SUCH STUFF

 

 

Of all the quarries in pursuit of which scientists have set out, determined to weigh and measure whatever they can catch, surely the most elusive must be—a dream.

It can’t be weighed. And only very recently, with work like William Dement’s at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, has it been possible to take measurements. Slowly we have garnered evidence, but most of it has been negative. A dream is not a journey by the soul, away from the body during sleep—at least, we’re fairly sure it’s not. Nor is it a vision of paradise (or hell) or of some coexistent other world—probably.

What it is … well, there’s symbolism in there somewhere, but symbolism is so plastic we can make what we choose of the images. Perhaps more fruitful would be to try and discover why we dream, what purpose dreaming serves. If someone took over and extended Dement’s work, he might find a Starling. …

 

* * *

 

With the leads of the electroencephalograph stringing out from his skull like webs spun by a drunken spider, the soft adhesive pads laid on his eyes like pennies, Starling resembled a corpse which time had festooned with its musty garlands. But a vampire-corpse, plump and rosy in its state of not-quite-death. The room was as still as any mausoleum, but it smelled of floor polish, not dust; his coffin was a hospital bed and his shroud a fluffless cotton blanket.

Except for the little yellow pilot lights in the electronic equipment beside the bed, which could just be seen through the ventilation holes in the casings, the room was in darkness. But when Wills opened the door from the corridor the shaft of light that came over his shoulder enabled him to see Starling clearly.

He would rather not have seen him at all—laid out thus, lacking candles only because he was not dead. That could be remedied, given the proper tools: a sharpened stake, a silver bullet, crossroads at which to conduct the burial—

Wills checked himself, his face prickly with new sweat. It had hit him again! The insane idea kept recurring, like a reflex, like pupils expanding under belladonna, for all he could do to drive it down. Starling lay like a corpse because he had grown used to not pulling loose the leads taped to his head—that’s all! that’s all! that’s all!

He used the words like a club to beat his mind into submission. Starling had slept like this for months. He lay on one side, in a typical sleeper’s attitude, but because of the leads he barely moved enough in the course of a night to disturb the bedclothes. He breathed naturally. Everything was normal.

Except that he had done it for months, which was incredible and impossible and not in the least natural.

Shaking from head to foot, Wills began to step back through the door. As he did so, it happened again—now it was happening dozens of times a night. A dream began.

The electroencephalograph recorded a change in brain activity. The pads on Starling’s eyes sensed eye movements and signaled them. A relay closed. A faint but shrill buzzer sounded.

Starling grunted, stirred, moved economically as though to dislodge a fly that had settled on him. The buzzer stopped. Starling had been woken; the thread of his dream was snapped.

And he was asleep again.

Wills visualized him waking fully and realizing he was not alone in the room. Cat-silent, he crept back into the corridor and closed the door, his heart thundering as though he had had a narrow escape from disaster.

Why? In daytime he could talk normally with Starling, run tests on him as impersonally as on anyone else. Yet at night—

He slapped down visions of Starling by day, Starling corpselike in his bed at night, and moved down the long corridor with his teeth set to save them from chattering. He paused at other doors, pressing his ear to them or glancing inside for a moment. Some of those doors led to private infernos which ought to have jarred on his own normality with shocking violence, as they always used to. But none affected him like Starling’s passiveness—not even the moaning prayers of the woman in Room 11, who was being hounded to death by imaginary demons.

Conclusion: his normality had gone.

That thought also recurred in spite of attempts to blank it out. In the long corridor which framed his aching mind like a microwave guide tube, Wills faced it. And found no grounds for rejecting it. They were in the wards; he in the corridor. So what? Starling was in a ward, and he was not a patient. He was sane, free to leave whenever he wished. In remaining here he was simply being cooperative.

And telling him to go away would solve nothing at all.

His rounds were over. He went back towards the office like a man resolutely marching towards inevitable doom. Lambert—the duty nurse—was snoring on the couch in the corner; it was against regulations for the duty nurse to sleep, but Wills had had more than he could bear of the man’s conversation about drink and women and what he was missing tonight on television, and had told him to lie down.

He prodded Lambert to make him close his mouth and sat down to the desk, drawing the night report towards him. On the printed lines of the form, his hand crawled with its shadow limping behind, leaving a trail of words contorted like the path of a crazy snail.

