The Productions of Time

by John Brunner

  The young designer put his hands together, twisted them so that the knuckles cracked and let them fall to his sides. "Well, I -- I have enough of the stuff to keep me going. I don't know where the hell Sam got it from, but I found it in my room when I got here, the way you found the liquor you were talking about this morning, and I wasn't complaining. I've been taken off the stuff once, and it nearly killed me, and it certainly was going to kill me professionally, so I'm stuck with it."

  He was sweating, and his low voice shook a little. They reached the head of the stairs and turned back into the new wing.

  "This is my room -- number ten," Gerry went on, stopping and fishing for a key. "I figure I must be just about over the middle row of seats in the theater. Crazy thing to find, isn't it? A private theater equipped like that! No, come in, Murray, I haven't finished."

  He stood aside and gestured for Murray to go in. The room was very much like Murray's, apart from the color of the bedcover and curtains.

  "Look, what I'm trying to say is this." Gerry shut the door and stood twisting the key between his hands. "You must have some kind of guts that I don't have. I hardly even have the guts to ask you what I am going to ask. But I know I've got to, if you follow me. Here!"

  He spun on his heel and pulled out a drawer from a chest under the window. He then produced a two-ounce jar almost full of fine white dust.

  "I've never seen so much of it in my life at one time," he almost whispered. "A thousand pounds' worth? Heaven knows how much it must have cost! Because it isn't cut, you see. It's simon-pure heroin. And if I -- well, when things -- oh, God damn ! Murray, will you take charge of it for me? Right now I have enough self-control to ask you, but I may not pluck up the courage again. Things have gone damned well today. Too well, maybe. I don't know. If they turn sour, I know from experience that I won't have the patience to load myself and wait for the stuff to hit. I'll go crazy waiting and take on a second load, and I'll probably make it a bigger one, if I have this much of the stuff at hand. And when I do that I'll kill myself. I know perfectly well I will. Here!"

  He thrust the jar toward Murray as though terrified he might change his mind in the next minute. "Keep it for me, will you? Don't tell me where you're hiding it. Lock it up if you can. Never let me take more than three grains at one time, do you hear? Not even if something goes wildly wrong, and the project looks as though it's breaking down, and I come crying to you for more, don't for God's sake let me take more than three grains!"

  Murray nodded, hefted the little jar in his hand and turned toward the door. As he reached for the handle, Gerry spoke again.

  "Murray, I -- I'm very grateful for this. I haven't any right to ask you to do this for me. If there's anything I can do in return, just let me know, won't you?"

  "Sure," Murray muttered and went out.

  VII

  Murray put on the light in his own room, closed the door, and looked around him ruefully.

  God, was there ever such a spavined, windbroken, knock-kneed string put together as this bunch here?

  But at least the experience of the first day's work with Delgado had improved Gerry Hoading. From their previous acquaintance, Murray wouldn't have credited him with the self-control necessary to separate himself from his precious drug.

  Now -- where to hide the stuff? A drawer or cupboard was much too obvious. Outside on a window sill? He peered through the darkness of the glass between the drawn curtains. No good -- the sill was only a lip, half an inch wide. Inside the back of the TV set, then. That had been one of his own most successful inspirations when he was hiding his liquor.

  This was a modem slimline set, though. When he turned it around and peered through the ventilation slits in the back, he couldn't see any space large enough to accept the bottle he held without interfering with the circuitry. Besides, the back of the set was fixed with some special kind of fastening, not ordinary screws which he could have removed with his pocketknife. He bit his lip and put the set back the way it had been.

  He considered his traveling bag, but when he checked his key ring he found the bag's key wasn't on it. Since he hadn't locked the bag on leaving home, he hadn't noticed the missing key before. The hell. Gerry's stuff would just have to go under the mattress for the time being. Maybe a better place would turn up later.

  He pulled back the bedding. As he did, his foot knocked against the base of the bed -- which in fact was a divan rather than a bed, with a box base and only a couple of inches clearance from the floor. The noise his shoe made sounded hollow, but he didn't realize the significance of the fact immediately.

  Under the bottom sheet was the mattress. And embroidered on it was a curiously complex design in metallic thread, running almost the full width of the mattress and about eighteen inches in depth -- approximately, in fact, the area over which the bolster would lie.

  Curious. Never seen a mattress like that before.

  But he gathered a fistful of the ticking and lifted the head of the mattress with a grunt. Then he saw why the side of the bed had sounded hollow when his foot struck it.

  There was a hinged panel cut into the base.

  What the -- ?

  With considerable straining, he managed to get the mattress off entirely and let it slide to the floor with the bedding tangled around it. Something went twang as he did this, and a glint caught his eye. As he moved his bead, he lost it again. He put out a cautious hand and located a metal thread as fine as gossamer running from the embroidered pattern on the mattress into the side of the hinged panel. The fall of the mattress had stretched it taut and then broken it. When he pulled at it experimentally, it felt as sharp as a razor.

  He put his fingernails under the edge of the hinged panel and opened it.

