighter. A puzzled expression crossed Leda's face; she watched him put the flame to the cigarette, watched him put the lighter down, watched him begin to turn away.

"No!" she said with sudden violence, and seized his shoulder with a trembling hand. "Look at me! Turn around and look at me!"

Greville obeyed, his face blank as a statue's. Leda stood up, panting, and met his eyes with hers.

"Aren't you going to say anything?" she demanded. "Don't you understand what I'm telling you? Look at me! Look at my body! Don't you remember what it felt like to touch this skin?" She snatched his hand in hers, pressed his fingers against her. "Remember now? Do you? Well, he touched me here, and here, and here! He kissed me here! Here! He—"

She broke off, her voice dissolving into a groan, and her lips quivered as she searched his face for signs of a response.

"What are you?" she said at last in a shaking whisper. "A human being or a machine?"

"I'm not a voyeur, at least," said Greville. "What you did in someone else's bedroom doesn't interest me."

"But aren't you jealous?" Leda took a horrified pace back, pressing herself hard against the table behind her. The last word spiraled up toward a cry of despair.

"Why should I be jealous?" said Greville. His mind was cold and clear now, like a crystal bowl full of pure water. "I might be jealous of what my wife did. But I didn't marry a happy dreamer. I didn't marry a trollop who would give herself to a drug peddler—something lower than an animal on any scale of human values. I don't know you. You're a stranger. What are you doing in my apartment?"

Leda covered her face with her hands and began to utter hysterical, self-pitying sobs. Her cigarette burned between her fingers; the green-dipped lock of her hair brushed across its glowing tip and sizzled.

"Now look what you've made me do!" she wailed accusingly and Greville suddenly found that he wanted to laugh. But he couldn't No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn't. He waited for her sobbing to stop.

At length she lowered her hands, drew a deep breath, and looked at him pleadingly. "What—?" she began, and had to pause, swallow hard and stir again. "What are you going to do?"

Greville shrugged. "One shot doesn't make a habit. Or it doesn't have to. I'll go in for treatment. As for you, what you do is entirely up to you."

She wasn't convinced yet. The shadow of her favorite coy little-girl expression crept across her face—the "I've been naughty, aren't I cute?" look. For the first time Greville saw it objectively, on the face of a woman of thirty-one, and felt a moment's nausea.

"Entirely up to you!" he repeated roughly. He made to turn away, and she moved after him, panicking, to catch him by the arm.

"Nick! Nick! You're saying that to frighten me, aren't you? That's why you're doing it—to be beastly to me!" Her voice was ragged-edged with honest terror now, as she began to understand that there wasn't going to be any rescue operation this time, that she couldn't pull him back to save her from herself.

"Let go," Greville said, and when she didn't release his arm, turned it toward her thumb sharply, forcing her to break the grip. "You've had your chance to learn to grow up, Leda. You were too lazy and selfish to take it. Now you've acted like a child once too often, and you're going to have to look after yourself."

"God damn you," she said. "G-g-god damn you, Nicholas Greville!" Her lips quivered; from the way her cheek muscles were drawn inward and upward he could tell she was trying to start tears flowing; with cold detachment he noted that she was failing. Abruptly she realized it too and abandoned the attempt in favor of shrieking at him.

"That's always been your way, hasn't it? What else could I have expected? You've never thought of anyone but yourself! You only married me for my body! You never let me have any fun! You're a stupid, heartless, selfish animal!"

"You've got your fun now," Greville said glacially. "And you're welcome to it."

He stubbed out his cigarette and strode toward the bedroom. Leda came after him, moaning and trying to catch hold of him. He shook her off.

"Where are you going?" she cried. "Nick!"

Greville dragged on his shirt, picked up his pants, drove his feet into his shoes. "I told you," he answered. "Down to the department to turn myself in for treatment."

"Nick, you can't just leave me like this!"

"Why not?" He sat down on the edge of the bed to lace his shoes. Irrelevantly, he wished they would issue lighter, cooler uniform shoes for hot-weather wear.

"Because you've got to help me! Nick!" She was clawing at him, pawing him, trying to break his granite-wall decision. "It wasn't my fault that I did this! It was all because you didn't come home when you promised! Do you hear me? You've got to understand! Nick, for God's sake, I love you, I love you!"

He paused from lacing the second shoe, turned his head and looked at her for a moment He didn't say anything. Then he went on fastening the shoe.

"Nick, it wasn't my fault, I didn't want to do it, but you can't enjoy life any more. Everything's so scarce, there isn't any fun and I hardly ever see you and I go half out of my mind because you're away all the time and even when you're here you don't act like you used to, you don't seem to care about me or want to do anything for me—"

He cut the hysterical flow by standing up. "Listen," he said in the calmest voice he could manage. "I'm doing more for you than you have any right to expect. After what you've done for me. It was your idea—you said so yourself. By rights I ought to drag you with me to the department, turn you in so they can make you tell where you got the drug, maybe find the end of a chain of peddlers through you—but I won't, because I don't think I could stop myself doing it for revenge. I'm crazy not to, I guess. But I've been married to you six years and I know you're not vicious. Stupid and selfish and you've never grown up. But you're not a criminal—none of you are. You're sick. And with the whole blasted planet sick around us, there isn't room to handle everyone. So you can't look to anyone else to cure you, Leda. If you want it, you've got to do it yourself."

He walked toward the door. She made no move to follow him except with her eyes. He had a vision of her face, ghastly, suddenly old, somehow crumbling. He almost halted before he actually passed through the door. But like a prick from a goad, the little insect-bite stab on his thigh reminded him that if he went back he would go mad, and maybe he would kill her.

The door, closing behind him, cut off the start of a high-pitched wail of self-pity.





He walked slowly toward the Narcotics Department building, in the humid morning air that grew hotter by the minute. What had just happened seemed to have insulated itself from the rest of his memory; it felt remote, as though on the far side of a pane of glass. Partly, he did not even yet accept emotionally that Leda had dosed him with happy dreams; partly, he had been firming himself for months against this final blowup of their marriage, so that he was not suffering the full pain, but only a kind of ache masked with the analgesia of resignation.

Won't she ever grow up? Greville found himself turning the words over in his mind. They fitted. They made sense. At the beginning, it was no obstacle—it helped to make life more amusing. But bit by bit the amusement wore off. And finally. . .

But how could he be vindictive about her dosing him with happy dreams, when he knew she was probably chuckling gleefully at her own cleverness when she did it?

Getting her own back. A suitable punishment for the unforgivable crime of not taking her out on her wedding anniversary. A once-only (well, maybe just once more, and then maybe just once more still) way of coloring the drabness of modern existence: everybody's doing it nowadays, and besides, Nick knows about this sort of thing, so he'll save me if I let myself go too far....

He felt the flow of his thoughts pause there, as though reaching a dam; in the instant before he found a new forward path he glanced at his watch and found that it showed seven-thirty. There was no point in getting to the department before work started at eight. He went into a restaurant and had coffee—thin, rather flavorless, but warm and tolerable when sweetened.

So those visions he had had were due to happy dreams. Were happy dreams. Leda's violent outburst had prevented his putting things together until now.

He had seen—open plains, woods, a river, grass, trees, animals, fish, rocks, veins of native copper. Someone had seemed to talk to him, explaining something very important. Or, more likely, he'd been explaining to himself, making sure he understood. And then ...

He fumbled for a word, and started with a jerk that spilt hot coffee on the back of his hand. "Varm," he said wonderingly. "Varm!"

It meant nothing, uttered like that. It was the German pronunciation of warm, meaning the same as in English, and possibly had other meanings in other languages. But it had come to him as the name of a color: a color neither red nor blue nor yellow—nor anything else. A different sensation, classifiable as "color-sensation" because apprehended with the eyes, but not in the normal spectrum.

What color would, say, infrared be, if one could see it? Greville thought of the test animals in the cages at the Institute, and of the film recording heat radiated from their bodies. What color was that radiation? Nor varm; somehow he was sure it wouldn't be varm. It would be—infrared.

It would be fascinating to see it again, to have another . ..

He caught himself with a jerk, and felt sweat prickle on his face again. So that was how the habit could catch hold of happy dreamers! Long before physical addiction set in, there was a subtler lure: intellectually provoking, rather than sensually rewarding. How do you describe varm? How do you explain color to a blind man? Cliché. Like all clichés, a condensation of an essential.

But even setting varm aside, there had been something infinitely attractive in the sight of those woods and plains, that river and those rocks. Was it not that they were empty? Unclaimed? Virgin ground?

Well, that was a predictable kind of paradise for a UN agent! In a world where making two ears of grain grow where one grew before led as though by a law of nature to five mouths gaping where two gaped before, that was a vision of Eden soundly based on economics.

As common as smoking tobacco in the last century . . .

But Leda couldn't regard it as lightly as smoking, with a load of risk comparable to the danger of lung cancer— which was curable nowadays, and anyway reduced to a fraction of one per cent by the development of carcinogen-free tobacco. (Was there a connection between that and the current decline of smoking as a habit? Human nature was perverse enough for it to be so.) Leda had heard from him everything that happened between the department's first identification of happy dreams as causing a specific addiction and its addition to the roster of prohibited addictive drugs;; she couldn't have failed to know the consequences. And, knowing, she had tried to ruin her life and his.

He stirred his second cup of coffee. Even if you granted that many people might be misled by the tough legal battle— with strong and mutually opposed opinions being hurled about by the experts—which preceded the bar against happy dreams, so that they felt it was nothing to make such a fuss about, Leda had no excuse.

Was he wrong to have walked out of the apartment and left her—to run away if she wanted? Should he not have stood guard over her and called an ambulance, committed her to a hospital on his agent's warrant before she had another chance to dose herself? Maybe she had a year's supply already bought and paid for, hidden in the apartment, which he should have hunted for so that it would go to help Barriman's work. . ..

No, that possibility was out of character. Leda wouldn't plan a year ahead. Indeed, it had become clear that she had expected him to fly into a panic and save her from herself; she wanted to enjoy seeing him suffer.

But she had no more power to make him suffer. All she could inflict on him he had already endured, in Lumberger's office at Isolation, hearing the tinkle of her laugh like glass shattering.

His mind was numb, as though through that prick-mark on his thigh an anesthetic had been injected into his soul.

"End," said Greville under his breath. And then he felt the stab in his thigh aching again, reminding him that however important a stage of his life had just ended, one infinitely more significant had just begun.





10
Eight o'clock. The third wave of workers was pouring through New York. Like flooded storm drains the subways, the streets, strained to cope with more than a million people on the move. Some workers went in at seven, some half an hour later, others again at half-hour intervals until nine-thirty. More than a million workers moved from home to their place of employment in each wave. Soon they would have to cut each wave in half and plan peaks at quarter-hour intervals instead of half-hour. After that...?

Greville's mind wandered over the unanswerable question as he made his way through the department not toward his own office but toward Al Speed's.

In years, Al was younger than Greville; he had been one of Barriman's pupils when Barriman was lecturing in biochemistry at Cornell, before he accepted his present post as head of research into the chemistry of addiction at the Institute.

Somehow, although Al had his doctorate in medicine and was an expert on the therapy of addicts, Greville had never been able to picture him in a hospital ward, or indeed anywhere else except where he found him this morning: seated behind his wide, plain, tidy desk with a thick file of papers open, his long head under its short light brown hair poised on his long neck, his contact lenses making his blue irises spread across the whites of his eyes.

"Morning, Al," Greville said, sliding the door of the office shut behind him. "Am I disturbing you?"

"Morning, Nick." Al didn't look up, merely gestured vaguely toward a chair. "Sit down. I won't be a moment— I'm just sorting the day's crop of disappearance rumors. I had one magnificent letter from a Holmesite yesterday which would amuse you, by the way." He went on scanning the papers before him.

"From a man in Albany," he continued after a pause. "He's established the exact geographical location of the original Garden of Eden, and says that if we want to find any missing Holmesites, that's where they are."

Closing the file, he leaned back, smiling faintly, and placed the tips of his long fingers on the arms of his chair. "Actually, this was his second letter. Some junior clerk made the mistake of replying to his first one, pointing out that the location he gave is currently about forty feet under water thanks to one of the Tigris water-storage projects. Says our Holmesite huffily, that makes no difference—these adepts are in astral bodies and can live happily under as much water as you like." Greville gave a weak smile, and Al briskened. "Well now, what is it? Something about that chimpanzee?"

Words balanced on the front of Greville's mind went flying as he readjusted his thinking. He shook his head; he had almost forgotten the report from Barriman he had brought in yesterday.

"No, it's something else, Al," he said stiffly. "I want some information about the effects of happy dreams on the nervous system."

Al gave a sad laugh. "This chimp seems to have taken most of our definitive knowledge into the wide blue yonder with her. If I were a Holmesite, I'd be singing with joy at how cleverly the trick was pulled. Still, go ahead and I'll see if I can help." He linked his fingers behind his head and jutted his elbows out so that his arms made a lozenge-shaped frame for his face.

"What do we know about happy dreamers whose supply is cut after their very first shot?"

"The very first?" Al echoed musingly. "I can't recall off hand whether I know of any such cases—there's so much of the stuff circulating, you know. We have seen several in for treatment after say half a dozen shots, though. Why?"

"I'm bringing you a one-shot happy dreamer," said Greville. 

"Could be interesting, I guess." Al sighed. "Hell, but if all these addicts change their mind and ask for therapy we're going to be swamped—what a thing for someone in my position to say! Hoping it won't happen!" He paused. "This is a voluntary case, I take it? You know we can't make it routine any longer; we haven't got staff."

"Yes, it's voluntary," Greville said, and passed his tongue across dry lips. "It's me, Al."

Hardly any reaction showed on Al's face. The words sank into his mind, were absorbed like water on thirsty soil. A neutral nod. "How did it happen?" he asked softly. "Is this a case of extreme devotion to duty?"

Greville gave a mirthless chuckle. "No, it's revenge, Al. I haven't told Lamancha yet, because the—the person who did it to me isn't a peddler. We might get a lead to a peddler through—uh—through the person, but before I do anything else, anything at all, I want to make double-damned sure I never take a Shot of my own accord."

Al let his lids fall over his exaggerated blue eyes. "Tell me the whole story," he requested.

Greville did so, baldly. He was tempted to hide Leda's part in it at first, but he couldn't see how to; anyway, Al was a pretty close friend, close enough to understand. Besides, Al was of the new generation; his interest in his job was medical rather than legal. The whole emphasis of Narcotics Department work was swinging away from prosecution toward the development of curative programs, and Al was in large part responsible.

When Greville had finished, Al unclasped his hands and sat forward on his chair. He spoke in a tone of clinical detachment.

"Sounds like a pretty typical reaction," he said. "Most happy dreamers tell a similar story. The first shot lasts about three to four days—you get vivid dreams the first two nights, a fading one the third night, like a torn sepia movie print following two in full color. After one shot, it isn't a habit yet There are no withdrawal symptoms. There's only a deadly fascination, a tantalizing, insoluble puzzle, like having a name on the tip of your tongue, which can only be stopped by another shot of happy dreams. And another, and another, and another."

"It's this color—this color varm!" said Greville, and spread his hands helplessly. "How about that? Where did I get the name from—how do I know that's what it's called?"

Calmly, Al regarded him. "You invented it," he said. "If you think it over, you'll see that no one else could have suggested it to you."

"I—guess not," Greville agreed after a moment's hesitation. "Have you had any other accounts than mine of a new color, though?"

"Not that I can remember," Al said. 'This seems to be the way the drug hit you. Why that way and not some other, we don't yet know."

"I've been thinking about that, too," Greville said. "Why in hell hasn't this whole problem been handed over to Pure Research for them to handle? It's all very well to have Mike Barriman struggling away at the Institute with a few assistants, but what's needed is a proper budget and a staff recruited from all over the world. This is a big problem, Al! It won't be solved by picking at it piecemeal."

"You should know better than that, Nick," Al said quietly. "Just because Pure Research has the biggest budget, the most prestige, the greatest facilities of any UN agency, that doesn't mean it has the most time to spare. I've been into this question myself, and as far as I can gather the only way we can honestly tackle the job is the way we're doing it now. You don't give this kind of problem to Pure Research, anyway. It isn't their job to solve existing problems, but to help us avoid future ones." He shrugged. "Of course, they may come up with an answer next week—but it'll be a by-product of a social research program, found by accident."

"Does nobody know even yet how happy dreams operates?"

"You can take your pick of theories. The Holmesites will be only too happy to reveal the truth to you. And there are other ideas nearly as far out, which some quite reputable scientists have propounded."

A thought crossed Greville's mind. "How about Franz Wald? I heard he had a theory which Barriman disagreed with."

"I vaguely remember that. . . ." Al frowned. "Oh, yes! He did have a theory, but it was all guesswork without a solid experimental basis. His idea was that our perception of reality depends purely on the chemical composition of our nervous systems, so the visions you get from drugs are no less 'real' than what you normally see."

Greville shook his head blankly. "That sounds pretty metaphysical to me. I'm not surprised Barriman couldn't take him seriously."

"I think he was influenced a lot by Kant and Berkeley," Al said offhandedly. "Well, that's a red herring. Nick, you said you wanted to make sure you never take a shot of happy dreams of your own accord. Do you mean you want to be proofed against the temptation? Because I can do that easily enough—get you a week's sick leave, put you under sedation in the hospital. By the time you wake up, the metabolic processes will have cleared away the compound. You'll only have the memory of the vision to bother you, and hypnotic amnesia will take care of that."

"That's approximately what I had in mind," Greville said, and hesitated. Then he went on, "But after what you've said —about our still knowing so little about happy dreaming— would I not be more useful if I volunteered to go through the process conscious? I wouldn't mind being under a few days' observation if it would help. The tension shouldn't be unbearable after a single shot, but if it is, and if it interferes with my work, hypnosis will take care of that then."

Al's thin-lipped mouth compressed, considering, then relaxed. "I think we'd be very grateful for the offer, Nick." He jerked a note pad across the desk and rapidly jotted down a few sentences. "Do you know what time you got your shot?" 

Greville shook his head. "Some time between one and seven A .M., presumably. I was so deeply asleep I didn't even half wake up."

"Have you any work on hand that needs to be cleared up?"

"I guess I'll have to tell Lamancha about—Leda's boyfriend," Greville answered mechanically. "There's an outside chance he may be a regular peddler."

"Ye-es." Al frowned. "Nick, you know I'm opposed to treating drug addiction as a crime instead of the sickness it really is, but there are limits. Why, in your view, have your people never yet caught up with a big peddler?"

"A dozen reasons," Greville said. "Mainly, there are twenty million people in Greater New York, there are still problems of conventional doping, alcoholism, and so on, which exhibit the standard labeling complex of associated petty crimes-store holdups, pilfering, robbery with violence for the sake of a drink or another shot of horse. Happy dreaming doesn't show the same signposts—happy dreamers are often among the most intelligent and respectable members of the younger generation, driven by pure frustration rather than personal inadequacy. It's my belief that the typical happy dreaming pattern—when we establish it—will be found to be not the group pattern, but the lone wolf pattern, with the dreamer buying a large quantity once or twice a year. If there is a group, it doesn't break open; once it's formed it stays tight. And I find it significant that none of our men has ever been offered happy dreams. Reefers, yes; mescal, yes; horse, yes; not happy dreams. It's as though nobody needs to push it! The effects are so transparently innocuous all thought of its being a drug of addiction goes out of the dreamer's mind."

"You make it sound pretty convincing," Al granted. "But surely you've followed up trails—the known addicts must have got their supplies somewhere."

"I've followed lots of such trails," Greville said feelingly. "Every last one of them has taken me to a long-time dreamer who's passed the point of no interest, left his home and his job and faded anonymously into the crowd."

Al sighed. "Okay. Go and see Lamancha, tell him what's happened, and then you can go into an observation ward at the clinic—and good luck to you."





On Lamancha's desk was an engraved metal plate, long and narrow, which said: director of narcotics investigations. It was like a caption permanently underlining the man on the other side of the desk.

Theodore Lamancha was a long way apart from Greville, or Al Speed, or Barriman—not in time, because he was Barriman's age, nor in his profession, because he was after all chief of this department. The direction in which he was distant was one of personality and background. He was an old policeman who had come into narcotics work when it was still a matter of crime and punishment. His fiendish talent for organization had kept him ahead of the field when the emphasis shifted first to psychological study, then to the chemistry of addiction and the specific therapy of the addict. When Lamancha went, of course, the Narcotics Department would cease to have any connection with law enforcement or police action; it would move out of its present between-two-stools position and come under World Health where it properly belonged, and everyone would breathe a sigh of relief. But until then, Lamancha was Lamancha and this was his department.

Greville wondered whether he kept on at the job because it was all he knew, or for a better reason—because he believed it needed to be done.

"Sit down, Greville," Lamancha grunted. "Speed just called to say he's putting you in the hospital for observation. Nothing serious, I hope?"

"I hope not, Director," Greville agreed. 

Lamancha sighed. "If this hadn't happened, I was going to send you back to that place in Kansas—Isolation. The field-workers they sent out from the Institute confirmed your estimate; the town's crawling with young addicts. People like that are fine for writing up comprehensive reports on the home background of addicts, fine for describing contributory conditions and suggesting changes—and no damned good at the real work of cutting off the supplies. That's our kind of job, Greville."

He broke off, searching Greville's face. "Is something wrong?"

"Yes," said Greville stonily. "My wife seems to have taken up with a happy dreams peddler."

Lamancha's face froze, like a granite statue ravaged by time.

Greville plowed on, giving the outline of the story, and finishing, "I hope you'll understand—why I couldn't bring myself to do anything at once, I mean. But I left her in my apartment. Maybe she's still there. Maybe someone should trail her, see who she goes to visit. I don't know who the guy is. I didn't ask. I couldn't make myself ask."

"You don't have to kill yourself giving me details," Lamancha said harshly. "All right, leave the rest to me. I— uh—appreciate your putting your duty ahead of your marriage."

"What marriage?"

Lamancha hesitated. "I thought you put in for leave of absence yesterday because it was your anniversary," he said finally. "Wasn't that right?"

"That's right. Only because I was stuck overnight in Colorado, Leda got tired of waiting for me. That's how it happened."

Lamancha picked up a pencil, which looked like a match in his large bony hand. He made a note on a sheet of paper.

"All right," he said again. "I'll see that the matter is handled discreetly, Greville. And if it turns out—as it usually does—that she wasn't in contact with a peddler but only with an ordinary addict who enticed her, maybe you or Speed can talk her into going for treatment too."

He didn't say any more—just turned the pencil over and over between his fingers. After a while Greville got up and went out.





11
The process was very like being one of Barriman's experimental animals, except that his cage was a tiny isolation ward, furnished with a bed, a locker and a sink.

They took a sample of his blood and another of his spinal fluid soon after Al brought him down to the clinic. While they were analyzing the results, Al fired a string of questions at him, recording the answers. Most of the questions were concerned with the color varm, and left Greville hopelessly frustrated by his own inability to revisualize it

When the analyses were finished, the treatment began in earnest

They pumped out his stomach so that complex organics from the food and drink he'd taken this morning would not bias later calculations. His diet for the next few days would consist of flavored but inert bulk by mouth, and sugar and vitamin and essential protein requirements intravenously.