5 a.m. All quiet except Room 11. Patient there normal.

Then he saw what he had written. Angrily he slashed a line through the last word, another and another till it was illegible, and substituted “much as usual.” Normal!

I am in the asylum of myself.

He tilted the lamp on the desk so it shone on his face and turned to look at himself in the wall mirror provided for the use of female duty nurses. He was a little haggard after the night without sleep, but nothing else was visibly wrong with him. Much as usual, like the patient in Room 11.

And yet Starling was sleeping the night away without dreams, undead.

Wills started, fancying that something black and threadlike had brushed his shoulder. A picture came to him of Starling reaching out from his bed with the tentacle leads of the EEG, as if he were emitting them from spinnerets, and weaving the hospital together into a net of his own, trapping Wills in the middle like a fly.

He pictured himself being drained of his juices, like a fly.

Suddenly Lambert was sitting up on the couch, his eyes flicking open like the shutters of a house being aired for a new day. He said, “What’s the matter, doc? You’re as white as a flaming sheet!”

There was no black threadlike thing on his shoulder. Wills said with an effort, “Nothing. Just tired, I think.”

He thought of sleeping, and wondered what he would dream.

 

The day was bright and warm. He was never good at sleeping in the daytime; when he woke for the fourth or fifth time, unrested, he gave up. It was Daventry’s day for coming here, he remembered. Maybe he should go and talk to him.

He dressed and went out of doors, his eyes dark-ringed. In the garden a number of the less ill patients were working listlessly. Daventry and the matron moved among them, complimenting them on their flowers, their thorough weeding, the lack of aphis and blackfly. Daventry had no interest in gardening except insofar as it was useful for therapy. The patients, no matter how twisted their minds were, recognized this, but Daventry apparently didn’t know they knew. Wills might have laughed, but he felt laughter was receding from him. Unused faculties, like unused limbs, atrophy.

Daventry saw him approach. The bird eyes behind his glasses flicked poultry-wise over him, and a word passed from the thin-lipped mouth to the matron, who nodded and pioved away. The sharp face was lit by a smile; brisk legs began to carry him over the tidy lawn, which was not mown by the patients because mowers were too dangerous.

“Ah, Harry!” in Daventry’s optimistic voice. “I want a word with you. Shall we go to the office?” He took Wills’s arm as he turned, companionably; Wills, who found the habit intolerable, broke the grip before it closed.

He said, “As it happens, I want a word with you, too.”

The edginess of his tone sawed into Daventry’s composure. The bird eyes scanned his face, the head tipped a little on one side. The list of Daventry’s mannerisms was a long one, but he knew the reasons for all of them and often explained them.

“Hah!” he said. “I can guess what this will be about!”

They passed into the building and walked side by side with their footsteps beating irregularly like two palpitating hearts. In the passageway Daventry spoke again.

“I presume there’s been no change in Starling, or you’d have left a note for me—you were on night duty last night, weren’t you? I didn’t see him today, unfortunately; I was at a conference and didn’t get here till lunchtime.”

Wills looked straight ahead, to the looming door of Daventry’s office. He said, “No—no change. But that’s what I wanted to talk about. I don’t think we should go on.”

“Ah!” said Daventry. It was automatic. It meant something altogether different, like “I’m astonished”—but professionally Daventry disavowed astonishment. The office accepted them, and they sat down to the idiot noise of a bluebottle hammering its head on the window.

“Why not?” Daventry said abruptly.

Wills had not yet composed his answer. He could hardly speak of the undead Starling with pads on his eyes like pennies, of the black tentacles reaching out through the hospital night, of the formulated but suppressed notion that he must be treated with sharp stakes and silver bullets, and soon. He was forced to throw up improvisation like an emergency earthwork, knowing it could be breached at a dozen points.

“Well—all our other cases suggest that serious mental disturbance results from interference with the dreaming process. Even the most resistant of our other volunteers broke down after less than two weeks. We’ve prevented Starling from dreaming every night for five months now, and even if there are no signs of harm yet it’s probable that we are harming him.”

Daventry had lit a cigarette while Wills talked. Now he waved it in front of him, as though to ward off Wills’s arguments with an adequate barrier—a wisp of smoke.