  Below, he found a tape recorder. At first glance, it looked quite ordinary. It wasn't switched on. There were two enormous, professional-size spools of conventional oxide-coated tape -- about a third had wound from the left-hand spool to the right. A second glance revealed that there were no controls on the recorder -- just the spool turrets and the heads.

  Murray studied it for a while and then shrugged. No good kidding himself; he knew from nothing about tape recorders except how to switch them on or off. He very much wanted to know, though, what the hell a tape recorder was doing in the head of his bed. Was this another of the country club's facilities? Soothing music under the pillow to lull the members to sleep? All right. Then where was the speaker, and how did you turn the music off if you wanted to?

  He straightened with a frown. He wasn't going to be able to put his head down on this bed before he'd asked a few pertinent questions. He picked up Gerry's bottle from the bedside where he'd left it while wrestling with the mattress. Blazes! He still had to find somewhere to hide it, and he'd better do that before leaving.

  A possibility occurred to him. There was a valance along the curtain rail. It might just be roomy enough to take the bottle on its side, resting on the rail. It was. He drew the curtains back and forth a couple of times to make sure he wouldn't dislodge the bottle. Satisfied, he left it there and went out.

  At the same moment, Gerry emerged from the toilet at the far end of the corridor and started back to his room. He gave a sickly grin on seeing Murray and muttered a good night.

  "Gerry, just a moment," Murray said, striding toward him. "Mind if I check up on something?"

  "Uh -- sure. What?" Gerry blinked at him.

  "Let me look at your bed, will you? I want to see if mine is a special case, or whether all the beds have them."

  "Have what?" Bewildered, Gerry watched as Murray peeled back his bedding and revealed first the metal-thread embroidery on the mattress, then an identical hinged panel opening above an identical tape recorder. Perhaps slightly less of the tape had wound on to the take-up spool of this one.

  "Good grief," Gerry said blankly. "What's that for?"

  "I haven't got the slightest idea," Murray answered. "But I'd like to know, I must say."

  "I sup
pose you found yours while hiding my -- my stuff." Gerry gave a weak chuckle. "Well, that's one place I needn't bother to look, anyway."

  "That's right." Murray felt for the strong fine metal thread linking the mattress with the bed's base, which he had been careful not to snap. This time he traced it all the way to the corner of the tape recorder; it disappeared there down a tiny metal tube.

  "Do you imagine it's lullaby music for the people who used to come here when it was a country club?" Gerry ventured. "A pretty Sybaritic place, it must have been. I wouldn't put an idea like that past whoever designed it."

  "I thought of that myself," Murray nodded. "Trouble is, I can't see any sign of a speaker down here." He was peering into the cavity holding the tape recorder.

  "You'd expect the speaker to be on top of the mattress, not under it," Gerry suggested, poking with interest at the metal-thread embroidery.

  There was an exclamation from Murray. Gerry swung around. "What's wrong?" he demanded.

  "What did you do just then?" Murray countered. "Do it again, whatever it was."

  "I was only touching this embroidery here," Gerry said. He put out his hand again. "I was -- "

  "That's it," Murray cut in. "I see; you're pressing on part of the embroidered pattern. So there's a switch somewhere. Look, the tape's running."

  At the full reach of his arm, Gerry craned to see. Sure enough, the turrets were turning steadily.

  "Well, where's your music?" Murray asked.

  Gerry glanced at him and then back at the slowly unreeling tape. "It is odd, isn't it? Uh -- do you suppose the tape's been wiped by accident?"

  "It might have. Look, don't strain yourself! You can stop pressing on the mattress now." Murray dusted his hands together. "So we'll have to eliminate that possibility, too. Do you know which is Lester Harkham's room? I imagine he's the only person here who knows anything about electronics."

  "No. No, I don't know which is his room." Gerry licked his lips. "Murray, aren't you making rather a big thing out of this? Surely it doesn't make any difference one way or the other. Suppose you do find one which plays music -- so what? Why can't you go back and see if yours does, come to that?"

  "Because I broke the thread linking the mattress with the base." Murray looked thoughtfully at the embroidery on the mattress, then touched it. "Only takes quite a light contact to start the spools turning, you notice. It's probably meant to respond to the weight of your head on the pillow."

  There was a faint sound of footsteps from the corridor; a door opened and closed.

  "There's somebody now," Murray said. "Come on."

  A little puzzled, Gerry shrugged and complied.

  Out in the corridor, however, it proved impossible to tell which room the owner of the footsteps had entered. Murray sighed. He put his ear to number eleven, the one next to Gerry's, then to twelve, and after each shook his head.

  "There's nobody in thirteen," Gerry said with a forced chuckle. "I asked Valentine."

  "And fourteen's mine. Must be the other end, then. Let's try nine." Murray went back. Beyond the door of number nine he caught a faint sound of conversation and knocked.

  "Who is it?"

  Why it's Heather. How interesting. Murray laid a small bet with himself. Aloud, he said, "Murray here. Gerry Hoading's with me. Can we come in? It's rather important."