When he passed water or defecated, the products went for study. They examined his retinas, his reflexes, his skin for dermographia, his brain for abnormal wave-patterns, and all his internal organs for disturbance of function.

They injected a labeled sample of a compound whose solubility compared with happy dreams into his thigh, and timed its progress toward his extremities and particularly to his head. They checked his personality file from the department's record office to see if his IQ or social index had altered since his last annual tests.

And when he slept he shared his pillow with the leads of a complex encephalogram recorder.

That night, and the night after, the visions were rich and detailed and in bright color. Again he saw a virgin world, whose every hill and valley, every rock and stream, was pregnant with promise of riches. And there were still flowers that shone brilliant varm against the banks of the river.

But the night after, the vision was shabby and dull, as if obscured by drifts of heavy yellow smoke. As Al had forecast, by comparison with the rich tints of earlier dreams, this one was like a tattered sepia movie print.

There was no varm in it, either.

"How do you feel in general, Nick?" Al inquired, having finished his probing questions about the latest of the visions. He kept the microphone of the recorder ready to catch the reply.

Greville leaned his head in bis hands and sighed.

"Trapped," he said after a while.

“Trapped?"

"Just that. Walled in—by people and by circumstances. As though I was running a kind of Red Queen's race, where the fastest I can go is just enough to keep me in the place where I started."

"Most of us in UN agencies feel that way," commented Al.

"Of course we do! Every time World Health gets another disease licked, that means more work for Food and Agriculture. Every time FAO abolishes another pest, that means trouble for Conservation because it upsets the ecology. And every now and again comes Pure Research to toss a wrench into the works by finding some brand-new and tantalizing opportunity for progress which we can't take because we're bogged down in the population problem.

"God, Al! Can you imagine what it would be like to start over, without forgetting the lessons we've learned the hard way? To sail to a new America and find it waiting to be picked like a ripe apple?"

Al's long face bore a wistful smile. "For pipe dreams, your visions are good and alluring, Nick."

"That's right. And they're solid, too, while they last. But once they're over they're as tough to recapture as any other kind of dream."

"This helps to explain why happy dreaming becomes compulsive even before there are any physical withdrawal symptoms," mused Al.

"But if it was just a question of their content, there'd be no trouble," countered Greville. "Look, sometimes when a real disappointment hits you it hurts a lot less than you expect it to—when you've been bracing yourself unconsciously against it beforehand."

"Leda, for example?" suggested Al sympathetically.

"Like with Leda." Greville licked his lips. "Anyway, I've been so conditioned to this treadmill world of ours that I can brace myself against dreams of a brand-new virgin America, or unlimited elbowroom, or untapped resources— we all dream of miracles that will fix this cranky planet and make it hum along its orbit sweet and true. Only there's varm as well, and that is too much."

"Varm," repeated Al thoughtfully. "The only varm-colored things you've seen are these fairyflowers, aren't they? Is that because varm is unique to the flowers? Or does varm take the place of some other color—blue, for instance?"

Greville closed his eyes and frowned with the strain of recollection. "I can't say!" he declared at last. "I suppose there may be other varm-colored things—but how many bright red things do you see in nature? I haven't seen anything bright red, but how do I know there aren't bright red flowers around the next bend in the river?"

"You're talking as though the place really exists," cautioned Al. "Don't let the idea get hold of you. If you start regarding a dose of happy dreams as an airline ticket to a brave new world, you're hooked."

"Don't worry," said Greville, and sketched a smile. "I don't intend to get hooked."

"Addicts never do."

The truth of the jab made Greville shudder; Al saw his reaction, and hastily switched the subject back. "Bright red," he said. "Well—flowers, some insects, some minerals, the clouds at dawn and sunset occasionally, a great many kind of fruit, and commonest of all is fresh blood. It's quite a list when you come to think of it." He hesitated, then gave a quick laugh. "You know, I've forgotten what I was trying to prove. Forget it!"

He switched off his recorder and stood up.

"Al!" Greville said.

"Yes?"

"Is there any news of Leda?"

"None so far," Al said in a tone that suggested he was going to be dogmatic about it. Maybe that was just as well; thinking about Leda implied thinking about why he was here, and Greville felt he could manage better if he avoided it.

He went on, "Can you do me one favor?" And found himself reaching up to scratch his head, having to check himself with a grunt of mingled annoyance and amusement. This was like having a itch in his very brain, shielded by his skull from the relief of scratching.

On Al's nod, he went on wryly, "Right now I feel like one of the seven blind men confronted with an elephant. I can make noises about my experiences, but that's all. I want to check on other blind men's views. Can you let me have some case histories to study—ones in first-person, for choice? And I'd like the happy dreams master file, too, if you can get Lamancha to send it down, or get it copied. I'm entitled to access to the master files, so there should be no difficulty."

"I take it," Al said after a pause, "that this means you're going to sweat it out, and you want to know what to expect."

"Right."

"I wish you luck, then. I can't do much for you, except have the nurse give you a shot of nöetine—that's the natural stuff which happy dreams fouls up in the brain cells. It may not do much good, but it'll do no harm. And after that, Nick, it's all yours."





It was a shock, when the happy dreams master file arrived, to discover how little had been added to their knowledge since he last refreshed his memory a matter of months ago.

The first item on file was familiar to him: a two-page summary of the physical characteristics of the compound—its crystal structure, composition, molecular weight, solubility, biological effects as far as known, taste, smell, appearance and so forth. A highly condensed and technical account of its reactions with nerve tissue grown in vitro was attached, part of a report submitted to the department by Dr. Michael Barriman and Dr. Franz Wald of the UN Research Institute, Sandy Gulch. (Come to think of it, the name Wald had seemed familiar when Kathy mentioned it—this must be why.) Greville lacked the technical knowledge which would have enabled him to follow the description in detail.

A progressive summary of investigations in the Americas was next, beginning with the identification of happy dreaming as an addiction distinct from any other two years and two months ago, and passing on to the wrangles which preceded its legal definition as a dangerous addictive drug. Greville remembered that period very well—Lamancha and Al Speed had taken opposite views, Al wanting to get on record a precedent which would establish drug addiction as a disease and not a criminal offense, Lamancha sticking to a more traditional attitude. In the end a compromise had been reached, and the wording of the statute had shown that peddling happy dreams was analogous to wantonly spreading an infectious disease, hence anti-social and punishable. It seemed a reasonable way of phrasing it.

The report also covered the estimated incidence of addiction, that insanely low price, the source—unknown—and practically nothing else.

Translations of similarly unsatisfactory reports from the other continents followed. About the only item of any great interest to Greville was that several small batches had recently been seized in Moscow. He was seized by anger for a moment—surely if they took it seriously over there, they could call out the militia and conduct a thorough house-by- house search . . . ? No, not nowadays. Half a century ago, maybe. But these days the Russkies were as touchy about infringements of personal privacy as anyone else. He remembered the old saying, "The only sensible kind of government would be one run by me," and felt his lips quirk in an ironic smile.

He slapped the file shut and turned to the stack of case histories Al had dug out for him. He didn't usually get to see these—by the time Al's staff compiled their reports on individuals, Greville's part in the job was long over and he had moved on to other cases. He devoured the words greedily.

"Non-habituated addicts" was the clumsy title of the first file—i.e., Greville thought, addicts who aren't addicted. Ridiculous. There weren't many under this heading. Each item consisted of a brief medical report clipped to a transcript of an interview. The effect was thin and watery; the facts were presented like naked bones, without the flesh to give them life.

"A-HD-8," began a typical example. "Susan Adelaide Peel, /., age 19 yr. 2 mo., colored. Eleven scars, last two fresh, left thigh (see att. diagram) Arr. 2/5/032. Slight withdrawal symptoms. Physical response to treatment good, but announced intention of resuming addiction on release (see att. trscrpt). Social index high, IQ 126, exc. educ. record. Committed Albany Care & Attention Home, NY, 1/10/032. Escaped 19/11 / 032. No further reports."

The transcript attached, condensed from a recorded interview, ran: "I started over a month ago. I got some from a boy I knew in school. I left school end of last summer. I like it because it takes you away from this f------ing city to where it's all clean and there's room to move and the air smells like it's been washed. I do it in my room at home. Sure it hurts a bit, but it's worth it. I don't see why anybody has a right to stop me doing it—everything you try to do these days someone says you mustn't because there's a shortage of this and a shortage of that, I say shit, this is all that makes it worth staying alive and not jumping in the river. No, I won't say who the boy is I got it from (Judicial Waiver secured, no. 0012416 Estab. under hypnosis to be case A-HD-34). No, he's not a peddler; this isn't dope, I keep telling you. Sure if someone asked me for some and I had it to spare I'd sell some. It always costs two dollars except the first shot which costs five. I don't know why. No, I don't recall that anyone told me—it's something people know, that's all. Like nobody has to tell you the medicare fee is always a buck. If you hadn't stopped me I'd have gone right on doing it and when I get out of here I'll do it again. No, I don't know where I'll go to look for some, but I'll get plenty."

Greville frowned and looked for case A-HD-34. He found it in the next file, which was labeled "Confirmed addicts." It was much fatter, having perhaps a hundred items in it. Case A-HD-34 was a white boy of the same age as the girl, with fifty-four scars indicating about five months' addiction. He had obtained supplies from cases A-HD-107 and A-HD-229 as well as from sources not known to the department. Both the known cases were entered in the file marked "Incurable addicts" and displayed more than a hundred scars apiece.

Incurable? Greville riffled back to the medical report on A-HD-34, and his lips drew back in a mirthless grin. This boy was still in the Merciful Angels sanatorium and his prognosis was bad. Was he "curable" on that showing?

Incurable—oh, all right. There might be a faint chance for the boy, but those who had put up their century were obviously beyond hope. He read: "Typical lack of affect. . . near-total withdrawal from reality . . . scrupulous attention to bodily hygiene, eating, etc., but refusal to communicate beyond basic questions and answers ... apparent intense concentration on personal fantasies."

The closing entry on case A-HD-107 said, "Died in Merciful Angels sanatorium." And the other stated baldly, "Escaped, probably resumed addiction."

There would have been little attempt made to track down these escapees. By then it had become clear—first, that there were too many happy dreamers to cope with, and second, that happy dreaming, since it did not display the associated crime-pattern of most drug addiction, wasn't immediately dangerous to the public at large. Hence most of the cases Al had picked out for him were old ones, reported ten months or a year ago.

It was extremely striking, Greville thought, that the common factor in the visions these addicts reported had already been a stress on room to move, open spaces and fresh air. But on the margin of one of the interview transcripts, a psychologist on Al's staff had pencilled a scornful comment: "Obvious compensation against overcrowding and scarcities. Of little significance."

After satisfying himself that nowhere was any reference made to a new color, Greville came back to this brief dismissal and reread it.

"I wonder," he said to the air. "I wonder...."

When you considered only the hopelessly overpopulated conurbations of the coasts and the Midwest, it was easy to jump to this conclusion. But how about those kids in Isolation, Kansas? What was their happy dream—Saturday night on Broadway? That was a point to check up.

The consistency here really was remarkable, especially since most of the addicts were young people with no direct experience of life except in a big city. Most? No, more likely the truth was that those over twenty-two, say, were better able to avoid being turned in by teachers, parents, neighborhood policemen. Addicts living on their own, financially independent, might last until the climactic point when they suddenly displayed these symptoms of withdrawal from reality and—sometimes literally overnight—dropped out of sight.

Out of sight, into—what? Presumably some kind of comatose half-world where identity blurred like mist.

Leafing again through the "Incurable addicts" file, he came across a note in Al's handwriting which he had previously overlooked. The photo-reproduction was poor, because the original had been written in gray pencil, but he could read it. He did so, then stared at it with eyes unfocused, shivering. It ran:

"The number of disappearances attributed to extreme happy dreams addiction is increasing. By sheer chance we should sooner or later start to bump into some of them. Director Lamancha's comments, please."

But there was no trace of Lamancha's reply. It looked as though Al's note had been misplaced from an internal correspondence file probably kept in the same cabinet.

No matter—it had given food for thought. Greville considered the implications. Yes, it was logical. You could lose one man in twenty million the way you could lose one raindrop in a thunderstorm. But when you were looking for any one of a thousand men the odds jumped. And pretty soon it wouldn't just be one of a thousand, but ten thousand, or twenty, or more.

The idea was suddenly exciting. Greville checked his watch. Al was late for his daily visit. Impatiently, staring at the door as though he could will it to open and reveal Al, he lay and reviewed in his mind what he had learned.

Looking harassed, Al finally appeared. He apologized for his lateness, removed his contact lenses with his little sucker-tube, and applied fresh lotion before replacing them. His eyes, Greville saw, were red-rimmed and tired.

"I'm sorry, Nick," he said, blinking to settle the lenses in place. "But things are chaotic in the department. Two of my indispensables have disappeared."

"What? Where?"

Al gave a bitter laugh. "Where do flies go in the winter? Who knows where happy dreamers go?"





12
Greville halted the questions he had on the tip of his tongue.

"Right in the department itself?" he said after a pause.

"Why not?" Al sat down with a look of pitiable weariness. "There were four hundred and eighty disappearance reports in New York State last month, and something like half of these may well have been associated with happy dreaming. It's a statistical fact that sooner or later we'll be affected."

"Yes, but—" Greville shook his head; he couldn't put his horrified reaction into words. "Anyone I know?"

"Clements and Agnew. Two of our best. Both brilliant, both frustrated to hell, fed up with the treadmill ... I'd noticed they were losing their enthusiasm, but I put it down to overwork. I offered them a medicheck and the chance of a rest, and they both refused. I guess I know why, now."

"How do you know they were happy dreamers?"

"We searched their apartments. Last night. Found a few grains of happy dreams in Clements' bedroom." Al passed his hand over his face. "Damnation, Nick! Even if it's too much to ask you to trace some of these people, why can't you trip over them occasionally? There are enough of them now!"

Greville let the implied insult slide past him; Al was plainly overwrought. He said calmly, "I saw a note from you to Lamancha in the file, pointing this out. What did he say?"

"Approximately, mind your own damn business. Much more of this, so help me, and I'll become a Holmesite out of pure desperation. At least they have a kind of manic security."

'The whole idea of someone in the department getting hooked—it's revolting," Greville said.

"Agreed. How we can maintain public confidence in our work after a scandal like this I simply don't know. I'm going to have a top-to-bottom house-cleaning job done—oh, hell, this doesn't concern you. Let's think about something else! Did you get any bright ideas out of those case histories?"

Greville struggled back to the points which had seemed so important before Al broke the news. He said awkwardly, "Well, there was one thing. Have any of the addicts in Isolation been interviewed yet? Because I want to know if their visions can be dismissed as compensation, too."

An expression which Greville found impossible to interpret, but which might—though his face was completely inexplicable—have been alarm, crossed Al's face. "What do you mean?" he said.

Greville ran over what he had worked out, and Al sighed.

"I get your point. But as far as I know, the Isolation problem is still in the hands of the original fieldworkers. I gather Lamancha had it in mind to send you there, which would have been fine, but in view of what happened and your being here he planned to send Mischa Poliakoff instead, only Mischa won't be back from the Tokyo Conference until day after tomorrow and the way things stand I'm going to have to appropriate him to help clear up the mess Agnew and Clements left behind." He shrugged.

Greville hesitated. Then he said, "Look, Al, from what you say we're in a mess. If you've got what you wanted from observing me, would I be more use back on the job?"

This time Al looked openly alarmed. He said, "Hold it, Nick! You've only been here three days."

"Which do you want, more data from me or me back on the job?"

"That's not the choice," Al countered. "Obviously, I'd like you back on the job in good shape, and so would Lamancha. Point is, you'd be working under strain. You're standing up pretty well so far—but how about next week, next month?"

"It'll get easier as time goes by. Won't it?"

"Maybe." Al regarded him thoughtfully.

Suddenly Greville lost his self-control. He slapped the files lying before him with his open palm, and the sound was like a pistol shot. "Al, for God's sake! I was willing to be a guinea pig because I thought it would be valuable, but do you imagine that after what you've told me today I'm going to be able to endure lying here, knowing that this thing is spreading like a plague, knowing the work of the department is going to hell in a helicopter?"

"And am I going to be happy knowing that if I let you out you may break down?" Al shot back. "Don't kid yourself, Nick! If you hadn't come in voluntarily for observation, to stay conscious throughout, you'd have had a week under sedation and then hypnosis to finish the job. It was your idea to be a guinea pig, but you'd have had treatment anyway whether you wanted it or not." Sweat shone on his long face.

"I tell you what I will do, though," he went on after a pause. "We're short-handed enough to justify it, I guess. I want to see how you get on tonight. In the morning, we'll check you over from head to foot, give you some hypnotic protection—probably against using a hypodermic or something else equally simple—load you with tranquilizers and send you home. Not back on the job. Home. And you'll report in daily for a checkup, for at least three or four days."

"If you're going to let me out at all, why keep me from working?"

"You're not going to an assignment in Kansas before I'm through with you, Nick. I want you here in New York, just in case something goes wrong. You can't dismiss what happened to you like a head cold, damn it!"

Reluctantly, Greville conceded the force of Al's argument. He pushed away the files before him and took a cigarette from a pack on the bedside table.

"Give me one," Al said.

Surprised, Greville did so. "I never knew you smoked," he said.

"I don't generally. Right now, I'm so wound up I've got to have something, and I'd rather a cigarette than happy dreams. I'm sorry, it isn't at all funny."

He bent his long head to light the cigarette at Greville's lighter and leaned back, breathing smoke. "Remember that report you brought in about the missing chimpanzee?"

"What about it?"

"I understand that Mike Barriman is so angry—you can't blame him—he's determined to have somebody's head for letting it happen. Right now it looks like the Security chief out there, Joe Martinez. Do you know him?"

"I met him briefly. He struck me as a competent man."

"He is," said Al. "But Barriman's got it into his head, and if it comes to choosing between Barriman and Martinez, you know which we have to keep sweet."

"What has Lamancha to say about this?"

"It's not up to Lamancha—the authority rests in Desmond as head of the Institute, and Desmond is a weathercock, turning whichever way the wind blows. I feel very bad about this, but I'm not sure why: whether because Martinez is going to suffer, or because someone brought off this clever trick and wiped out so many months of hard work."

Al rose to his feet, stubbing out the barely smoked cigarette. "If I were Lamancha, and I had a hundred spare men, I'd draft them into the Kansas and Colorado State Chapters of the Holmesite movement, just to make sure this doesn't happen again. It's bad for morale, Nick. You've no idea how bad." He turned toward the door, shoulders hunched.

"Al!" Greville leaned forward. "Any—uh—any news of Leda?"

"She's been seen in Philly, that's all I know."

"Pennsylvania's her home state—that figures. But no other news?"

"None at all, Nick." Al hesitated. "I'm very sorry," he added almost under his breath, and went out.

Strange, thought Greville when he was alone. Strange how after so short a time the ashes of his pain had grown quite cold, and he could speak of Leda almost as of a stranger.

But, of course, she was a stranger. The Leda he had married was dead. Or maybe she had never existed.





That night there were no visions—only chaotic jumbled fragments of ordinary dreams, interspersed with snatches of memory. No varm. The sense of loss and frustration was so great that once in the middle of the night Greville woke to find that his eyes were blurred with tears.

But of itself, this disappointment was no harder to bear than the thousand and one others that the whole world had to put up with. And this Al accepted, when he saw Greville in his office the next morning.

"I think you'll make out, Nick," he said. "I've seen the morning's report from the clinic. There are no residues of the drug, so you only have to fight your memories. I'll get one of our psychologists to hypnotize you, as I promised. They can give you an auto-hypnotic formula to ease the strain, as well as a compulsion against using an injector. And you'd better have these." He slid open a desk drawer and took out a box of tablets.

"Formula K," he said, handing the box to Greville. "Not a sleeping pill—a disinhibitor or relaxant, rather. But if you have trouble sleeping without dreams, one of those ought to calm your mind."

"And—?"

"Take it easy. Walk the streets a bit. Go to a bar and try to pick up a girl. Or read. Watch TV. Keep yourself occupied with things that don't connect with your work. I mean that!"

"Anything else?"

"No. You step along. I have work to do. Joe Martinez is coming in from the Institute to present his personal report on the theft of the chimpanzee, and if it's a good one I want to see if we can stop Barriman from getting him fired. I doubt if there's much hope, but I'll do what I can."

Pocketing the box of tablets, Greville rose. He said, "I don't see why it's your worry whether Martinez keeps his job or not, Al."

"Maybe not," Al said, shrugging. "But I'd hate to see an able and honest man kicked out of his post for—well, you have even less interest in the matter. 'Bye, Nick. See you tomorrow."





Going out of the department, slowly, like a departing visitor, Greville walked with his head bowed. How the hell did it come about that two members of the staff had succumbed to happy dreaming? He'd found Leda's capitulation dreadful but the case of Clements and Agnew was incredible. He hadn't known Clements more than to say hello to (he noted the automatic use of the past tense, and shivered), but Agnew was a man he had worked with on some of his earliest happy dreams cases. He liked the guy. He was patient and sympathetic, and his attitude toward the addicts he had to deal with was like Al's, a model of tolerance and understanding.

He wished he'd remembered to say directly to Al: "You don't have to worry about my becoming a happy dreamer. I feel too bad about this. All the way down to my bones, I'm full of disgust."





13
Al had said he should only take the Formula K pills if he had trouble sleeping without dreams. Accordingly, when he went to bed that night, Greville did his best to doze off naturally, promising himself an hour's trying before he took a pill.

He had been lying in darkness for almost half the fixed time, unable to still the restless surge of his thoughts, and was being strongly tempted to conclude that there was no point in waiting out the full hour, when there was a click, faint but distinct, from the apartment's front door.

His eyes flicked open. Straining, he made out the sound of the door opening, and soft footfalls on the resilient floor of the living room. And then words which made him suddenly tense with anger, in Leda's voice—shrill as a wet finger rubbing a glass.

"C'mon, lover! C'mon in and shut that door!"

Greville felt the muscles of his face strained by a grin absolutely without humor: the utterly primitive teeth-baring reaction which was properly called a snarl. His mind reviewed his movements immediately before coming to bed, while his body acted with savage purpose. As far as he could remember, he had left nothing obvious to betray his presence in the living room; if Leda had been back since she fetched her clothes, she might just possibly realize he had moved a few items, but the door of the bedroom was slightly open, and he could see that only the dim, diffuse wall lighting was on.

On soundless bare feet he went to the door. Standing well to the side of the opening, he contrived to catch sight of the intruders. The man—whoever he was—had his back to Greville; there was something hauntingly familiar about his appearance, but maybe that was only due to the fact that he wore a UN uniform. The light was too low for Greville to distinguish his badges. And Leda's white arms were around his neck, crushing his face down against her own.

Greville took a deep breath, measuring with his eye the distance he had to cross on the other side of the door, feeling a vast excitement seize him like a blaze spreading through dry grass. He jerked the door wide and went through.

There were four simple motions. A leap, like the pounce of a wild beast, which carried him to arm's length from the man's back. A heave, which lifted the man backwards and broke Leda's grip on him. A punch delivered with bunched knuckles, which threw the stranger staggering against the wall. And lastly an open-handed slap across Leda's face—a face on which horror had barely begun to dawn.

