2
I rose slowly. The muscles of arms and legs and shoulders felt stiff
and sore, as if they had actually been tested and strained in the
ordeal of which I had dreamt. I glanced at the luminous clock face
built into the wall just to the left of the bedroom telescreen. It was
after three in the morning.
The floor of the trailer creaked gently as I plodded barefoot into
the tiny kitchenette. The creak always gave me the impression that
the trailer was moving, like a ship that groans protestingly even as
it rides with no apparent sway on smooth waters. I pressed the coffee
button and then, because I was too tired to move into the living area
when I would only have to come back in a minute, I stood beside the
sink, staring at the glowing red button as if hypnotized by it. I
couldn't shake off the depression brought by the recurrence of the
dream.
The red button blinked off, a green one flared, and a coffee cup
dropped into the slot beneath the spout from which coffee poured in a
hot black stream. I added a sugar pill and carried the cup into the
living room.
This was a small room about seven feet wide and ten feet long. All of
the furniture was built in--a sofa across the narrow wall under the
picture window, two flanking plastic chairs on pedestal bases, a coffee
table and a desk with its contour pedestal stool. Cramped quarters, but
they were comfortable enough for one. The kitchenette in the center of
the trailer had a small dining area. Beyond it were the bath, utility
closets, and the small bedroom. I had never completely got over my luck
in finding a place so close to the university.
Particularly one with a view.
I pressed the wall button and the draperies parted slowly and silently
across the picture window to frame a panoramic view of the west basin
of the San Fernando Valley. It was a clear moonlit night. The trailer
community I lived in was on a knoll above Mulholland Drive near the
crest of the Santa Monica mountains. Behind me, at the southern foot of
the hills, were the massive buildings of the University of California
at Los Angeles. My trailer faced northwest. In the distance I could see
the glow which was always visible over the spaceport of the Western
Space Command, though I could not now make out the bullet-shaped noses
of the shuttle rockets pointing skyward, dominant landmarks which could
easily be seen in the daytime projecting above an intervening ridge of
hills at the far western end of the valley. The ever-present glow came
from the atomic reactor factory where the power plants were produced
for the interplanetary space ships. These days the bullet-nosed rockets
were thundering skyward daily, carrying parts to the space station
where the interplanetary ships were being assembled.
Thinking of the coming moment less than a month away when man would
be leaving on his second flight to Mars, I felt some of my depression
lifting. The good hot coffee had quieted the quivering muscles in my
stomach. I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
At last I permitted my mind to return to the dream. It was the third
time I had experienced it, the same dream in every detail, with its
latent death wish, its peculiar delusion of extraordinary mental
powers, its mysterious unknown enemy, its strange water fear. The
terrifying reality of the dream, coupled with the unshakable conviction
that it was in some way a portent, only partly explained why it left me
so shaken.
For the dream was not the only symptom I had had. There were also
the voices--and the clear sense of someone plotting against me.
Sometimes the voices were extraordinarily vivid, whispering in my ear
with as much clarity as if I were wearing earphones and tuning in a
broadcast. I would stand at the window overlooking the valley, or even
in my cubicle of an office at the university, and I would hear the
meaningless fragments of thought--phrases, words and half-words jumping
into my mind with an eerie suddenness, bringing the peculiar sensation
that the thoughts in my own mind were being formed by someone else. For
over a year I had heard the elusive voices, but it was only recently
that I had begun to entertain the delusion that they were plotting
against me.
"Someone is listening."
That startling declaration had chilled my mind a little over a month
ago. There had been an immediate impression of total silence, of
waiting in a mental vacuum, and I had found myself holding my breath,
my mind blank in readiness. But there had been nothing else--only the
waiting silence.
In the weeks that followed, the references to the listener--to me, I
was sure--had been numerous. And I had sensed a deep animosity toward
me in the voices that spoke to me unknowingly. They were trying to
locate me. Who they were, I had no idea. But they were hunting me
coldly and methodically.
In the dream they caught me.
Psychology was not my field. I taught English literature at the
university and I was more familiar with Dostoyevsky's probing of the
human mind than Jung's or Freud's. But after I started hearing the
voices, I did some intensive reading on abnormal psychology. I even
quizzed friends in the psychology department, being careful not to
discuss my symptoms with them openly.
The research had been frightening. I had found nothing in the
literature of psychology that exactly duplicated my symptoms--but I
learned that minds, like fingerprints, always had their individual
twists. And there were many parallels to my particular pattern, cases
of multiple personality in which one identity had spoken to the other
as a clear voice in the mind--and had even tried to "murder" his
fellow. The conflict of personalities often expressed itself in dreams
in which the unconscious mind cleverly dramatized the conflict in
bizarre terms. The fact that the enemy on the beach was unrecognizable
was even a typical factor.
