“So?” said Helga. “What did you want to say?”
He looked around at her. She studied him with the same hostile bearing, her arms folded in front of her short, square torso. “Actually,” said Ralph, “I really wanted to ask you some things—”
“Like what?” she snapped.
“Well, about what you and Stimmitz saw when you sneaked into the Thronsen Home, and—”
“You didn’t make that part of your deal, then. Too bad.”
“Huh?” Ralph looked at her in puzzlement. “Deal?”
Her expression didn’t change. “If you’re so curious about what’s going on over there you should have asked for some information along with whatever they did pay you.”
“Pay me? What are you talking about?”
One corner of her mouth curled in disgust. “Come on. I told Stimmitz I didn’t think he should tell you anything. That you couldn’t be trusted. But he went ahead. His last mistake.”
“What?” Ralph spun around and faced her. “You think I finked on Stimmitz or something?”
“You were the only one he told about going into Thronsen. You were the only one who knew.”
“Hey, that doesn’t mean I said anything to anybody about it. Why would I want to get him in trouble?”
She said nothing, only continued her hard, level gaze at him.
Ralph felt a surge of anger, like a heat in his chest. “How much do you think they paid me?” he said bitterly.
“You’re so stupid you probably did it for nothing.”
“Forget it.” He walked to the door and put his hand on the knob. “I didn’t set Stimmitz up and nobody’s letting me in on anything.”
“Get out,” said Helga flatly.
He opened the door and stepped into the hallway. He turned to say something more but the door closed in his face. From inside he could hear the small metal noises of the lock clicking into place.
* * *
Ralph cradled the back of his head in his hands and gazed up at the featureless white ceiling over his bed.
I don’t know what’s going on around here.
Stimmitz was gone, of that much he was sure. There had been no blood on the jumpsuit, but that didn’t prove anything, one way or the other. So what else is there? he thought, staring at the ceiling. Helga was acting crazy—but then he had always felt she was kind of strange. Perhaps her own universe had finally snapped shut around her like a trap.
Give up, Ralph told himself disgustedly. Accept what Stiles told you. Go drink a beer with the others. He took his hands from behind his head and saw that they had clenched into fists, the nails digging into the flesh of his palms. Convulsively, he got up from the bed and stalked into the living room.
The morning sun came through the window in a shaft, bleaching out the color of everything in the apartment. Ralph looked from the couch to the walls, as though some message could have been written there, then across the door and back to the couch. Stupid-looking couch, he thought, feeling something going sour in his stomach as he turned and gazed out the window.
If only there was something solid, he thought, that I had brought back with me from the dreamfield. So that I’d know for sure. Something like—shoes! He swivelled around toward his bedroom door. The shoes he had been wearing that shift were under his bed—he hadn’t left them in the locker room with his jumpsuit.
Crouching on his knees beside the bed, he pulled out the shoes. He hurriedly examined them, turning each one around and studying it from all sides. After a couple of minutes he sat down heavily on the bed. Still nowhere, he thought. There had been no spots of blood anywhere on the shoes. His disappointment had a sense of finality.
Come on, he thought. Why can’t you accept it? Nothing happened. Stimmitz is probably in L.A., looking in the want ads for another job. He tilted one of the shoes and poured a small hill of sand into his palm. For several seconds he stared at the tiny bit of desert before the realization hit him.
That’s impossible, he thought. The base is all paved or landscaped. There’s no sand between here and the line shack. There’s no way I could have gotten any in my shoes—but it’s here somehow.
He reached for the other shoe and tilted it over his palm. There was even more sand in that one, making a gritty fistful in all. Carefully, he stood up and carried it into the other room.
Standing at the window, he looked from the sand to the desert beyond the base and back again. I don’t get it, he thought, baffled. The sand was something tangible, disturbing in its inexplicable way, but the connection between it and everything else that disturbed him seemed tenuous.
Maybe it’s a sign. He studied the multi-faceted grains. Go to the source, or something like that. He went over by the couch and tore a sheet of newspaper free from the stack beside it. In the center of the paper he placed the sand and then folded it into a makeshift envelope. While stuffing it in his back pocket, he headed for the door. Then again, he thought, it might be just sand.
When he reached the top of one of the low hills surrounding the base, Ralph turned and looked back at it, shading his eyes from the sun with his hand. From where he was, standing between two large clumps of the desert’s dry, prickly brush, he could see all of the base’s buildings, the paths linking them, and the fence circling the space.
Turning ninety degrees, his feet crunching against the hill’s pebbles and sand, he could see part of the high security fence that surrounded the Thronsen Home. The complex itself was out of sight beyond the chain-link mesh, which was topped with barbed wire and laced with cables for the electronic alarm devices. Somewhere inside there were the kids whose nightly dreams had been merged and formed into the field. If, thought Ralph, that’s really what’s in there. He headed down the side of the hill away from the base.
A flat gully, deep enough to be still shaded from the sun, lay at the foot of the hill. Ralph looked in either direction along its path, then started walking toward the east. He wondered if he would recognize what he was looking for when he came across it. From atop a small rock, a dust-colored lizard squirted its tongue at him, then vanished.