Greville stared at her, panting, his hands curling at his sides. "You really decided to glory in it, didn't you?" he spat at her. "You really made up your mind to foul yourself!"

Her mouth worked, but no sound came out. In the pale mask of her face only her eyes reflected the mortal terror in her mind.





Greville turned aside deliberately. "Now for this—dope peddler of yours," he said, and was so certain in bis first assumption that he had been looking at the man for many seconds before the circuit of recognition closed—after Clements and Agnew, not even the UN uniform was a guarantee he was mistaken.

Then he said, in a voice like the distant soughing of trees, "No ..."

The word was something of a prayer.

One hand bracing himself against the wall, the other holding his jaw where Greville had hit him, Joe Martinez stared back, his eyes rimmed white with disbelief in his tanned face. The shock of the blow passed from him more quickly than the shock of recognition passed from Greville, and he spoke in a dazed tone.

"Hell, Greville—I didn't know! I didn't know who she was! She said her name was Young! I just wanted—hell, man, I've just been thrown out of my job by that pig-headed fool Barriman, and I was past caring what I did!"

He stood up with a kind of dignity. "I can't say any more to excuse myself. I'd better just get out."

"No," said Greville. He looked at Leda. "No, Martinez. There's a job to be done which I couldn't make myself do because I thought it would make me look small. Now I'm going to do it. I've got to. And" —he finished with an orgiastic wave of masochism— "since you know Leda pretty well now, I guess you're qualified to help me."

Leda's eyes grew round. She put up one hand as though to ward off an attack. "Nick!" she forced out between straight lips. "Nick, you couldn't!"

"Martinez, you're used to interrogation techniques, I guess," Greville said, not taking his eyes off Leda.

"I—I don't get you," Martinez mumbled.

"You probably hadn't got as far as this," Greville said. "Not that she'd have stopped you. But I think you'd have stopped of your own accord." He raised his arm and pushed Leda; it was not much more than a touch with his fingers, but she stumbled back, pace after pace, till she fell into a chair behind her. Greville followed. He caught her right arm with one hand and thrust her skirt back over her thighs with the other. There were three of the small round stab-marks now.

"Nick, damn you, damn you, damn you!" Leda moaned, and tried to force her legs together to hide the marks. Greville prevented her and looked coldly at Martinez.

"See?" he said.

"Greville, I swear—"

"I believe you," said Greville, straightening. "Even if you've been fired from the Institute, you're still on the job. We all are. Now Leda here has made up her mind to crowd what's left of her life as a human being with plenty of excitement and lots of men, and it isn't that I hate so much but the refusal to accept what's got to be done, the refusal to try and work at setting the world straight, the abdication of responsibility —hell, I'm preaching, but I mean it. I couldn't bring myself to make her tell me where she got her supply of happy dreams, but I'm going to. I've got to. We've never had a lead to a big peddler, and Jesus Christ we need one like never before."

Martinez's face was hard and emotionless now, like a stone mask.

"In the next room I have some disinhibitor tablets which I was given to help me sleep. One of them crushed in water and injected intravenously ought to be a pretty good makeshift truth drug, by my reckoning. Right?"

Martinez bit his lower lip.

"Right?" Greville repeated, more loudly.

"Yes! Yes! But how about injecting it?"

Greville reached down and unfastened the buckle of Leda's pouch-belt. "One of the first things a happy dreamer must learn," he said musingly, "is not to leave his injector and his supply of the drug lying around for anyone to find. Ah! See?"

He slid out from one of the compartments of the belt an injector—brand-new and shiny, of a type to be had in any pharmacy—and a little plastic sachet containing a fine brown dust. Leda closed her eyes as though an intolerable weight had dragged them down and made no move to interfere.

"Here!" said Greville with sudden violence, and thrust the sachet and injector into Martinez' hands. "Get some water while I fetch the tablets. And put that sachet out of my sight —I ought to turn it in to the department, but the way I feel right now I'm more likely to throw it down a drain."





The Formula K pills were less efficient than a proper truth drug, but they could be seen to be working. At first Leda maintained a sullen silence in face of Greville's questions; bit by bit she grew irritable, and sweat started out on her forehead, smearing her evening makeup. Martinez sat to one side, his face blank, not offering to join in the questioning. Greville accepted his silence. After all, this was a personal affair.

Patiently, hating himself, trying to mask the element of revenge in what he was doing by covering it with justifiable anger, Greville hammered again and again at the same questions: "Who is he? Who gave you happy dreams? Who taught you the habit?"

He could see the strain building up in Leda's face, like floodwaters straining a cracked levee. A little more pressure and the levee would burst.

And it did.

Because the drug he was using was only a makeshift it did not wipe away completely her tensions, fears and anxieties as a specific would have done. Her voice was like the ghost of a scream.

"Who the hell do you think? Who would I know? Who do I get the chance to meet, being tied hand and foot to you? His name's Clements, and he works in your department, right under your nose!"

A huge expanding vacancy grew cold in Greville's mind. He turned away blindly and fumbled for a cigarette from the box on the table.

"Wasn't that what you wanted to know?" said Martinez in a thin voice, after a moment of lonely silence. Greville nodded.

"Then—well, what's so wrong? Is he a friend of yours, or something?" 

"I've met him," Greville said, and gave a hollow chuckle. "But I'm not likely to see him again. A couple of days ago he made like all happy dreamers seem to eventually—decided life was too much for him and walked out on it."

"You mean—right up till two days ago he was working in the department?" Martinez kept switching the direction of his remarks, as though slightly dazed. "Wasn't he spotted, if he was so far gone?"

"No, he wasn't spotted." The taste of his cigarette was foul in his mouth; Greville stubbed it out, barely shortened, and was reminded of Al. "If I'd done as I should have, he might have been found out. But it's too late now. Call the department, would you? Have an ambulance sent out. I think maybe Leda would be better off in a hospital."





While Martinez was making the call, Greville sat and stared at his wife's pallid face.

"Why did you have to do that of all things?" he said softly. She heard him through the mist of the hypnotic fogging her mind; stirred; spoke, in a miserable empty voice.

"It was a thing to do. It was what he said. I hated you so bad for a while. ... I made myself hate you, and I wanted to make you suffer, and he wouldn't touch me, so that was all I could think of."

"Wouldn't touch you?" Greville echoed.

"He wouldn't do anything," said Leda wearily. "He was all shut in on himself, behind glass. Worse than you. Oh, God, I didn't have any fun that night, believe me. I only told you he'd done it because I wanted to hurt you every way I could, make you jealous and angry and make you show that you still cared about me. . . ." Her voice trailed away. She tried to raise a hand in a gesture of dismissal, but the hand was limp on her limp arm, and she failed.

Martinez came away from the phone. "There'll be an ambulance right down," he said, and hesitated. Then: "Do you want me to stay any longer? I'd like to get out. I guess you ought to throw me out."

"Sit down," said Greville. "It isn't your fault. It isn't Leda's either—and maybe it wasn't Clements', but the fault of whoever started him on happy dreams, and not his either but the fault of this whole damned stupid messed-up planet. I tell you, Martinez I don't think human beings are fit to be trusted with Earth."

Martinez' dark, lean face, calm now, with a bruise starting where Greville had hit him, turned. "You don't believe that. None of us do. After being thrown out of my job for not doing the impossible, I still don't."

"How did it happen?"

Martinez shrugged. "You saw the sterile lab at the Institute. No reasonable person would have taken more precautions than you saw. Would they? But someone managed to get in and out, and Barriman isn't content to let me find out who. Because I didn't bring him the culprit next day, cellophane-wrapped and tied with a bow, he's used his influence to get me out. The best I can hope for is a transfer to the worst job available."

"What's that?"Greville asked, more to save the room from total silence than because he expected an answer.

"God knows."

And after that the silence fell, heavy as lead, until the ambulance came. They took Leda, and Martinez went after having again apologized and having been told wearily once more that it wasn't his fault, which it wasn't.

That left Greville alone, and with the help of the Formula K tablets he forced himself under the surface of sleep.





14 
When he awoke, streams of rain like straight steel legs were marching across the city to the rattle of a thunder like drums. He tried to get back to sleep, to avoid having to face the empty day immediately, but the effect of the drug he had taken had worn off, and his mind at once crowded with disturbing images.

He swung his legs to the floor and sat looking at Leda's vacant bed.

How the hell was he going to endure today, and tomorrow, and the next day, doing nothing as Al had ordered? How could he not think of anything connected with his work, when his memory was crowded with bitter, mocking images?

He sent for breakfast and picked at it listlessly, watching the morning news bulletin on TV. It was mainly concerned with the monthly UN report on the state of the planet's resources. There were a few cheering items—a new cheap bulked plastic suitable for insulating the walls of apartment buildings; a method of extracting usable fuel oil from an alga, shortly to go into effect on an industrial scale. Both these processes had begun as Pure Research projects several years ago. It was ironical, Greville thought, that a body with such a name should nowadays be the major source of practical ideas. Actually there was hardly any real pure research being conducted; so great was the need of humanity that every advance was greedily seized by the engineers, the chemists, the technicians of all sorts, and a practical application was wrung from it.

The newscaster concluded the account of the UN report and turned to other matters. The tone of these was determinedly optimistic, but keeping it up was hard work. And then, right at the end of the news, came something which hit Greville hard.

Two pictures, side by side, went up on the screen—faces of men he recognized. The newscaster's voice went blandly on.

"And now an appeal to you, the public. Have you seen either of these men? They are missing from home, and it is feared that they have suffered breakdowns through overwork—"

At that point Greville reached the switch and turned off the set. He saw the screen go blank, felt himself shaking, felt his teeth begin to chatter with the intensity of his feeling. Clements and Agnew—breakdowns through overwork! How in heaven's name could he sit calmly at home and do nothing after that?"

So he wasn't going to.

The decision, like a cold breeze, calmed him. His shaking stopped. He waited for a moment to assess the depth of his recovery, and found it went so far that it had even brought back a semblance of appetite. Fantastic. He returned to the breakfast he had abandoned and sat down to finish it

Of course, it wasn't enough merely to say he was going to do something. He had to make a plan of action. He considered the most obvious one—to go hunting for the men missing from his own department. But on reflection he decided that was pointless. Al and Lamancha would already have an intensive search under way, and in any case he had no illusions about the chances of finding two men who could be anywhere on the continent by now, or conceivably already overseas.

No, what he really wanted to do was something different.

Having eaten, he fetched a note pad and scribbled two letters: one to Lamancha, stating that he would report for duty at Isolation at the beginning of next week, having been directed to take a few days' sick leave; the other to Al, explaining what he had told Lamancha, and continuing:

"You'll probably want to tear me to ribbons for walking out against your orders and then having the gall to ask you to cover for me with the department. I guess I'm being cynical when I say that after studying your one-shot addict—me— you now have a chance at an addict slightly past the initial stage. I mean Leda, of course.

"But I'm sure the temptation to—well, to see varm again, if you like—will be more of a strain if I stay in New York and kill time. Instead, I'm going off to ask various people various questions which have stuck in my mind as a result of reading the case histories you loaned me. In case the questions are stupid, I'm not going to put them down here. Since I only have three days, I shall have to hurry."

He sealed the letters and dropped them down the mail chute to the basement. Then he called the airport and made a reservation on the Mach 5 West Coast Express at eleven A.M.

There was another man besides Martinez who had been unjustly thrown out of a job, and it was he whom Greville proposed to question first.





The airport waiting room was crowded, of course, but there was something odd about the distribution of the people standing and sitting about. Greville paused in the doorway and studied the scene with a frown. Half the hundred-odd who were present were massed in one corner, shoulder to shoulder, listening to someone whom Greville could not see, talking in an intense and rapid voice.

Curiosity drew him that way, and as he came up he caught a snatch of what was being said.

". . . escape from the physical limitations of this over-populated world by using the knowledge which is available to us!"

Oh, God. Holmesites. Holmesites everywhere nowadays, with their voluble doubletalk and their cranky faith in astral projection and mastery of mind over matter. Before turning away again he caught a glimpse of the one who was holding forth—a young man, not more than thirty, holding a sheaf of printed tracts and emphasizing his points by shaking them. It was probable that this man would be taking the same plane as Greville; like other unorthodox cults for more than a century, the Holmesite movement had struck deeper roots on the West Coast than in the comparatively conservative East and South.

He was getting dedicated attention from his audience. That was what was so dreadful about it.

Then suddenly the atmosphere of sympathetic interest was shattered by a challenging remark in a voice which Greville recognized. "So you want us all to become happy dreamers, is that it?”

Joe Martinez? Greville drew himself up to his full height to peer between the heads of the listeners, and saw that it was indeed Martinez, standing near the front, facing the Holmesite directly. He had his arms crossed on his chest, and both his stance and his tone of voice suggested he hadn't liked what he had heard so far.

"I didn't say that," the Holmesite countered. "It's a matter of individual choice. All I'm saying is that Holmes showed us the way."

"You know it's illegal? You know it's an addictive drug?"

Stiffly, the Holmesite selected a pamphlet from the sheaf in his hands. "You should read this text on the legal status of happy dreams. At the time of its use by Holmes, it was not illegal, and we are conducting an intensive campaign at the United Nations to have the statute against it rescinded."

"Anyway" —a woman's voice hesitantly cut in from another place in the crowd— "didn't the experts disagree about its being dangerous? It was pretty well an accident that it was made illegal!"

Martinez ignored the interruption. He shot out a hand and fixed the young Holmesite with a pointing finger. "How seriously do you believe all this propaganda of yours?"

"Implicitly," said the young man.

"I see. So you're a happy dreamer?"

The young man looked uncomfortable. His eyes roved over Martinez' UN uniform. He said, "Well—uh—while it's not legal, of course ... But we're campaigning, as I said, to have the statute rescinded."

"What difference does a bad law make to you if you believe what you say? You've got a conscience, haven't you? It isn't respect for the law that stops you—it's because you know perfectly well what becomes of happy dreamers in reality, not in this cosy little fantasy world of yours! They turn into wrecks that you can barely call living human beings —abandon their homes, their families, their responsibilities. You Holmesites are a gang of nasty confidence tricksters!"

The young man's face was very white. With a certain dignity he said, "That comes badly from you, at a time when we know that UN agents have been taking advantage of their position to get around the legal barriers which stop ordinary folks like us—"

"Why, you dirty little dope-taker!" Martinez hissed, and took a pace forward.

"Martinez!" Greville shouted. "Martinez, don't!"

The sound of his name checked Matinez in mid-stride, his fist already raised. He looked around and saw Greville; his face blanched. Then he let the tension go out of himself, and his shoulders drooped. He turned and forced his way between the bystanders till he emerged on the side near Greville.

Not looking at the other, he said, "Thanks. It would have been good for my soul to beat hell out of him but it wouldn't have proved a thing."

"It's never any good arguing with a Holmesite," Greville said. "They have their minds made up. Cigarette?"

"No, thanks." Martinez took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I'm over it." He glanced at the people behind him, who were once more listening with deep attention to the young Holmesite, and pantomimed a shudder of disgust "Although I'd still like to—no, the hell with it. What are you doing here? Going to the Institute?"

Greville shook his head. "Out to LA to see if I can find Franz Wald. You know him, don't you, from his time at the Institute?"

"Slightly, yes."

"What sort of a person is he?"

"Youngish, supposed to be very intelligent, has a sort of defiant manner which probably covers a basic shyness, doesn't make friends easily, very much wrapped up in his work. I knew him to speak to at the Institute, but the only people who were at all close to him were Barriman and Kathy Pascoe, and he had this row with Barriman, so if you really want to know about him, you'd have to ask Kathy."

"I presume when he was transferred out to LA he went into bio-research there?"

Startled, Martinez drew back his head. "Didn't you find out before letting yourself in for a trip all that way?"

"I can't very well. I'm under orders to say at home and relax, so I daren't make inquiries at the department which might reveal that I'm going to California."

"I see." Martinez' dark eyes studied Greville's face. "Well, to the best of my recollection Wald went to one of the sea-fertilization projects in LA. I don't know which."

"Thanks for that lead, anyway. Mark you, it'll be easy to track him down."

There was a moment's uneasy silence. During it, Martinez' gaze strayed to the wall clock, to see how long remained before his flight was due to leave.

"How about yourself?" Greville said. He was conscious of trying a little too hard to be friendly, to wipe out Martinez' embarrassment about last night.

"I'm going back to the Institute—the long way round, the way that stranded you the other day, through Topeka. To clear up for whoever they put in my job. I wish him joy in it," he added bitterly.

"Where are they sending you?"

"They're transferring me to 'general security duties', that's all I know. How about you—how long are you free to chase your own ideas all over the country?"

"I have three days or so. After that I'm due to go to Isolation and work with Marek and Rice. Has there been any news from there lately?"

"They've only been there a week—“

A bell rang, and a number lit on the outward flights board. Martinez broke off, unable to hide his relief. "My flight," he said. "I must be going. I'll see you again some time, I hope."

Greville nodded and put out his hand.





The young Holmesite was indeed on the same flight as Greville. But he was no trouble. Although the Mac 5 liners, far above low-lying weather, were about the stablest form of transport ever developed, he suffered acutely from airsickness and spent the flight moaning quietly to himself in his seat. It seemed so like poetic justice to Greville that by the time the express landed he was almost cheerful.

Summer traffic for LA was now mainly routed to the offshore pontoons. The colorful complexity of this floating sub-city where cars, boats and helicopters all served as transport and already more than fifty thousand people lived a seaborne existence was famous as representing one of the century's few real steps toward a solution of overcrowding. But Greville had no time to pause with other arrivals and watch the gaudy little shoreboats come jetting up through the countless succession of low arches bridging the waterway to the adjacent city proper. He went directly to a public phone booth and contacted the headquarters of the FAO sea-fertilization project. A weary-faced girl clerk answered him.

Yes, Dr. Franz Wald was now on their staff. Yes, at Experimental Sea-Farm Number Five. Yes, he was currently there and not on leave or at a conference. An appointment would be difficult to arrange owing to heavy pressure of work.

Greville told her not to worry about an appointment. He left the phone booth and went in search of transport out to the sea-farm. He settled for a 'copter as being fastest, and had to wait in line for more than a quarter-hour, which suggested he might have been better advised to pick a slower vehicle and start sooner. But by the time he decided this, it was hardly worth abandoning his wait.

Here, with the morning sun bright on the offshore pontoons, it was almost possible to be taken in by the spurious gaudiness and busyness of everything in sight. Looking a little closer, though, one could recognize reality showing through. Not everyone moved busily and with purpose; haunting the edges of the pontoons like ragged ghosts, scores of vacant-faced men and women lounged against the rails and stared into the water, barely noticing when one of the hurrying shoreboats crossed their field of vision. They were all tanned and looked healthy, but they were stringy-lean, and their apathy was born of an absolute lack of hope. The sight of them shocked Greville. It was a long while since he last came out to LA, and he had forgotten about the beachcomber problem.

Here it was in front of him. Here were the people who had given up, seeing no future possible except one of denser population, worse shortages, keener hunger, and finding no reason to waste their efforts on postponing the inevitable.

There were such people everywhere, more or less tolerated —in the anthill cities of China they were called "those abandoned to chance," in Europe fainéants or Leergeistige or layabouts. In New York you didn't see them so plainly; the city was big, and they blurred into the gray mass of other people. But here on the West Coast they were beachcombers, and the kindness of climate allowed them to stay outdoors.

Greville watched one of them in particular—a tall, rather handsome man of about forty, who lay half-reclining on a stack of rope coils at the far side of the small 'copter stage where Greville waited. The man wore a shirt with one sleeve torn and a pair of old jeans; his eyes were closed against the sun. All the time Greville was there, he did not move except to breathe.

Happy dreamer? The thought crossed Greville's mind. Had this man left home and family and job because happy dreams killed his interest in reality? He was tempted to walk across the stage and challenge him, but sighed and stayed where he was. Suppose he were a far-gone happy dreamer, could be identified and returned to his home—he couldn't be kept there by force, he would have no interest in his family, he would be a living act of cruelty to those around him. As for curing him, there was the burning memory of the epitaph to case A-HD-107: "Died in Merciful Angels sanatorium."

God's name, what a deadly trap the world was drifting into!





The entrance hall of the sea-farm building—itself built on pontoons—smelled characteristically of fish. Trying to ignore the strong odor, Greville walked toward the reception desk.

"Find out if Dr. Wald is available, would you?" he asked the clerk. "My name's Greville—Narcotics Department."

The clerk looked at him steadily for a moment, then waved him to a chair and disappeared behind a soundproof glass screen. Greville sat down patiently in the middle of the hall, where he could see the water of the experimental ponds catching and breaking up the reflection of the sun.

"Greville?"

The sound of his name made him look up sharply. A tall, brisk woman in summer uniform had walked soundlessly across the hall and was standing before him, her face calm but hardly welcoming. Greville nodded.

"I'm Dr. Fizer," the woman said, pulling up a chair to face Greville's. "I'm in charge of this farm. What do you want?"

"I didn't wish to disturb anyone," Greville said, feeling that something must have gone wrong. "I just—"

She cut him short with a humorless smile. "Anyone inquiring after Franz Wald disturbs us. The receptionist has orders to report anyone wanting him. I suppose it was you who called the headquarters office, trying to locate him."

"Yes, I did."

"May I see your ID cards?"

He produced them and handed them over; she studied them and gave them back, nodding. Leaning back in the chair and crossing her legs, she went on, "Now what do you want with Franz Wald?"

"Simply to ask him a few questions. I'll take up as little of his time as possible."

"Anything to do with happy dreamers? Anything to do with the experimental animals that disappeared when he was working at the Institute?"

"Partly."

"I see. Well, I'm going to ask you to change your mind and go away." Dr. Fizer raised a hand to forestall Greville's interruption. "Listen, Greville—this is a branch of FAO. Our job is mainly concerned with nutrition. You're certainly aware that half the world's population gets barely enough to eat; you may or may not be aware that if sea-farming had been on a proper scientific footing by the end of the century this would not have happened. Accordingly, we've got about thirty years' backlog of work to clear off."

"I don't quite see—"

"Let me finish. Dr. Wald is a biochemist of the first rank. Wis job is—or is supposed to be—a study of uptake of additives from sea water by shellfish. It's work he ought to be able to do standing on his head. We need the results he's capable of getting for us."

"But what has this to do with—"

"Listen to me, will you! When we acquired Dr. Wald for our staff we were overjoyed, because his reputation had preceded him. We handed him a completely planned research program which had been hanging fire for lack of personnel with the necessary skills. It took us almost his first six months here to get one month's work out of him—because he refused to think of anything except his blasted happy dreams!"

"Do you mean he's an addict?" Greville said, with a foggy feeling of having missed something Dr. Fizer had said.

"No. At least I don't think he is—if it didn't interfere with his work I wouldn't care." Dr. Fizer spoke gloomily. "What I mean is that while supposed to be working on the project assigned to him, he was spending most of his time theorizing unproductively about happy dreaming. Until we clamped down on him, he was inviting happy dreamers to come to his office here, paying them a dollar a visit. About the only thing I can say in mitigation is that he paid them from his own pocket. Now, when we finally seem to have got him under control, you show up from Narcotics Department and threaten to start the whole thing over again."

