This Crowded Earth Read online

  4. Harry Collins--2000

  Harry didn't ask any questions. He just kept his mouth shut andwaited. Maybe Dr. Manschoff suspected and maybe he didn't. Anyway,there was no trouble. Harry figured there wouldn't be, as long as hestayed in line and went through the proper motions. It was all amatter of pretending to conform, pretending to agree, pretending tobelieve.

  So he watched his step--_except in the dreams, and then he was alwaysfalling into the yawning abyss_.

  He kept his nose clean--_but in the dreams he smelled the blood andbrimstone of the pit_.

  He managed to retain a cheerful smile at all times--_though, in thedreams, he screamed_.

  Eventually, he even met Myrna. She was the pretty little brunette whomRitchie had mentioned, and she did her best to console him--_only indreams, when he embraced her, he was embracing a writhing coil ofslimy smoke_.

  It may have been that Harry Collins went a little mad, just having topretend that he was sane. But he learned the way, and he managed. Hesaved the madness (_or was it the reality?_) for the dreams.

  Meanwhile he waited and said nothing.

  He said nothing when, after three months or so, Myrna was suddenly"transferred" without warning.

  He said nothing when, once a week or so, he went in to visit with Dr.Manschoff.

  He said nothing when Manschoff volunteered the information thatRitchie had been "transferred" too, or suggested that it would be bestto stay on for "further therapy."

  And he said nothing when still a third nurse came his way; a woman whowas callid, complaisant, and nauseatingly nymphomaniac.

  The important thing was to stay alive. Stay alive and try to learn.

  * * * * *

  It took him almost an additional year to find out what he wanted tofind out. More than eight months passed before he found a way ofsneaking out of his room at night, and a way of getting into thatThird Unit through a delivery door which was occasionally left openthrough negligence.

  Even then, all he learned was that the female patients did have theirliving quarters here, along with the members of the staffand--presumably--Dr. Leffingwell. Many of the women _were_ patientsrather than nurses, as claimed, and a good number of them were invarious stages of pregnancy, but this proved nothing.

  Several times Harry debated the possibilities of taking some of theother men in his Unit into his confidence. Then he remembered what hadhappened to Arnold Ritchie and decided against this course. The riskwas too great. He had to continue alone.

  It wasn't until Harry managed to get into Unit Four that he got whathe wanted (what he _didn't_ want) and learned that reality and dreamswere one and the same.

  There was the night, more than a year after he'd come to the treatmentcenter, when he finally broke into the basement and found theincinerators. And the incinerators led to the operating and deliverychambers, and the delivery chambers led to the laboratory and thelaboratory led to the incubators and the incubators led to thenightmare.

  In the nightmare Harry found himself looking down at the mistakes andthe failures and he recognized them for what they were, and he knewthen why the incinerators were kept busy and why the black smokepoured.

  In the nightmare he saw the special units containing those which werenot mistakes or failures, and in a way they were worse than theothers. They were red and wriggling there beneath the glass, and onthe glass surfaces hung the charts which gave the data. Then Harry sawthe names, saw his own name repeated twice--once for Sue, once forMyrna. And he realized that he had contributed to the successfuloutcome or issue of the experiments (_outcome? Issue? These horrors?_)and that was why Manschoff must have chosen to take the risk ofkeeping him alive. Because he was one of the _good_ guinea pigs, andhe had spawned, spawned living, mewing abominations.

  He had dreamed of these things, and now he saw that they were real, sothat nightmare merged with _now_, and he could gaze down at it withopen eyes and scream at last with open mouth.

  Then, of course, an attendant came running (_although he seemed to bemoving ever so slowly, because everything moves so slowly in a dream_)and Harry saw him coming and lifted a bell-glass and smashed it downover the man's head (_slowly, ever so slowly_) and then he heard theothers coming and he climbed out of the window and ran.

  The searchlights winked across the courtyards and the sirens vomitedhysteria from metallic throats and the night was filled with shadowsthat pursued.

  But Harry knew where to run. He ran straight through the nightmare,through all the fantastic but familiar convolutions of sight andsound, and then he came to the river and plunged in.

  Now the nightmare was not sight or sound, but merely sensation. Icycold and distilled darkness; ripples that ran, then raced and roiledand roared. But there had to be a way out of the nightmare and therehad to be a way out of the canyon, and that way was the river.

  Apparently no one else had thought of the river; perhaps they hadconsidered it as a possible avenue of escape and then discarded thenotion when they realized how it ripped and raged among the rocks asit finally plunged from the canyon's mouth. Obviously, no one couldhope to combat that current and survive.

  But strange things happen in nightmares. And you fight the numbnessand the blackness and you claw and convulse and you twist and turn andtoss and then you ride the crests of frenzy and plunge into thetroughs of panic and despair and you sweep round and round and sinkdown into nothingness until you break through to the freedom whichcomes only with oblivion.

  Somewhere beyond the canyon's moiling maw, Harry Collins found thatfreedom and that oblivion. He escaped from the nightmare, just as heescaped from the river.

  The river itself roared on without him.

  And the nightmare continued, too....