_They wanted a world without war. The answer was simple: Stay in bed._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science
Fiction, May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
A warning hum started somewhere down in the audoviso.
Greg stared. Perspiration crawled down his face. This was it. This was
the end of the nightmare. This had to be Pat Nichols.
After seventy-two hours in which Greg had had to do without anesthesia!
Seventy-two hours of reality! Seventy-two hours of _consciousness_!
Consciousness. Reality.
Greg didn't know how he'd managed to remain sane.
It seemed incredible that a man who had advanced to Stage Five in
the Dream Continuity Scale, and who had been in anesthesia most of
the time, could suffer seventy-two hours of boring, drab, dreary and
revolting reality. And still be sane.
Pat Nichols was the answer. Her body faded into slim and luscious focus
on the three-dim screen. Her brooding eyes and wide mouth that curled
so reprovingly.
[Illustration: _In his mind was the certainty: This is no dream._]
She had gone psycho. Had fled from the Cowl into the dreadful Outside,
seventy-two hours ago. Gone to join that fanatical group of Venusian
Colonists, those outlaw schizoids who planned to start over on Venus.
"Pat!" Greg's hand reached as though she weren't just a three-dim
image. "Listen, Pat! Thank the Codes, you haven't blasted yet. I've
been crazy, waiting for this call. Pat, I can't even go into integrated
anesthesia without you around. My dreams don't seem to focus right."
"That's too bad, Greg," she said.
He moistened his lips slowly. He slid his hand toward the warning
button beneath the table. Her eyes didn't notice, never left his face.
Accusative, sad eyes.
He felt sick. He pushed the button. Now! Now Drakeson up on the
apartment roof would trace the point of her call. He'd chart her
location with the rhodium tracker beams. Then the two of them would
go and pick Pat up and prevent that insane, suicidal, one-way trip to
Venus.
She might consider it a very unfair thing, but then she was psycho.
She'd be glad of it, after she was brought back, brain-probed, and
re-conditioned. The thought made Greg even more ill. Brain-probing and
re-conditioning involved months of a kind of mental agony that no one
could adequately describe. The words were enough to give anesthetic
nightmares to any Citizen. But, it was for the good of the Cowls, and
of the psychos.
Her voice was sad too, like her eyes. "I was hoping you would join me,
Greg. Anyway, I called to tell you that in about five hours, we're
blasting. This is goodby."
He said something. Anything. Keep her talking, listening. Give Drakeson
a chance to employ the rhodium tracker, and spot her location.
A kind of panic got loose in Greg's brain. "Pat, don't you have any
insight at all? Can't you see that this is advanced psychosis, that--"
She interrupted. "I've tried to explain to you before, Greg. But you've
always preferred anesthesia. You loathe reality. But I'm part of
reality."
Yes. He had dreams. The anesthetic cubicles, Stage Five where a man was
master of thalamic introjection, dream imagery. A stage where any part
of reality was supposed to have faded into utter inconsequence. But Pat
Nichols had always been a part of his conditioned personality pattern.
By taking her out of it, fate had struck him with an unbalance in
psyche that disturbed the sole objective of life--to dream.
"But that's a suicide trip, Pat, and you'll never have a chance to be
cured of your schizophrenia, even if you do get to Venus--"
Her interruption had weariness in it.
"Goodby, Greg. I'm sorry for you. That silly status quo, and futile
dreaming. It will never let you realize what a fine man you are. You'll
decay and die in some futile image. So goodby, Greg. And good dreaming."
She was gone from the screen. Maybe from earth, unless he got out there
and stopped her before that suicide ship rocketed out from its hidden
subterranean blast tube.
* * * * *
Greg Hurried. He didn't realize he could function so rapidly in the
world of physical reality. In seconds he had zipped thin resilient
aerosilk about his body, and was running across the wide plastic mesh
roof toward the heliocruiser in which Drakeson was waiting.
Greg felt the physical power flow as he ran. It sickened him. The
conditioners kept the body in good shape, but only to allow the
cortical-thalamic imagery faculties to function better. Actual physical
business like this was revolting to any Cowl citizen. Any sort of
physical and materialistic activity, divorced from anesthesia, might be
a sign of encroaching psychosis.
That was the fear. That fear of psychosis that might lead to violence.
To change. The Cowls over the Cities protected them from any physical
interference with an absolutely stabile, unchanging and static culture.
But the Cowls hadn't been able to protect the Citizenry from insanity.
During the past year, psychosis had been striking increasingly, without
warning, indiscriminately.
Greg dropped down beside the thin ascetic figure at the controls. He
grabbed Drakeson's arm.
"Did you pick it up, Drake?"
"Uh-huh," Drakeson drawled. His mouth was cynical, his gray eyes
somber. "Traced it down to a ten meter radius, but it's underground.
About five miles out of Old Washington, just inside the big
radioactivated forest east of the Ruins. About half an hour's flight as
the crow might fly. If there was a crow left."
"Then let's go. Lift this gadget out of here!"
A spot of nausea bounced into Greg's stomach at Drakeson's reference
to what the big Chain blow-up had done to almost all high cellular
life forms, including crows. Only insects and a few shielded humans
had withstood the radiation. Most higher complex cellular organisms
had paid for their complexity. But thanks to the establishment of the
Cowled Cities and the Codes of non-change, non-violence, they wouldn't
have to pay again. No chance for social change now that might lead to
another such disaster.