"I'm sorry," Greville said after a pause. "I guess, if you care to invoke your authority to stop me seeing Wald, you can. Here, that is. It'll only mean that I have to wait till he leaves work, and see him then."

"Why? If your department is so interested in what Wald thinks about happy dreaming, why send him here in the first place? Why let us get involved in an expensive project and then snatch back the key man?"

"We have no intention of withdrawing him," Greville said. "But I must say this, Dr. Fizer—unless we get to the bottom of the happy dreams problem, a hell of a lot of essential personnel are going to be withdrawn, and not by us either."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean how is your program going to continue if two years from now your personnel are migrating to the offshore pontoons, to sit in the sun and rot with the rest of the beachcombers? The habit is catching, and UN agents are no less human than anyone else."

Dr. Fizer's eyes widened. She said, "Are you serious, or bluffing me?"

"Two agents in New York have gone already. God knows where, but we know why."

Dr. Fizer got slowly to her feet, shaking her heed. "All right," she said abruptly. "I'll take you to see Wald."





15
Wald was a lanky man with a small, round, aggressive head, smooth dark hair, round cheeks plumped up beside an ill-tempered mouth. He stood over a tank in which there were colonies of shellfish; it was one of perhaps fifty ranked on shelves along the walls of the temperature-controlled laboratory. Under the shelves there were racks that held aqualung equipment, harpoon guns, nets, draglines, cans of organic compounds and stacks of blank forms.

He didn't turn around as the lab door opened. "For heaven's sake, Ilse, don't interrupt!" he snapped. "It'll just have to wait!"

Dr. Fizer put her mouth close to Greville's ear and spoke in a tone of weary resignation. "Just as he gets really involved, you see?"

Greville didn't answer. He watched, fascinated with what Wald was doing. He was poking at one of his shellfish with a device that consisted of sharp-jawed tongs sliding in a shiny metal tube. Near the jaws of the tongs was a small hook with a scrap of food stuck on it. Cautiously the shellfish let its valves open, sensing the food; three times it snapped shut again. The fourth time, Wald jabbed down with the tongs, released the spring catch holding them open, dislodged the scrap of food so that it fell between the valves and withdrew his instrument—bearing a sample of the shellfish's mantle.

"Hah!" he said, and brushed his hair back out of his eyes. "All right, Ilse, get this sample down for analysis—"

Then he realized it wasn't Ilse who had entered the room.

"I'll take it down for you," Dr. Fizer said, stretching out her hand. "This is Narcotics Agent Greville, Franz. He insists on talking to you."

"Does he now?" Wald's bright brown eyes fastened on Greville's face as his tongs had fastened on the shellfish's flesh. "Well, if it's another experimental animal gone from the lab at the Institute, I'm not responsible. And if that's not what it's about, I'm not interested."

He turned away, picking up a towel to dry his wet hand.

Dr. Fizer, making it clear she was glad to be going, took the tongs bearing the sample for analysis and went out. Greville moistened his lips.

"I regret taking up your time, Dr. Wald, but—"

"Look," Wald said, tossing his towel on to a high-set hook, "my connection with narcotics is finished. That's been made very clear to me. I ought to have known long ago, when they kicked me out of the Institute."

"Yes," Greville said. "That had something to do with rat' disappearing, didn't it? For some reason Barriman blamed it on you. Clearly you weren't responsible for stealing the chimpanzee that vanished recently, which suggests that Barriman had some—some prejudice against you."

Wald gave a snort. "Don't tell me! Someone has had a fit of blinding sense!"

"If you like." Greville perched himself on the edge of the nearest tank shelf.

"Kee-rist, don't lean on that!" Wald barked. "Get a chair if you're too tired to stand up—there are some folded up against the wall behind you."

Greville straightened. "Sorry. What I'm after is the reason for that prejudice. I gather you had an unorthodox theory about happy dreams. Orthodox approaches have got us exactly nowhere. I'm a comparative layman when it comes to the chemistry of addiction—I'm an investigator, that's all. But I'd like to hear your ideas."

"Ask Barriman!" Wald snapped. "He's heard them often enough."

"I came here for your version, not his," countered Greville.

For a while Wald seemed to be debating with himself. At length he shrugged. "Why the hell not?" he said. "Give me one of those chairs and take one yourself."

Greville did so and sat down.

"Layman, you said?" Wald grunted after a pause.

"Yes."

"How much do you know about the biological aspects of addiction?"

Greville frowned. "Well, essentially it's a matter of metabolic disturbance. Psychological factors involved aren't uniquely determinant—the oral component of smoking, for instance, can be gratified by other oral compensations. But the effect of tobacco on the sugar storage system of the liver is determinant and creates specific withdrawal symptoms."

Wald was waving one hand idly. "Okay, okay," he said. "So you know the basics. How about neurochemistry, cerebral processes, the mechanics of perception—are you grounded there?"

"Not adequately."

"Then we'll start there. You think—okay? You get sensory impressions of the outside world in the form of coded signals supplied by nerves. The optic nerve, the nerves from your skin, your gut, all over; your kinesthetic nerves tell you where your limbs are, and so on. You perceive nothing directly. All your knowledge of the universe, including your own physical body, exists—well, we call it existence —in the form of these codes which can be stored in the cells of the brain as electrochemical energy. Right so far?"

Greville nodded. Wald spoke with a dry didactic offhand tone, like an unenthusiastic teacher instructing his fiftieth class in the same elementary subject.

"You can mess about with this storage system we call the memory in lots of different ways. You can foul up the input with hypnosis, for example. You can stimulate total recall by the action of mild electric currents on the bare brain. You can also foul up the perception themselves, and the kind of drugs which produce hallucinations do just about that"

He leaned forward, eyes fixed on Greville, and his voice became warmer, as though he was working up to the pitch of enthusiasm he had previously lacked.

"What I'm trying to get at is this. Our entire knowledge of the universe, what we assume to be the external reality—if there is one—depends absolutely on the complex active compounds which make up our nerves and the cells of our brains."

"You mean external reality is a figment of our—?"

"No, no, no!" interrupted Wald in an exasperated tone. "Berkelianism is a completely hypothetical view which is inconsistent with human experience. I'm pragmatic when it comes to the question of reality or das Ding an sich or whatever you call it. Human experience indicates that there's something external to our nervous systems which acts on our organs of perception, and whatever it may be in its own essence we have to accept that it's there. But don't let's get sidetracked!

"Now you'll grant that every characteristic we assign to the external world, so far as we're able to establish, is subjective in the sense that its identity depends on the receipt and storage of coded nerve impulses in our brains. In 'reality' —let's say, in the view of a purely non-material being which we can hypothesize as perceiving light and other radiation and even matter and remembering them as themselves rather than as coded impusles—in the view of this imaginary being, then, the nature of the water in that tank is water-nature. But to you and me it's a collection of characteristics. Follow me? It's bluish-green, it's liquid, wet, salty, cool to the touch and so on. We could define the characteristics more precisely by analyzing it, measuring its temperature against a fixed standard, its weight, volume, density, index of refraction —but nothing we can do or conceive of doing would fix its nature in our minds in the form of anything but a series of coded impulses."

Greville suddenly felt a little faint. He said, "I think— I think I get what you're going after."

Wald eyed him skeptically. "Let's hear it, then," he said. "You're probably wrong."

"You're saying," Greville stated, formulating his words with care and pausing between phrases to check his logic, "that whatever the nature of the external world may be, it's plastic so far as human perception is concerned. Our idea of the world depends on symbols which in turn depend on the actual constituents of our nervous systems. On this showing, a—well, a man drugged with mescalin, for instance, is experiencing a world which is nonetheless real for being a minority opinion."

"I'll be damned," said Wald in a matter-of-fact voice. "Finally I run up against someone with some sense. Go on."

"I don't quite know where to go from there," Greville acknowledged. He felt the palms of his hands sweating, as though he was on the verge of some tremendous revelation. "I was told you'd been bringing happy dreamers here to question them—was it to check these ideas of yours?"

"Happy dreamers? Happy dreamers? I should pester the poor devils? I've been interviewing Holmesites to see how much of the truth they've stumbled on, and frankly it's damned little, so wrapped up in doubletalk—" He broke off abruptly. "Who told you, anyway?"

"Dr. Fizer."

"She wouldn't know a Holmesite from a hole in the ground. Anything but her beloved domestic fish is beyond her. Some people call that dedication." Wald gave a harsh forced laugh.

"But—uh—you have talked with happy dreamers?"

"If I have, and they've been cooperative with me, it's not likely I'd repay their trust by telling a Narcotics Department agent, is it?" Wald retorted.

"You mistake my meaning. What I want to know is: have you heard any of them talking about a new color, which may or may not be called varm?"

"Varm? No, that's just a noise to me." Wald spoke impatiently. "One would expect color to be among the first things to be affected—after all, it's the most ultimately subjective of all sense impressions. But the incidental content of the dreamer's vision doesn't matter. Haven't you caught on to what does matter yet?" 

Greville shook his head.

"Good God, man!" Wald roared, slapping the fiat surface of the tank shelf beside him and startling a group of gaudy fish in the nearest of the tanks. "What distinguishes happy dreams from ordinary drugs with hallucinogenic effects? Its specific action on the cells of the brain, of course! Its cumulative action as it deposits out in the tissue!"

A little bell shrilled at the far end of the lab, and he jumped to his feet, staring at his watch. "That's all the time I can give you, Greville. I have to make up my daily progress charts, and I don't want to have to stay late to finish them. I'm going to have to face complaints from Fizer because I didn't feed you to the abalone as it is."

Slowly Greville also rose. "I wanted to ask a few more questions," he began.

"What for?" Wald had turned his back and taken a long thermometer from the tank shelf; he was examining the mercury thread with concentrated attention. "You wanted my wild theory, and you've got it—or at any rate you've got all the evidence for it. If you want something with a 'sound scientific basis'"—he glanced around briefly, and Greville saw his mouth was twisted with sarcasm— "go ask the people who haven't been dismissed from the Institute. Kathy Pascoe is a bright girl; if Barriman doesn't throw her out, she may even yet recognize what's staring her in the face."

"I met her. I was there the night the chimpanzee was stolen."

"Stolen!" echoed Wald, and swung around. "Do you still think that a Holmesite stole that chimp? I thought you had more sense. I've met Holmesites, dozens of them, and not one of them had the intelligence to work a trick like that. And I didn't steal those damned rats, either! What would I want with a bunch of fleabitten rodents? Apparently it's going to take Barriman until—"

Greville didn't want Wald's opinion of Barriman. He cut in, "All right, what became of the chimp, then?"

"Same thing that becomes of happy dreamers," Wald said harshly. The bell at the end of the lab rang again, more insistently, and he moved to switch it off. "Get out, Greville. If I say any more of what I think, you'll call me a fool and I've had enough of that from Barriman to last me for life."





16
Instead of taking a 'copter away from the sea-farm, Greville walked. He needed time to think over what Wald had said. He followed a long series of narrow, precarious floating gangways separating the experimental ponds from each other; he could see that eventually it was possible to get on to a long anti-erosion groyne and walk along that up to a sandy beach where a dozen men and women lay. They weren't sunning themselves, as he could see, for they had clothes on. Still, he couldn't care less what they were doing.

He grew calmer as he walked. Clearly, Wald was claiming something as wild as any notion of the Holmesites. His rationality could only be superficial ... or was that too hasty judgment? He had evidence on his side—negative rather than positive, but evidence—and Greville doubted his own ability to criticize the philosophical basis of the theory. It would explain a lot of things. ...

Greville caught himself angrily. It was too damned simple to invent a fantastic theory and tailor it to the facts. You could account for them equally well by assuming that the sufferers died and their bodies turned to dust and blew away. Small wonder that Barriman had lost patience with Wald.

But the conversation had left a peculiar disjointed sensation —as though he was sorting through the bits of some maddening puzzle, the kind with which it is claimed you can make a square, or a circle, out of seemingly random fragments.

One of the men who had been lying on the beach was getting up. He was collecting a handful of pebbles. Greville, threading his way along the unstable gangplanks toward the groyne, glanced at him occasionally.

Wald had told him to go see Kathy Pascoe. That was logical. Find the nearest Transport Rationalization office and get himself a ride to Pueblo or somewhere close to the Institute ...

The man ahead had collected his pebbles and walked out along the groyne to a few yards beyond the edge of the water. Now he was sitting down, his legs dangling, and tossing the pebbles one by one away from him. None of the others had moved. Greville's attention shifted to the immediate problem of how to pass the man without falling off the groyne. He wasn't going to be able to. The man would have to move.

Greville jumped from the last gangplank to the groyne. The sitting man didn't take any notice; he had apparently run out of pebbles but made no move to go and get more. He was a typical beachcomber in appearance, with untidy hair, some days' growth of beard, and clothes which, though clean, looked as though they had been rinsed by their owner jumping into the sea with them. He kept his head quite still, not glancing up even when Greville was a pace from him and casting a shadow on him.

"Let me by, please," Greville said as calmly as he could. The man didn't seem to hear. After his talk with Wald, Greville had little patience left; he raised one foot and prodded the man's thigh with his toe.

"Let me by!" he repeated.

Now, slowly, the fog in the man's mind seemed to lift. He turned his head at last and looked up at Greville, his eyes wide and vacant and his mouth slightly open. He betrayed not the faintest sign of recognition, but Greville was so taken aback that he almost lost his footing and slipped off the groyne.

"Agnew!" he breathed. "God damn, you're Richard Agnew!'

The other man's only reaction was to shuffle himself, still seated, toward the side of the groyne so that Greville would have room to sidle past him and continue to the shore.

"No, you don't!" Greville reached down and caught him by the shoulder of his shirt, forcing him to scramble to his feet. "You're not going to pretend you don't know me! I know who you are! And what's more, now I've found you, I'm going to take you back where you came from. I guess you thought that by crossing the continent you could just disappear like the rest—well, you're out of luck, aren't you?"

He heard the disgust and anger naked in his voice, so changing it that it seemed not to be his own.

"It's no use, Agnew," he went on. "Don't try to lie to me —I've know you too long not to recognize you!"

As he spoke, he was remembering. Yes, there could be no doubt—this was Agnew who had disappeared from New York the other day. But a limp, impersonal, somehow drained version of the man he had known so long. So much for Wald and his lunatic ideas!

Passive, Agnew stood staring. Greville made to take him by the arm and march him toward the beach, and then there was an explosion of pain in his skull, the world was twisting —and his startled lungs were full of water.

Choking, coughing, he fought back to his feet, the water up to his thighs. His skull rang with the echo of the violent punch Agnew had given him. That wasn't just from a fist; he must have had one last rock in his hand, and used it to reinforce his blow. Now, as Greville recovered sufficiently to wipe the streams of tingling water from his eyes and stare toward the beach, he could see Agnew running like a wild animal up over the dunes and out of sight.

It was no use going after him when he had such a start. The beachcombers lounging apathetically on the sand had paid no attention, of course. And besides—

Greville doubled over and vomited the sea water he had gulped on falling face downward off the groyne.

Cursing himself for a careless fool, he straightened up and clambered back, his uniform hanging clammily on him and his shoes squelching full of water. He began to plod to the beach. He had had his hand on Agnew's shoulder! He had been face to face with a happy dreamer who had passed the point of no interest—and found he was still sufficiently interested not to want to be taken back where he came from.

Remembering the blankness in that face, Greville shuddered. Willing or not, Agnew should have been dragged back to New York, to be shown to all those who had known him before, so that they could see what happy dreams had done to him. After this, if after nothing else, he knew there was no danger of his being tempted by the drug. Not even for the sake of varm.

The effort of vomiting always left him weak and giddy; that, the sun and the pain from his head combined to make his progress up the beach slow and unsteady. In a little while, however, he heard the noise of a car passing, and on breasting the dunes above the beach found that he was in sight of a major highway. He walked toward it and stood at its edge waiting for a car he could flag down.

The first one that saw him stopped, braking violently and then reversing back; it was an open car driven by a plump woman of middle age in an exiguous sunsuit, California-style.

"What on earth have you been doing to yourself?" she exclaimed inanely, staring at him as he approached the car. "Why, you're soaked through and covered in blood!"

Blood? Greville put his fingers to the patch of pain on his head, and they came away sticky-red. He hadn't noticed he was bleeding. "It's nothing much," he said. "Do you—?" 

"You get right in and I'll take you to a doctor," the woman instructed. "It's nothing, indeed! Why, it's all over your shoulder and back!"

"Do you have a phone in the car?" Greville said patiently.

"Why—uh—yes, I do."

"I'd like to use it, please. United Nations business, most urgent."

The woman hesitated only a second. Then she opened the compartment on the dash and took the phone out, handing it to Greville. While he was making the call she sat studying him with an expression of wonder.

"Get me the state police, narcot—no, cancel that: missing persons division. Hurry—UN crash priority, Narcotics Agent Greville speaking."

The imperturbable voice of the central operator acknowledged the order. It was only a few seconds before another voice announced his connection with the police.

"You'll have had a notice about a man called Richard Agnew missing from New York. A UN employee. Probably reached you the day before yesterday or the day before that."

"May have," the police operator agreed, sounding bored. "Right now we're getting so many—"

"I don't care if you're wading in them!" Greville snapped. "This man Agnew is important. I'm speaking from a car on the highway along the coast just level with FAO Experimental Sea-Farm Number Five. There's a stretch of undeveloped beach here with some beachcombers on it."

"Paternoster Sands," the police operator said. "Can't be anywhere else."

"All right then. I just saw Agnew here and tried to take him in. He hit me with a rock and I fell in the sea, and he got clear. This is UN Narcotics Department business and I'm claiming triple-prime emergency action."

"Jesus God, man, be reasonable!" the operator said, shocked out of his pose of boredom. "We're so overworked right now—"

"I said triple-prime emergency, and I'm not kidding." Greville fumbled out his soaking handkerchief and made to dab his head wound; the woman in the car checked him and offered a box of tissues, which he accepted gratefully.

"I'll have to go to New York on that," the operator said stonily.

"You—! Damn it, go ahead. Check with Director Lamancha at Narcotics Department headquarters and he'll roast your ears."

"Listen, you UN creep," said the operator softly, "we don't like being ordered around by your sort. I'll go through the right channels, and for what you've said I'll take my time about it. And I hope when he hit you with that rock he did a lot of harm."

The connection went dead. After a moment the voice of the central operator came back. "Monitoring—have you completed your call to the State Police?"

At considerable length Greville said what he thought should be done with the State Police, but before he had finished his head began to swim and he let the handset of the phone fall.

"Here!" the woman in the car said, alarmed. "You get right in and I'll take you to that doctor."

Dully, Greville obeyed. It was no good railing about what had happened. It was just bad luck which had brought him up against someone who hated the UN's guts; even so, it meant that the chance of finding Agnew immediately was lost, and by the time the police operator had sent the request through all the channels he could find, it would be a matter of checking every beachcomber of thousands. Moreover, knowing he had been recognized, Agnew might perfectly well head out of the state.

As the car hummed down the highway he began to wonder dizzily whether it had been Agnew after all.





There being no point in staying on to conduct a one-man hunt for Agnew, he made for the TR office when he had had his head wound dressed, to ask for a route to the Institute. He was allotted exactly what he had expected—a ride in a freight 'copter as far as Pueblo. It was dark before he arrived. At the Pueblo field there was a truck loading knocked-down crates for the Pure Research division of the Institute, and that took him the rest of the way. Sitting in the cab of the truck Greville reflected on the paradoxes of the modern world. If you wanted to cross a continent or an ocean, it could be done in a single high-speed bound and generally you didn't have to wait for a reservation longer than a few hours. If you wanted to make a local trip, you had to dodge and double back and take what became available.

Of course, more people made more short-distance journeys. That was the reason.

At the watch house beside the main gate to the Institute grounds, he thanked his driver and scrambled down. One of the duty watchmen, seeming nervous, checked his ID cards and then the driver's and moved to open the gate. He kept glancing back at the watch house. Puzzled, Greville looked up at its lighted windows.

Something was certainly going on in there. He could hear voices raised in anger and see shadows cast by a brilliant photographic floodlight

The truck's turbine hummed, and it moved on through the gate, raising dust with its wide soft tires. Greville made to walk after it; then changed his mind and called to the watchman closing the gate again.

"What's wrong?"

Before the man could answer him, the door of the watch house flew open and Joe Martinez stamped out, paused, shouted back at those inside.

"And I'm telling you you're talking through your ass!"

He slammed the door and strode away, shaking all over. He walked past Greville without seeing him, eyes fixed on vacancy.

"Martinez!" Greville called. "What's going on?"

The security man turned slowly, his face dark with fury.

"What the hell are you doing here? You said you were going to LA."

"I did." Greville didn't want to give details. "What's going on?"

"Barriman's stock of happy dreams has gone from the watch-house safe. He's trying to accuse me of selling it to an addict. Go and look if you want to. I'm sick to death of it."

A car pulled up a few yards away. Greville glanced at it automatically and saw Dr. Desmond getting out, his famous white crest of hair shining in the light from the watch-house windows.

"Martinez!" Desmond said sharply. "What are you going out here? I told you to wait till I got here."

Martinez spat in the dust at Desmond's feet and walked away. Taken aback, Desmond made no move to stop him. Another of the huge Pure Research trucks came down the road and the driver shouted for the gate to be opened. Desmond stepped hurriedly aside and marched into the watch house.

After a moment's hesitation, Greville followed him.

The watch house consisted of a single large room. In the center was an armchair facing a bank of controls and dials, above which was set a TV screen. The walls were crowded with alarms, both auditory and visual; there was an equidistance map of the Institute grounds and a group of telephones with and without screens, one of which was bright red and marked EMERGENCY ONLY. Beyond the armchair was a tall safe, nearly five feet high, of a type Greville recognized—the nearest thing to perfect security ever devised, built of three-inch sintered ceramic with a magnetostrictive seal on the door operated by a person-keyed lock. That safe would blunt a diamond saw, no cutting torch could do more than make it glow, the door was ground to a Johansson-block finish and even if the magnetostrictive pressure failed the gap around it was a mere thousandth of an inch. Explosive would wreck a building before it wrecked such a safe.

Now it stood ajar; using the photoflood to light the deep-recessed mechanism, a technician was examining the lock. The other people in the room included Barriman, Kathy Pascoe, and a group of security men headed by a sergeant with a white and worried face, who looked around optimistically when Greville entered, doubtless hoping Martinez had decided to return.

Both Kathy and Barriman looked at him with surprise. But they said nothing. Desmond was demanding of the sergeant to know the facts.

"Is anything else missing from the safe?"

"No, sir. There's the payroll for the security staff in there, some valuables deposited by individuals, and fourteen pounds of spent radio-gold due for return to Los Alamos. The happy dreams is all that's been taken."

"When was the theft discovered, exactly?'

Barriman spoke up. "Martinez insisted on my keeping the drug here, and I've been drawing what we needed every three days. This morning I miscalculated—I was four grains short. I found out about an hour ago, and wasted some time trying to locate Kathy in case she'd administered the rest to the animals—I mean, in case I hadn't taken too little this morning and she'd used up more than I thought"

"I hadn't," Kathy said, and added, "I'd have told you if I had, Mike."