I knew that I should have treatment while there was still time--before
I did something dangerous. It was not beyond the area of possibility
that I would try to kill myself as the dream suggested. And yet--
I believed in the voices. Reason said they could not exist. Logic
argued that they were products of my own ailing mind. But my belief in
them was a barrier that prevented me from seeking treatment at once. I
kept searching for explanations of the voices. I kept thinking of them
as completely foreign to me. I built up a flimsy case for the actual
existence of beings who were telepathic, who communicated by direct
thought transference. They were engaged in some melodramatic plot.
Against whom? Me, of course. But only because I was a menace. I was
able to hear them. I was a threat to some kind of monstrous plot that
was far bigger than me, far more important than my life.
I found it easier to demolish these theories than to construct them;
nevertheless I clung to them with a desperate hope. For either there
were real voices, there were real enemies, or I was insane.
These brooding reflections were interrupted by a splash of light that
fell across the narrow strip of lawn outside my trailer. I crossed
quickly to the side window and peered through the vertical plastic
blinds. When I saw the source of the light I relaxed, smiling faintly.
For a moment I continued to stare at the curtained bedroom window of
the adjoining trailer. This time I could see nothing clearly, only a
blurred shadow of movement. It was enough to recreate a vivid picture.
A moment later, light glowed at the front of the trailer, but again the
blinds cut me off from my neighbor.
With a slight feeling of embarrassment I turned away, remembering the
guilt I had felt a few nights before when my new neighbor had forgotten
to draw her bedroom curtains closed. There is something especially
stimulating in seeing a beautiful woman when she isn't aware of being
observed. And in this case nothing had prepared me for the golden grace
of the girl's figure.
She had moved into the adjoining trailer only two weeks before. Trailer
life is of necessity fairly intimate and I had met her briefly a number
of times. She was not the kind of girl you particularly notice. I had
got the impression that she was painfully shy. The first time I met
her, the day after she moved in, I said hello casually. She blurted
a reply, stammered a name I didn't catch when I introduced myself,
whirled, and fled into her trailer. I failed to get a clear impression
of what she looked like. Young. Slender. Taller than average. Blonde.
Not a real yellow or a striking white-blonde, but fair. Large,
frightened eyes whose color I hadn't caught. And that's all. Nothing
that would enable me to recognize her on the street.
During the days that followed, she avoided close contact. My first
instinctive suspicion of any newcomer, a reaction to the knowledge that
I was being hunted by an unknown enemy, quickly evaporated. I exchanged
greetings with the girl a couple of times, but she didn't invite
conversation and passed on quickly. I concluded that she would probably
misinterpret any friendly overtures I made and I dismissed her as a
timid soul who wanted to be left alone. I wasn't interested.
Until that midnight glimpse through the bedroom window. Glancing out,
I had been startled by the extraordinary sight of the girl in the act
of pulling a nightgown over her head. Too surprised to move, I stopped
to gape at her. The gown was a pale iridescent green against the honey
tones of her skin. For several seconds she stood completely revealed,
her arms raised, small breasts pulled tautly erect, her body bathed in
soft light. Then she lowered her arms and took a step forward which
placed her out of my line of sight. I became rudely aware of what I
was doing. Chagrined, I told myself to stop acting like a peeping Tom,
but I couldn't erase that golden image from my memory. It gave me a
restless night.
Now, with a somewhat rueful smile, I turned out the lights in the front
of my trailer and went back to the small bedroom. I felt a return
attack of nerves at the prospect of going to sleep again. Perchance to
dream. Ay, there's the rub. For in that sleep of sleeps what dreams may
come....
I forced myself to turn out the light and lie on the narrow bed.
After a while my eyes began to ache from the effort of staring at
the ceiling. Don't think about it, I told myself. You've never had
the dream twice in one night. You can think about it tomorrow. In
the daylight. Think of the girl next door. You forgot all about your
troubles when you glanced out the window.
Maybe sex is your whole problem. How would a psychoanalyst interpret
your dream? The faceless enemy is obvious. That means it's someone very
close to you, someone you hate but shouldn't hate--or someone for whom
you feel a forbidden love. And what about the water symbol?
But there was no one very close to me, no one it could have been. My
mother was dead. Over two years. And I had never known my father, the
man from Los Alamitos who had been my mother's lover for a week in
Albuquerque and had left his seed in her.
