CHAPTER IX


DECLARATION: “No,” he said to the Masters, “no, you are wrong. One man may change the course of history, may change the na­ture of the rooms which we inhabit. I refuse to believe it is hopeless, I know that it does not have to be that way if we do not accept this as our condition.” Even though he was dreaming this there was a great deal of satisfaction in making his case clear even if the Master was a defeated little creature near the bottom of the hierarchy (at least as far as Scop could judge from the insignia of his robes) who could hardly understand what he was saying. “I know that I am doing the right thing here,” Scop said, “do you think it’s easy? There are enormous sacrifices you know and besides that I’m being exposed to social scorn.”

The Master made a defeated motion, ran his hands over the table interposed between he and Scop, the material of the table due to the extreme poverty and transparency of the dream of a weak rubber which yielded easily to his fingertips, damp spots as residue to the pressure when the fingers were removed. “Whatever you say. It is not important to us.”

“If it isn’t important to you why are you trying to stop me? Why is it such a struggle? Why am I being harassed instead of assisted? After all I’m doing this for all of us.”

The Master sighed and leaned away from the table. He seemed acutely uncomfortable but then most of the figures in Scop’s dreams had the same aspect; he did not dream images of grace, his life itself being so cluttered and filled with damp, swift motions impossible to dignify under all of the pressures. Then again he had to keep the fact that it was a dream in his mind at all times lest he began to take it seriously and if he took it seriously . . . well if that occurred the Master might take a different form more reflective of Scop’s actual unconscious and he did not want to deal with this either. It was better, it was always better by far to conjure with images which were masks for the buried reality and if you did not have to ever see that buried reality so much the better. “Why don’t you just leave?” the Master said in a little voice. “Why must we have these continual arguments? Why must you constantly seek to justify yourself? Isn’t it enough for you simply to do what you have to do without looking for approval from us?”

Scop said, “I don’t think that you understand the situation. This involves everyone.”

“You must leave,” the Master said. His figure began to waver, Scop could see little streaks of light coming from behind. “I don’t believe that I am going to stay in this form much longer. This is a dream you know and I am apt to become something far more terrible—”

“Why can’t you accept?” Scop said rather desperately, not wishing to yield pride but then again the dream was as had been pointed out ending. “You could make it so much easier if you would only cooperate, if you would see that this is being done for all of us.”

“Listen you fool,” the Master said, his features descending slightly toward him, “this is not being done for your convenience. The world is not manipulated in order to give you pleasure and none of us are here to make matters any easier for you than they must be. If you wish confirmation you will have to find it within your own activities.”

Strong language for a dream-image, Scop thought. But then again the unconscious was no more malleable than any other part; he should not have expected otherwise. “All right,” he said. “Have it your way.” The consciousness of his dreaming, the awareness that he was having vigorous debate with himself caused him to flush although of course discreetly. “Whatever you say.”

“You should stop this foolishness.”

“Never. I cannot.”

“Then you must bear absolute responsibility for what you have become.”

“All right,” Scop said. “If you say so. I can’t argue this any more. It’s really ridiculous, you know,” he added conversationally and made effort to disperse the image, willing himself toward awakeness in the fashion that a diver might crouch over himself, begin the manipulations for surfacing. “I’m only doing this to help everyone,” he continued and waited patiently for the vault from the dream to begin, for the image of the Master to become translucent but it did not, much to his dismay the Master remained as concrete and implacable as he had before. The walls of the room in which they were conferring did not diminish in their solidity. “It isn’t so easy you see,” the Master said, “you can’t simply get away with ending these discussions whenever you’d like; you have to stay and deal with them and there are certain things which have to be said to you.”

Scop cannot bring himself to pay attention to the Master. Nor, it seems, can he cause the scene to disperse; he seems to be caught instead in a perilous middle ground where midway between the dream and the actual form which he would take, the Master seems bound now to the necessity to lecture. “You can change nothing,” the Master said, “absolutely nothing within and without. Your quest is hopeless. It is not change you are creating but merely slaughter.”

“Two by two is four,” Scop said, remembering an old assur­ance from somewhere that the fabric of a dream could be broken down by the fixation upon, the reiteration of irrelevant material. “And eight times three is twenty-four. In 1963 at the age of forty-six John Fitzgerald Kennedy—”

“These mnemonic devices will get you nowhere, Scop. You cannot evade the truth any longer. The constantly reiterated rape which seems to be at the very center time and again of your obsessions—” “The first President of the United States was George Wash­ington. The thirty-ninth was—”

“Should give you the deepest insight into yourself. What do you really think you want?”

“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. A prime number is a number divisible only by one or itself. The number of sexes is two, the number of chromosomes forty-eight except in the case of—”

“Oh enough, enough!” the Master shouts with disgust and makes a dismissive gesture. “Have it your way. I’m not going to stay here anymore and try to argue with you; if you won’t see the sense of it it’s not going to be from me, you’ll just have to undertake all the suffering yourself. But don’t blame me,” he says and brings fire down with his hand blowing Scop quite free of the fabric of the dream and into a tight enclosure where he lies rocking above—