The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  They bumped ashore on the island and he crossed a rickety wharf directly into the first dining room. The boatman followed, to serve as his waiter.

  “Here, zor,” he suggested. “Here be a vine table vor ’ee.”

  “It is already occupied,” said John Stock. It wasn’t, but he knew somehow that it soon would be; and meanwhile the waiter made no protest.

  “Here be a good ’un, zor.”

  “It is in a draft.”

  “Here be a very good ’n, zor.”

  “Good for eating fish or crepes, possibly. Not for eating anything in Blue Gravy.”

  Instead of rising to the code name, the ferryman led him to a table one of whose four legs rested on nothing but air above a gaping hole in the floorboards. “Here be one us zaves vor special customers, zor.”

  Stock glanced into the hole and saw a giant roulette wheel going round and round, the teeth along its outer rim biting chunk after chunk out of the players, who seemed not to notice. Some of them had horizontal sections taken completely out of their bodies and heads, so that the rest of them moved suspended above and below cross-sections of emptiness. Stock shook his head. “What I should like is a table to myself on a small balcony overlooking the lake.”

  “Ah, iss! Iss, zor. Right this way, zor.” But the ferryman led him to the one empty chair at a table for eight round which a party of seven were already pouring their wine.

  Stock lifted the waiter by the collar and repeated his order in tones of polite steel. At length, after two or three more tries, the boatman found him a private table on a well-railed balcony, poured his wine, and put down in front of him a white plate in which lay a rat roasted in its own still-white fur.

  “What is this?” Stock inquired.

  “House specialty, zor. The Blue Gravy be inzide.”

  Stock lifted the rat with his fork. It had been eventrailed and hollowed out. Peering into the cavity of its ribcage, he saw that it was, true enough, filled with thin blue gravy. And at the same time he remembered what “Blue Gravy” meant in medical slang: the blood of a drowned corpse.

  At this memory, he saw the balcony split neatly off from the rest of the building. Knowing that to fall with it would be to be sucked under in its suction, he leaped free and struck the water some minutes sooner, plunging beneath the surface in a fine swan dive.

  Not even the most perfect competence can forestall every turn of the wheel. The balcony, in striking the water, spread out like a huge ice floe, nullifying his precaution in leaping wide of it. He swam deeper, kicking strongly to get out from under the obstruction, and found that all was well, after all. In the blue gravy of the water, he could breathe with complete comfort and only minimal dizziness. It was almost like flying. Almost like…floating…waking ...

  “No, by the Blue!” he muttered half aloud. “I will not wake yet.” Refusing to let his eyes open, he pushed himself deeper. The next inhalation seemed to thicken in his nostrils, and he thought he lost consciousness and began to drift.

  He returned to his senses in the unspeakable debunking area beneath the Pearl Pagoda. The ferryman-waiter was there, neither a waiter nor a ferryman, but a sinister doctor in white lab coat and spectacles the lenses of which appeared to be a pair of perfect glass spheres, bending over him. The telltale clue to the man’s triple identity was his teeth.

  “Where is it?” said Bond, who stood in the background, a dark shadow against the harsh lights.

  “I’ll ask you the same question, Bond,” said Stock.

  “You’ve failed anyway, Stock,” said Bond. “You’re having an adventure. But let me introduce you to my friend, Dr. Nyet. He delights in bondage.”

  Flexing for action, Stock found his muscles already bound—bicepses, brachioradiales, quadricepses, and gastrocnemii, all corded securely to the surface he lay on. He guessed that he was completely naked. “I expected as much from you,” he told Bond. “Having lost it, you’d go to any effort to cover your own bumbling. The crudest first.”

  “You won’t find mein Nein’s efforts crude,” said Bond.

  Eyes swimming behind his globular spectacles, the doctor held up a long rubber band. “Virst,” he remarked, “ve locate all ze moles und zpecklies.”

  Dangling the rubber band by one end, he began delicately grazing the other end over Stock’s bare skin, centimeter by centimeter. The sensation resembled the simultaneous touch of fire, ice, acid, and electricity, concentrated into a single tracing point. John Stock clenched his teeth and watched the smoke from Bond’s cigarette as it curled up around the backlight. Screaming would have been a waste of energy. Besides, it might have awakened him. Such exquisition as the present could be appreciated only in dreams, and even in them only rarely.

