Lathe of Heaven, The (7 page)

"Dual time-tracks, alternate universes," Miss Lelache said. "Do you see a lot of old late-night TV shows?"

"No," said the client, almost as dryly as she. "I don't ask you to believe this. Certainly not without evidence."

"Well. Thank God!"

He smiled, almost a laugh. He had a kind face; he looked, for some reason, as if he liked her.

"But look, Mr. Orr, how the hell can I get any evidence about your dreams? Particularly if you destroy all the evidence every time you dream by changing everything ever since the Pleistocene?"

"Can you," he said, suddenly intense, as if hope had come to him, "can you, acting as my lawyer, ask to be present at one of my sessions with Dr. Haber--if you were willing?"

"Well. Possibly. It could be managed, if there's good cause. But look, calling in a lawyer as witness in the event of a possible privacy-infringement case is going to absolutely wreck your therapist-patient relationship. Not that it sounds like you've got a very good one going, but that's hard to judge from outside. The fact is, you have to trust him, and also, you know, he has to trust you, in a way. If you throw a lawyer at him because you want to get him out of your head, well, what can he do? Presumably he's trying to help you."

"Yes. But he's using me for experimental--" Orr got no further: Miss Lelache had stiffened, the spider had seen, at last, her prey.

"Experimental purposes? Is he? What? This machine you talked about--is it experimental? Has it HEW approval? What have you signed, any releases, anything beyond the VTT forms and the hypnosis-consent form? Nothing? That sounds like you might have just cause for complaint, Mr. Orr."

"You might be able to come observe a session?"

"Maybe. The line to follow would be civil rights, of course, not privacy."

"You do understand that I'm not trying to get Dr. Haber into trouble?" he said, looking worried. "I don't want to do that. I know he means well. It's just that I want to be cured, not used."

"If his motives are good, and if he's using an experimental device on a human subject, then he should take it quite as a matter of course, without resentment; if it's on the level, he won't get into any trouble. I've done jobs like this twice. Hired by HEW to do it.

Watched a new hypnosis-inducer in practice up at the Med School, it didn't work, and watched a demonstration of how to induce agoraphobia by suggestion, so people will be happy in crowds, out at the Institute in Forest Grove. That one worked but didn't get approved, it came under the brainwashing laws, we decided. Now, I can probably get an HEW order to investigate this thingummy your doctor's using. That lets you out of the picture. I don't come on as your lawer at all. In fact maybe I don't even know you. I'm an official accredited ACLU observer for HEW. Then, if we don't get anywhere with this, that leaves you and him in the same relationship as before. The only catch is, I've got to get invited to one of your sessions."

"I'm the only psychiatric patient he's using the Augmentor on, he told me so. He said he's still working on it--perfecting it."

"It really is experimental, whatever he's doing to you with it, then. Good. All right. I'll see what I can do. It'll take a week or more to get the forms through."

He looked distressed.

"You won't dream me out of existence this week, Mr. Orr," she said, hearing her chitinous voice, clicking her mandibles.

"Not willingly," he said, with gratitude--no, by God, it wasn't gratitude, it was liking.

He liked her. He was a poor damn crazy psycho on drugs, he would like her. She liked him. She stuck out her brown hand, he met it with a white one, just like that damn button her mother always kept in the bottom of her bead box, SCNN or SNCC or something she'd belonged to way back in the middle of the last century, the Black hand and the White hand joined together. Christ!

5

When the Great Way is lost, we get benevolence and righteousness.

--Lao Tse: XVIII

Smiling, William Haber strode up the steps of the Oregon Oneirological Institute and through the high, polarized-glass doors into the dry cool of the air conditioning. It was only March 24, and already like a sauna-bath outside; but within all was cool, clean, serene. Marble floor, discreet furniture, reception desk of brushed chrome, well-enameled receptionist: "Good morning, Dr. Haber!"

In the hall Atwood passed him, coming from the research wards, red-eyed and tousled from a night of monitoring sleepers' EEC's; the computers did a lot of that now, but there were still tunes an unprogrammed mind was needed. "Morning, Chief," Atwood mumbled.

