Henry Ritchie sighed and slumped in the chair. “I tried, Max.”
“Did you? Did you try—I mean with everything?”
“With everything. Might as well face it: the boy’s going to burn, right on schedule.”
Kaplan opened his mouth.
“Forget it. The governor isn’t about to issue a commutation. With the public’s blood up the way it is, he knows what it would mean to his vote. We were stupid even to try.”
“Lousy vultures.”
Ritchie shrugged. “They’re hungry, Max. You forget, there hasn’t been an execution in this state for over two years. They’re hungry.”
“So a poor dumb kid’s got to fry alive in order for them to get their kicks. …”
“Wait a second now. Don’t get carried away. This same poor dumb kid is the boy who killed George Sanderson in cold blood and then raped his wife, not too very long ago. If I recall, your word for him then was Brutal Murderer.”
“That was the paper. This is you and me.”
“Well, get that accusatory look off your face. Murder and rape—those are stiff raps to beat, pal.”
“You did it with Beatty, you got him off,” Kaplan reminded his friend.
“Luck. Public mood—Beatty was an old man, feeble. Look, Max—why don’t you stop beating around the bush?”
“Okay,” Kaplan said slowly. “They—let me in this afternoon. I talked with him again.”
Ritchie nodded. “And?”
“Hank, I’m telling you—it gives me the creeps. I swear it does.”
“What did he tell you?”
Kaplan puffed on his cigarette nervously, kept his eyes on the clock. “He was lying down when I went in, curled up tight. Trying to sleep.”
“Go on.”
“When he heard me, he came to. ‘Mr. Kaplan,’ he says, ‘you’ve got to make them believe me, you’ve got to make them understand—’ His eyes got real big then, and—Hank, I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Just him, maybe. I’m not sure.”
“He carrying the same line?”
“Yeah. But worse this time, more intense somehow. …”
Ritchie tried to keep the smile. He remembered, all right. Much too well. The whole story was crazy, normally enough to get the kid off with a life sentence in the criminally insane ward. But it was a little too crazy, so the psychiatrists wouldn’t buy.
“Can’t get his words out of my mind,” Kaplan was saying. His eyes were closed. “ ‘Mister, tell them, tell them. If you kill me, then you’ll all die. This whole world of yours will die. …’ ”
Because
, Ritchie remembered, you don’t exist, any of you, except in my mind. Don’t you see? I’m asleep and dreaming all this. You, your wives, your children, it’s all part of my dream—and when you kill me then I’ll wake up and that will be the end of you. …
“Well,” Ritchie said, “it’s original.”
Kaplan shook his head.
“Come on, Max, snap out of it. You act like you never listened to a lunatic before. People have been predicting the end of the world ever since Year 1.”
“Sure, I know. You don’t have to patronize me. It’s just that—well, who is this particular lunatic anyway? We don’t know any more about him than the day he was caught. Even the name we had to make up. Who is he, where’d he come from, what’s his home?”
My home … a world of eternities, an eternity of worlds. … I must destroy, hurt, kill before I wake always … and then once more I must sleep … always, always. …
“Look, there’s a hundred vagrants in every city. Just like our boy: no name, no friends, no relatives.”
“Then he doesn’t seem in the least odd to you, is that it? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“So he’s odd! I never met a murderer that wasn’t!” Ritchie recalled the lean hairless face, the expressionless eyes, the slender youthful body that moved in strange hesitant jerks, the halting voice.
The clock bonged the quarter hour. Fifteen to twelve. Max Kaplan wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
“And besides,” Ritchie said, somewhat too loudly, “it’s plain ridiculous. He says—what? We’re a dream he’s having, right? Okay—then what about our parents, and their parents, everybody who never heard of the kid?”
“First thing I thought of. And you know his answer.”
Ritchie snorted.
“Well, think it over, for God’s sake. He says every dream is a complete unit in itself. You—haven’t you ever had nightmares about people you’d never seen before?”
“Yes, I suppose so, but—”
“All right, even though they were projections of your subconscious—or whatever the hell it’s called—they were complete, weren’t they? Going somewhere, doing something, all on their own?”
Ritchie was silent.
“Where were they going, what were they doing? See? The kid says every dream, even ours, builds its own whole world—complete, with a past and—as long as you stay asleep—a future.”
“Nonsense! What about us, when we sleep and dream? Or is the period when we’re unconscious the time he’s up and around? And keep in mind that everybody doesn’t sleep at the same time—”
“You’re missing the point, Hank. I said it was complete, didn’t I? And isn’t sleeping part of the pattern?”
“Have another drink, Max. You’re slipping.”
“What will you wake up to?”
“My home. You would not understand.”
“Then what?”
“Then I sleep again and dream another world.”
“Why did you kill George Sanderson?”
“It is my eternal destiny to kill and suffer punishment.”
“Why? Why?”
“In my world I committed a crime; it is the punishment of my world, this destiny. …”
“Then try this on for size,” Ritchie said. “That kid’s frozen stiff with fear. Since he’s going to have to wake up no matter what, then why not sit back and enjoy it?”
Kaplan’s eyes widened. “Hank, how soundly do you sleep?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I mean, do you ever dream?”
“Of course.”
“Ever get hold of any particularly vivid ones? Falling downstairs like, being tortured, anything like that?”
Ritchie pulled at his drink.
“Sure you have.” Kaplan gazed steadily at the clock. Almost midnight. “Then try to remember. In that kind of dream, isn’t it true that the pleasure—or pain—you feel is almost as real as if you were actually experiencing it? I remember once I had a nightmare about my old man. He caught me in