Barriman shrugged.

"Is the lock in order?" Desmond rapped. The technician working on the safe door raised his head, his face glistening with sweat.

"Perfect," he answered in a tired voice. "It's adjustable for up to six different individuals. Right now it's set for only three—the chief, you, sir, and Dr. Barriman. Far as I can tell it hasn't been interfered with since I altered it to include Dr. Barriman."

"That was when the happy dreams was deposited here— the same day the chimpanzee was stolen." The sergeant wiped his face.

Unaccountably, Wald's mocking voice was heard in Greville's memory, saying, "Stolen! Do you still think a Holmesite stole that chimp?"

The idea of the package of happy dreams dissolving into thin air like the chimpanzee should have been funny, but Greville wasn't in the mood to be amused.

Desmond looked at Barriman helplessly. Barriman's lip curled. "That reduces us to one possibility," he said. "Martinez must have opened the safe. Sergeant, has he been in here alone at all today?"

The sergeant looked uncomfortable. "Yes, he has," he admitted. "He called a routine fire drill this afternoon on the far side of the grounds."

"And supervised it from here?"

"Yes. That's what he's supposed to do."

"I don't know about you, Des," Barriman said heavily, "but if I were about to be transferred away on short notice I doubt if I'd organize a routine fire drill."

There was silence for a moment, except for the sounds of the technician turning over parts of the lock machinery.

"Very well," said Desmond at last. "Sergeant, confine Martinez to his quarters. Mike, you'll have to notify New York of what we've done."





As soon as he could, Greville slipped away. No one could spare enough attention from the mystery of the missing drug to ask him what he was doing here; they seemed to assume he was on official business and would be content to wait to find out what it was.

He went out to near the perimeter of the grounds and sat down on a rock, looking up at the clear dark sky and thinking about Wald, and Agnew, and Martinez, and Barriman. At last, growing stiff, he shifted his position and lit a cigarette. He stared at its glowing end, like a tiny counterpart of Mars.

Then there were footsteps behind him, and he turned. "Nick?" said Kathy's voice hesitantly. "Is that you?"

"Yes."

She came up and sat beside him on the rock, not saying anything. The sound of her breathing was loud in the silence. Eventually she moved and cleared her throat.

"What are you doing here this time?" she said.

"I came to ask you some questions."

She half turned her head, tilting it on one side. "Me?" she said, puzzled. "What sort of questions?"

"About happy dreams. I was in LA today, seeing Franz Wald."

A pause. Her voice was breathy when she spoke again. "Were you? How is he?"

"I guess if you like the guy I'd better not answer that."

He meant to imply a reference to Wald's theory of the effects of happy dreams; she took it differently.

"I'm not surprised. He's angry and bitter—the same as Joe."

"You don't sound as though you believe Joe took the drug," Greville commented.

"I don't see how anyone else could have," she answered dispiritedly. "Not unless—no, that's completely absurd. I can't understand this business at all."

She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. "Look, either the stuff was taken to sell to addicts—and I can't imagine Joe doing that—"

"Nor can I," Greville said soberly.

"—or else it was taken in order to sabotage our experimental series again. We have some rhesus macaques that seem to be approaching the same crisis point as Tootsie reached. We delayed a couple of them—oh, I won't bother you with technicalities, I'll just say that another two or three doses, another week or so, and they'll hit the crisis. Without more of the drug, those poor monkeys are going to be very ill indeed, and our experiments will be wasted. Why should Joe want that? I wish to God Mike had more imagination!"

"How do you mean?"

"In his book, things happen according to rigid rules. All he can think of to account for the loss of the drug is that Joe must have stolen it. He doesn't ask whether Joe would have stolen it. He jumped to the conclusion that a Holmesite had somehow stolen Tootsie, in spite of all our precautions. He wouldn't listen to any other explanation. He has no imagination at all. That was the root of his disagreement with Franz, you know."

Worried, Greville stared at her. "Is there any other explanation?"

"Franz had one—there were those rats, you remember. If you were talking to him today about happy dreams, you must know."

"But he has some crazy notion about people physically vanishing, and that's absurd!"

"Absurd?" Kathy turned challengingly to face him. "Any more absurd than Tootsie being spirited out of the sterile lab? God, I remember Franz arguing with Mike about this! Mike was saying, 'I don't think any reputable scientist would entertain the concept for a moment!'" She contrived to mimic Barriman's voice when he was on his dignity. "And he went on, 'Franz, I know you're a biologist by training, but even so you must have heard of the law of conservation of energy!" She gave a sarcastic little laugh.

"Anyway, it isn't true," Greville said after a pause. 

"What isn't?"

"Franz Wald's idea. I had proof that it isn't true this afternoon."

He told her briefly about his encounter with Agnew on Paternoster Sands. When he finished, Kathy sighed.

"I don't honestly care whether Franz is right or wrong— what matters to me is that he's willing to look all the facts in the face. I can't get Mike Barriman to do the same."

"Do you want to have to believe in people physically vanishing?" Greville said.

"No, but if that can be shown to be the explanation I'll accept it. Mike would rather die." She gave a little unhappy laugh. 

Greville was shaping a reply when a voice boomed out through the night, startling, as though a giant had thrown his head back and shouted with all his strength.

"Greville! Agent Greville to report at once!"

"What the devil—?" said Greville under his breath. He tossed his cigarette into the dark and got to his feet

"That's the watch-house PA," Kathy said, also standing up; "I'll come down with you—I have to go in that direction anyway."

They picked their way back across the rough ground to the nearest roadway and turned toward the watch house. For a while Kathy didn't say anything. Finally she glanced up.

"Nick, are you sure it was Agnew you saw today?"

"Positive," Greville answered curtly. "I've worked with him several times. I'd know him anywhere. Why?"

"Tootsie didn't make for the coast to turn beachcomber."

Greville's head was beginning to ache again from Agnew's blow. That was factual enough. He didn't reply.

"Aren't the odds pretty high against your meeting the one happy dreamer personally known to you who has disappeared?" Kathy went on, in a musing—almost dreamy—tone.

"It was bound to happen sooner or later!" Greville snapped. "With the increasing number of disappearances we'll inevitably chance across some of those who've gone, no matter how they try to hide."

Brilliant light speared past them from behind and they had to step hurriedly off the road to let another of the big Pure Research trucks by. There seemed to be a lot of them tonight. After the interruption Kathy didn't say any more until they reached the gate; it was just being closed behind the departing truck. As the duty watchman turned away from it, he caught sight of them.

"Are you Agent Greville?" he said.

"That's right."

"Message for you inside. Sergeant!" he added at the top of his voice, and the worried-looking sergeant appeared in the watch-house door.

"Greville? Message for you from New York." He held out a UN phone-memo form. "Call came through a few minutes ago. I didn't realize who you were, so I wrote it down."

"Thanks." Greville spread the paper and studied it with a frown. The originator was Lamancha, and it ran:

"If you won't obey Speed's instructions and take things easy, there are better things for you to do than making trouble on the West Coast. Immediately on receipt of this message report to Fieldworker Vassily Marek at Isolation, Kansas. Your assignment is to trace the girl Mandylou Hutchinson who disappeared from there today."

Greville folded the paper and looked at the sergeant He said, "What's this about a girl disappearing?"

"I guess you wouldn't have heard yet," the sergeant said. "It's a girl who was being watched by Marek and Rice. Far as they can tell she's faded from the face of the earth."

Kathy had been standing in the background, listening. Now at the sergeant's words she drew her breath in sharply and came forward.

"Like Tootsie?" she said. "Like our chimpanzee?"

"Yeah!" The sergeant nodded and rubbed his chin. "According to what they say, exactly like that chimpanzee."





17
"We seem to have fallen down rather badly," said Marek in a stiff voice. He had commandeered the deserted shoestore below Lumberger's FAO office and made a headquarters there; the display windows were boarded up, and the shafts of sunlight peering through the places where the boards failed to meet danced with specks of dust.

Greville shifted on his uncomfortable chair. His head was still painful, and he had hardly slept last night. He said at random, "Far as I can see these addicts will disappear when they decide to, and no one will be able to account for it, any more than they can account for that chimpanzee that got out of the sterile lab at the Institute."

Marek's colleague, Peter Rice, gave him a curious look. "What exactly do you mean?" he said, and wiped his plump red face with his handkerchief. It was oven-hot in the old store.

Good question. Greville wasn't sure any longer. At the moment of uttering the statement he had felt that he understood it; on reflection, he was skeptical that it made any sense at all. He contrived an enigmatic look which made Marek sigh.

"Okay, okay. Well, you have the background on the situation here—I mean, of course you do, because it was thanks to your passing this way that we learned about the incidence of addiction."

"It wasn't hard to find," said Greville grayly.

"So we discovered." Marek linked his hands. "This is out of my range, and Peter's. Our job is supposed to be observation and analysis—weighing up environment, finding out what social lacks lead to drugging as compensation."

"Here," Rice said dryly, "there's not much call for that The social lacks come out and jump at you. These kids have nothing. But nothing."

Marek glanced at him and then back at Greville. "But that wasn't the point of sending us here. We were instructed to try and identify all the addicts in town and just keep track of our various leads till someone could be assigned to pick them up and follow them."

"We did that," Rice said. He reached down under what had been a display counter and brought up a long locked box. He opened it, revealing a thick wad of paper. "Entries on about forty addicts, all kids under twenty. Makes you nauseous, doesn't it?"

Greville picked the top sheet of paper off the pile and scanned it cursorily. "Seems fine," he said with a frown. "So where have you fallen down?"

"On this girl Mandylou Hutchinson," Marek said. "We figured that the most advanced addict in town must be the one who started the habit among the kids. That's assuming it spread from a single focus."

"Reasonable, in a town this size. And that was the Hutchinson girl?"

"Yes. Peter, the photos, please."

Rice produced another locked box. This one held dozens of photographs. He selected one and passed it to Greville, with a magnifier. It showed a group of four teenage kids sunning themselves on a patch of dry bare ground.

"That's Mandylou," he said, and pointed to a girl on the right of the group who lay on her back with legs and arms spread wide to the sun, her eyes closed. Greville recognized her instantly as the girl who had shown off her scars to him the first time he came here.

"The detail is pretty good," said Marek clinically. "We spent our first few days getting those pictures. Fortunately the kids spend a lot of time lying around in the sun. But we damn near got beaten up for Peeping Toms."

Greville passed the magnifier over the picture. The detail was excellent, as Marek had said. The little dots on the girl's legs showed plainly. For comparison he inspected the legs of the others in the picture. Mandylou definitely had more scars than they did—there would be fully a hundred marks on her legs.

He put the picture aside with a frown. "Now: what actually happened to her?" he demanded. "Tell me slowly. The story I heard last night at the Institute was just incredible, and I guess it was garbled in transmission."

Rice gave a sarcastic chuckle. "Not necessarily," he said.

"Shut up, Peter," Marek rapped. "Well, the girl's gone. Just plain disappeared. You saw the police wagons as you came into town?"

Greville nodded. "They're here on account of her?"

"Right. Now the girl's father—name of Quincy Hutchinson—runs the local deep-freeze vault. All the farmers around here store their surplus produce with him, what there is of it. Well, he had some trouble with pilferers last winter, so the farmers got together and paid for a set of alarms for the vault. Hutchinson has a four-room dwelling over it, so the only way to make sure of protecting all the entrances was to wire the whole place including the living section. Every night he locks up and turns on the alarms, usually when Mandylou gets in."

"Is that apt to be late?" Greville put in.

"Sometimes, yes." Marek wiped his face. "Things have changed in the past few years. I'm from a small town like this one. Kids here get one hell of a lot more freedom and privacy than I ever had. Still, I suppose that's one thing their folks can give 'em which isn't in short supply."

Again Rice gave his sarcastic chuckle.

"Anyway," Marek pursued, "yesterday morning Mandylou wasn't in her bedroom."

"She was there the night before?"

"Sure she was," Rice said. "I know. I watched her go to bed."

"Believe me, Greville," Marek added, "since we decided Mandylou was the most advanced happy dreamer in town, we haven't let her move or breathe without our knowing."

"What's more," Rice said, lifting his buttocks in turn from his chair as though sweat were making him uncomfortable, "the alarm was properly set when she came in, and it sounds right in the old man's bedroom. You can't get at the switch without going in there and waking the Hutchinsons up. It's key-operated—the key's under his pillow!"

Cold hands seemed to pass over Greville's nape. He remembered the thoughtful comment of the security sergeant last night: "Yeah! Exactly like that chimpanzee."

He didn't say anything.

Marek glanced at his watch. "By my figuring we have about two hours before they decide to come and get us. It's up to us to move first."

"What do you mean?" Greville demanded.

Marek told off points on his fingers. "One: Mandylou Hutchinson was a good girl and wouldn't touch dope. Two: Mandylou must have been kidnapped. Three: we've been hanging around Mandylou—we couldn't hide the fact. Four: UN agents are liked in this town about as well as rattlesnakes." He spread his hands. "I saw the captain in charge of the police who've come down from Great Bend. Saw him last night. Name of Simonson. He doesn't like us any more than the Hutchinsons do, or anyone else in town."

"He's not considering any other possibility than kidnapping?"

"Currently he'd rather not. Not till he's arrested us on suspicion of complicity, anyway." Marek scowled.

"If he wanted to do that," Rice said stonily, "he'd have done it already. I think he's waiting for a mob to deal with us."

Greville looked from one to the other of them. "You sound as though too much of Lumberger's company has got you down," he said.

"Lumberger's been in this place for over four months," said Marek dryly. "He's lasted pretty well, in my view."

Greville let the remark ride. He stood up.

"Okay, let's get over to the Hutchinson place. Will the police captain be there?"

"Simonson? Yeah—he's operating from there. By this time he's probably expecting you. Were you stopped on your way into town?"

"A couple of cops are guarding the road I came in by. Flagged down my car and checked my ID papers."

Marek nodded. He looked wary. "Anything we should bring?" he asked.

"Yes, as many pictures as you have of Mandylou that show her injector scars."

"Will do," Marek shrugged. "But if you're hoping pictures will convince the Hutchinsons, you'll die trying."

Rice gave a short disillusioned laugh and moved toward the door. As he opened it, he tensed and suddenly charged forward with a cry of rage. From outside another cry— shrill with alarm—responded, and there was a sound of running.

Greville and Marek ran to the door. Out on the sunbaked street Rice was bending down by the nose of the big UN-yellow car Greville had been loaned by the Institute to bring him out here.

"What is it?" Greville rapped.

"Little bastards," Rice muttered. "I was just in time. See here!"

From under the car he pulled a bundle of old rags and straw, darkened as though by damp, and there was a sudden strong odor of kerosene. He pointed with his foot at a book of matches lying on the dusty ground a few yards away, where it had been dropped as the owner fled.

"Going to fire the car," Marek nodded. He glanced at Greville and went on heavily, "Maybe when I guessed we had another two hours, I guessed wrong."

"Drive down to the Hutchinson place," Rice said, tossing aside the kerosene-soaked rags. "Better keep the car where we can watch it, or they'll try again."





It was easy to tell which was the Hutchinsons' home, even without troubling to read the signs outside which said DEEP-FREEZE VAULT----LOW RATES----50,000 CU. FT. AVAILABLE FOR RENT. There were people outside, staring at it—sun-dried people, who looked the same color as the dust on the street.

Greville tried not to meet their accusing eyes as he got out of the car and approached them, walking between Marek and Rice. There was one thing which puzzled him about them. There were no youngsters among them. This was the middle-aged generation.

Their stony faces turned to watch the newcomers; grudgingly they stood aside a few inches to let them pass in single file, then closed in behind them.

The ground level of the building was a reception room, with scales, piles of plastic storage containers and a flat elevator platform on which goods would be stacked for lowering to the vault in the basement. It was cool inside the double doors because of the refrigeration under the floor.

There was a hard-faced woman in state police uniform sitting in a tilted-back chair next to the elevator platform. She looked around as the UN agents entered.

"What do you want?" she said.

"To see Simonson. And the Hutchinsons." Marek matched her icy tone automatically. "This is United Nations Narcotics Agent Greville, from New York headquarters. They have an interest in this case."

"Yeah?" The woman scowled. "Okay, come on through. The captain's seeing one of the girl's boyfriends right now, but I guess you can wait in back."

She didn't rise to show them the way—just indicated a door at the back of the reception room, with a finger like a dry bone.

Beyond that door was Hutchinson's accounts office. It was full of police. They were sitting on anything that was available. Four of them were rolling dice on a table; the other two were just sitting. Again Marek explained their errand. Scowling, one of the officers repeated what the woman outside had said.

"He's seeing to one of Mandylou's boys. You'll have to wait."

That was as far as they got. They stood in the oppressive heat, shifting from foot to foot. Greville was tempted to voice objections, and then remembered the faces of the people standing outside. He decided to keep silent.

In the end they only had to wait a few minutes. Then a door on the other side of the office flew open, and a boy of about eighteen walked through, his face a mask of boredom. He went straight past the waiting officers and made his way out.

Behind him came a man with captain's rank badges on his sweaty shirt—a gross man, his hair thin and gray, with narrow eyes and a rash of beard. He leaned in the opening of the door and thrust one hand in his pants pocket.

"Dumb bastard, that one," he said harshly. "Doesn't know this, doesn't care about that. But he's in the clear, anyway. Okay, haul yourselves to your feet—we're going around town to pick up a few more of 'em."

"There's some people to see you, Cap," one of the waiting men said, not looking up from the dice game. Simonson turned his narrow eyes on the three UN agents.

"Them? They're not people—they're just bums from the UN," he said, and laughed. It was an ugly sound. Greville felt in the back of his mind for the memory of a voice he hadn't used since he was coach of a sandlot ball team as a kid.

"Are you Simonson?" he said, straightening up. The voice worked; it somehow suggested broad shoulders and a closed fist. 

Simonson took his hand from his pocket uncertainly. 'That's my name," he agreed.

"All right. One more crack like that out of you and you go all the way down. I don't mean back to the beat, I mean back to the gutter." Greville took his ID cards from bis shirt pocket and fanned them under Simonson's nose. "Narcotics Department headquarters, New York. Special authority from Director Theodore Lamancha. You're handling this case like a punch-drunk Mexican peon from your showing so far. Now get this. Some of us in the UN agencies got where we are by doing the right thing at the right time, and I'm one of them. My business is dope peddlers, and I've met dope peddlers who make people like you look like the pride of the Sunday school. I'm still alive and going up. I intend to stay that way. Clear?"

An incredulous look spread across Simonson's face. It was followed by a wave of redness. "Now see here!" he began angrily. The watching policemen turned their attention from the dice game and stared at Greville.

"I've no time," Greville said. "I want to talk to you. Privately. Where you were interviewing that kid, for example. Where is it—upstairs?"

He walked past Simonson and found himself in the hallway at the foot of a flight of stairs. He went up it. Without looking back, he could tell that Simonson, Marek and Rice were following him.

At the top of the stairs a door stood open, leading into a living room. Greville went through and found himself facing a man of forty-five or so, wearing dark business clothes like a suit of mourning. There was a doorway in the wall beyond him, through which Greville could see a kitchen where a woman of about the same age, dressed in black, was doing something with a dish on a table.

"Are you Mr. Hutchinson?" Greville snapped. The man stared at him.

"That's right," he confirmed in a dull voice.

"I'm Narcotics Agent Greville," Greville began, and was going to continue when there was a cry from the kitchen and a clatter as the woman there dropped the dish she was holding. She bent down and thrust her head through the doorway; her eyes were bright, rimmed red with crying.

"Narcotics!" she said in a firm voice. "It isn't true! Mandylou is a good girl!"

Greville drew a deep breath and turned to the door as the others followed him in—Simonson sullen and visibly puzzled, Marek and Rice exchanging conspiratorial grins. He said, "The pictures, Marek. We'd better clear this up right now."

While Marek was producing the photographs and the magnifier, Mrs. Hutchinson came in from the kitchen, her mouth set in a determined line. She stopped just inside the door, put her hands on her hips, and looked prepared to deny the truth of two plus two.

"Have you seen these pictures, Simonson?" Greville snapped. The police captain scowled and shook his head.

"Marek, did you offer to show them to him?"

"Of course. But he wasn't having any."

"My daughter's a good girl," Mrs. Hutchinson said grimly.

"All right!" Greville picked up one of the photographs and handed it and the magnifier to Simonson. “Take a look at the lines of dots on Mandylou's legs," he directed. "I'm not asking your opinion on them. I'm telling you those are happy dreams scars."

"Crap," said Simonson, and threw the picture down on a table beside him. His narrow hard eyes fixed Greville's, and Greville felt the initiative suddenly threaten to slip from his precarious grasp.

"What makes you think you know more than me about my own specialty?" he said icily.

"Those are the scars of a rash," Simonson grunted. "Mrs. Hutchinson told me so. Lot of the kids here have it—from some vitamin deficiency, probably."

"That's right!" said Mrs. Hutchinson.

Simonson took a step closer to Greville. "Now you listen to me," he said gratingly. "Maybe in New York and LA and big cities like that you get kids who take dope. But around here they're good people. I know—I'm one of 'em. And we get more'n enough trouble out of you UN bastards without you coming here slandering our kids. Mandylou was kidnapped, and the way things are shaping right now I'm pretty certain I know who sold her out!"

Greville felt a moment of dislocation from reality, as if the whole world had suddenly spun off its axis of logic and common sense. There was only one thing to be done. He swung around to face his colleagues.

"Which is Mandylou's room?" he snapped.

"Right opposite this one," Marek answered.

"Out of my way," Greville said, and thrust between Marek and Rice.

A glance showed him that his luck was in. It was an ordinary kind of kid's room, walled in gaudy colors, decorated win half a dozen solidos. It was untidy to a degree that suggested Marek was right about the privacy enjoyed by young people in Isolation; if Mrs. Hutchinson had been accustomed to keep the room clean and neat, she might also have forestalled what he was going to do.

From behind he heard her wail, "Stop him! Stop him!"

He settled on a bedside locker with drawers in it. Not the top drawer—probably the bottom one. He jerked it out. It was full of underwear, short socks and handkerchiefs. He tipped the contents on to the bed.

And there it was, in plain sight now—a small stoppered tube with a little fine brownish dust in it.

He picked it up and spun around to confront Simonson. "See this?" he barked.

"So I see it!" Simonson rapped back. "So by what right—?"

"That's happy dreams in there," said Greville coldly. "I guess you didn't know what the stuff looked like, Mrs. Hutchinson—or you'd have thrown it away!"

The woman's face went pale. "It's a lie," she said. But the determination had faded from her voice, like the color from her face.

"All right. Then you'll have no objection to being given a small shot of it, I guess. Marek, if the garbage disposer hasn't been cleared since yesterday, you'll probably find the girl's injector in it. Go look, will you? And bring some water, and—"

"That's enough!" said Hutchinson suddenly, and his face seemed to crumble like dry earth in a strong wind. "All right, I guess it must be true."

His wife buried her face in her hands and began to sob soundlessly.

Greville thrust the small stoppered tube in his pocket and dusted his hands off against each other. "Now we can get started," he said in a satisfied voice. "And unless you and your wife want to be prosecuted for concealing material evidence, Hutchison, you'd better tell the truth this time. And get this, Simonson!" he added, turning blazing eyes on the police captain. "From here on out the case gets handled my way. In accordance with the facts!"