And from Miss Crouch in his own office, "Good morning, Doctor!" He was glad he'd brought Penny Crouch with him when he moved to the office of Director of the Institute last year. She was loyal and clever, and a man at the head of a big and complex research institution needs a loyal and clever woman in his outer office.

He strode on into the inner sanctum.

Dropping briefcase and file folders on the couch, he stretched his arms, and then went over, as he always did when he first entered his office, to the window. It was a large corner window, looking out east and north over a great sweep of world: the curve of the much-bridged Willamette close in beneath the hills; the city's countless towers high and milky in the spring mist, on either side of the river; the suburbs receding out of sight till from their remote outbacks the foothills rose; and the mountains. Hood, immense yet withdrawn, breeding clouds about her head; going northward, the distant Adams, like a molar tooth; and then the pure cone of St. Helens, from whose long gray sweep of slope still farther northward a little bald dome stuck out, like a baby looking round its mother's skirt: Mount Rainier.

It was an inspiring view. It never failed to inspire Dr. Haber. Besides, after a week's solid rain, barometric pressure was up and the sun was out again, above the river mist. Well aware from a thousand EEG readings of the links between the pressure of the atmosphere and the heaviness of the mind, he could almost feel his psycho-soma being buoyed up by that bright, drying wind. Have to keep that up, keep the climate improving, he thought rapidly, almost surreptitously. There were several chains of thought formed or forming in his mind simultaneously, and this mental note was not part of any of them. It was quickly made and as quickly filed away in memory, even as he snapped on his desk recorder and began to dictate one of the many letters that the running of a Government-connected science research institute entailed. It was hackwork, of course, but it had to be done, and he was the man to do it. He did not resent it, though it cut drastically into his own research time. He was in the labs only for five or six hours a week now, usually, and had only one patient of his own, though of course he was supervising the therapy of several others.

One patient, however, he did keep. He was a psychiatrist, after all. He had gone into sleep research and oneirology in the first place to find therapeutic applications. He was not interested in detached knowledge, science for science' sake: there was no use learning anything if it was of no use. Relevance was his touchstone. He would always keep one patient of his own, to remind him of that fundamental commitment, to keep him in contact with the human reality of his research in terms of the disturbed personality structure of individual people. For there is nothing important except people.

A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.

His current patient, Orr, was coming in at four this afternoon, for they had given up the attempt at night sessions; and, as Miss Crouch reminded him at lunch tune, an HEW

inspector was going to observe today's session, making sure there was nothing illegal, immoral, unsafe, unkind, unetc., about the operation of the Augmentor. God damn Government prying.

That was the trouble with success, and its concomitants of publicity, public curiosity, professional envy, peer-group rivalry. If he'd still been a private researcher, plugging along in the sleep lab at P.S.U. and a second-rate office in Willamette East Tower, chances were that nobody would have taken any notice of his Augmentor until he decided it was ready to market, and he would have been let alone to refine and perfect the device and its applications. Now here he was doing the most private and delicate part of his business, psychotherapy with a disturbed patient, so the Government had to send a lawyer barging in not understanding half of what went on and misunderstanding the rest.

The lawyer arrived at 3:45, and Haber came striding into the outer office to greet him--

her, it turned out-- and to get a friendly warm impression established right away. It went better if they saw you were unafraid, cooperative, and personally cordial. A lot of doctors let their resentment show when they had an HEW inspector; and those doctors did not get many Government grants.

It was not altogether easy to be cordial and warm with this lawyer. She snapped and clicked. Heavy brass snap catch on handbag, heavy copper and brass jewelry that clattered, clump-heel shoes, and a huge silver ring with a horribly ugly African mask design, frowning eyebrows, hard voice: clack, clash, snap.... In the second ten seconds, Haber suspected that the whole affair was indeed a mask, as the ring said: a lot of sound and fury signifying timidity. That, however, was none of his business. He would never know the woman behind the mask, and she did not matter, so long as he could make the right impression on Miss Lelache the lawyer.