  A whispered exchange which Murray didn't follow; then he heard, "All right, come in. The door's open."

  He turned the handle. Heather was sitting up in bed, her face very pink and young without makeup, a satin bed jacket over her black nightgown. On a chair beside the bed was Ida, still in her rehearsal outfit; she had a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other -- a martini, by the look of it. Murray paid out on his bet.

  "Well!" Ida drawled as Murray shut the door after letting Gerry pass him. "To what do we owe this honor, friends?"

  "Heather, do something for me, will you?" Murray said. "Lean on your pillow -- hard -- and listen to it. Is there music coming from it when you do that?"

  "What on earth -- ?" Heather began. Then she gave a giggle and did as she was asked, with elaborate pantomime of putting her ear to the ground. Straightening again, she shook her head.

  "All right, what's the punch line?" Ida demanded.

  "None so far," Murray snapped. "But if you'll hop out of bed, Heather, I'll show you why I asked."

  Uncertainly, she looked from him to Ida and back again.

  "There's some kind of gadget hidden in the bases of these beds," Gerry said. "Murray's getting a thing about them, and he won't let anyone rest till he's solved his mystery."

  "What sort of gadget?" Heather said, bewildered. "Oh -- very well. Ida darling, give me my dressing gown, will you? Over the back of your chair."

  She got out from between the sheets with enough decorum to satisfy the Lord Chamberlain, and Murray proceeded to show what he was talking about -- the embroidery, the connecting metal thread, and the tape recorder hidden in the base.

  Even Ida was startled out of her cynical manner when she saw what was revealed. "I see what you mean about music coming from the pillow," she admitted. "But there's nothing happening at the moment, is there? The spools just go around when you lean on the mattress." She pressed the mattress herself to prove the point.

  It occurred to Murray that there was a time when a tape recorder never made a noise of its own -- when it was recording, not playing back. In this connection, the point seemed irrelevant. He had no idea why it should make his skin crawl for a moment.

  "Any idea where I can find Sam Blizzard?" he asked. "As Gerry said, I'm not likely to sleep until I've got to the bottom of this."

  Ida laughed. "You're a screwball, Murray. So long as the one in my bed is as quiet as this one I imagine I'll sleep fine!" She turned to stub her cigarette and emptied her glass with a quick gesture. "But if you really want to beard Sam in his den, then I think you'll find him and Delgado having a tęte-a-tęte in the room on the right of the dining room. They're using that as an office, sort of. They have the typewriter in there and the duplicator for scripts. Me, I'm going to call it a day. 'Night, Heather honey."

  She bestowed smiles all round and went out. After a pause, Gerry spread his hands and did the same.

  "Murray, I wish you hadn't told me about this thing in the bed," Heather said, staring down at the tape recorder. "It's absurd, but it makes me feel creepy -- it being there, and no obvious reason for it. Is there a reason?"

  "I don't know, darling," Murray said grimly. "But I'm going right to Sam to find out, and if I do I'll come back and let you know. Okay?"

  VIII

  Without knocking, Murray tried the handle of the door on the right of the dining room to which Ida had directed him. It was locked. Beyond, he could hear the purr of an electric typewriter and a mutter of voices, which stopped as the noise of the turning handle came to the speakers.

  "Just a moment," Blizzard said. Murray drew back from the door. There was a click and it was opened by Blizzard.

  "Oh, it's you, Murray. What do you want?"

  "Do I have to talk through the door, or can I come in?"

  Blizzard hesitated, then shrugged and drew back. Murray went past him. This room might have been the secretary's office in the country club. There was a big desk, a pair of matched file cabinets, an electric duplicator. At a table against the wall the girl Cherry Bell sat, her fingers flying over the keys of the typewriter. In an easy chair, Delgado was turning typed pages on his knee, marking his place with a finger. He looked up interestedly on Murray's entrance.

  "Well?" Blizzard pressed him. "Is it something important, Murray? It's getting very late, and we haven't finished working through today's material yet."

  "It's about the tape recorders hidden in our beds," Murray said. He spoke to Blizzard, but his eyes were on Delgado, and he was obscurely delighted to see an expression of dismay and even alarm fleet over that beautifully controlled visage.

  "What on earth are you talking about?
" Blizzard said. "Really, Murray! What kind of state are you in? If this is like the row you tried to kick up this morning, then I can see I'm going to lose patience with you pretty quickly."

  "Ask Delgado if it's nonsense," Murray said, still staring at the writer. "He knows what I mean. Don't you, Delgado?"

  "Yes. Yes, I know." Delgado shifted easily on his chair and put his pile of papers on the corner of Cherry's typing table. "It's part of my method of working, about which you've learned practically nothing. Those tape recorders have fitted in very conveniently."

  Murray had an indefinable feeling that Delgado was improvising his answer, but there was nothing to prove it.

  "Go on," Murray challenged harshly.

  "Do you understand the meaning of the word hypnopaedia?"