Padgett - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

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HE KNEW it was a dream when he shot Carolyn through the head. But not until then. The imperceptible shifting from reality to the familiar nightmare had come, as always, so stealthily that the shock of surprise almost woke him. Then there came the thought: I must tell the Controllers.

And after that: But in three weeks therell be the quarterly psych check, and theyll find out anyhow.

Standing, he looked down at the motionless gray head aureoled in spreading red, and listened, and made a bargain with himself. If I cant get rid of this recurrent dream, this warp, this compulsion before the psych check, Ill be fired automatically. There cant be any danger from a dream. Its merely a fear-dream; it cant be wish-fulfillment.

The thought chilled him horribly.

He dreaded the next moment, when the pattern of weeks would repeat itself, and he would straighten up above the narrow table, with its intricate controls and warning signal lights, and turn toward the door that led to the unthinkable.

But he turned.

Tomorrow Ill report to the psych board.

It wont mean being fired, really. Not washed up. Ill simply be reconditioned and tested. But I can never hold this post again!

The ancient, powerful conditioning of his early environment stirred in savage rebellion. I cant give it up! The highest honor in the world

He walked down the passage. He made the secret signals that permitted his safe ingress. But he knew it was impossible; there were protective devices that even he did not know how to deactivate. In real life, he could never have penetrated this far toward toward it.

The dream blurred. There was a confusion of nightmare.

That coalesced suddenly. He found himself in the brain and the heart. He stood before It.

And as always he felt that what he had to do was impossible. He had been chosen and trained for his post simply because his psychological background was entirely trustworthy, a more important factor than his technical training. Yet the perverse devil hung on his shoulder, laughing.

Of course, if I were awake, I would never do it. But in a dream

Do it. Its the release I need,said the devil at his shoulder.The release you need. That we need. Youre under terrific tension, and youre neurotic and worried for fear this very thing will happen. So get your release. A dream is harmless.

Somehow in the dream it was ridiculously easy to do. You merely had to detach the boron dampers and pull them out. But what had happened to their locks?

He watched the gauges on the walls. Geiger counters began to chatter insanely. Needles rose in jumpy, warning spasms as the dampers were withdrawn. The critical mass had nearly been reached.

But its only a dream, of course, he thought, as he woke amid the inconceivable fractional-second beginning of the atomic blast.

JOSEPH BREDEN made himself sit motionless. He opened his eyes slowly, saw the tri-di chessboards in front of him, red and black, and let his lids drop against the light. But the light was not dazzling. A chain of reactions leaped through his mind; he drew a long breath of relief. He could not have been asleep longer than a few seconds, or his pupils would have contracted against light that would have seemed blinding to him.

There was no reason to feel surprise. It always happened this way. But there was always the sense that he had been asleep for a long, long time, and that Carolyn Kohl would have noticed. She would have had to report him then. Though that would scarcely have been necessary, with the built-in visio-recorders always focused on the guardians who sat in this room, and in two others elsewhere in the enormous sunken ziggurat.

He tapped one finger a little on the table, to show Carolyn he was awake. The recorders would catch that, too, on their wire tape. A small panic touched him. He stared at the chessboards, pawn, knight, bishop, king; to save his life he could not remember the gambit, and whose move it was. He had a feeling that this exact situation had occurred before. He remembered

His mind leaped on ahead, taking fire with its own irrational hysteria. He had to make the right move. It was vital. If he didnt Carolyn would notice and suspect, or the recorders would, and he would be investigated and psych-checked and lose his post; there would be disgrace

Stop it, he told himself frantically. Move any place. No, dont do that. Carolyn knows your game. The records note any deviation from the norm. But do something!

His brain was empty. All he could feel was that flailing panic, and all he could sense was the silent terror far under his feet, the uranium pile that hovered below the critical mass, the incubus he guarded.

Something shifted, a soft rustle of motion, across the table, and the terror drained swiftly out of Breden. He knew, now, what it was he had feared.

He raised his eyes and looked at Carolyn Kohl. There was no cinder-edged hole marring her smooth forehead under the gray hair. A bulky, heavy-faced woman of sixty-eight, she lay back comfortably in her chair, sharp black eyes watching Breden through her contact lenses, her rather thick lips parted to show strikingly even white dentures. Though nearly seventy, she was still a top-flight nuclear physicist, and until lately had been better than Breden. But now she was slowing down a little, and Breden silently blessed that factor; if she had been sharper, she might have suspected something.

She was sharp, though. And Breden knew he could not go on with the game. He had to find an out. That wouldnt be easy. There must be no deviations from his habit-patterns for the recorders to pounce on. The cool, soft light of the room was smothering.

The tension was growing again within him.

He thought of Margaret. But his wifes familiar features blended, somehow, with the dark, placid, confident face of his brother Louis. And instantly all stability left him. It had always been that way, since he was old enough to understand that Louis was different, though not until years after that did he fully comprehend why his brother was a member of the strangest club that had ever existed on earth.

A club of the cursed and the blessed. The damned and the saved. And membership was strictly limited; it was so highly exclusive that you had to be born into it. You had to have been born within the effective limits of a chain reaction not so close to the monstrous center that you disintegrated or were charred or died more slowly, with your flesh flaking off and your bones rotting, and not so far distant that your parents genes and chromosomes were unaltered. You had to have been in exactly the right place at the right time. It had only happened a few times since 1945, in Japan and New Mexico, and, some years later, in other localities, but the atomic explosions had salted humanity with a few very special specimens. Not supermen, although rumors were still highly popular about mysterious, omnipotent figures who stayed godlike in the background and moved humans like puppets. That was standard stuff in the television shows. The truth was less flamboyant, as usual. The mutants were a mixed breed. Some survived, but neither the best nor the worst. They were, however, better than humans in a number of ways. Not that they werent human themselves; it was semantically wrong to consider them alien. They were merely humans extended, just as Louis had been. As Louis