If it didn't go cordially, at least it didn't go badly; she was competent, had done this kind of thing before, and had done her homework for this particular job. She knew what to ask and how to listen.

"This patient, George Orr," she said, "he's not an addict, correct? Is he diagnosed as psychotic or disturbed, after three weeks' therapy?"

"Disturbed, as the Health Office defines the word. Deeply disturbed and with artificial reality-orientations, but improving under current therapy."

She had a pocket recorder and was taking all this down: every five seconds, as the law required, the thing went teep.

"Will you describe the therapy you're employing please, teep and explain the role this device plays in it? Don't tell me how it teep works, that's in your report, but what it does.

Teep for instance, how does its use differ from the Elektroson or the trancap?"

"Well, those devices, as you know, generate various low-frequency pulses which stimulate nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. Those signals are what you might call generalized; their effect on the brain is obtained in a manner basically similar to that of strobe lights at a critical rhythm, or an aural stimulus like a drumbeat. The Augmentor delivers a specific signal which can be picked up by a specific area. For instance, a subject can be trained to produce alpha rhythm at will, as you know; but the Augmentor can induce it without any training, and even when he's in a condition not normally conducive to the alpha rhythm. It feeds a 9-cycle alpha rhythm through appropriately placed electrodes, and within seconds the brain can accept that rhythm and begin producing alpha waves as steadily as a Zen Buddhist in trance. Similarly, and more usefully, any stage of sleep can be induced, with its typical cycles and regional activities."

"Will it stimulate the pleasure center, or the speech center?"

Oh, the moralistic gleam in an ACLU eye, whenever that pleasure-center bit came up!

Haber concealed all irony and irritation, and answered with friendly sincerity, "No. It's not like ESB, you see. It's not like electrical stimulation, or chemical stimulation, of any center; it involves no intrusion on special areas of the brain. It simply induces the entire brain activity to change, to shift into another of its own, natural states. It's a bit like a catchy tune that sets your feet tapping. So the brain enters and maintains the condition desired for study or therapy, as long as need be I called it the Augmentor to point up its noncreative function. Nothing is imposed from outside. Sleep induced by the Augmentor is precisely, literally, the kind and quality of sleep normal to that particular brain. The difference between it and the electrosleep machines is like a personal tailor compared to mass-produced suits. The difference between it and electrode implantation is--oh, hell

--a scalpel to a sledgehammer!"

"But how do you make up the stimuli you use? Do you teep record an alpha rhythm, for instance, from one subject to use on another teep?"

He had been evading this point. He did not intend to lie, of course, but there was simply no use talking about uncompleted research till it was done and tested; it might give a quite wrong impression to a nonspecialist. He launched into an answer easily, glad to hear his own voice instead of her snapping and bangle-clattering and teeping; it was curious how he only heard the annoying little sound when she was talking. "At first I used a generalized set of stimuli, averaged out from records of many subjects. The depressive patient mentioned in the report was treated successfully thus. But I felt the effects were more random and erratic than I liked. I began to experiment. On animals, of course. Cats. We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot! Well, with animal subjects I found that the most promising line was to use rhythms previously recorded from the subject's own brain. A kind of auto-stimulation via recordings.

Specificity is what I'm after, you see. A brain will respond to its own alpha rhythm at once, and spontaneously. Now of course there are therapeutic vistas opened up along the other line of research. It might be possible to impose a slightly different pattern gradually upon the patient's own: a healthier or completer pattern. One recorded previously from that subject, possibly, or from a different subject. This could prove tremendously helpful in cases of brain damage, lesion, trauma; it might aid a damaged brain to re-establish its old habits in new channels--something which the brain struggles long and hard to do by itself. It might be used to 'teach' an abnormally functioning brain new habits, and so forth. However, that's all speculative, at this point, and if and when I return to research on that line I will of course reregister with HEW." That was quite true.