The bus started up slowly, and Hansard was able to keep from sinking all
the way through his seat. Each time the bus accelerated or decelerated,
Mansard was in danger of slipping out of the vehicle altogether. At a
traffic light just before the bridge over the Potomac the bus braked
suddenly and Mansard somersaulted through the seat in front of him,
down through the floor of the bus and the transmission, and deep into
the roadway itself.
After that he decided to hike the rest of the way into the city.
FOUR
THE REAL WORLD
In witnessing the foregoing remarkable events, it may have occurred to the
reader to wonder how he would have reacted in Hansard's circumstances,
and if this reader were of a skeptical temperament he might very well
question the plausibility of Mansard's so-sudden and so-apt adjustment
to the enormous changes in the world about him. Yet this hypothetical
skeptic shows the same ready adaptibility every night in his dreams.
Hansard, in those first perilous minutes, was living in a dream,
and his actions showed the directness and simplicity of the actions
of a dreamer. What had he done, after all, but flee from the face of
danger? It can be objected that Mansard was not dreaming; but can we
be so sure of that yet? When else, in the usual course of experience,
does one walk through steel walls?
So it is not really so wonderful that Mansard should have fallen into
a half-dreaming state and been able to act so naturally amid so much
that was unnatural. Perhaps our skeptical reader might even allow that,
with the wind in the right direction, he might not have acted entirely
differently himself -- at least he should not discount the possibility.
Mansard did not shake off this sense of unreality at once. Indeed, with
the occasion for action past, with nothing to do but explore and reflect,
this sense grew, and with its growth he felt the beginnings of dread --
of a subtle terror worse than anything he had experienced in the hall
outside the transmitter. For it is possible to flee the figures of a
nightmare, but there is no escape from the nightmare itself, but waking.
The worst of it was that none of the people that he passed on the city
streets, the drivers of cars and buses, the clerks in stores,
no one
would look at him. They disregarded Hansard with an indifference worthy
of gods. Hansard stood between the jeweler and his lamp, but the wraith's
shadow was as imperceptible to the jeweler as was the wraith himself.
Hansard grasped the diamond in his own hand; the jeweler continued his
careful cutting. Once, when he was crossing a street, a truck turned
the corner and without even ruffling Hansard's hair drove straight
through him.
It was as though he were a beggar or deformed, but in that case they
would at least have looked away, which was some sort of recognition.
No, it was as though each one of them had said to him:
You do not exist
,
and it became increasingly difficult not to believe them.
So that Hansard walked through this unheeding, intangible city as through
a dream-landscape, observing but not understanding it, not even endeavoring
as yet to understand it. He walked past the immemorial, unmemorable white
stoneheaps of the capital buildings: the unfenestrated mausoleum that
housed the National Gallery; the monumental Yawn of the Supreme Court;
the Capitol's Great White Wart; and that supreme dullness, the Washington
Monument.
Though he had lived in the District of Columbia for the last eight years,
though he had passed these buildings almost daily, though he even supposed
that he admired them, he had never seen them before. He had always regarded
them with the same unseeing, reverential eyes with which he would have
regarded, for instance, his nation's flag.
But now, curiously (for architecture was far from being his immediate
concern), he saw them as they were, with the veil of the commonplace
ripped away. Why, he wondered, did the capitals of the columns
burst into those Corinthian bouquets? Why, for that matter, were
the columns there? Everything about these buildings seemed arbitrary,
puzzling. Presumably they had been built for human purposes -- but what
purpose can be served by a five-hundred-fifty-five-foot obelisk?
He stood beneath the blossoming, odorless cherry trees and tried to argue
against the horror mounting within him.
At those rare moments when the skin of the world is peeled away and its
substance laid bare before us, the world may assume either of two aspects
-- benign or malignant. There are those sublime, Wordsworthian moments
when Nature apparels herself in celestial light; but there are other
moments too, when, with the same trembling sensibility and the same
incontrovertible sureness, we see that the fair surface of things --
all flesh, these white and scentless blossoms, the rippled surface of
the reflecting pool, even the proud sun itself -- are but the whiting
on the sepulchre within which . . . it were best not to look.