This is ridiculous, thought Ralph after walking for a few minutes along the gully. There’s nothing out here but dirt and rocks and— He froze.
From somewhere in the desert’s total silence he had heard a tiny, metallic click. After a few seconds of intent listening, he heard it again. The noise, so slight it would have been undetectable anywhere else but in a desert, came from somewhere above the gully.
As carefully and silently as he could, he mounted the gully’s sloping wall. Lying flat among the stones near the top, he peeked over the edge.
Several meters away a woman appeared to be photographing something on the ground in front of her. Though her back was turned to him, Ralph knew that he had never seen her before. She was dressed in jeans and a faded blue shirt, with her hair pulled back into a golden curve along her neck. The camera she held in her hands was some battered but functional-looking antique, the size of a small ham—it was no wonder that the ancient mechanism of its shutter made so much noise.
Her body blocked the view of whatever she was photographing. She moved a few steps and clicked off another shot from a different angle.
Ralph pushed himself a little higher above the gully’s edge, trying to see what was on the ground before her. His foot brushed a few small rocks and sent them clattering down the slope.
The woman quickly lowered the camera from her eye and half-turned her head at the noise. Ralph caught a glimpse of her precise-featured profile against the sky before he had slipped out of sight below the rim of the gully.
He waited several seconds, then cautiously raised his head. The girl with the camera was gone. He scrambled up and went to where she had been standing. A quick glance over the barren spot of desert showed nothing but rocks, scruffy brown brush and sand.
What was she taking pictures of? he wondered. Maybe I should have just gone up and asked her. That was the trouble with
paranoia—complications multiplied until their source became perfectly insulated from the world. But then, he thought, she did take off when she heard me. How come?
The sun was now almost directly overhead. Ralph, a little dazed with heat, wiped the sweat from his neck and walked away from the spot.
Whatever he was looking for didn’t seem to be here. He wondered if he would ever see the girl again.
Several minutes later he came to the Thronsen Home security fence.
Well over ten feet tall, its intertwined wire diamonds shone in the sunlight like a radiant net stretching across the desert. The black cables of the alarm system snaked their way through the mesh.
Ralph walked slowly along the fence, until he could at last see a corner of one of the Thronsen Home buildings. Avoiding the thin, black cables, he stopped and examined the fence. The rigid metal wire was nearly as thick in diameter as his thumb. It would have taken some doing to have cut through very many of the links, in addition to not setting off the alarms.
So how did Stimmitz and Helga do it? thought Ralph.
As he puzzled over the newest additions to the questions circling in his head, he continued walking beside the fence. A few meters farther on the questions grew even more numerous.
A small, neat square was missing from near the bottom of the fence.
The hole was just large enough for a person to crawl through. When Ralph bent down to examine it, he saw that the ends of the severed links were smooth, as though they had been melted through by some kind of torch.
Attached to each segment of the alarm cables were small alligator clips with wires leading to a small metal box lying on the ground—a bypass device, he assumed.
He stood up and backed a few steps away from the fence. The whole set-up was more sophisticated than he could have anticipated. Maybe, he thought, there was more to Stimmitz, than he let on.
Nervously, he glanced around the area. No one was visible on either side of the fence. The coast is clear, he found himself thinking. He stepped up to the fence and touched the cut wires. As he hesitated, his eyes scanned the distant Thronsen House complex.
If he sneaked in, found nothing sinister, didn’t get caught-—then he’d be able to forget all this stuff and go back to his old life, for what it was worth. If he got caught, then he’d be canned. But that was preferable to straddling the two universes until he split up the middle.
Yeah, he told himself, but what if there is something going on in there and I do get caught? Then whatever happened to Stimmitz will happen to me, too. And it won’t be just getting fired, either. He shook his head, dislodging a few lines of sweat down into his collar, and started to turn away from the fence.
But what if I don’t find out what they’re doing in there? And it’s something— dangerous? The thought halted him for a few seconds. Then he went back to the fence and knelt down in front of the hole. I don’t see what good this is going to do anyway, he thought grudgingly as he crawled through.
Once on the other side, he crouched and ran, veering from one clump of dry brush to another. He suddenly felt ridiculous, as though he were fumbling through an antique grade B combat picture. If only Blenek could see me now.
He covered the last few meters to the nearest building in a burst of speed. Panting, he pressed his back to the gray concrete wall and listened.
He hadn’t seen or heard anyone yet. Cautiously, he sidled along the wall.
He came to the corner of the building, hesitated, then peeked around. A metal door was propped open with a folding chair. A large electric fan had been placed in the opening and was whirring softly to itself.
In a few more seconds he was alongside the open doorway. He peered into the dark interior, then stepped around the electric fan and inside the building.
The air smelled of ozone, just as the line shack did back at the base. To one side of the door was an unoccupied desk. Its lamp cast a small circle of light on the floor of the dark, cavernous space.
