The Productions of Time

by John Brunner

  There was a pause. Murray glanced at Blizzard and saw that the portly director was as much in the dark as he himself.

  Very illuminating, he thought sarcastically. Aloud, he said, "You mean this notion which keeps cropping up about getting a higher education painlessly in your sleep? I've heard of it. And I'm also aware that it doesn't work."

  "Have it your way." Delgado made a graceful gesture of dismissal with one hand. "For me, it works excellently. I always employ it. I am not satisfied with a cast which puts on a role for a few hours in the theater and for the remainder of the day reverts to totally different behavior. I require a depth of identification which not even the Method provides. Hypnopaedia offers a technique for achieving this. That's all."

  "Manuel, I'm not quite clear what you're talking about," Blizzard put in.

  "Aren't you?" Murray said. "Then listen. At the head of my bed, and Gerry Hoading's, and Heather's, there are hidden tape recorders. These are connected to some kind of switch in the mattress; when you lie down, the tape begins to run. Delgado is trying to say that these are for perfecting a role during sleep -- that you get your lines or something repeated and repeated to you. What lines are you thinking of giving to Gerry Hoading, Delgado? He's a designer, not an actor."

  Was that a trace of sweat shiny on the author's sallow forehead? Murray couldn't be sure.

  "Murray, you are making a great fuss, aren't you?" Delgado countered. "I didn't install these recorders specially, you know. They were intended to play soothing music if required by the users of the country club. They are in all the beds."

  "Really! There are two things wrong with this explanation. First, there's no sign of a speaker with any of them. And second, the tapes, which are still in place, are apparently blank."

  "Oh, dear ." Delgado made the trite phrase bear a weight of exaggerated patience. "Murray, these instruments have not been used for some time. I have had them reconnected so that it can be established whether they are all properly operating. You can't do this without putting a spool of tape on each of them -- which I have had done. Of course the tape is blank! As for the speakers which you didn't find -- they are inside the mattresses. Moreover, even when instruction tapes are used, you will not hear them consciously. The sound is at the very limit of audible perception. It is in fact subliminal. If it were louder it would risk disturbing the sleeper and ruining the value of the technique. Now I hope you're satisfied. And I also hope, Sam, that you will be able to persuade Murray not to fly off the handle at any other unusual aspects of my personal method of working."

  Blizzard took a cigar from the front pocket of his jacket and mechanically bit the end. He said, "Why didn't you mention this to me, Manuel? It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure I -- "

  "You will see its effectiveness soon enough, Sam," Delgado cut in. "The only reason I hadn't mentioned it was because the existence of tape recorders hidden in the beds meant I did not have to ask you for a special supply of recorders. If it weren't for that, you would have had to hire me a dozen of them, and I would have explained why. Is this really worth so much fuss?"

  "I guess not." Blizzard looked at his cigar as though wondering what it was doing in his hand. "But if you have any more surprises like this to spring on the cast, Manuel, it might be better to warn them in advance."

  "No. Positively not." Delgado gave an emphatic shake of his head. "As it is, I am a little annoyed that Murray has stumbled on this. There may be a tendency to resist subconsciously the educational effect of the tape. However, we shall see. Perhaps when you have some experience of the value of hypnopaedia, Murray, you will accept it more readily."

  A few moments earlier, Cherry had removed the last sheets of paper from her typewriter. Now she switched it off, and the room was suddenly very quiet.

  "Finished, Mr. Blizzard," she said into the pause following Delgado's remark.

  "Oh, good girl." Blizzard seemed to pull himself together. "Okay, give the last page to Mr. Delgado, and you can turn in. Was that all you wanted, Murray?"

  "No. Not by a long chalk. But I guess it'll have to do for now."

  In accordance with his promise, he knocked on Heather's door to tell her what Delgado had said, but got no answer; she must have dropped off to sleep. He went to his own room with his face set in such a frown he felt it threatened to become a fixture, and before putting the bed back together he traced the broken thread of metal linking the tape recorder to the mattress, wrapped it around his fingers with a handkerchief to protect his skin and pulled it free. When he was done, he had unraveled a good twenty yards of very fine wire from the embroidered area on the mattress.

  Which left nothing. There was no point of attachment. There was no speaker inside the mattress. Delgado was lying.

  What the devil could be the purpose of a tape recorder with no speaker? What could it be recording, since, obviously, it couldn't be playing anything back? And how? There was no microphone either. Just the wire.

  Could the wire form a sort of mike, or speaker, by itself? This was the only possibility that occurred to him. He had vague impressions of new advances in printed circuitry at the back of his memory, but he had no way of telling whether a simple wire could generate or receive sound. . . .

  The hell with it. He turned the mattress end over end as a kind of defiance, put the bed roughly back together, and climbed in. He lay for a long time in darkness, wondering what he had let himself in for. Eventually sleep came, like a switch being turned.