  He understood that Dr. Nyet was charting his body for moles, any one of which could have been—but, of course, was not—the camouflaged microdot. How the mad doctor was able to reach the bound man’s back with his rubber band was something of a puzzle, but that he managed it was indisputable by the feel. Curiosity, if nothing else, determined Stock to dream on and learn what Nyet-Nein would do next.

  After an interminable time, Nyet put down his rubber prod and picked up a long, thin pin, visible only by its glint. “I zink,” he said, “ve ztart virst wiz zis vun.”

  He made a stab. The pain Stock felt was generalized through the whole hollow of his left shoulder, but he could pinpoint which mole it was by the bright spot of blood that appeared on Dr. Nein’s white tunic. Someone screamed. With a dull oppression, Stock figured out that it was Bond.

  “Nein, nein,” said the doctor. “Zat vun is real mole.” He continued to jab, once, twice, and again, working his way unmethodically through every mole on John Stock’s body. Once or twice he brushed at the new spots of blood on his lab tunic as if they were flies. Bond screamed anew with each jab. Stock grew annoyed at his exhibitionism.

  At length Nyet said, “Vell, zo ve try dis vun,” and plunged his pin into the large mole between Stock’s fourth and fifth ribs.

  “The fool!” thought John Stock. “Anyone with any competence could see that that one is too large for a microdot.”

  But the pin sank down and down. By now Bond was on his knees, hunched over, writhing and hitting the floor with his fist.

  The point seemed to meet some obstruction. Nein grunted a little and pushed again. Watching the blood as it soaked the doctor’s jacket and started to drip, Stock thought, “It must be into the table by now. What is the fool trying to prove?”

  He, however, could bear the pain. Bond could not. Bond’s howls filled the air. “Be quiet,” Stock told him. “Are you trying to get at me through my eardrums?”

  Dr. Nyet leered and levered the pin. Stock’s body arched. Bond wailed, “Cigarette filter! In my cigarette filter! It’s in my cigarette filter!”

  With a shout, Stock made a snatch for it, sitting up. The shout became a tiny mewl, the lights disappeared, his clenched palm throbbed as though it had closed upon a burning cigarette, but he was sitting up in bed. With his sheets slightly tangled, but that happened every night.

  “No!” he whispered. “I have—had?—have it in my hand. I will complete this assignment!” Keeping his right hand fisted, he stretched his left beneath the pillow to make sure the Dreamstone was still in place, then lay down again without so much as attempting to straighten his sheets.

  How had he rid himself of his bonds, anyway? Ah…his sweat must have loosened them, stretched them, made them slippery, neither the mad doctor nor the pain-preoccupied Bond ever noticing. So…he had the microcube. He had left them both dead in the debriefing cell. He could have used the submachine gun beneath his right forefingernail, but he had always disdained such cheap gimickry, had complained when they implanted it. Therefore, the doctor died of a karate chop to the throat and Bond of a heart-stopping kick to the chest. Stock had shredded the cigarette filter to retrie
ve the microcube. He had taken a ship (knowing that all the airlines would be watched) to Mexico City, sharing Maggie Dance’s stateroom, champagne, and wide bed. The bed was shaped rather like a huge tulip blossom, concave beneath them and arching above. That ship ride was very good.

  Mexico City had its own Computer Cave, as extensive as Boulder’s, but less widely publicized. In fact, Mexico City’s was secret, belonging as it did to the intelligence network of the Free World. As M’s best double-oh agent, John Stock was in natural possession of the access code for passing through the upper levels, which formed a simple tourist trap of Paleolithic art, and being admitted to the truly important depths. The admittance point looked like a plain, old-fashioned tubular metal turnstyle, but Stock knew that it and what lay beyond were actually invisible as well as impassable to the innocent and uninitiated public.

  Down several more twisting ramps, and he was among the computers, huge floor-to-ceiling models blinking their silent galaxy of randomized display lights. Above him they towered on every side, giants the size of infinity, insignificantizing him as his own bulk might—almost—be said to dwarf each infinitely microscopic point of blinking light. Laboring between the unthinkably large and the unthinkably small, even John Stock, Secret Agent 009, felt a continuum of panic.

