‘“Sure,” he said doggedly, “but it’s the way in which you acquire it. You see, you participate in it. That’s a far cry from just reading about it on an autoteacher screen.”
“I’ve heard the point made before,” she admitted, “and it has a certain amount of validity for some people. I knew one fellow who started off dreaming he was Columbus first sighting land. It must have been quite a thrill. But that’s how the addicts start; soon they go on to more stupendous things. I knew another fellow who first became an Eskimo, hunting seal and walrus, building igloos and that sort of thing. Within a month, he was being Napoleon at Waterloo and defeating Wellington… somewhat of a switch on history. That so intrigued him that he fought all of Napoleon’s battles, one by one, and from there went on to battles that had never happened. Among other things, he had our little corporal invading North America and conquering the United States, and Canada to boot. What he’s dreaming up now, God only knows. I haven’t seen him for six months. He spends eight hours out of the twenty-four in programmed dreams. He is in real life just long enough to eat, get minimum exercise, get some true sleep, and then he’s back to his dreams. He used to be a notable scholar.”
Tracy said, “What happens to those who didn’t even start off being scholars? The ordinary man or woman in the street?”
She said in disgust, “I had one male friend… he used to be a lover of mine… who set off to bed every famous beautiful woman in history. He started with Queen Nefertiti of Egypt, wound his way up to Cleopatra and Messalina and then onward to such notables as Agnes Sorel, Madam Du Barry, Catherine the Great, Madame Pompadour, Nell Gwen, and on and on. Finally, he ran out of names of the most beautiful women he knew of and began studying up on the subject. He went down the list, reading all he could find in the data banks on famous courtesans, prostitutes and such. One by one he bedded them all. Then he got into fictional characters. You’ll never believe this, he even took on Minnie Ha Ha, the Indian princess girl friend of Hiawatha.”
“He must have had a time for himself,” Tracy laughed, finishing his drink.
“That’s right,” she said bitterly. “But he no longer had time or desire for real women. He was no longer my lover, nor anyone else’s in the real world.”
“Yeah,” Tracy said, standing. “I got the implications when you were telling me the story. There must be quite an impact on the birth rate.”
“Birth rate,” she said, still bitterly. “What birth rate?”
He had been about to leave, but now he came to a halt. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that the birth rate has been falling off to the vanishing point. It’s not just that our most potent men spend so much time living it up in harems in Turkey or Araby, but we women aren’t exactly immune. There are those among us who would rather spend a night with Hercules or Paul Bunyon than with a truly live, breathing, normal man.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“Yes, but that’s not the all of it. The Dream Palaces are only one factor. Who in this hedonistic world of ours wants to go through the trouble of childbirth and raising a child? A decreasing number. Frankly, I have no special desire in that direction myself. And I’m comparatively conservative.”
He stared at her.
“And now,” she said, and the mocking quality was back in her voice again, “I assume that you are not particularly interested in my accompanying you to your bed tonight. Not in view of the fact that you have experienced more than six orgasms… in your mind.”
“No, I suppose not,” he said. “Good night, Betty. This sort of thing isn’t going to happen to me again.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “You’ve already let us know that so far what you’ve seen of this society you rather like.”
“I’ll talk about it with the three of you tomorrow,” he said. “Good night, again.”
He made his way to his room, but instead of undressing he stretched out on his bed, fully clothed and stared up at the ceiling.
So, it was for this that he had devoted his life to the movement. It was for this he had fought in half a dozen wars, revolutions, and revolts. It was for this that he had been wounded more times than he could remember. It was for this that he had spent years in prisons and concentration camps.
And all his friends who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him. All those who had died in the struggle. Jim Farthington and Bud Whiteley, in the Spanish Civil War; Ferry Washington, who had been lynched in Mississippi; Buck Dillard, Dave Woolman, Fred Thompson, all dead fighting Hitlerism in the Second World War; Ilya Rostov and Michael Manovich, caught by the Soviets and last heard of in a Siberian labor camp; Luca Memmi and Lippo Signorelli, dead with the partisans, fighting Mussolini in Northern Italy. Yes, and many more, and above all, Dan Whiteley, who evidently had been shot after Tracy had gone into hibernation, or whatever you wanted to call it. Shot by the Maoists in Communist China when he was trying to get the movement going there.
All of them dead, and many more. But they were the dead. Hundreds and thousands of others in the organization Tracy had belonged to had been caught and imprisoned for varying terms, some of them for life.
Yes, all of the martyrs. The men and women who had given all there was to give, fighting for a cause, a better world, a Utopia.
Well, here it is, Tracy Cogswell. Here is the Utopia you all fought for.
His mind went back again over the list of those who had been close to him and had gone down in the fight, and as before, he ended the list with his best friend.
The last time he and Dan Whiteley had worked together to any extent had been in Budapest in 1956 when the revolution was on there. Otherwise, he hadn’t even seen Dan except for those times in the Tangier medina.
Tracy was even more tired than he had realized. He fell off into sleep, still clothed, still thinking about Dan Whiteley.
Chapter Twelve
And the dream that came to him was almost as vivid as the one he had gone through in the gardens of Hasan Ben Sabbah… but hardly as enjoyable.
Tracy Cogswell and Dan Whiteley had both been in Vienna when the anticommunist Hungarian revolution of 1956 began.
Tracy was already permanently attached to the organization in Tangier, and Whiteley had been working with the Solidarity branch of the movement in England; but both had been sent to Austria in an attempt to strengthen the organization there. The Austrians, they found, were on the easy going side when it came to drastic changes in the politico-economic system. Their idea of carrying on a conspiracy was to sit around in one of the little taverns on the outskirts of town, drinking
Before meeting in Vienna, the two hadn’t seen each other for some time. Dan Whiteley had less than enjoyed a rather remarkable stint in the Second World War. He had been in England when it started and immediately signed up, anti-Hitlerite that he was. His years in Spain didn’t do him any good with the British military authorities and they didn’t even make him a noncom. He had been captured at Dunkirk and, instead of being sent to a military concentration camp, he had been sent to East Prussia and assigned to work on a farm along with one other allied prisoner. The three young sons who had formerly helped with the farm chores had been called up by the German army, leaving only their elderly parents. The two old folk weren’t particularly hard to get along with, but Whiteley had no intention of sitting the war out in such wise. He and his companion escaped and, rather than trying to get all the way through Germany to France or England, headed north in the direction of Poland. They thought they might be able to make it across the Baltic to Sweden. Happily, his companion was of Slavic background and could speak the language, so when they were captured by the Polish partisans they made out all right, and Dan spent two years with them, before his companion was killed and he was recaptured. The Gestapo decided Dan was an American who had been parachute dropped to stir up the Poles, and they worked him over a bit for a confession and to get him to reveal any other American agents in the country. He was saved from being shot by the advancing Red Army, which took the prison in which he was held.