  Next day, he had no immediate chance to carry out his half-formed intention of questioning Lester Harkham about these tape recorders, for none of the other three who knew of them was particularly concerned, and they were as eager as the rest to get back to work. Heather did ask him what he had learned, but seemed barely interested; it was enough that Delgado had given some kind of explanation, and the point -- immensely significant to Murray -- that it could not have been the whole truth she dismissed with a shrug.

  By the evening, Murray was coming around to the same view. Under Delgado's skillful and precise guidance, some form was already emerging from the half-baked chaos of rival ideas which had been thrown up. No doubt about it. This man was good .

  It was so long since Murray had been caught up in the fever of a production which, from the start, everyone knew was going to be brilliant, that he had almost forgotten the sensation. Late in the afternoon he realized what was happening to him, and the shock was so great he felt weakened by it. Who the hell cared how Delgado chose to get his results? Let him use black magic if he wanted to; let him tell all the lies and half-truths he wished. You couldn't set a price on a gift such as his. It was fairly clear that no one liked him, but it was certain that he was generating immense respect.

  And yet . . .

  As he had done yesterday, Delgado stopped everything with a curt word at five o'clock and went backstage with Blizzard, and there was the same sudden drop in the level of tension. The group looked around as if startled to discover themselves back in the little theater instead of in their artificial world; then the cast began to disperse, on the grounds of extreme exhaustion and the desperate need of a drink.

  However, Jess Aumen stayed at his piano, experimenting with a curious harmonic progression which he could not quite get right; Gerry jumped up on the stage and walked around speculatively, A pad of paper in one hand and a steel tape in the other, making notes for his proposed set, and Lester Harkham -- who had been working with the compact, but remarkably extensive lighting system -- remained for a few moments in the aisle at the side of the little auditorium, his expression thoughtful.

  Murray made up his mind and went over.

  "Lester, can you spare me a few minutes?"

  "Hm?" Lester seemed to come back from a great distance. "Oh, surely, Murray. What is it?"

  "Well . . ." Now it had come to the point, it did feel absurd to make such a fuss about Delgado and his tape recorders. Murray changed his line of attack smoothly. "Look, Lester, keep this to
yourself, will you? Gerry has asked me to look after a jar of horse for him, because he's afraid if he gets depressed he may overdose himself. The best place I've ever found to hide something like that is inside a TV set -- he'll never think of looking there. But I can't get the back off the one in my room, and I don't want to foul up the machinery. Do you think you could give me a hand?"

  For a moment Lester looked blank. "That's about the oddest request I've ever had!" he exclaimed.

  "I'm not surprised," Murray agreed. "I wouldn't ask you, but you're the only person here who knows anything about electronics as far as I know."

  "Well, I can find my way around a TV set okay. Sure, I'll be with you in a moment. Just let me have a word with Gerry."

  "For Christ's sake keep this to yourself, Lester! He made me promise not to -- "

  "All right, all right! I'm not so big a fool. Hang on. Hey, Gerry! Word with you!" Lester strode toward the stage.

  So far, so good, Murray reflected. Now he could bring up the matter of the tape recorders casually. And he was looking forward with some eagerness to hearing what Lester's reaction might be to hypnopaedia and the rest of Delgado's spiel.

  IX

  "Oh yes. Got those fancy don't-do-it-yourself fastenings on the back, I see." Lester bent to inspect the TV set, fishing in his hip pocket. He found what he was after -- a multi- purpose electrician's screwdriver -- and set to work. "What do you make of this affair so far, Murray? Bit of a phenomenon, our friend Delgado, isn't he?"

  "I can't deny that I'm impressed," Murray admitted, sitting on the edge of the bed to watch. "Though there's a lot more I want to know about him."

  "Don't we all! Chiefly where the hell has he been hiding himself?" Lester twisted the first of the fastenings loose and attacked the next one. "You know, when Sam Blizzard first put the plan up to me, I told him he was off his nut. Whoever heard of sinking this kind of money into this indefinite a project? He'll have spent a good five thousand just on trimmings before we leave. But now I'm beginning to think he wasn't so stupid. Take me, for instance. Normally I'd just be sitting in the back row chewing my nails. As it is, I can go up to the lighting booth and start thinking, even though there's not much more than half a scene worked out. I mean, I know what I'm doing is going to be definitive, apart from changes which Gerry may want for -- Jesus God!"

  He snatched his hand away from the TV set and let his screwdriver fall on the table. Murray jumped to his feet.

  "What the devil happened?"

  "This damned thing's live. I got the healthiest shock I've had in years." Breathing hard and shaking his hand up and down, Lester bent to inspect the on-off knob. "It says off , all right," he muttered. "Bloody thing must be faulty. But I don't see how . . ."

  He went off into a string of technicalities about live chassis and condensers not discharging properly, which Murray didn't attempt to follow.

  "Want me to unplug it?" he demanded.

  "Yes, for heaven's sake! I ought to have done it myself." Lester put his hand on the top of the set, then sniffed at the ventilation slots behind. "Funny. It's stone cold, and if there were current passing you'd expect it to smell warm, at least."

  Murray examined the thick rubber-cased cable leading from the set to the floor. It vanished at the edge of the fitted carpet; he dropped on one knee and turned the carpet back.