  But not for long. To stop functioning was incompetent. Wading through the murk to the tidy Apricot coded with his own 009, he sat and inserted the microdroplet.

  The numbers began to spin crazily, like those of a slot machine, tumbling from 009 to 221. The Apricot coughed out the slug.

  He tried again and again, tabbing keys, bending the microdisk into more aesthetic shapes, even slapping the machine. Two or three times it protested, whining words almost intelligible in a voice almost human. But it continued spitting out the chip.

  When, at last, after an infinity of tries, he finally coaxed it into accepting the frozen software, its screen gave him only garbage. Soups of alphabets and numerals, not even in straight lines, but splaying out like the rays of a kaleidoscopic image and then scattering into constellations. Orion, the Wain, the Sickle…and what had the Sickle been called before the S.S.S.R. officiously insisted on renaming it in the star charts of the world? He sensed that the asterism’s old name, if he could remember it, would give him the code he needed to get this program working correctly.

  “You’re wrong,” said a voice behind him. “Entirely wrong. The code is in my head. Nowhere else.”

  Stock swiveled in his chair. Behind him stood Bond, calmly lighting a cigarette.

  “Your first incompetence,” said Bond, “was killing me. Your second was failing to pick my brains.”

  With a kiyah from his power center, Stock leaped up aiming the heel of his hand at Bond’s chin.

  Bond dropped into a crouch and squeezed his cigarette straight up at Stock. It was a disguised minimissile launcher—the minimissile entered Stock at the groin, arched around in his body, and exited through the heart area. Meanwhile, he had fallen on Bond, pinning him to the floor with both knees. So that the minimissile, when it left his own body, entered Bond’s throat with the deadly accuracy of a guillotine.

  Knowing that he must work fast, Stock finished Bond’s decapitation by yanking his head all the way off. The neck skin parted like old, rotten cloth. Stock broke the cranium like an eggshell, smacking it once on the concrete floor. He snatched up the cigarette, which had a sharp point, and began picking Bond’s brains. They resembled tiny gears, springs, and metal cogwheels mixed loose into a blend of catsup and cottage cheese.

  To pick an agent’s brains was a much more competent method of getting information than torture, truth drugs, or bribery. If the harvester had patience and time. John Stock had patience. But not time. The minimissile had gored him completely. But for his own brains, competence, and assignment, he was entirely hollow inside. And hurting. Hurting hideously. The mad doctor’s ministrations had been nothing to it.

  Under such conditions, not even 009 could operate forever on competence alone. He found a cog that he thought was the code…he had just finally succeeded in fishing it up on the tip of his pick, when he felt himself pitching forward over the lip of the endless abyss.

  One second longer…just enough to reach up and leave the code on the table beside the screen-spluttering Apricot…and then he could no longer fight it. Headlong, he fell.

  And did not bother, this time, to keep himself from waking up. “So,” he cogitated, digesting the fact that he had awakened alive, “the thing must have counted it all as a single dream, after all. With two short intermissions.”

  Magadance had remarked, however, that the third dream was not always the one that killed. It might be the fourth or fifth. To be on the safe side, he removed the stone from beneath his pillow and tossed it across the semidark bedroom to land near the door in the carpeting’s deep pile.

  * * * *

  He retrieved it in the morning and returned it to M. Magadance at breakfast.

  “Well?” she wanted to know. “Did it work for you?”

  “Admirably.”

  Elsin Klipspringer and Dr. Macumber shared their table for this meal. M. Klipspringer asked, in her habitually softspoken way, “Will you tell us about it, M. Stock?”

  “I will enter my report in our common computer, for anyone to read or request a printout who will.” He would, of course, edit out many of the scenes involving Magadance, might well disguise her identity in whatever he allowed to remain for its bearing on the main plot. He might someday, depending on how matters developed, confide those scenes to her in private.

  “You can’t do it soon enough, boy!” Macumber chuckled. “The fresher the more valuable to future research, they always say.”