“Good gracious, Harry!” he said affably. “What damage are we doing? Did you detect any signs of it last time you ran Starling through the tests?”

“No—that was last week and he’s due for another run tomorrow—no, what I’m saying is that everything points to dreaming being essential. We may not have a test in the battery which shows the effect of depriving Starling of his dreams, but the effect must be there.”

Daventry gave a neutral nod. He said, “Have you asked Starling’s own opinion on this?”

Again, concede defeat from honesty: “Yes. He said he’s perfectly happy to go on. He said he feels fine.”

“Where is he at the moment?”

“Today’s Tuesday. He goes to see his sister in the town on Tuesday afternoons. I could check if you like, but—”

Daventry shrugged. “Don’t bother. I have good news for you, you see. In my view, six months is quite long enough to establish Starling’s tolerance of dream-deprivation. What’s next of interest is the nature of his dreams when he’s allowed to resume. So in three weeks from now I propose to end the experiment and find out.”

“He’ll probably wake himself up reflexively,” Wills said.

Daventry was prepared to take the words with utmost seriousness. He said, “What makes you think that?”

Wills had meant it as a bitter joke; when he reconsidered, he found reasons after all. He said, “The way he’s stood the treatment when no one else could. Like everyone else we tested, his dreaming frequency went up in the first few days; then it peaked at about thirty-four times a night, and dropped back to its current level of about twenty-six, which has remained constant for about four months now. Why? His mind seems to be malleable, and I can’t believe that. People need dreams; a man who can manage without them is as unlikely as someone who can do without food or water.”

“So we thought,” Daventry said briskly. Wills could see the conference papers being compiled in his mind, the reports for the Journal of Psychology and the four pages in Scientific American, with photographs. And so on. “So we thought. Until we happened across Starling, and he just proved we were wrong.”

“I—” began Wills. Daventry took no notice and went on.

“Dement’s work at Mount Sinai wasn’t utterly definitive, you know. Clinging to first findings is a false attitude. We’re now compelled to drop the idea that dreaming is indispensable, because Starling has gone without dreams for months and so far as we can tell—oh, I grant that: so far and no further—he hasn’t suffered under the experience.”

He knocked ash into a bowl on his desk. “Well, that was my news for you, Harry: that we finish the Starling series at the six-month mark. Then we’ll see if he goes back to normal dreaming. There was nothing unusual about his dreaming before he volunteered; it will be most interesting. …”

 

It was cold comfort, but it did give him a sort of deadline to work to. It also rid him of part of the horror he had suffered from having to face the presence in his mind of the vampire-corpse like a threat looming down the whole length of his future life path. It actually heartened him till the time came, the following afternoon, to retest Starling.

He sat waiting in his office for half an hour beforehand, because everything was otherwise quiet and because before he came up for psychological examination Starling always underwent a physical examination by another member of the staff. Not that the physicals ever turned anything up. But the psychological hadn’t either. It was all in Wills’s mind. Or in Starling’s. But if it was in Starling’s he himself didn’t know.

He knew the Starling file almost by heart now—thick, much thumbed, annotated by himself and by Daventry. Nonetheless he turned back to the beginning of it, to the time five months and a week ago when Starling was just one volunteer among six men and six women engaged in a follow-up to check on Dement’s findings of 1960 with superior equipment.

There were transcripts of dreams with Freudian commentary, in their limited way extraordinarily revealing but not giving a hint of the most astonishing secret—that Starling could get by without them.

I am in a railway station. People are going to work and coming home at the same time. A tall man approaches and asks for my ticket. I try to explain that I haven’t bought one yet. He grows angry and calls a policeman, but the policeman is my grandfather. I cannot understand what he says.

I am talking to one of my schoolteachers, Mr. Bullen. I am very rich and I have come to visit my old school. I am very happy. I invite Mr. Bullen to ride in my car, which is big and new. When he gets in, the door handle comes off in his hand. The door won’t lock. I cannot start the engine. The car is old and covered with rust. Mr. Bullen is very angry but I do not care very much.

I am in a restaurant. The menu is in French and I order something I don’t know. When it comes I can’t eat it. I call the manager to make a complaint and he arrives in a sailor’s uniform. The restaurant is on a boat and rocks so that I feel ill. The manager says he will put me in irons. People in the restaurant laugh at me. I break the plates on which the food is served, but they make no noise and no one notices. So I eat the food after all.