"I—" Simonson said. 

Greville cut him short.

"And no more of this crap about 'they're good people around here,' either! When it comes to drugs and drug addiction no one is any better than anyone else, and you'd better write that out good and large and fix it up over your bed so it doesn't slip your memory. Okay, let's get to work."





18
But when he had painstakingly backtracked over the evidence that Simonson had acquired in the past twenty-four hours, his own words rang hollow and ironic in his memory.

"In accordance with the facts!"

Fine. But when the facts aren't in accordance with sense, or logic, or anything. . . ?

It was not in dispute that Mandylou Hutchinson had come home the night before last, kissed her boyfriend goodnight, told her parents she was in, and gone to bed. On that, Hutchinson had turned the key-operated alarm switch and put the key, as always, under his pillow. Even if he had been drugged, and his wife as well, at least twenty people were sleeping within earshot of the alarm bells, which were mounted not only in his bedroom but also high up on the outside wall of the building.

Now he was beginning to understand why Kathy was tempted by Franz Wald's theories. If he'd followed Wald correctly, the scientist was arguing that the end result of the depositing-out of happy dreams in the brain was to change the reality which the addict perceived. But from there it became too abstract and metaphysical for him to follow. So long as there was any alternative to Mandylou disappearing into thin air, he had to explore it.

One by one the alternatives failed. Even if she had managed to get out of the house without breaking the alarm circuit, she would still have to get out of town. Police had searched the surrounding countryside; there was little traffic around here and most of it was on the FAO area register because it was using vital-production fuel supplies. No cars had been stolen. The only public service route—a bus line running into Great Bend—had been checked. And so on and so on.

The boy Simonson had been interrogating when Greville arrived was the one who had brought Mandylou home the night she vanished. His name was Hank Darby, and he was the son of the local agricultural machinery repair agent, who had premises just outside the town, and was doing bad business through shortage of spare parts.

"Want him brought in again?" Simonson suggested. He wasn't enjoying cooperating with Greville, but he was doing it after a fashion.

"No," said Greville, and heaved himself to his feet. "I'll go see him myself—I need a breath of air. Marek, Rice— I want you to go over all your photographs and identify every happy dreamer in town to the captain and his men. Find out how many of them look as though they're near the century of shots. And make sure none of them leave town."

He almost added: "Any way we can stop them going."





Hank Darby was sitting on an abandoned tractor wheel. He was spitting at the edge of his shadow on the dusty ground, trying to outline his head and shoulders with a succession of damp spots. He was finding it difficult because the spittle jumped into a dusty ball on hitting the ground and bounced away from the spot he was aiming at.

It had taken Greville a bit of dodging to make sure he got here alone, but in the end he had managed it. And the dust ensured that he walked silently as he came up to the boy.

"You're Hank Darby?" he said, halting.

"They tell me so," said the boy, not looking up.

Greville felt in his pocket. He took out the little tube of happy dreams he had found in Mandylou's locker. He hefted it in his hand and then tossed it accurately into the boy's lap.

Hank stopped in the act of pursing his mouth for another shot at his shadow and looked down. He didn't make to touch the tube.

"What's that for?" he said, bis voice suddenly sharp with suspicion.

"I thought it might be more use to you now than it is to Mandylou," said Greville in a neutral voice. "It was in her room."

The boy picked up the tube and closed his hand around it He raised a puzzled, freckled face toward Greville, screwing up his eyes against the sun.

"You're the UN agent Mandylou showed off her legs to," he said.

'That's right." Greville leaned against the handles of a quarter-horse cultivator that was probably twenty years old and due for reduction to scrap. There was a lot of scrap in this big yard—more than there was of serviceable machinery.

"All right," said Hank warily. "What do you want?"

"More a question of what you want, Hank," Greville shrugged. "Whether you want the same as Mandylou or not."

He watched the boy's face intently to read the reaction his words provoked. His assumption was that if Mandylou's mysterious disappearance was taken seriously by Hank and his friends—seriously enough to scare them—he was going to get cooperation. But he hadn't yet dared to think through the other consequences.

There was a long pause before Hank answered. Then he muttered almost inaudibly, "I don't know. I just don't know!"

"What becomes of happy dreamers, Hank?"

"I don't know that either!" the boy snapped. Greville detected a raw edge of fear on his voice.

"What do you think happens? What do people say? This matters to you, Hank. Before I came out to find you, I counted your scars on a picture of you that we have. I made it one hundred and two shots, nearly as many as Mandylou. It's getting close, isn't it?"

Again there was a pause. Greville stood up and brushed away the line of dust the cultivator had left where he leaned on it.

"Wait a minute," Hank said. Greville looked at him. "Mister, what has happened to Mandylou?"

"That's better," Greville said. He saw a wooden crate lying a few yards away, fetched it and sat down on it facing Hank. "She's vanished. Far as we can tell, she's vanished completely. She couldn't possibly. But she did."

"You're not kidding?" Hank's eyes burned with anxiety.

"It's gospel-true," Greville said, and wished achingly that it wasn't.

"Oh, Jesus," Hank said under his breath. Greville pounced.

"Were you expecting that, Hank? Was that what you really thought must have happened?"

"No!" Hank said, so sharply Greville felt the denial was aimed at himself and not his listener. "I—figured maybe her old man had found her dosing herself, and she'd run off somewhere to keep him from beating her. He would, too. Or if he didn't, I bet Mrs. Hutchinson would." He licked his lips.

"I wouldn't turn her in to the police and let her get whopped for dosing herself. But—but—well, it's been more than a whole day, and I thought she'd show up out of town. We have places where we meet. . . ." His voice trailed away.

"So what are you thinking now?" Greville said sternly. When there was no answer, he leaned forward. "Listen, Hank, we're not going to do anything to you or your friends just because you're happy dreamers. Do you listen to the news? Do you ever see a paper? Then you must know there are so many millions of happy dreamers all over the world we couldn't possibly catch up with all of them.

"Anyway, Hank, it isn't a crime. It's more like a disease. Sure it's attractive to escape from this dull world of shortages and overcrowding and all that. But what happens if everyone opts out? If nothing gets done any more because all of us have settled for pleasant visions instead of hard work? That's why it has to be stopped."

He was beginning to get through to Hank. With a sense of vast relief he saw the boy give a reluctant nod.

"I do know that, mister. Believe me. Only somehow that's all a lot of words—doesn't connect, you know? You keep at it and keep at it without caring."

"What's it like, Hank? What does it give you?" 

Hank shrugged. "Like you say—escape, I guess. You sleep, and you get dreams. It gets so you want to sleep more than you can, if you get me. We spend a lot of time just lying in the sun, trying to sleep. Lately I've been managing to get the dreams just by thinking hard. Mandylou could do that too. Say—is that bad?"

Greville felt a shock of horror. The boy's words had at first brought the memory of Agnew to mind. But all of a sudden that image had been displaced by one of Tootsie in her cage, absolutely immobile. You could well have said she was "thinking hard." But he kept his face expressionless. "It's all bad, Hank. What do you see in these dreams?" 

"It's good grass. Rivers. Trees. A lot of big animals, like the ones they say Indians used to hunt. Buffalo, you know? With the big shoulders?"

So much for that know-it-all psychologist in New York, Greville thought. He was beginning to shiver in spite of the hot sun. He said, "And—?"

"That's all," Hank said helplessly, and spread his hands. "It doesn't sound like much, I know. It isn't what you see, it's more—well, a feeling that there's a whole lot of good new ground to be gone over. All the time here, something gets in your way. All the folks squawk about shortages and lack of this and lack of that, and it's not just hot air. Oh, maybe it doesn't matter that we hear all the time how when they were kids they had cokes and candy and they had their own cars and we don't—but it does matter that this wheel here is off a tractor that my dad had to cannibalize because he couldn't get parts to fix another one. See what I mean?"

"Sure I see," said Greville gently. "You talk more sense than some people." And he thought: a hell of a shame if you end up like Agnew, drained of your mind. . . .

Hank shook his head. "Mister, we aren't stupid. Maybe we don't so much like school, but we got to read and write and we know what's going on in the world. I know if there's no candy it's because someone somewhere is pretty near starving and needs the sugar worse than we do. They tell us all about that and it hangs together okay. But what I'm getting around to is that we gang up on you and that gutless guy Lumberger and we call you a UN thief and the rest of it, but it's not personal. It's like we were getting mad at the whole damned world, see? And the UN is supposed to be the whole damned world, isn't it?"

"It isn't, of course," said Greville, thinking what a volume of understatement that short phrase contained. "All we are is a bunch of guys running around slapping patches on the holes that keep breaking out in the levee between us and a real planetwide mess."

"Yeah." Hank regarded him with vague puzzlement. "Yeah, I guess you don't have time to explain that to everybody."

Some frightening conclusions were forming in Greville's mind. He said, "Do you see varm in your visions, Hank?"

"See what?"

"A color like you never saw before, anywhere. Flowers that color."

"No, I never did," Hank said. And then, before Greville could feel the relief he was expecting, went on, "But Sandy Grogan did say something like that. And someone else, I forget who. Another girl, I guess. Why? Everything's different in the dreams—even the air seems to smell different."

Once more Greville felt himself shivering. He was glad to excuse himself from pursuing this line with specious arguments: you can't describe a color, anyway the content of the visions is for the psychologists and my business is different....

"Hank, how did the habit get started in Isolation?"

The boy hesitated. "Mister, you did say you weren't going to do anything—"

"Happy dreamers fix everything that's coming to them themselves."

"Yeah." Hank's face was troubled. "I'm with you there. Okay. Well, it got started about a year ago. Mandylou was on a visit with some cousins in Frisco. And there was one time just after she got back when we were having a kind of private party in the old grain elevator out of town to the west —maybe you saw it. It's been empty for years. And she sold some of us a shot. Five bucks. She insisted on five bucks. But later on it was only two."

"Don't you mind injecting yourself?"

The boy's face showed scorn. "Nah! We learned how to do it in school for vitamins."

"Did you always get your supplies off Mandylou?"

"Oh, no." Hank's forehead creased. "Say, you know, that's pretty odd! I never gave it a thought before. I don't know that anyone in particular keeps up the supply—it just always seems like someone has some."

"Have you ever been the person who just happened to have some?"

"Well—uh—I guess I have. I bought fifty bucks' worth off a guy in Topeka when I was there last fall. I sold some of it to Jud Crane, and some to Dan Himmelweiss, and— yeah, that's right: some to Mandylou as well."

"Who was the guy in Topeka you bought it off?"

"Christ, I don't know!"

"Someone you ran into by accident?"

"Well, not exactly. He was at a party I went to. Thrown by a guy I met when he was hitching through here. But I don't recall the name and I never saw him again."

Greville sighed. "But the supply must come from somewhere," he said. "It doesn't just grow on trees, does it?"

Hank gave a dry chuckle. "Some people say so," he said. "There was this guy called Johnny Happydreams, and—"

"I know the story. Spare me a repeat." Greville wiped his forehead, feeling how gritty the dust was that had settled on his skin. "Where did your last batch come from?"

"Off Jud Crane."

"Did Jud say where he got it?"

"No, but he'd been down in Great Bend with his old man two weeks ago."

"Does Jud often have the dust? More often than other people?"

"Not that I can think of." Hank shook his head helplessly. "One time when we hadn't any Mandylou wrote off, or maybe she called—anyway, she contacted her cousins in Frisco and some came by mail. Way it seems to me, there's plenty of it in the big cities. Here, somebody knows somebody and gets some, and ..." He shrugged.

Clearly, Hank didn't think the origin of the drug important. Something else was gnawing at his mind. Greville shifted on his improvised seat.

"What's bothering you so much?" he demanded.

"It's like this." Hank stared at the ground between his feet, his face in a deep frown. "There's me, and Jud, and Dan, and Dan's girl Sandy Grogan, all near having a hundred shots, or over. And there's—well, look, it's like something you don't talk about much, or even think about, but it's something you know. Up around here it's getting dangerous. I don't exactly know how or why. You make jokes about it like kids do to stop being scared of the dark.

"But after Mandylou, I don't know that it's a joke any more."

"What are you trying to say, Hank?" Greville kept his voice as level as be could, but it was a struggle.

Still the boy didn't look at him. He almost whispered his reply. "Nobody ever actually says this, but you know it. You pick it up somewhere, put it together from a gang of hints. You don't last much beyond the hundred shots. You—"

"You what, Hank? What happens?" Greville leaned forward intently.

"Whatever happened to Mandylou." Hank drew a deep breath and suddenly jumped to his feet, his face expressionless now. "And you know something crazy? I ought to be scared blue. But I think it's absolutely goddamned wonderful to be shot of this miserable world."

He spun on his heel and ran off across the scrap-littered repair yard, leaving Greville to stare after him and endure the weight of his parting words.





19 
Eight days. No progress. Like walking through a wall. Greville pushed aside a stack of statements taken from the young happy dreamers of Isolation, all of which were as vague —and as indefinably hostile—as what Hank Darby had said on the occasion of that first meeting.

No, not so much like walking through a wall. Like grappling with wraiths of mist. He was almost persuaded he had the answer; then, as his hand closed to grasp it, he found it had dissolved into air.

Like Mandylou. Like the chimpanzee. Like—? Across the room from him the typist-phone operator sent out from the Institute to organize their masses of data looked up as he banged the counter on which he was working.

"Get me a call to FAO Experimental Sea-farm Five," he said gruffly. "West Coast station. I want to speak to Dr. Franz Wald." 

"Crash priority?" the girl said, noting down the instruction. 

Greville nodded, and as she turned to the phone leaned back in his chair. He had been putting off and putting off this call, because he saw it as in a sense a renunciation of logic. Only now, when all rational effort was baffled, could he bring himself to appeal to Wald and his cockeyed half-formulated theories. For days he had reassured himself by remembering Agnew on the beach, but the soreness from his head wound had faded as it healed, and once that was gone, he no longer had any emotionally valid link with a common-sense explanation for the vanishing of happy dreamers.

The first time he got discouraged he had called Al in New York and had been reassured by the cool rational terms in which Al discussed Agnew.

"Yes, we found two other people who had seen him close enough to identify him later from a solido. No, we haven't located him again. Probably his encounter with you drove him to move on—the last thing he wanted was to see old acquaintances. Yes, if anything happens we'll certainly let you know. We have a nationwide appeal out for him and Clements, and all the papers have had big stories about them. Not stressing the happy dreams angle. It would be bad for the department But I'm afraid a lot of people have put two and two together. We hear the Holmesites in particular are making hay of the case."

They would. Damn them. About the only consolation was that they hadn't reached Isolation yet.

"Your call," the girl said, and pushed an extension phone toward him. Greville hauled himself out of his reverie and looked at the little screen.

It wasn't Wald's face that showed. It was Dr. Fizer's.

"Greville, Dr. Fizer," he said. "If you're still screening people from talking to Wald, I'm sorry, but I must—"

"Wald isn't here," Dr. Fizer cut in.

"What!"

"They took him away from us the day after you called— no reason given. They told him to leave immediately for a new assignment in the Pure Research division. We have no address for him except care of the Institute. And we've lost the project he was working on." Her voice was full of measured bitterness.

"Didn't he object?'

"Someone came down from Pure Research and talked him out of objecting. He went like a sheep and left his work as it stood—didn't even take time out to make up a progress report for his successor. If we ever find a successor."

The connection broke.

For some time Greville sat looking at the blank screen with an equally blank mind. The intensity of the letdown was overwhelming.

The outside door opened and Marek entered, looking as Greville felt—tired beyond bearing. He mopped at his face with a handkerchief.

"There's a delegation of prominent citizens to see you, Nick," he said.

Greville stirred and looked around. Marek had left the door slightly ajar so that the pattern of shifting light on the figures outside could be seen like an abstract mobile. Drawing himself back to the present, Greville said, "Who are they, and what do they want?"

"There's Darby, and Crane, and Hutchinson, naturally. And Dan Himmelweiss, Sr. They want to talk to you."

"Show 'em in," Greville sighed. "Try and find them something to sit on."

They shuffled in, tense, wary, seeming as dusty as the neglected contents of the room before the UN agents took it over. They sat down at Marek's direction and then waited for Greville to speak as Marek withdrew.

"Good morning," Greville said at last. Dan Himmelweiss, Sr., who kept a failing store, was the one that answered.

"Mr. Greville, you've been here a week now," he said.

"Eight days," Hutchinson corrected.

There was a pause. Greville made an inquiring noise.

"It comes down to this," said Hutchinson eventually, and clasped his hands together. "I guess we've been trying to lie to ourselves. I recall you turning out that little tube of—of drugs from my daughter's drawer."

"Is there any way to stop it?" snapped Darby. "That's what we want to know."

And Crane, a red-haired slow-spoken man, repeated the request. "Mr. Greville, you've rubbed our noses in the fact that our kids are taking this stuff. You've got to tell us how to stop them."

"I tried whopping my boy," Himmelweiss said. "And he just didn't care. Do we chain 'em up like animals? Do we ride herd on 'em night and day, watch 'em like criminals? We can't!"

"Are you doing anything to stop them?" Crane finished.

Greville felt sick with helplessness. He looked from one tanned face to another, thinking of what they must be suffering. He said, finding it an effort to shape the words, "No. I'm sorry. But so far as we can tell, the cure in the sense of stopping their doing it is worse than the disease."

There was no understanding in the men's faces. There was only a dogmatic dullness. "It's up to you," said Himmelweiss after a pause. "If you make us find out that our kids—our own kids—are doing this, then it's up to you to stop them."

Abruptly Greville was very angry. This too was a reason for the sickness of the world—this blind recourse to authority, this abdication of personal responsibility. He slammed down on the counter with both fists, making dust rise cloudily.

"Jesus God! Are we to work miracles overnight? The thing was under your noses for a year and you did nothing! Now you tell me to put right the results of your neglect!"

He drew a deep breath, seeing that his accusation had gone home too deep for any of the four to challenge it, and went on in a calmer tone, "Do you want your boy to die insane, Himmelweiss? That's what happens to far-gone happy dreamers if we take away their supply and put them in a sanatorium. It's plain hard fact, and it's because of that that we gave up taking addicts inside. We're working on the problem, at the Institute and right here, but—"

"Where's my daughter?" said Hutchinson stonily. "Where is she?"

"Ask Simonson," said Greville. "He has his men hunting for her all over the state. If she's run out she could be anywhere."

"But has she run out?" Hutchinson uttered the words with a dull designation that almost took away their force as a question. "How could she have?"

The implications of that were so appalling that Greville couldn't answer at once.

"That's right," said Darby in a voice which creaked like one of the malfunctioning farm machines he spent his life repairing. "My boy's been acting peculiar lately. Maybe he's mooning over Mandylou, because the two were keeping company. But then again maybe he isn't. Maybe he's waiting to—go."

So they'd been driven to the conclusion which Greville had been evading as best he could. The impact was shattering for a moment. There was no conviction at all in his voice when he said, "I don't know what you mean, Darby. The idea's absurd."

"No, it's not!" Himmelweiss said hotly. He leaned forward, taking a folded paper from the pocket of his shirt. "There was this man called Holmes, who—"

He broke off as Greville burst out into laughter that had an edge of hysteria on it, and sat scowling and insulted until the laughter was over. That put things back in rational perspective, of course. If it was only Holmesite propaganda which had lured them into believing, rather than concrete facts, it didn't matter.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Himmelweiss," Greville said when he could. "But in our department we've heard so much nonsense from the Holmesites, and so many downright lies, I'd forgotten there were people who might still take the story seriously. Excuse me for laughing at you."

Himmelweiss sat there smoldering, folding and refolding the paper between his hard fingers.

"Matter of fact," Greville went on, "I'm glad you came in this morning, Mr. Darby. Maybe you've heard of Dr. Michael Barriman. He's the chief of research into addiction at the UN Institute at Sandy Gulch. He's coming here today, and he asked if there was someone who could go back with him for special study. I'd meant to suggest your boy Hank. It might be the only hope for him."

His companions looked at Darby. After a moment Crane said, "Why Hank? My Jud is pretty near as far gone."

"But not quite," said Greville, in a tone that left no room for more questions.

Darby sighed. "Okay," he said. "I'd be glad for him to go. When will it be?"

"Some time today—likely this afternoon."

"Okay," said Darby again, in a voice of absolute despair.





When they had gone, Greville sat with his head in his hands. He didn't look up when he door opened, thinking that it was probably Marek or Rice coming back from outside. Instead, it was Lumberger whose voice broke in on his thoughts.

"I brewed up some coffee, Greville," he said. "Want some?"

Greville raised his head. Lumberger was in the doorway with a tray on which stood steaming cups.

"Sure, thanks," he said. "That's good of you."

Lumberger came forward a little nervously and put down his tray. He gave a cup to the typist and then to Greville before sitting down in a chair which one of the visitors had vacated and offering a cigarette which Greville accepted.

He hadn't seen much of Lumberger since he moved in here, except when he went upstairs to wash up; they were living and eating in this same deserted store where they worked. He had met him occasionally as he went to and from the experimental sites around the town, but had hardly talked with him.

He said, "You've been keeping pretty much to yourself for a guy who claimed he was in need of company."

Lumberger forced a laugh; the humor didn't get as far as his eyes. "Habit," he said. "And I didn't want to get in your way. I thought my job was bad enough, but so help me I wouldn't trade it for yours."

Greville sipped his coffee. "It's not so good right now," he acknowledged.

"Rice was telling me that Barriman was coming here today," Lumberger pursued. "Is that the famous Barriman, the biochemist?"

"That's right." Greville checked his watch. "I'm expecting him any time now. Wants to take one of the kids from here out to the Institute and study him while he gets to the crisis."

"What'll they get out of that?"

"They'll most likely go crazy," Greville said. "I think I will."

"Why?" said Lumberger, startled. "Frustration, maybe?"

"Not exactly." Greville sighed. "Things just aren't fitting together any more the way they used to. I guess I could become a Holmesite instead of going off my head—or maybe that's the same thing."

"I don't get you," Lumberger said after a pause.

"I'm not surprised," Greville said savagely, and drank the rest of his coffee in a gulp.

There was the sound of a turbine outside; he half turned, thinking it might be the car or 'copter bringing Barriman. But it was too throaty a noise—more like a heavy truck. Lumberger heard it too and got to his feet as though glad to have the excuse to break off the conversation.

"That'll be my load coming in," he said. "There's a batch of special soil additives due today some time, and that sounds like the sort of truck they send my stuff in on. I'll go see."

"Thanks for the coffee," said Greville.

"That's okay."

When Lumberger had left, he sat staring into nowhere. It was like living a nightmare to be here in Isolation at the moment The pattern of events formed in miniature a parallel to the way in which the UN fell heir to the world's troubles. At first the treatment the UN agents got from the citizens suggested that from children to old folk they regarded the UN as a vast bogeyman; having failed to scare him away by making faces and calling him names, they were now pleading with him to do the impossible. Just so, the nations had struggled for decades against the surrender of their sovereignty to the world authority which alone could tackle planet-wide problems; then they had capitulated as suddenly as a bursting balloon, when it was already much too late.