  “So they do.” He believed that he would document in full detail the role Macumber had undoubtedly played as Bond’s sidekick. “Meanwhile, Doctor, maybe you’d like to test it next. Assuming that your heart is up to the stimulation.”

  THE DREAMSTONE III: CURLING SNAKES

  “Up to the stimulation, whippersnapper? Of course this old ticker is up to the stimulation. You can take it from the doc.” Chuckling at young Johnny Stock, who only shrugged and poured more coffee, Doc Mac turned to young Tally Magadance and held his left hand out over the eggs and gravied pancakes for her Dreamstone.

  To Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber, they were all young, everybody on the short side of eighty. All fantasy perceivers, too, whatever age. For more than three decades now, he’d been just about the only reality perceiver in a social circle of fanciers. Nobody else except servants and suchlike to talk to about the way things really were.

  * * * *

  Back in his own suite at 14:30, he paused in the middle of semi-disrobing, sat down, and eyeballed the Dreamstone where he’d set it on his desk.

  Of course his old heart was up to the stimulation, for two reasons.

  One: because he took care of himself. (Hell, how much else was there for him to do?) As part of it, he prescribed himself plenty of rest, and that included a two-hour siesta every afternoon, 14:30 to 16:30. Couldn’t call it a nap exactly, seeing how he almost never slept. Didn’t even much want to sleep in the afternoon, anyway…made it that much harder, for him anyway, to sleep at night. Just a little lie-down between the exercises of digesting lunch and tackling tea, just two hours of lying back and keeping up with the world outside, fiddling around with the softglo screen unit he’d had put in above his pillow, browsing through whatever interesting new literature they let into the internal computer library.

  Two: because this Dreamstone thing wasn’t going to cause his old heart any stimulation anyway. He’d been a GP, for crissake. Had to know enough about everything to recognize what kind of specialists his patients might need, and “specialists” included shrinks and psychodocs, mental hygienists and herbalists and spiritual advisers—psychomysticalists, they were calling the lot of ’em nowadays.
Except the herbalists, that was. Anyway, all that had included a byte or two of dream theory and therapy.

  This knickknack of the new lady’s, now…this so-called Dreamstone ... pretty little wafer of polished agate, nice piece of “Mother Nature’s art,” as they used to call it ... supposed to bring you one helluva marvelous dream, vivid, exciting, pleasurable as you liked, jampackful of meaning, and a real memory-sticker to boot. Wowie, if you believed it.

  But the old family-clinic doc knew the score. These dream-incubating gimmicks, from Whozit’s live snakes on the bedroom floor to that Victorian lady novelist’s indigestible bedtime snacks to Jungson’s Dream Mandalas, any and all of ’em worked if you believed in ’em—and knowing that simple trick, that it was the user’s faith that did it, not the gimmick itself, automatically screwed it so that none of those little items would work for you yourself. A real catch-22 if there ever was one. That extract of Amanita macumbra he’d started trying out on little Sylvie Tomlinson—her Sergeantship Thursday’s sidekick—now that stuff would give you dreams whether or not you even knew you’d swallowed it. Tally Magadance’s Dreamstone wouldn’t. The difference between chemistry and faith.

  No skin off an old man’s nose, though. He’d keep the trinket a night or two, maybe make up a good, long dream yarn to wow the young’uns. He’d run into enough samples of other floaters’ dreams, he should be able to whip up a convincing one of his own. Freudian, Jungian, Campbellian, Farafieldian, LaBergian, Distorsian, old pun-ian, or maybe a grabmix, he had a passing acquaintance with most of the major modern theories. Then pass the stone on and let the young fanciers incubate their own thrills from it.

  Meanwhile, there was this other business, this new mushroom he’d found after lunch, out near the so-called wildgrove. Cap convex, viscid, and all over white warts; gills crowded, white, and free; stalk having a membranous veil, growing out of a bulb, and marked with a ring or two, maybe three: dam’ close match to both Amanita muscaria and Amanita pantherina, but instead of being yellowish, orange, red, or brick-brown, this one was purple as a Cortinarius violaceus. More likely a new mutant than a previously unrecorded species, but a gumdandy little find either way. Amanita cortinaria, he reckoned he’d name it.