That last one was exactly what you would expect from Starling, Wills thought. He ate the food after all, and liked it.

These were records extracted from the control period—the week during which his dreams and those of the other volunteers were being noted for comparison with later ones, after the experiment had terminated. In all the other eleven cases, that was from three to thirteen days later. But in Starling’s—!

The dreams fitted Starling admirably. Miserable, small-minded, he had gone through life being frustrated, and hence the dreams went wrong for him, sometimes through the intervention of figures of authority from childhood, such as his hated grandfather and the schoolteacher. It seemed that he never fought back; he—ate the food after all.

No wonder he was content to go on cooperating in Daventry’s experiment, Wills thought bleakly. With free board and lodging, no outside problems involved, he was probably in paradise.

Or a kind of gratifying hell.

He turned up the dreams of the other volunteers—the ones who had been driven to quit after a few nights. The records of their control week showed without exception indications of sexual tension, dramatized resolutions of problems, positive attacks on personal difficulties. Only Starling provided continual evidence of total surrender.

Not that he was outwardly inadequate. Considering the frustration he had endured first from his parents, then from his tyrannical grandfather and his teachers, he had adjusted well. He was mild-mannered and rather shy, and he lived with his sister and her husband, but he held down a fairly good job, and he had a small, constant circle of acquaintances, met mainly through his sister’s husband, on whom he made no great impression but who all “quite liked” him.

Quite was a word central to Starling’s life. Hardly any absolutes. Yet—his dreams to the contrary—he could never have surrendered altogether. He’d made the best of things.

The volunteers were a mixed bag: seven students, a teacher on sabbatical leave, an out-of-work actor, a struggling writer, a beatnik who didn’t care and Starling. They were subjected to the process developed by Dement at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, as improved and automatized by Daventry—the process still being applied to Starling even now, which woke him with a buzzer whenever the signs indicating dreaming occurred. In the eleven other cases, the effect found was the same as what Dement had established: interrupting their dreaming made them nervous, irritable, victims of uncontrolled nervous tension. The toughest quit after thirteen days.

Except for Starling, that was to say.

It wasn’t having their sleep disturbed that upset them; that could be proved by waking them between, instead of during, dreams. It was not being allowed to dream that caused trouble.

In general, people seemed to spend about an hour a night dreaming, in four or five “installments.” This indicated that dreaming served a purpose. But what? Dissipation of antisocial tensions? A grooming of the ego as repressed desires were satisfied? That was too glib an answer. But without Starling to cock a snook in their faces, the experimenters would have accepted a similar generalization and left the matter there till the distant day when the science of mind was better equipped to weigh and measure the impalpable stuff of dreams.

Only Starling had cropped up. At first he had reacted predictably. The frequency of his dreaming shot up from five times a night to twenty, thirty, and beyond, as the buzzer aborted each embryo dream, whirling into nothing his abominable grandfather, his tyrannical teachers—

Was there a clue there? Wills had wondered that before. Was it possible that, whereas other people needed to dream, Starling hated it? Were his dreams so miserable that to go without them was a liberation to him?

The idea was attractive, because straightforward, but it didn’t hold water. In the light of previous experiments, it was about equivalent to saying that a man could be liberated from the need to excrete by denying him food and water.

But there was no detectable effect on Starling! He had not lost weight nor grown more irritable; he talked lucidly, and he responded within predictable limits to IQ tests and Rorschach tests and every other test Wills could find.

It was purely unnatural.

Wills checked himself. Facing his own reaction squarely, he saw it for what it must be—an instinctive but irrational fear like the fear of the stranger who comes over the hill with a different accent and different table manners. Starling was human; ergo, his reactions were natural; ergo, either the other experiments had agreed by coincidence and dreaming wasn’t indispensable, or Starling’s reactions were the same as everyone’s and were just being held down until they blew like a boiler straining past its tested pressure.

There were only three more weeks to go, of course.

The habitual shy knock came at the door. Wills grunted for Starling to come in, and wondered as he looked at him how the sight of him passive in bed could inspire him to thoughts of garlic, sharpened stakes, and burial at crossroads.