And that was an answer, of course. The bastard son. What was the ratio
of insanity among bastards? Higher than normal? I would have to look it
up.
I shut the thought out of my mind. For a long while, I stared at the
dim whiteness of the plastic ceiling. And then the picture of a shy,
fair-haired girl with firm, uplifted breasts stole into my thoughts.
The tension slid away from me. The horror of the dream was forgotten.
It's funny, the tricks your mind can play on you.
3
The following night I worked late, correcting a batch of the
interminable freshman themes. I didn't have any night classes, but the
offices were bright for the lecturers who did. I found it difficult
to concentrate on the semi-adolescent exercises in expository
composition even though the office was quiet and almost empty most
of the evening. Near the bottom of the pile of papers I came across
one theme that jolted me. It was called "How to Conduct a Seance." It
was a juvenile and jocular approach to the subject, and I had never
placed much credence myself in preternatural events and influences--or
in extra-sensory powers. But now I found myself feeling defensive,
resenting the spoofing tone of the student's theme. Wasn't anything
possible? How much did we really know? Wasn't the wisest philosopher
actually as ignorant as this nineteen-year-old?
I wondered if a man could have unusual perceptions, strange mental
powers, for twenty-seven years without knowing it. Wouldn't a talent
for thought transference or for hearing the mental communications of
others make itself known early? Or would it be necessary to have two
sensitive people involved, sender and receiver? Could you be a telepath
without knowing it simply because you had never encountered another?
And I remembered the incident, distant in time and dim in memory, which
I had refused to recall during the disturbing recent months. In itself,
the experience, though startling at the time, was not unique. At least
you hear about similar things happening to a great many ordinary
people. You hear about it--but you brush off the story as coincidence
or as the product of an over-active imagination.
I have mentioned my father. Until I was eighteen, I never knew who he
was or that he was alive. My mother had always talked about him as if
he had been killed the year I was born, during the brief Chino-American
war of 1963. After I had the extraordinary vision, she told me the
truth, her story muffled by tears long contained.
Ernest Cameron was a well-known physicist. He was married and had two
children. If my mother can be believed, his was an unhappy marriage,
but one which he did not feel justified in renouncing. During part
of 1962 he was in New Mexico working with the army on atomic field
weapons, the kind that did a hell of a lot of damage in a confined
area, what they used to call "clean" bombs in those days before all
atomic weapons were outlawed. My mother was at that time a woman in her
early twenties living in Albuquerque.
She met Ernest Cameron when he was on a weekend leave. They fell in
love, suddenly, catastrophically. Their passionate affair lasted for
nine days. Then, as the threat of war intensified in Asia, he was
abruptly transferred overseas. My mother never saw him again, but she
was already carrying the infinitesimal germ of life that grew into the
son he never knew. Me. Paul Cameron.
My mother always loved him. She moved to Los Angeles and took the name
of Mrs. Rose Cameron, wanting me to bear my father's name. For eighteen
years after I was born, she posed as a widow. The role was never
questioned.
It was the vision which forced her to tell me who I really was--and who
my father was. It happened on a clear sunny afternoon. I was in the
yard outside our small trailer. Having just graduated from high school,
I was taking a week's vacation before hunting for a job. I was sitting
on a canvas chair, idly enjoying the summer sun and thinking wistfully
about my hopes of going to college, when it happened.
I saw him. A sandy-haired, middle-aged man with bent, rounded shoulders
and a tired walk. Preoccupied, his eyes on the ground, he stepped off
a curb and started across a street I had never seen in my life. I sat
in the canvas chair, staring at the familiar setting of the crowded
trailer court, and the picture of the sandy-haired man was superimposed
on the reality before me, equally clear and vivid. When I saw the truck
hurtling toward him, the illusion was so graphic that I cried out in
alarm. The man looked up at the last moment of his life, soft gray eyes
widening in blank surprise, without fear, as if he had not had time to
bring his mind back from some distant point of reflection to this time
and place of life and death. He had stepped out from behind a parked
car. The truckdriver, seeing him too late, tried to swerve. There was
a terrifyingly slow sequence of brakes screeching, rubber scraping off
in black streaks on the pavement, big trailer lurching sideways--and
the final sickening violence of impact, of smashed bones and flesh and
blood.
I stood trembling beside the overturned canvas chair amid the familiar
cluster of trailers and covered patios and cement walks and hotly
glittering parked cars, and I knew that the echo of a final scream of
pain had broken from my own lips. My mother was standing in the doorway
of our trailer, her mouth open, one hand at her breast in fright,
staring at me.