Abruptly he could not endure the close oppressive air of the room any more. He got up and went to the door. Outside in the broiling glare Lumberger was talking with two burly truckers, whose articulated yellow vehicle was piled more than twice man-height with crates, boxes, cartons, packages, stamped FAO with care or world health—drugs, or, like one rack at the back of the load, pure research—EXPERIMENTAL GOODS---DO NOT OPEN TO AIR.

What would be in those cases there? Some miraculous new discovery which would save the world? Greville walked idly around the truck, noting that several kids—young children, not the teenagers who had posed this terrible problem of addiction—were laughing and playing behind it.

But before he could satisfy his curiosity there was the sound of another engine, and he raised his eyes to see a car identical to the one he had himself on loan from the Institute rolling up the road toward him. The convertible top was open to the heat; he recognized Kathy Pascoe at the wheel, with Barriman beside her.

He waited until the car drew up, then greeted them like old friends, almost surprising himself with the warmth of his words. But then, stuck here in Isolation, one had this feeling that the world was passing by... .

It wasn't until he had uttered his greeting that he realized neither of the visitors was in a particularly friendly mood. Kathy's pretty face was pouting and irritable, and Barriman's expression and manner were jerkily tense.

He didn't comment until he had taken them into the store, given them seats, and found a place to put the documents and equipment they had brought. In the background there were heavy footfalls, presumably those of the truckers as they carried Lumberger's sacks of soil additive up the stairs.

He dropped into a chair himself and said, "What's wrong?"

Kathy jerked her head at Barriman. 

"Just a slight difference of opinion," Barriman said in a resigned voice.

"Difference of opinion, hell!" said Kathy with sudden fire. "No, Mike, you can't brush it off like that! You can't claim to be a scientist and then apply the rules when it suits you— you have to take all the evidence or none of it."

"Will you be quiet!" Barriman blazed back. "You'll be accusing me of stealing the drug from the watch-house safe in a moment!"

"I'm damned sure Joe didn't!"

There was a taut silence. The typist looked around with a vague expression of surprise, got up and walked out of the room.

"You're suffering from heat and overtiredness, Kathy," Barriman said at length. "I'll forget that. This time. Nick, you mentioned this boy Hank Darby. Can I see him?"

Greville gave a last glance at Kathy's mutinously angry face and turned to him. "Yes, of course. I got his father's permission to take him to the Institute just a short while ago."

"Thank God for that!" Kathy said loudly. "But I suppose that when he vanishes from his bed in the middle of the night, like Tootsie, you'll say I kidnapped him."

"Kathy, I've had more than I can stand," Barriman exclaimed.

"Well, you've only had one answer to what's happened so far!"

Greville, partly embarrassed, partly appalled at what Kathy had said, got to his feet. "Ah—Hank usually spends the middle of the day dozing around his father's repair yard, I'll send Vassily or Peter down to fetch him for you."

"No, don't send out for him." Kathy also stood up. "I'd like to meet him in his natural habitat, so to speak, before we take him down for observation. Mike, how about you?"

Barriman shook his head, not meeting her eyes. "I'm half dead with the heat, and anyway maybe you'll be calmer if you get away from me for a few minutes. I'll stay here."

"Then I'll walk you over, Kathy," Greville said. "He's grown pretty friendly toward me lately. Maybe he'll open up in my company."

"Fine."

They walked in silence for a little way, scuffing up dust with their feet. Greville was having trouble framing an all-important question. Finally, for want of anything better, he tried a jocular approach.

"Not turning Holmesite, are you, Kathy?"

"What?" She glanced at him, puzzled.

"Talking about Hank Darby melting into thin air in the middle of the night."

"I believe it," Kathy said after a pause.

Greville stopped dead in his tracks, almost stumbling. He recovered and moved on again slowly.

"I didn't want to," Kathy said rapidly. "I've been driven to it. Mainly, by Mike's pigheaded behavior. I tried to get hold of Franz Wald the other day to talk with him about it, and he's gone, and nobody knows where."

"Reassigned to Pure Research," Greville said slowly.

"You believe that?" Kathy gave a cynical twist of her lip. "I don't see why you should. There's no proof. I can't find out where he's been sent. There's mail for him at the Institute, but nobody knows where to send it on to."

Greville felt a terrible icy ball of fear gather in bis guts. He said, "But I—"

"If you're going to talk about meeting this man from your New York headquarters out there in California, well, I know about that. Doesn't it strike you as being rather too pat a coincidence? In any case, there are eight and a half billion people in the world. Did this man admit to being Agnew, or did he claim to be someone else? Someone who just looked very like Agnew?"

Greville drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to control the pounding of his heart. He said, "Very well, for the sake of argument.. . Tell me how it could happen."

"Franz probably told you how. By permanently altering the chemical constitution of the brain, and so changing the way in which we perceive and affect the external world."

"I—" Greville bit his lip. "No, damn it! It means throwing away all our ideas of free will."

"Of course it doesn't. Just the opposite!" Excited now, Kathy emphasized her words with gestures. "It means that we are not after all bound by our environment!"

"You mean relationships between human beings are objective because they can be affected by the subjective experience due to happy dreams absorption. Someone reaches the crisis point, ceases to react with everyone else's world, and objectively vanishes." He hesitated. "But—hell! What about the point I remember you said Barriman raised with Franz? What about conservation of energy? Surely this blows the law to blazes."

"Not if energy is summed across a parallel set of universes," Kathy contradicted eagerly. "The energy would be displaced, not destroyed."

She checked and raised curious green eyes to Greville's face. "Nick, you've been doing some heavy thinking on this, haven't you? I didn't realize that was your line."

"It isn't. I'm an investigator, that's all—it's my line to weigh all the data, just as it is a scientist's." He slapped fist into palm helplessly. "Like you, I've been driven. No matter how hard I fought against it. But I can't bring myself to the bitter end of all the implications. Look, there's the Darby repair yard. Hank generally goes out after lunch and suns himself on the other side of that old cultivator. Hank!"

There was no reply. They continued to walk forward, passing around the old cultivator with its blunted metal teeth raised in a senile snarl, and Greville's face grew worried.

"Yes, there he is! I hope to heaven he's just asleep. He's been saying that lately he can get the dreams by just 'thinking hard.' Like Tootsie on her last day—remember?"

"Do you mean—?" Kathy was beginning, and then put her hand to her mouth suddenly, as though to choke back a scream. Greville could not even move as much as that. He felt struck to stone.

The moment before, Hank Darby had been lying in the sun, his shirt off, his head pillowed on an old sack. And now there were his jeans disposed as his legs had been; there was the depression in the sack where his head had rested. And nothing else except the dust.





20
Kathy stepped forward at last, as though in a dream, and laid her open palms down twelve inches apart: one on bare ground where the sun had lain all day, one on ground which had been shadowed by Hank's body.

"It's—true," she said in a strangled voice. "Feel it! The ground is cooler where he was lying."

Perhaps Kathy was in possession of more facts than he was, Greville reasoned foggily. Perhaps that was why she seemed capable of action, while he was still rooted to the spot. He made to moisten his dry lips with a tongue that proved to be dry also and spoke in a croaking voice.

"But it's impossible, it's impossible!"

Still kneeling at the spot where Hank had vanished—into thin air, Greville kept hearing in his memory, as though the words had acquired the force of a famous quotation—she retorted with controlled annoyance, "Nick, if we're not going to accept the evidence of our senses, what are we going to accept?"

There were flaws in that somewhere, Greville felt sure, but at the moment he was too dazed to find them. He said, "I—I guess we'd better tell Barriman."

"And much good may it do us!" said Kathy sardonically, rising and dusting her hands off against each other. "He'll say we're suffering from heat and overtiredness." She hesitated. "Maybe he'd be right, at that. But we'll have to go and tell him."

They turned together and began to walk away. Somehow they quickened their pace. By the time they were back on the road they were going at a run, and when they were in earshot of the store where the temporary UN headquarters had been set up, Greville could contain himself no longer. He yelled, "Barriman! Barriman!"

People who had looked curiously at the pair running began to follow at a circumspect distance. The two truckers, who had finished unloading Lumberger's soil additives, as well as Lumberger himself, looked out from the entrance of the building, where they were sharing a can of beer prior to the truck's departure.

The other entrance, the one into the store itself, was of course locked. Breathless, Kathy and Greville halted in front of it while Greville fumbled for his key, but before he could get it to the lock the door was flung open, and Barriman himself emerged, blinking a little against the sunshine. "Were you calling me?" he said. 

"He's gone!" said Greville stupidly. "He's gone!" 

Barriman looked from one to the other of them. "What? You said you were going to find this boy. Where is he?" 

"I'm telling you he's disappeared!"

A peculiar, indecipherable expression passed over Barriman's face. He said, "Now that's ridiculous, and you know it. I suppose the next thing will be that you watched him dissolve into thin air!"

Greville drew breath for a vociferous confirmation; he checked himself before he had formed the words. He felt a kind of nightmare frustration, as though he wanted to raise his fist and batter open Barriman's skull, so that the truth could be implanted in his bare brain.

"What did I tell you?" Kathy said in a voice of incredible weariness. But he scarcely heard her. The sense of frustration had triggered off an avalanche of memories which he had successfully held at bay since coming to Isolation the second time. Varm.

"After all, color is the most subjective of our—" He snapped the thread of the words, but not before realizing that he remembered them in Franz Wald's dry, didactic tones.

A kids' question: How do you know that what you see as red is what I see as red?

You don't. And you don't know that it's what a chimpanzee sees as red, either.

Somewhere at the edge of his consciousness hovered an autohypnotic formula which would release him from this flood of recollection. He could use it now, if he chose to. Only he didn't.

The surging, screaming frustration of not being able to make Barriman believe what he knew to be true combined with the heat and dryness of the day, tempting him. Preventing him from wanting to forget his vision of a rich, fresh, lush world full of the promise of riches. Full of hope for a planet overcrowded and overdeveloped.

Somewhere very close to awareness there was a significant fact which he had almost, but not quite, seized hold of.

He came back to reality. Only a few seconds could have passed. He had half heard Kathy say something else, and now she was defiantly meeting Barriman's disbelieving stare.

Lumberger and the two truckers had moved from the other entrance to listen, their faces set in masks of amazement. Lumberger said, "But that's impossible!"

"Of course!" Barriman said sharply. "You plainly have more sense than these two here. We'd better get them inside out of the sun—they're delirious!"

"Delirious be damned!" said Greville harshly. "I'm telling you we saw it happen. Go look in Darby's yard, if you like. You'll find the poor bastard's clothes laid out the way they were when he vanished from inside them."

Barriman put on a sympathetic expression and exchanged a glance with Lumberger.

"It's no use, Nick," Kathy said hopelessly. "He can always make out we stole the clothes and laid them on the ground. You can't force truth into a closed mind."

Open his head. Force truth into his brain. And that was it. The clue. From Wald's hypothesis of the non-material creature that would remember light as light and not as a series of coded nerve impulses.

He found himself saying in a grating, ugly voice, "It's not impossible, Barriman. Shall I tell you how it could happen?"

Barriman put on a frightened expression, tempered with bland calm. As though humoring a dangerous lunatic, he said soothingly, "Yes, by all means! Tell us how it could happen!"

Greville drew a deep breath. "Happy dreams—you said it yourself—is specially fitted to serve as cell material in the brain of a highly developed animal. It's not the same as the compound we have in our own brains. It does the same work, but it's not the same!

"Our perception of external reality depends on the electrochemical reactions in our nervous system. We remember outside events—light, heat, the movement of our bodies—not as themselves, but as coded symbols."

He shot a glance at Kathy. She was nodding vigorously, one white tooth catching her lower lip. When he paused, she said, "For heaven's sake go on, Nick—you're doing fine!"

"In this sense, then," said Greville, and found himself calming with the ordering of his chaotic thoughts, "whatever the outside world is 'really' like, it's plastic to our human perception. So long as it gives us consistent impressions, we can regard it as unchanging reality—"

"Yes, yes," Barriman cut in. "Now suppose you—"

"Shut up!" Greville blazed at him in the voice which had cowed Simonson into cooperation. "Get this! The composition of a happy dreamer's brain is changed! Memory continues, of course—happy dreams stores the coded symbols just as well as the normal nöetine. You said yourself it did the job! And because of this happy dreamers do perceive a different reality and they do disappear!"

Barriman threw up his hands. "This is Wald's crazy theory turned upside down and magnified!" he cried. "Kathy, how can you as a trained scientist believe such abysmal nonsense, such subjective rubbish, such—?" He ran out of words and began to stutter.

Greville looked about him. While he was talking, Marek and Rice had appeared from wherever they had been—but not only they. He saw Darby, Crane, Himmelweiss, Hutchinson, others of the townspeople who were now standing silently in a ring before the store entrance. Lumberger eyed their set faces; he went pale and stepped back between the two big truckers, as though into shelter.

"What's all this that's going around town?" Marek demanded, seizing on the momentary silence. "Someone else disappeared?"

"That's right," Darby said, taking a pace forward. His hard eyes switched from Barriman's face to Greville's to Kathy's and to Greville's again. "Someone been saying my boy disappeared."

Greville passed a dusty hand across his forehead, "I—I'm sorry," he said half inaudibly.

"Then it's true?"

Behind Darby other men took a step forward.

"Yes, it's true," Greville said with an effort. "I saw it happen. So did Dr. Pascoe here."

"And you didn't stop him?" Darby's voice was almost a sob.

"It wasn't a matter of stopping him!" Greville found himself shouting, as though in vain self-defense. "It's what happens to happy dreamers when they run out of time! Kathy," he broke off appealingly, "there must have been other cases where people actually saw happy dreamers disappear!"

"Your department would have heard about them—not ours. Probably they tried to prove the witnesses were crazy, or drunk."

Bit by bit, Marek and Rice were shuffling around the edge of the group. Now they were lined up: the citizens behind, five or six deep as others came to join the ring and the word passed between man and man; Barriman, Marek, Rice, Lumberger and the two truckers together; and in the center Kathy and Greville.

"Go on, mister. Tell us some more." Darby's voice was dangerously quiet.

What more did he know? What kind of consolation could he offer?

"We don't understand this thing yet," Greville said eventually. "It isn't a matter of dying, I guess. Maybe it's like going to a different world, sort of."

"Hear the preacher talking!" said a harsh-voiced man at the back of the crowd. Greville glanced automatically in his direction and saw that for once the crowd was reinforced with young people. He saw Jud Crane with his father; Dan Himmelweiss, Jr. with his; the girl Sandy Grogan with hers.

"I don't want talk of going to another world," said Darby flatly. "I want my boy. Here, in this world, which is good enough for me. Or was, till you UN bastards started mucking it up!"

A howl of agreement and approval chorused upward. Greville felt Kathy press close against him and slip her fingers into his. He gave her a reassuring squeeze, then pulled his hand loose and turned it into a fist. Raising the fist, he walked slowly forward till it was an inch from Darby's nose. The man didn't budge. He barely looked down.

"See this?" Greville said in a choking voice. "That's the wrong way! That's what we've tried to save you and your kids from! We've tried to give them this instead!"

He opened his hand, reached out, and snatched a can from the back of the UN truck.

"Mucked this world up? Who mucked it up? Us? Of course it was us! What do you think the UN is, anyway—some kind of monster? It's men and women, Darby, like you and me and your wife and kinfolk. We've got too many people in the world right now, so things are scarce and sometimes there's not enough to go around.

"But you know how they'd settle that in the old days? How do you fancy a war, Darby, to kill off a few million surplus people—including you? How do you fancy that boy of yours being sent to rot in a foxhole some place he never heard of and doesn't give a damn about? You want that? You're welcome to it!"

With all his force he slammed the can back on the truck. It struck the rack of cases marked experimental goods; its side dented, and one of the boards of the case it hit cracked so that half of it bent outward.

"Or would you rather have things the way they are? So your kids don't have their teeth rotted with too much candy, and their minds fouled with crude and bloody TV shows— how are your teeth, Darby?"

The man's lip curled, and Greville plunged on. "Thought so! Not your own, are they? And how old are you—forty-two, forty-three? Your kids' teeth are good, their legs are straight and not bent with rickets, their bellies aren't blown up with pellagra like kids' bellies used to be when things got hard and food was short. There isn't too much of anything in this world right now, except people. What there is goes around to the people who need it, and that's our doing."

He stepped back, panting. "Listen!" he went on, looking around the group with his head hunched very slightly forward as though preparing to spring. "My own wife is going the way your kids are going. Do you think I'm lying down on the job when there's a chance to stop her?"

The men exchanged glances. Darby drew back a yard, his face puzzled; Hutchinson put a hand reassuringly on his shoulder.

"Okay," Greville said with a sigh. "I've said my piece. You know it's true. It's up to you to act sensibly."

There was a shifting in the crowd. Some of those at the edge made to slip away.

Leda, thought Greville grayly. But he didn't think of Leda herself. He thought of the Leda he believed he had married. So he had lied, in the service of truth as he saw it. Well, what did that matter?

And then Marek's eyes strayed to the crate from which the board had been cracked away by the violence with which Greville hurled the can back on the UN truck. He said nothing, but went toward it.

Because he was making a distinctive movement when the scene seemed to be frozen, eyes followed him. Greville's eyes followed him. He didn't for a moment take in what he saw. He saw a thin trickle of brown powder pouring like sand in an hourglass from the broken side of the crate.

"What in hell—?" said someone blankly.

Marek put his finger in the stream of dust. He looked at what settled there. He rubbed it, smelled it, moistened his thumb and put a few grains on the wet place.

He turned slowly, dazedly, not understanding, and spoke before he had thought of the consequences.

"It's happy dreams!" he said. "A bulk consignment of happy dreams being shipped aboard a UN truck!"





21
"Make for the car," said Kathy suddenly, in a soft voice, and then when Greville still did not move, dragged at his arm with surprising strength. They were away from the group in seconds, barely after the first cry of hatred and execration had been raised; before the crowd had caught its breath and decided to act, they were in the car and the turbine was humming.

And they had spun around and were careering down the road before the crowd had started to wreck the truck.

"Kathy!" shouted Greville. "Where the hell are you taking me? What about Barriman and the others? That mob will—"

"The hell with Barriman," said Kathy between her teeth. "The hell with the others. I don't care about Mike any more —I'm disgusted by him. I don't care very much about anyone any more, I guess. Somebody like you, maybe. Because of what you said to Darby. Because you accept the evidence when it's offered to you, like an honest man. But the rest of them can go to hell."

The car was clear of the town already, its speedometer indicating eighty-five. Like all UN vehicles it was superbly maintained, and except for the rush of wind it hardly seemed to be moving.

"But you've got to turn around!" shouted Greville. "Kathy! If we don't help them get away from that mob, they'll be lynched!"

She turned her head and looked at him, her green eyes like chips of stone. "I saw plenty of police in the town! They'll be all right if they get inside the old store—until it's set afire. We can call the Institute from the next town and get a riot squad sent out by 'copter. I guess Vassily and Peter are all right, and I hope they get away with just bruises. But I hope Mike Barriman gets his head beaten in."

The casual vindictiveness in her voice startled Greville. He forced out the single word, "Why?"

"Haven't you figured it out yet, Nick? That truck was from the Institute, and it was carrying happy dreams. You're not going to tell me Joe Martinez loaded that stuff on, are you? Joe's under arrest for taking happy dreams from the watch-house safe. Only he didn't do it. And Dr. Desmond, damn him, wouldn't know happy dreams from a pile of garbage. Who does that leave, Nick?"

Greville sat back, staring at the unwinding ribbon of road ahead. "Spell it out," he said.

"All right. It started with Franz Wald and the first batch of test animals that disappeared—the rats. Franz didn't predict that, but he drew the right conclusion about the effect of replacing the normal cell material of the brain with happy dreams. Barriman fired him. I thought—why shouldn't I have thought? Barriman's a reputable man! —I thought he had good grounds for his decision, and after all it was conceivable in that case that someone had deliberately turned the animals loose. We weren't working under strict security.

"But that didn't apply to Tootsie, any more than it did to the theft of happy dreams from the safe."

"Who worked out the dose rates for the experimental animals?" Greville said, dry-mouthed. "You or Barriman?"

She glanced at him before replying; the car swept around a long curving bend, lurching a little because the road surface was irregular and badly kept. "Beginning to catch on, aren't you? He did. I believe now that he deliberately prevented our experiments from showing any result—first by firing Franz when he was close to the truth, by miscalculating the dose to give each of the animals so that our research would have come to a halt if you hadn't brought that extra batch from New York for us; then by taking the dust from the safe when more of our monkeys were due to go the same way as Tootsie and accusing Joe Martinez to cover himself—"

"But hell!" Greville broke in. "A load of happy dreams on a UN truck is—is crazy!"

"No, it isn't. It all fits. Hasn't Mike Barriman said over and over again that the stuff could only be produced by someone with access to gigantic production capacity? All the time he's been ingeniously drawing our attention to facts so that he can foster wrong conclusions on them. He's been keeping up a magnificent front of devotion to research—he fooled me, and I was under his feet most of the time, right up to a few days ago. How else could happy dreams be produced in such vast quantities? How else could it be distributed all over the world? How, if not through the channels which are always open because they carry the world's most essential supplies?"

"Through the UN agencies," Greville said slowly.

"Of course."

The road ducked into a cutting, and patterns of light and shadow flashed across them. Greville thought back to that first day in Isolation, when Mandylou Hutchinson had boasted to him of her and her friends' addiction. And had said, "The UN doesn't give us this!"

If she had only known . ..

"But my God!" he said desperately. "You can't make tons of the stuff invisible! People must know about it, must see it being shipped around!"

"Of course they do. But didn't you read what was stamped on that crate you accidentally broke open? It said pure research—EXPERIMENTAL GOODS—DO NOT OPEN TO AIR! I've seen literally hundreds of crates like that leaving the Institute. Who'd risk looking into one of them. There'd be hell to pay if you, for instance, contaminated a new strain of hygroscopic bacteria on the way to a soil research site."

"You think it's all being done by the Pure Research people?"

"I can't think of any better explanation."

Greville sat thinking of what he had said to Darby a few short minutes—and an eternity—ago: "What do you think the UN is, anyway—some kind of monster?"

A small town showed up on the road ahead. Kathy said abruptly, "I'll stop there, find a phone, call the Institute. I guess we have to send someone out to quell that mob. But I wonder how long Mike will take to climb back on his dignity and deny that anything happened."

"It can't be hidden much longer," said Greville. "Pretty soon a hell of a lot of people are going to see addicts actually vanish—far too many to cover up."

"It ought to have been too many to cover up a long time ago," said Kathy, and slowed the car to enter the little town. "This whole thing has been planned as a conspiracy—it's been done with genius, nothing less! It must involve thousands of senior UN staff, and yet it's been a mystery for more than two years."

Greville beat on the dash with his fist until it hurt, and kept on, and kept on. He said, "God's name, what are they doing it for!"

Kathy braked and brought the car to a halt outside a drugstore as neglected as the one back in Isolation. She shrugged.

"You put your finger on it a few minutes ago. When you said there wasn't too much of anything in the world—except people."

"Who can we tell, if this is true? Is there anyone at all?"

"Desmond, maybe." Kathy got out of the car. 