The fault must be in his own mind, not in Starling’s.

 

The tests were exactly as usual. That wrecked Wills’s tentative idea about Starling welcoming the absence of his dreams. If indeed he was liberated from a burden, that should show up in a trend towards a stronger, more assured personality. The microscopic trend he actually detected could be assigned to the fact that for several months Starling had been in this totally undemanding and restful environment.

No help there.

He shoved aside the pile of test papers. “Mr. Starling,” he said, “what made you volunteer for these experiments in the first place? I must have asked you before, but I’ve forgotten.”

It was all in the file, but he wanted to check.

“Why, I don’t really know, doctor,” Starling’s mild voice said. Starling’s cowlike eyes rested on his face. “I think my sister knew someone who had volunteered, and my brother-in-law is a blood donor and kept saying that everyone should do something to benefit society, and while I didn’t like the idea of being bled because I’ve never liked injections and things like that, this idea seemed all right so I said I’d do it. Then of course when Dr. Daventry said I was unusual and would I go on with it I said I hadn’t suffered by it and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t if it was in the cause of science—”

The voice droned on, adding nothing new. Starling was very little interested in new things. He had never asked Wills the purpose of any test he submitted to; probably he had never asked his own doctor what was on a prescription form filled out for him, being content to regard the medical abbreviations as a kind of talisman. Perhaps he was so used to being snubbed or choked off if he showed too much interest that he felt he was incapable of understanding the pattern of which Wills and the hospital formed part.

He was malleable. It was the galling voice of his brother-in-law, sounding off about his uselessness, which pushed him into this. Watching him, Wills realized that the decision to offer himself for the experiment was probably the biggest he had ever taken, comparable in the life of anyone else with a decision to marry or to go into a monastery. And yet that was wrong, too. Starling didn’t take decisions on such a level. Things like that would merely happen to him.

Impulsively Wills said, “And how about when the experiment is over, Mr. Starling? I suppose it can’t go on for ever.”

Placid, the voice shaped inevitable words. “Well, you know, doctor, I hadn’t given that very much thought.”

No, it wasn’t a liberation to him to be freed of his dreaming. It was nothing to him. Nothing was anything to him. Starling was undead. Starling was neuter in a human scale of values. Starling was the malleable thing that filled the hole available for it, the thing without will of its own which made the best of what there was and did nothing more.

Wishing he could punish the mind that gave him such thoughts, Wills asked their source to go from him. But though his physical presence went, his nonexistent existence stayed and burned and loomed and was impassive and cocked snooks in every hole and corner of Wills’s chaotic brain.

 

Those last three weeks were the worst of all. The silver bullet and the sharpened stake, the crossroads for the burial—Wills chained the images down in his mind, but he ached from the strain of hanging on to the chains. Horror, horror, horror, sang an eldritch voice somewhere deep and dark within him. Not natural, said another in a professionally judicious tone. He fought the voices and thought of other things.

Daventry said—and was correct according to the principles of the experiment, of course—that so as to have a true control for comparison they must simply disconnect the buzzer attached to the EEG when the time came and not tell Starling what they had done, and see what happened. He would be free to finish his dreams again. Perhaps they would be more vivid, and he would remember more clearly after such a long interruption. He would—

But Wills listened with only half an ear. They hadn’t predicted Starling’s reaction when they deprived him of dreams; why should they be able to predict what would happen when he received them back? A chill premonition iced solid in his mind, but he did not mention it to Daventry. What it amounted to was this: whatever Starling’s response was, it would be the wrong one.

He told Daventry of his partial breaking of the news that the experiment was to end, and his chief frowned.

“That’s a pity, Harry,” he said. “Even Starling might put two and two together when he realizes six months have gone by. Never mind. We’ll let it run for another few days, shall we? Let him think that he was wrong about the deadline.”

He looked at the calendar. “Give him three extra days,” he said. “Cut it on the fourth. How’s that?”

By coincidence—or not?—Wills’s turn for night duty came up again on that day; it came up once in eight days, and the last few times had been absolutely unbearable. He wondered if Daventry had selected the date deliberately. Maybe. What difference did it make?

He said, “Will you be there to see what happens?”