Ralph froze—he had heard someone breathing. The sound changed into a gurgling snore, and he relaxed. As silently as possible, he crossed over to the desk and looked around it. On the other side a man was sleeping on a low cot, his head resting on his arm. The same laxness in security from the unmended hole in the fence showed here as well. Maybe, thought Ralph, some of them weren’t really expecting anyone ever to try to get in here.
It must have been Stimmitz’s bad luck to have been seen by someone.
Still cautious, Ralph walked farther into the building. As the ozone smell grew stronger, a luminous blue rectangle seemed to be floating in the distance in front of him: a small window set into a door. He looked through the glass and noted a corridor lined with banks and panels of electronic equipment, illuminated by fluorescent lights overhead.
The door yielded to his touch and he stepped into a long corridor, lined with equipment panels. There was the same manufacturer’s insignia—PKD Laboratories—as on the electronics boards in the base’s line shack, but this assemblage was much bigger. The corridor went on for some distance, the banks of equipment towering over Ralph’s head as he walked past them.
Another door opened into a dark L-shaped passageway. He stepped into it, then heard footsteps approaching from the other direction.
Pressing himself into the corner of the L, he saw the corridor’s other door open, momentarily framing a man carrying a clipboard. In the darkness of the passageway the man didn’t see Ralph, but let the door close behind him and walked past, leaving by the other door. Ralph let out his breath.
The passageway’s other door opened onto a much larger space. A few rows of dim fluorescent lights dangling on cables from the ceiling produced a semi-twilight in the space. Ralph sensed that he was alone here, too, until he heard the sound.
Breathing. Slow, shallow breathing. A muffled sighing, like wind in the distance.
He looked around the space, his vision growing sharper in the dim light. The breathing came from all sides, from some kind of open bins that were stacked in tiers against the walls. He walked over to the nearest group and looked inside a bin that came as high as his chest.
It held a sleeping teenage boy. A plastic tube had been inserted through the boy’s nose and taped to his face. Another piece of surgical tape ran across his forehead with a series of numbers scrawled in black ink. At other points on the boy’s body different tubes and wires were attached.
One black cable ran into a metal plate that seemed to be sutured to the side of his head.
The boy didn’t awaken as Ralph looked at him. The breathing was so slow and shallow as to barely raise the boy’s bare chest.
Ralph backed away, the skin on his shoulders and neck stiffening. There was a bin below the one in which he had looked, and two above. His eyes circled the room, counting the tiers. It came to an even hundred bins, each with its tube and cables running in and fastened onto its occupant. A hundred children suspended in something deeper than sleep, suspended above death by the plastic tubes that nourished them.
He felt something sink and go cold within him. So this is what Stimmitz found, he thought. There’s something wrong, they lied to us, they’re doing something here—
He clenched his fists to keep his hands from trembling. Get out, he told himself, I’ve got to get out of here. They’ll kill me if they find out I’ve seen this.
Fear cramped inside him as he spun around, looking for the door. He spotted it at last and headed for it. His breath swelled in his constricted throat when he pushed the door open and saw another dimly lit space, outlined by the same tiers with tubes and wires dipping into the bins.
For a dismaying span of seconds it seemed as if he were caught in a line of mirror images, like the dream field’s repeating sections of a small town.
But here it would be an infinity of dark rooms, stale air thickening with the slow breathing of the sleeping children . . .
Convulsively, Ralph spun away from the door. He saw now that he had lost his beari
ngs in the dim light—the door by which he had come in was on the other side of the room. He hurriedly crossed the space towards the door and collided with a large object set in the middle of the floor.
It was a metal filing cabinet. Gasping to catch his breath, Ralph pushed himself away from its side. The top drawer rattled out as he took his hand away. What he could see of the cabinet’s contents produced a chill of recognition.
The stiff manila folders filling the drawer were delinquent children’s personal histories. He had seen hundreds of them when he had been working at the Juvenile Hall to the south of L.A. The folders were soiled and battered-looking from too many hands, thick with each child’s accumulated court papers, therapist and probation officer comments, booking slips, and other records—troubled lives compressed into dry ink and paper.
The personal history folders travelled with each child to every institution to which he was sent. Now the folders were here, stored close to the unconscious youths. On impulse, Ralph pulled out two of the folders from the drawer and stuck them under his arm. He crossed to the right door and hurried out of the room’s semi-darkness.
The man who had passed him in the passageway was nowhere to be seen, and the one on the cot behind the desk was still asleep as Ralph cautiously went by him. In a few seconds he was out of the building, around the corner and running with the two folders clamped to his chest towards the nearest clump of brush in the open desert.
Sliding the folders ahead of him on the sand, Ralph crawled through the opening in the fence. He stood up on the other side and brushed the grit from his pants. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the edge of one of the Thronsen Home buildings wavering in the noon heat, the unsuspected pools of darkness inside them hidden from sight again. He picked up the folders from the ground and headed back to the base.
When he came to the spot above the gully where the woman with the camera had been, he halted. The light had changed its angle and now he could see distinctly what she had been photographing. As if something had been butchered on the spot and the earth had soaked up the blood, the ground itself was discolored with an irregular, reddish-brown stain.
The Dreamfields Page 4