  "Curiouser and curiouser," he murmured. "Lester, this flex doesn't plug into a socket. It just goes under the skirting board. Look here."

  "Huh?" Lester came over and leaned a hand on his shoulder. "Why, how extraordinary."

  The thick black cable ran straight along the floor. Close to the wall, a piece of one of the floorboards had been cut away, and the cable led down through the slot so created.

  "That's new," Murray said. "Isn't it? Look, the edge of the wood is clean and white." He moved the cable so Lester could see.

  "It must be a rediffusion system," Lester said with half-hearted optimism. "But you usually have an external selector with rediffusion, and sound as well as the TV channels. Let me take another look at the set, if I can manage it without getting shocked again."

  Murray turned around and sat on the floor with his back to the wall. He only had to wait a short while before Lester removed the rear panel of the set, carefully placed it on the floor, and peered inside. He gave a whistle.

  "Something else funny?" Murray suggested, in a tone that implied he was altogether unsurprised.

  "Very funny indeed," Lester confirmed. "I've never seen a clutter of circuits like this in a TV set before. The basic circuitry's in here -- I think -- but there's a gang of other stuff been added. Murray, you didn't know about this, did you?" he interrupted himself. "Was that story about trying to hide Gerry's horse just an excuse to have me investigate?"

  "Now why should you think that?" Murray countered, genuinely startled.

  "Something Ida was saying over lunch. Something about you finding weird electronic circuits in your bed."

  "Oh, I see." Murray didn't try to hide his relief. "I'm glad you've heard about that from someone else already."

  He ran quickly over the events of last night. While listening, Lester continued to peer around the interior of the TV set, not touching anything except a wire, which he occasionally pushed aside with the end of his screwdriver.

  "And he said it was all for sleep learning, did he?" he commented when Murray had finished. "Well, that's a lot of garbage for a start. This sleep-learning notion keeps turning up -- Huxley had it in Brave New World , remember? But as far as I know it's never amounted to anything. Still, I suppose if Delgado likes to kid himself that it's useful, it won't do any harm."

  "Without a speaker for the sound? I told you -- I pulled all the wire off my mattress, and it came loose. There was nowhere it could have been connected to a speaker or a mike."

  "Well, there are some experimental installations -- " Lester checked himself. "No, it's ridiculous. They cost about five hundred apiece, and you wouldn't find them lying around in the bedrooms here. Can I have a look at this gadget?"

  "What's left of it," Murray said, rising. "If Delgado was telling the truth when he said they're in all the rooms, you can see this wire embroidery on your own mattress, I imagine. But the rest of it -- "

  He broke off. He had turned down the bedding to reveal the mattress, and the embroidery was back.

  "Delgado must take this pretty seriously," he said. "He's had a replacement supplied for me." He kept his tone light, but he was taut with unaccountable alarm. "Okay, what do you make of it?"

  Lester said nothing for some moments. Then he heaved up the mattress, tracing the gossamer-fine wire to the hinged panel, and satisfied himself about the operation of the tape recorder. At length he let the mattress drop into place again.

  "Tell you one thing," he said harshly. "This stuff on the mattress -- it couldn't possibly act as either a speaker or a mike."

  "Then what's it for?"

  "I don't know." Lester bit his lip. "This isn't my speciality, you realize. I've just had a bit of knowledge rub off on me. If I had to make a guess . . ."

  "Yes?" Murray prompted.

  "I'd say it might be some kind of field-sensitive antenna. See here." Lester made compasses of his thumb and forefinger and measured off sections of the embroidery. "There's definitely a harmonic ratio involved in the design, isn't there? The longest straight runs might be a dipole -- like a TV aerial." He shook his head. "Which doesn't explain why it's here ."

  "Like a TV -- Lester, is there any connection?" Murray pointed at the open back of the television.

  "No idea. The tangle inside that set would take me hours to work out. And frankly, with the HT-load it's carrying, I don't fancy poking about in there."

  "Have you no idea what's been added?"

  "None at all. I said so." Lester wiped his forehead. "Tell you one more thing, though -- there isn't room for Gerry's stuff. I'd better just put the back panel on again and leave it."

  "Are you going to
ask Delgado about it?"

  "Well, I'll certainly ask him about this hypnopaedia jazz. You want my honest opinion, though?"

  "I want anything I can get. This thing worries me."

  "All right." Lester stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket. "I think it'll turn out that Delgado has a streak of cockeyed mysticism, which he's a bit ashamed of. Nowadays, a lot of gullible people who don't know a diode from a horse's ear fall for slick operators who claim revolutionary breakthroughs in -- ah, what's the word? -- bio-electronics, that's it. A few high-sounding phrases about tuning in on the cosmic wavelengths, and they hang their tongues out and buy a little black box for a hundred pounds and the slick operator bows out, chuckling. My guess is that you're right, and Delgado only uses his halfway convincing excuse about sleep learning to cover for a bit of pure nonsense. Like Marie Stopes insisting on turning her bed to magnetic north, you know?"