Daventry’s face set in a reflex mask of regret. “Unfortunately no—I’m attending a congress in Italy that week. But I have absolute confidence in you, Harry; you know that. By the way, I’m doing up a paper on Starling for Journ. Psych.” Mannerism, as always: he made it into the single word “jurnsike.” “And I think you should appear as coauthor.”

Cerberus duly sopped, Daventry went on his way.

 

That night the duty nurse was Green, a small clever man who knew judo. In a way that was a relief; Wills usually didn’t mind Green’s company, and had even learned some judo holds from him, useful for restraining but not harming violent patients. Tonight, though …

They spoke desultorily together for the first half hour of the shift, but Wills sometimes lost track of the conversation because his mind’s eye was distracted by a picture of what was going on in that room along the corridor where Starling held embalmed court among shadows and pilot lights. No one breached his privacy now as he went to bed; he did everything for himself, attached the leads, planted the penny pads on his eyes, switched on the equipment. There was some risk of him discovering that the buzzer was disconnected, but it had always been set to sound only after thirty minutes or more of typical simple sleep-readings.

Starling, though he never did anything to tire himself out, always went to sleep quickly. Another proof of his malleable mind, Wills thought sourly. To get into bed suggested going to sleep, and he slept.

Usually it was three-quarters of an hour before the first attempted dream would burgeon in his round skull. For six months and a couple of days the buzzer had smashed the first and all that followed; the sleeper had adjusted his position without much disturbing the bedding, and—

But not tonight.

After forty minutes Wills got up, dry-lipped. “I’ll be in Starling’s room if you want me,” he said. “We’ve turned off his buzzer, and he’s due to start dreaming again—normally.” The word sounded unconvincing.

Green nodded, picking up a magazine from the table. “On to something pretty unusual there, aren’t we, doc?” he said.

“God only knows,” Wills said, and went out.

His heart was pumping so loudly he felt it might waken the sleepers around him; his footsteps sounded like colossal hammer blows, and his blood roared in his ears. He had to fight a dizzy, tumbling sensation which made the still lines of the corridor—floor-with-wall a pair of lines, wall-with-ceiling another pair—twist like a four-strand plait, like the bit of a hand drill or a stick of candy turned mysteriously and topologically outside-in. Swaying as though drunk, he came to Starling’s door and watched his hand go to the handle.

I refuse the responsibility. I’ll refuse to coauthor the paper on him. It’s Daventry’s fault.

Nonetheless he acquiesced in opening the door, as he had acquiesced all along in the experiment.

He was intellectually aware that he entered soundlessly, but he imagined himself going like an elephant on broken glass. Everything was as usual, except of course the buzzer.

He drew a rubber-shod chair to a position from which he could watch the paper tapes being paid out by the EEG, and sat down. As yet there were only typical early-sleep rhythms—Starling had not yet started his first dream of the night. If he waited till that dream arrived and saw that all was going well, perhaps it would lay the phantoms in his mind.

He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket and closed it around a clove of garlic.

Startled, he drew the garlic out and stared at it. He had no memory of putting it there. But the last time he was on night duty and haunted by the undead appearance of Starling as he slept, he had spent most of the silent hours drawing batwing figures, stabbing their hearts with the point of his pencil, sketching crossroads around them, throwing the paper away with the hole pierced in the center of the sheet.

Oh, God! It was going to be such a relief to be free of this obsession!

But at least providing himself with a clove of garlic was a harmless symptom. He dropped it back in his pocket. He noticed two things at the same time directly afterwards. The first was the alteration in the line on the EEG tapes which indicated the beginning of a dream. The second was that he had a very sharp pencil in his pocket, as well as the clove of garlic—

No, not a pencil. He took it out and saw that it was a piece of rough wood, about eight inches long, pointed at one end. That was all he needed. That, and something to drive it home with. He fumbled in all his pockets. He was carrying a rubber hammer for testing reflexes. Of course, that wouldn’t do, but anyway …

Chance had opened a gap in Starling’s pajama jacket. He poised the stake carefully over his heart and swung the hammer.

As though the flesh were soft as cheese, the stake sank home. Blood welled up around it like a spring in mud, trickled over Starling’s chest, began to stain the bed. Starling himself did not awaken but simply went more limp—naturally, for he was undead and not asleep. Sweating, Wills let the rubber hammer fall and wondered at what he had done. Relief filled him as the unceasing stream of blood filled the bed.