"What use is he? Isn't he a—a pompous figurehead?" 

"Oh, of course he is. But in his way he's an honest man. There's just a chance he's too innocent to have been involved, and he's dangerous to make a fool of. Easy, but dangerous. We can only try."





The phone in the drugstore had a poor line; the picture on the screen was blurred and kept fading before the half-minute was up and it was due to shift. But he caught a clear enough glimpse of the watch house at the Institute to know he was properly connected.

He said harshly, "There's been a riot in Isolation. You'd better get someone out there—"

"We know!" said the duty watchman in a savage voice. "They got a call through before the mob cut the phone wires, and a riot squad took off five minutes ago."

Greville felt himself go shaky with relief. "Any news of whether they're safe?"

"Not yet—we aren't in the prediction business. Was that all? We're busy as hell."

Greville tossed a mental coin. He said, "Put me through to Dr. Desmond. At once. It's an emergency."

"I'll try," the watchman said.

Waiting, Greville looked at Kathy standing in the doorway of the booth. He said, covering the phone, "Are you sure it's wise to appeal to Desmond?"

"I don't know anyone else!" Kathy snapped. "He's lived all his life on one piece of original research that made him famous and the fact that he photographs well. He's head of the Institute because his appointment didn't offend anybody. I say he might—"

"I was thinking of Al Speed," Greville said. "My colleague in New York, head of addict therapy."

"The way I see it," Kathy said, "the senior staff of your department must have been in on this from the start."

Greville was set to deny the possibility violently, and found he couldn't. There were too many facts that pointed to it. But now Desmond's voice was irritable in the booth, and his picture was going up on the screen.

"Dr. Desmond! Narcotics Agent Greville here—I have Dr. Kathy Pascoe with me. We have conclusive evidence that happy dreams is being shipped in UN trucks disguised as experimental goods."

There was blank silence for a moment. Then, creakingly, "What did you say?"

"It's being smuggled through UN channels all over the country—probably all over the world!" Greville emphasized. "And that's not all. Dr. Pascoe and I have just seen with our own eyes a happy dreamer physically vanish. There must be a vast conspiracy—"

Desmond broke in. "Stop! Don't say it all over the phone. Where are you calling from?"

"A small town between Isolation and the state line—I didn't notice the name. Kathy?"

Kathy shook her head and went to ask someone.

"Doesn't matter!" Desmond said. "Stay where you are. Have you anything that can be spotted from the air?"

"Uh—yes. Our car should show up all right. It's the UN-yellow convertible that Barriman took out today."

"Right. Drive just out of town to a piece of road where a 'copter can land, and I'll have someone trustworthy come out to you. Don't talk to anyone, do you understand? This is terrible news!"

The phone went dead. Slightly taken aback by the prompt reaction he had had from someone he regarded—on the strength of their first meeting—as an ivory-tower nincompoop, Greville put down his receiver and stepped out of the booth.

He met Kathy coming back from her inquiries. She said, "The name of this place—"

"Too late," Greville said, and explained what Desmond had ordered. "It looks as though you were right. I didn't expect such a positive response."

Kathy wiped her face.

'Too quick, maybe," she said somberly. "Nick, I don't like this. I'm scared stiff. But there's nothing else we could have done, is there?"





The burring of the 'copter was like the drone of a bee in the hot clear air. Standing beside the car, Kathy and Greville signaled to the pilot and saw either him or a passenger wave back as the craft began to descend.

He exchanged a tense glance with Kathy, then forced a smile.

"Cross your fingers!" he said.

But she didn't smile back.

Its rotors creating a brief dust storm, the 'copter settled about twenty yards away. They strode over to it. The pilot was unknown to Greville, but the one passenger in his craft was the sergeant of security who had been present when Martinez was accused of robbing the watch-house safe. He leaned out, holding the door open.

"Inside!" he directed. "Quickly!"

They scrambled up. As soon as he heard the door slam, the pilot engaged his rotors and there was the express-elevator sensation of rapid take-of.

"Where are we going?" Greville demanded. 'To the Institute?"

The security sergeant shook his head. He was fumbling in his capacious uniform pockets, taking out something in the shape of a gun.

"Nick!" said Kathy in a shaking voice. "Nick, I was wrong! We've been trapped!"

"I'm sorry," said the sergeant with sincere emphasis. "I have my orders." And he fired the little gun twice.

As the puff of anesthetic gas spat, stinging, against his face, Greville's last conscious thought was that the whole of mankind must have gone insane.





22
How long had he been here? One week? Two? Greville had lost count. All he knew was that he was in the Merciful Angels sanatorium—he recognized the intertwined MA monogram on the uniform worn by the male nurse who brought him his meals. But the male nurse never said a word, never answered his questions, never did anything except take stock of the situation and deliver the food. The plates were paper, and disposable; the cutlery consisted of disposable plastic forks and spoons.

The days were blending into a gray uniformity.

"If I'm kept here any longer," Greville said sometimes to the featureless walls, "I shall really be out of my mind. I guess that's why I'm here. I guess that's what they want."

Lately there had been the gnawing suspicion, born of long hours of solitary contemplation, that he might already be insane. His memories seemed unreasonable: visions of an international conspiracy organized through the UN, supplying happy dreams to the world and thus siphoning off addicts into—wherever they went; his recollection of seeing Hank Darby literally and physically vanish; Kathy's accusations against Barriman as an arch-conspirator—they all whirled in the past like colored paper in a kaleidoscope, like dead leaves under an autumn tree.

He had had his third meal today. Through a tiny, high-set window he could see that the sky was darkening. Aside from these clues, he had no idea what was going on in the outside world.

Where was Kathy? In another such room as this?

And Leda?

The irony of what he had been through sometimes made him give way to bitter laughter. But he tried to stop himself, for fear that one time the laughter might go on, and on, and on.

What kind of peak would the disappearance rate have reached by now? Thousands per month? Tens of thousands?

Was it in fact any more than a trickle, compared with the vast number of new births every day?

He tossed the plate with the remains of his evening meal, and the plastic cutlery, into the sanitary bowl. And there was nothing now but his featureless room.

But suddenly, as he was composing himself to endure the silence of night, there was a sound at the door, and he tensed. New. Strange. Disturbing. There were never any interruptions of routine here.

The door opened. He caught a glimpse of the male nurse, but instead of coming forward the man stepped back and someone else moved through the door. With a shock of recognition Greville saw it was Al Speed.

He didn't say anything, but remained sitting motionless on the low plain bunk.

The door closed. For a moment Al stood uncertainly as if expecting attack—a barrage of insults, a blow, even. When Greville stayed silent, he sat down awkwardly on the other end of the bunk, his exaggerated eyes behind their contact lenses round and unhappy.

He said, "Nick, I'm sorry it had to be this way."

Greville shrugged and found his voice. It seemed rusty with disuse. "I've given up hope," he said, and thought how melodramatic the words sounded.

"I think you can start hoping again," said Al.

"If I haven't completely forgotten how." Greville rose and began to walk restlessly back and forth, four steps each way along the narrow room. "Al, I assume I am out of my mind, right? If not, what the hell am I doing in the Merciful Angels?"

Al didn't answer directly. He said merely, "How do you feel?"

"Stamped on by the world," said Greville. "Kicked in the face. I've been cut off from everything. Locked in. I've been thinking about—well, what does it matter? The color varm. The disappearance of Hank Darby. Barriman. I'd be a happy dreamer from choice to get away from this world."

"Nick, I am sorry," Al said, shaking his head. "But this is an unjust world, and there hasn't been time to do everything we ought to keep the balance straight."

There was a moment's silence. Greville licked his lips.

"How's Kathy?" he said. "Is she in here?"

"Yes. She's okay. I've just seen her."

"And Leda?"

"We—turned her loose."

"What?"

"We turned her loose. That's our business, Nick. We're turning loose everyone we can. Here, I want you to take a look at this."

Al reached in a pocket and brought out a folded sheet from a newspaper—the front page, torn raggedly down the side. He gave it to Greville, who unfolded it with the intention of looking first for the date. But his eyes didn't get that far. They were arrested by the headline blaring across the whole of the page. DISAPPEARANCES ESTIMATED AT ONE MILLION! And underneath, in small type above the story, a subhead:

Trickle now a torrent. His head whirling, Greville read on, forming the words with his lips as though that would convince him of their reality. "Authoritative sources stated at UN headquarters in New York that not less than one million 'happy dreamers' have vanished in the course of the past twenty-four hours. Of these some half-million were in Asia, and almost one quarter in the Americas. A warning was given that the rate may double over the next week—"

Greville folded the paper suddenly and closed his eyes. "Al, I'm having hallucinations. I must be." 

Al reached out and took back the paper. "No, you're not," he said levelly. "That's today's paper. We've passed the arbitrary deadline we set ourselves, and there's no going back. Now we can say what we've done and try to justify ourselves." He got to his feet and took Greville's arm. "Come with me—there are some visitors to see you." 

Numbly, Greville did as he was told. They passed along the corridors of the sanatorium from the wing where Greville had been living toward the center block. Outside the door of a sitting room, Al paused, slid open the panel, and gestured for Greville to pass him and enter. Greville did so. He was content to let events carry him where they would.

In the room, there were people. His gaze swept over them, and his sense of dreamlike unreality redoubled. For his eyes informed him that those present were Barriman, Kathy— pale, wearing an expression that matched the disbelieving look he felt on himself—and a man whose round, olive-skinned face with its bright black eyes and narrow black moustache was perhaps the best-known countenance on Earth.

What in hell was he doing here—Ismail Zafiq of Afghanistan, Secretary-General of the United Nations?

"Please sit down," said Zafiq, in that resonant baritone with its shading of rich accent which Greville had many times heard broadcast from the rostrum of the General Assembly. "Mr. Speed, are we all assembled?"

"We're just waiting for Dr. Wald," said Al. "He should be here in a moment."

Greville crossed the room and took a vacant chair next to Kathy, looking at her uncertainly. She shook her head, seeming dazed, and said nothing. A moment later the door opened again, and Franz Wald came in, expostulating with his companion. The companion was Dr. Desmond of the Institute.

"But you can't do this! This is criminal lunacy! I demand my rights as a human being—"

Wald's shrill, aggressive voice stopped abruptly as he too recognized the Secretary-General. He looked about him uncertainly and then barked at Greville, "Are you part of this conspiracy of madmen, too?"

"Please!" Again Zafiq's resonant boom. "Be seated, Dr. Wald. I would ask you not to say such things until you know the facts. Then you may say what you will."

Suddenly he passed his hand over his face, and it was clear that he was very tired. In a lower tone, he added, "Indeed, that is why you are here. We are asking you to constitute yourselves a—a kind of jury, so that you may judge us. You have suffered very directly through our actions; we must be justified to you or not at all. Dr. Speed, do they all know the facts?"

Al cleared his throat, seeming nervous. He said, "Dr. Pascoe and Mr. Greville have known for some time, but Dr. Wald does not. Franz, look at this."

He passed over the newspaper he had shown to Greville, and Wald seized it, read it with his eyes rolling.

"We agreed," Al said in a low voice, "that we would conceal the truth by any means we could until the day the disappearances reached a million. Now, of course, the flow is absolutely unstoppable. We expect that within the next three months not less than one and a half billion of the population of Earth will disappear."

"What?" said Greville faintly. "But there'll be chaos! There'll be rioting! Collective insanity! There'll be—"

"We know," Zafiq said calmly. "The most massive propaganda campaign in history is going into effect today. We anticipate rioting and hysteria in the worst-affected areas, but we have records of every happy dreamer who holds a key post in an essential service, and we have deputies ready to take over. The plans exist, and so far they have not failed us once." He shifted in his chair. "Dr. Barriman, would you please complete the picture?"

Greville felt Kathy's hot hand laid on his; he clasped it reassuringly.

Barriman hesitated, hunting for the right words. Finally he found them.

"What it amounts to," he said, "is that we are colonizing other worlds."





23
"Probably you know, but never think about, the purpose for which the Pure Research division of the United Nations scientific agencies was set up," Barriman said thoughtfully. "Its job is to exploit as rapidly and thoroughly as possible every new discovery which may help to alleviate the world's problems. Well, obviously, the first step in so doing was to find out what the problems were, how big, how immediate. And that was exactly what was done.

"The result of that study was . . . alarming. By the most conservative estimate, we had started thirty years too late to cope with the explosion of population made possible by the abolition of war and the advances of medical science. What were we to do with this overcrowded Earth of ours? Were we to legalize cannibalism, as Secretary-General Zafiq proposed ironically in his last state-of-the-planet report? Or order sterilization of all below IQ one hundred? Or allow the world to fall prey to disease and famine again, to reduce the population?"

"It wasn't a question of allowing, if you will excuse me," Zafiq said. He looked at Wald, who sat with his face in a mask of hostility, the sheet of newspaper across his knees. "It was a matter of certainty. We do not yet control the weather. We can expect bad harvests in China, India and Latin America again four years from now. Famine will kill two hundred millions of people—or would have. Continue, Dr. Barriman."

"Well—uh—about ten years ago," Barriman said, "when we were first coming face to face with this appalling problem, I was conducting an investigation at Cornell financed by a Pure Research grant into the physical constituents of nerve tissue, and I came across a compound which had extraordinary properties. I called it neurologue, but you know it better as happy dreams. At first I thought it was simply another of the fairly well-known compounds that induce mental aberration by chemical action—like those associated with schizophrenia, for instance. I was very wrong.

"Happy dreams has the property of, first, inducing visions, and second, making the body accustomed to accepting it as ready-made cell material and selectively depositing it out. The phenomena is not unprecedented—there are artificial vitamins which differ chemically from the usual ones, but which the body can learn to accept as substitutes. And the final effect, as you know, is that the subject no longer perceives the world which we accept as the real one, no longer affects it, and to our senses disappears.

"Picture the Earth, and the entire universe, as a potential reality, actualized to consciousness by the intermediary of sense data. We were lucky in that the philosophical climate was right for acceptance of this idea; there are fashions in metaphysical speculation as in all fields of human activity. I say lucky, because our hypothesis along these lines was borne out at once in practice. The chain of evolution which led to man employs only one of many possible forms of coding and storage of perceptions, all different, all valid. This is what you were working toward, of course, Franz. But you see, if we'd allowed you to publish the discovery, it would have wrecked the scheme we built on this basis."

Wald smoldered and said nothing.

"I was a pupil of Mike's at the time of the discovery," Al said. "I helped to work out the techniques for quantity production of the compound as well as the optimum dose rate and other minor problems. Then I took on the job of keeping it flowing."

"It was, as you know, manufactured under the guise of a Pure Research project," Barriman said. "We knew that as a simple escapist narcotic it would catch on rapidly—with the decline of smoking and the strain of world events, the time was ripe—but that wasn't all we had to do to secure public acceptance. Al, for example, contributed immensely by his public-spirited fight against the definition of happy dreaming as a crime in itself, so that people had good reason to argue that it was not as 'bad' as other addictions. In the countries of Asia and Africa, where little social opprobrium attaches to the use of narcotics because opium or marijuana was once as widespread as tobacco in Europe and America, we had less difficulty than we did here in the western hemisphere. Jokes like the 'Johnny Happydreams' story helped, but our best single stroke was the brainchild of the Secretary-General himself."

"You exaggerate," said Zafiq.

"Nick!" Al turned in his seat. "How often were you close to the truth, only to discard it because it sounded like Holmesite propaganda?"

"Uh—several times, I guess," Greville acknowledged.

"Zafiq invented Holmes," said Al. "There was never any such person."

For a while there was silence. Greville nodded slowly. Yes, that was a master stroke all right. To create a disreputable cult and so to discredit the truth by association with it "Our plans," Barriman resumed, "called for happy dreaming to account for a minimum billion people within two years of its discovery by the world. We didn't quite make it, but we've missed by only a few months and it looks as though the final figure may be fifty per cent above what we envisaged. To manage this cost a great deal—injustice, suffering, pain. . . . But on balance, we claim we have done pretty well. When the crisis point passes, we can and will cure the addicts who have not disappeared. UN-sponsored propaganda on the unconscious level has worked miracles for us— maintaining that fixed price, for instance, which puzzled so many people. We know what we've done, and we believe we can reverse it The next three months will show if we're right or not."

"Nick," Al said, not looking at Greville, "it's been very hard to see someone like you, a personal friend, hurt as you have been. I can only say it was inevitable. And you, Franz! We had to act as we did to stave off the day of revelation. You remember your meeting with Dick Agnew in California, Nick?"

Greville nodded. His mouth was very dry.

"Clements was a happy dreamer; we knew about him. He was assigned to 'go through' as part of the hard core of responsible leaders we've been careful to maintain in the —the new world. Agnew wasn't. Agnew was a decoy, aimed not at you but at Franz Wald. It was the most regrettable accident that confronted you with him; what I was hoping to do was to present Franz with conclusive proof that his theories were wrong, in the shape of a 'vanished' happy dreamer still alive and in his physical body. Thanks to your raising a hue and cry about Agnew, of course, the plan fell through, and all we could do was put Franz, like yourself, somewhere where he could not reach anyone else with the dangerous truth."

"But—but hell!" Greville said. "How do you know you haven't simply killed all these people?"

"The world of the happy dreams is a consistent world, isn't it? A virgin world, as real as any other. That's one point." Al licked his lips. “The second, which is harder to accept is that we've asked people who went through with their eyes open, like Clements, to leave signs of their presence. And some far-gone happy dreamers have seen those signs. They have seen for themselves proof that men can survive in, and make changes in, this new world."

"It's working," Zafiq said with satisfaction. "One doesn't have to understand it—and frankly, I don't."

Little by little, he and Al and Barriman, who as he implied had put themselves on trial, were relaxing. For the first time now Al smiled.

"You gave me a bad time, Nick, you know," he said. "When you talked about the color you called varm. I don't know what name they use for it over there. But it wasn't news to us. About one addict in a hundred sees immediately, as you did, what most of them see only at the very end: that in this new world the spectrum has not seven colors, but eight. I had to hand-pick the case histories I showed you because of this."

"But this is criminal!" Wald said suddenly, and balled up the newspaper on his lap to hurl it at the floor. "It's deportation! It's against human rights!"

Zafiq's face remained stony calm. He said, "Dr. Wald, with respect, you're overlooking two things. The first is the real state of the planet. Stripped of the deliberate optimism of the UN's official statements, the naked truth is that we face famine, or disease, or war, in four to five years' time. Even if every current project to farm the sea—a special interest of yours, I hear—and the land goes through without setback, we shall be in the same position twenty years from now. But at least we shall have twenty more years to plan with."

He raised a stubby finger. "Moreover, this is not deportation. The very nature of the visions offered by happy dreaming of itself invites those who are frustrated by this crowded world rather than those who are—as they say—out for kicks. Those with ambitions they cannot fulfill; those who want to build and develop and explore, and who cannot do so here. All our unconscious propaganda has been aimed at these people, and only those who were attracted succumbed. Not deportation, Dr. Wald. Emigration."

For the first time since he brought Wald into the room, Dr. Desmond now looked up with his habitual air of mild uncertainty. "Ismail, you're presenting this as a mere palliative," he said. "To me it's much more. It's perhaps a way to the dream which speculative thinkers have clothed in the garb of travel to other stars. It seems to me that we've unlocked a door in the human mind, and while at present we are simply treating this door as a means of escape from an intolerable situation, one day it will rather admit us to a new kind of human progress. Eventually, perhaps, we shall find means of directing our perceptions; we shall be able to pass from one mode of perception—one universe, if you like—to another as easily as now we pass from one continent to another in aircraft."

"I hope so," Zafiq nodded. "But for the moment I can't see that far ahead—I'm blinded by present difficulties. We are the people to whom mankind looked, demanding a solution to an insoluble problem, a solution better than war, or starvation, or selective extermination, or"—he hesitated and gave a wry smile—"cannibalism. We say it was thirty years too late for anything but this. How say you?"

He looked at Wald, at Greville, then at Kathy. There was a long silence.

"I think—" Kathy said slowly, and checked, and went on. "I think—yes, I think you did right."

Zafiq bowed his head.





24
The sensation was very strange. He had of course had the compound's mode of operation explained to him before making up his mind; he knew about the initial effects on the temporal lobes and the centers of vision and hearing. But now that the process was taking command of his brain, now the rate of replacement was soaring like the line of a graph approaching infinity, it was nonetheless terrifying.

And yet there was that promise. ...

Memory, they had confirmed to him, went through the process because the new cell material performed the same function as the old. Hence personality went through also, and special skills. Most of the dreamers whose dreams had become reality for them had skills; as he had seen during those struggling months after the big vanishing, when the world had threatened to totter and break down, Zafiq's assertions were literally true. It wasn't usually the inadequate and lazy who were attracted by this vision, but the ambitious, the determined, the would-be pioneers.

Well, they'd got over the crucial period somehow. A small war in Africa stamped out within weeks; religious hysteria in India, somehow controlled and canalized; chaos in the highly industrialized areas of Europe and America and Russia, handled by brilliant improvisation in the UN agencies; and in China and much of Asia pure fatalistic resignation.

So the gamble had come off.

How about his own gamble?

Where, after all, was he going? The question had no real meaning. This other world was on no map—perhaps it was a minute fraction of a millisecond, a time-quantum, distant, in the past, the future, or to one side of the normal human world. It made no odds, anyway. He wasn't having to set a course to it.

Sooner or later the philosophers would find an acceptable way of defining this event. Until then, people would have to accept it, as they had accepted other inexplicables in the past. And somehow they had kept going. They had always managed to keep going.

When it finally happened, it was as easy as waking up. It was a kind of waking up. Only it was waking in a world where a rainbow had eight colors, and there was a certain difference in the feel of the air, and the bird's song which was the first sound he heard was not a song he had heard before.

He rose to his feet, wondering. It was cool but not cold; he was naked, of course, because only what he perceived as himself had changed. He looked about him. There were trees. There was grass. He was standing on level ground, but a short distance away there was a rise, and he could hear water and fancied he could make out human voices mingling with it.

He walked toward the sound of water.

When he topped the rise, he found he was looking down on a town. There were cabins of wooden planks. There was a stream, and a watermill turned in it There were sounds of hammering, on wood and on metal. He could not see anyone, but he heard voices quite distinctly. He went down into the little town. There must be hundreds of people living here, he thought.

He paused at the door of the first small house. There was smoke rising from its chimney.

And then the second miracle happened. He had barely decided to knock on the door and ask what he must do, when the door opened and he heard his name cried out.

"Nick! Nick! You're here!"

And Kathy was standing in the door, half laughing, half crying. She wore a plain straight dress woven of some sun-bleached natural thread; her feet were thrust into sandals of plaited reeds.

For a moment she went on trying to form words. Then she gave it up, jumped from the step of the wooden porch and flung her arms around his neck.

"Nick, this is the most wonderful place!" she said. "All the things they've done already! All the things there are to do!"

Greville looked down at her, smiling, and saw that the bright eyes she raised to him—were varm.

She spun around, caught his hand and tugged him towards the door. "Come and see what I've been doing! I've been making clothes, weaving and sewing, I've been testing plants and discovering natural drugs, I've been—oh, I can't tell you all of it! There's so much—so much of everything!"

The newcomer in the new world, Greville followed her.





THE END