Hansard stood at such a brink that first afternoon, and then he drew back.
Once already in his life, long ago and in another country, he had stepped
beyond that threshold and let himself see what lay there, so that this
time he was able to foresee well in advance that such a moment threatened
again. (The symptoms were clear. A minacious cold seemed to settle over
him, followed by a feeling of hollowness that, originating in the pit
of his stomach, spread slowly to all his limbs; his thoughts, like the
music on a record placed off-center on a turntable, moved through his
consciousness at eccentric tempi -- now too fast and now too slow.)
He foresaw what was to be, and resisted it. This is not an easy thing to
do. Most of us are passive before our strongest emotions, as before one
of the Olympian gods. Even Medusa-headed horror has an allure, though
we won't often admit it; and when we do surrender ourselves to her,
it is with averted eyes and the pretence that we are not helping out.
The same reader who may at first have tended to overvalue Hansard's quick
reflexes in the face of immediate danger may now be inclined to value
his struggle with the "Medusa" too lightly, or not at all. Let such a
reader be assured of the reality of this peril. Had Hansard succumbed to
these feelings -- had he, slipping into solipsism, let himself believe
that the Real World was not any longer as real as it had been, then we
would either have a much shorter and sadder tale to tell, or we would
have had to find another hero for it.
But for all that, it is true that a man in good health can bear a few
hours of supernatural terror without lasting ill effect. The worst fear,
after all, is of the known rather than of the unknown -- a truth that
Hansard became aware of as soon as he realized, about sunset, that the
hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach was a symptom of more than
malaise; it was simply hunger pangs. And worse than the hunger pangs
was his thirst.
In restaurants he could see people eating, but their food -- like all
matter that belonged exclusively to the Real World -- sifted through his
fingers like vapor. He could not turn on a water faucet or lift a glass,
and if he could have it would have availed him nothing, for the water of
the Real World was as insubstantial as its solid matter. Hansard stood
in a public fountain and let the water cascade though his body without
dampening his clothes, or his thirst. It began to seem that his sojourn
in the dream-world might not be of much longer duration than a dream.
How long could one go without food or water? Three days? Four?
But what then of Worsaw and the others in Camp Jackson? To judge only by
the length of their beards these men were veterans of the dream-world,
from which it was only reasonable to suppose that some place in this city
there was ghostly food and drink to satisfy his most unghostly appetites.
He had only to find it.
If the theory he had developed earlier that day concerning the cause of
his changed condition were correct, there could be but one source of
the food that sustained Worsaw and Co.: -- it had to originate from a
transmitter, just as they themselves had. The "ghost" of food that had
been transmitted to Mars would logically be the only food a ghost could
eat; the "ghost" of water would be the only water a ghost could drink.
And would not the same hold true of air as well? Did Hansard breathe the
same air that the residents of the Real World breathed -- or another air,
the "ghost" of theirs? If the latter were the case, it would explain the
strange silence of the dream-world in which the only noises audible to
Hansard were the noises he made himself; and these, in turn, were inaudible
in the Real World. The air that bore, the sound waves Hansard produced
was a different medium from the air of the Real World.
It was a theory easily confirmed or disproved. The transmitters that supplied
the Mars Command Post with a constant fresh supply of both air and water
were located beneath the D.C. Dome, just outside the eastern perimeter
of Camp Jackson itself.
As the simulated daylight of the domed city modulated from dusk to darkness,
Hansard walked back toward Camp Jackson on the delicate snowcrust of
the sidewalks, occasionally popping his toes through the thin membrane
of the surface. He had discarded his military hat and jacket, depositing
them with his attaché case inside the thick walls of the Lincoln Memorial
where, invisible to all eyes, Hansard was certain a Top-Priority secrecy
could be preserved indefinitely. His tie was loosened, and his shirt open
at the collar, despite the discomfort this caused him. Except for the
officer's stripe down his pants' leg, he should pass for a pedestrian
of the Real World -- or so he hoped.