The door behind him was ajar. Through it he heard the cat-light footfalls of Green and his voice saying urgently, “It’s Room 11, doc! I think she’s—”

And then Green saw what had been done to Starling.

His eyes wide with amazement, he turned to stare at Wills. His mouth worked, but for a while his expression conveyed more than the unshaped words he uttered.

“Doc!” Green said finally, and that was all.

Wills ignored him. He looked down at the undead, seeing the blood as though it were luminous paint in the dim-lit room—on his hands, his coat, the floor, the bed, flooding out now in a river, pouring from the pens that waggled the traces of a dream on the paper tapes, making his feet squelch stickily in his wet shoes.

“You’ve wrecked the experiment,” Daventry said coldly as he came in. “After I’d been generous enough to offer you coauthorship of my paper in Journ. Psych., too! How could you?”

Hot shame flooded into Wills’s mind. He would never be able to face Daventry again.

“We must call a policeman,” Daventry said with authority. “Fortunately he always said he thought he ought to be a blood donor.”

He took up from the floor a gigantic syringe, like a hypodermic for a titan, and after dipping the needle into the river of blood hauled on the plunger. The red level rose inside the glass.

And click.

Through a crack in Wills’s benighted skull a fact dropped. Daventry was in Italy. Therefore he couldn’t be here. Therefore he wasn’t. Therefore—

Wills felt his eyes creak open like old heavy doors on hinges stiff with rust and found that he was looking down at Starling in the bed. The pens tracing the activity of his brain had reverted to a typical sleep rhythm. There was no stake. There was no blood.

Weak with relief, Wills shuddered at remembered horror. He leaned back in his chair, struggling to understand.

He had told himself that whatever Starling’s reaction to being given back his dreams might be, it would be the wrong one. Well, here it was. He couldn’t have predicted it. But he could explain it now—more or less. Though the mechanics of it would have to wait a while.

If he was right about Starling, a lifetime of frustration and making the best of things had sapped his power of action to the point at which he never even considered tackling an obstacle. He would just meekly try and find a way around it. If there wasn’t one—well, there wasn’t, and he left it at that.

Having his dreams stopped was an obstacle. The eleven other volunteers, more aggressive, had developed symptoms which expressed their resentment in manifold ways: irritability, rage, insulting behavior. But not Starling. To Starling it was unthinkable to express resentment.

Patiently, accustomed to disappointment because that was the constant feature of his life, he had sought a way around the obstacle. And he had found it. He had learned how to dream with someone else’s mind instead of his own.

Of course, until tonight the buzzer had broken off every dream he attempted, and he had endured that like everything else. But tonight there was no buzzer, and he had dreamed in and with Wills. The driving of the stake, the blood, the intrusion of Green, the appearance of Daventry, were part of a dream to which Wills contributed some images and Starling contributed the rest, such as the policeman who didn’t have time to arrive and the giant hypodermic. Starling feared injections.

Wills made up his mind. Daventry wouldn’t believe him—not unless he experienced the phenomenon himself—but that was a problem for tomorrow. Right now he had had enough, and more than enough. He was going to reconnect the buzzer and get to hell out of here.

He tried to lift his arm towards the boxes of equipment on the bedside table and was puzzled to find it heavy and sluggish. Invisible weights seemed to hang on his wrist. Even when, sweating, he managed to force his hand towards the buzzer, his fingers felt like sausages and would not grip the delicate wire he had to attach to the terminal.

He had fought for what seemed like an eternity and was crying with frustration when he finally understood.

The typical pattern of all Starling’s dreams centered on failure to achieve what he attempted; he expected his greatest efforts to be disappointed. Hence Wills, his mind somehow linked to Starling’s and his consciousness seeming to Starling to be a dream, would never be able to reconnect that buzzer.

Wills let his hands fall limp on his dangling arms. He looked at Starling, naked fear rising in his throat. How much dreaming could a man do in a single night when he had been deprived for six mortal months?

In his pocket was a sharp wooden stake and a hammer. He was going to put an end to Starling’s dreaming once for all.

 

He was still in the chair, weeping without tears, tied by invisible chains, when Starling awoke puzzled in the morning and found him.