Hansard arrived at the barricade about the Mars "pipelines" an hour after
the false twilight of the domed city had dimmed to extinction. The D.C.
Dome was composed of two shells: the inner was an energy-screen, designed
late in the 1970's as a defense against the neutron bombs. Had it ever
been put to the test, the unhappy residents of the city would have found
it no more effective a defense than a magic pentagram drawn with the fat
of a hanged man -- an awesome but empty symbol. Subsequent to its erection,
however, this energy dome was found to have the pragmatic property of
supporting a second outer dome, or skin, of plastic. Soon, from this
single phenomenon, an entire technology had developed, and now it was
possible to build outer domes substantial enough to act as a weather
shield over areas twelve miles in diameter and able to support a complex
of lighting and ventilation systems as well.
The Mars pumps stood just outside Camp Jackson, since they were officially
administered by NASA, though in fact by the Army. Accordingly, Army guards
patrolled the barrier built about the pumping stations. Hansard need take
no heed of either guards or barrier, but he did. If his theory was correct,
he would have to be wary not to encounter any other men of "A" Company,
for this would be their only source of water as well as Hansard's.
Within the barrier, the grounds sloping up to the concrete pumphouse were
attractively landscaped -- apparently for the benefit of the inner guards,
since the barrier prevented anyone else from seeing them. Hansard lowered
himself into the earth and swam slowly up the hill through lawn and
flowerbeds.
Reaching the pumphouse and having satisfied himself that he was alone,
Hansard again assumed a standing posture and walked through the concrete
wall of the building.
And found himself drowning.
The entire pumphouse was filled with water -- real liquid water, or rather,
unreal water of the sort that an unreal Hansard might either drink or
drown in. Instead of floundering back through the wall, Hansard swam
upward. The water rose to a height of fourteen feet, which was yet a few
feet less than the high ceiling of the building. Surfacing, Hansard's
ears popped.
The surface of the water was brightly lighted by the illuminated panels
of the ceiling, and Hansard could see that the water in the center
of this strange reservoir was bubbling furiously. Remarkable as these
phenomena were, Hansard's first consideration was to quench his thirst
and be gone. He could fit these facts to his theories at his leisure.
Regretful that he could carry back no water to the city, except what was
sloshing about in the toes of his shoes, Hansard returned on the bus --
this time without mischance. He got off outside the New St. George,
a hotel which, in the ordinary scheme of things, he would have never
been able to afford. At the reception desk he informed himself of the
number of an unoccupied suite, and found his way to it up the stairs
(he suspected that the hotel's elevators would start and stop too quickly
for him to be able to keep from popping out through the floor).
Once in possession of his rooms he realized that he might just as well
have gone to a flophouse, for he was unable to turn on the light switch.
Shivering in his damp clothes, he went to sleep in the midst of the
suite's undoubtable, but darkened, luxury. He slept on a canopied bed,
but he would have been just as comfortable, after all, on the floor.
He woke with a bad head-cold and screaming.
It had been so many years since he had had the dream that he had been able
to convince himself that he had rid himself of it. The dream always
concluded with the same image, but it might begin in a variety of ways.
For instance:
He was there. Drenched. Mud up to his thighs. A buzzing somewhere, always
a buzzing. Always wet. Always knowing that the enveloping greenness was
made green by wishing for his death. Always bodies, scrap-heaps of bodies
along the muddy road. He was very young. He didn't always want to look.
"I won't look," he said. Whenever he was there, in that country in his
dreams, he knew how young he was. But you could look at anything if you
had to. And diseases, lots of diseases. And always something that buzzed.
The people of that country were very little. Little adults, like the children
in the paintings of the Colonial period. Their faces were children's faces.
He could see long rows of their faces pressed up against the wire. He was
carrying pots of cooked rice. When they spoke it sounded more like screaming
than speech. The compound always got fuller. Every part of the fence was
filled with their faces. They asked for "incendigel," which seemed to be
the word for rice in their country.