He opened the machine and checked the permanent record inside it, recorded by pens on paper tape. “Thought I’d misread the screen,” he said, and gave a peculiar laugh, a very clipped version of his usual full-throated roar. “Queer stuff going on in your cortex there, and I wasn’t even feeding your cortex at all with the Augmentor, I’d just begun a slight stimulus to the pons, nothing specific.... What’s this.... Christ, that must be 150 mv there.” He turned suddenly to Orr. “What were you thinking? Reconstruct it.”

An extreme reluctance possessed Orr, amounting to a sense of threat, of danger.

“I thought—I was thinking about the Aliens.”

“The Aldebaranians? Well?”

“I just thought of one I saw on the street, coming here.”

“And that reminded you, consciously or unconsciously, of the euthanasia you saw performed. Right? O.K. That might explain the funny business here down in the emotive centers, the Augmentor picked it up and exaggerated it.

You must have felt that—something special, unusual going on in your mind?”

“No,” Orr said, truthfully. It had not felt unusual.

“O.K. Now look, in case my reactions worried you there, you should know that I’ve had this Augmentor hooked up to my own brain several hundred times, and on lab subjects, some forty-five different subjects in fact. It’s not going to hurt you any more than it did them. But that reading was a very unusual one for an adult subject, and I simply wanted to check with you to see if you felt it subjectively.”

Haber was reassuring himself, not Orr, but it didn’t matter. Orr was past reassurance.

“O.K. Here we go again.” Haber restarted the EEG, and approached the ON button of the Augmentor. Orr set his teeth and faced Chaos and Old Night.

But they were not there. Nor was he downtown talking to a nine-foot turtle. He remained sitting on the comfortable couch looking at the misty, blue-gray cone of St. Helen out the window. And, quiet as a thief in the night, a sense of well-being came into him, a certainty that things were all right, and that he was in the middle of things. Self is universe. He would not be allowed to be isolated, to be stranded. He was back where he belonged. He felt an equanimity, a perfect certainty as to where he was and where everything else was. This feeling did not come to him as blissful or mystical, but simply as normal. It was the way he generally had felt, except in times of crisis, of agony; it was the mood of his childhood and all the best and profoundest hours of the boyhood and maturity; it was his natural mode of being. These last years he had lost it, gradually but almost entirely, scarcely realizing that he had lost it. Four years ago this month, four years ago in April, something had happened that had made him lose that balance altogether for a while; and recently the drugs he had taken, the dreams he had dreamed, the constant jumping from one life-memory to another, the worsening of the texture of life the more Haber unproved it, all this had sent him clear off course. Now, all at once, he was back where he belonged.

He knew that this was nothing he had accomplished by himself.

He said aloud, “Did the Augmentor do that?”

“Do what?” said Haber, leaning around the machinery again to watch the EEG screen.

“Oh... I don’t know.”

“It isn’t doing anything, in your sense,” Haber replied with a touch of irritation. Haber was likable at moments like this, playing no role and pretending no response, wholly absorbed in what he was trying to learn from the quick and subtle reactions of his machines. “It’s merely amplifying what your own brain’s doing at the moment, selectively reinforcing the activity, and your brain’s doing absolutely nothing interesting.... There.” He made a rapid note of something, returned to the Augmentor, then leaned back to observe the jiggling lines on the little screen. He separated three that had seemed one, by turning dials, then reunified them. Orr did not interrupt him again. Once Haber said sharply, “Shut your eyes. Roll the eyeballs upward. Right. Keep them shut, try to visualize something—a red cube. Right....”

When at last he turned the machines off and began to detach the electrodes, the serenity Orr had felt did not lapse, like the induced mood of a drug or alcohol. It remained. Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, “Dr. Haber, I can’t let you use my effective dreams any more.”

“Eh?” Haber said, his mind still on Orr’s brain, not on Orr.

“I can’t let you use my dreams any more.”

“‘Use’ them?”

“Use them.”

“Call it what you like,” Haber said. He had straightened up and towered over Orr, who was still sitting down. He was gray, large, broad, curly bearded, deep-chested, frowning. Your God is a jealous God. “I’m sorry, George, but you’re not in a position to say that.”

Orr’s gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.

“Yet I do say it,” he replied mildly.

Haber looked down at him, really looked at him for a moment, and saw him. He seemed to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a granite door. He crossed the room. He sat down behind his desk. Orr now stood up and stretched a little.

Haber stroked his black beard with a big, gray hand.

“I am on the verge—no, I’m in the midst—of a breakthrough,” he said, his deep voice not booming or jovial but dark, powerful. “Using your brain patterns in a feedback-elimination-replication-augmentation routine, I am programming the Augmentor to reproduce the EEG rhythms that obtain during effective dreaming. I call these e-state rhythms. When I have them sufficiently generalized, I will be able to superimpose them on the d-state rhythms of another brain, and after a period of synchronization they will, I believe, induce effective dreaming in that brain. Do you understand what that means? I’ll be able to induce the e-state in a properly selected and trained brain, as easily as a psychologist using ESB induces rage in a cat, or tranquillity in a psychotic human—more easily, for I can stimulate without implanting contacts or chemicals. I am within a few days, perhaps a few hours, of accomplishing this goal. Once I do, you’re off the hook. You will be unnecessary. I don’t like working with an unwilling subject, and progress will be much faster with a suitably equipped and oriented subject. But until I’m ready, I need you. This research must be finished. It is probably the most important piece of scientific research that has ever been done. I need you to the extent that—if your sense of obligation to me as a friend, and to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the welfare of all humanity, isn’t sufficient to keep you here—then I’m willing to compel you to serve a higher cause. If necessary, I’ll obtain an order of Obligatory Ther— of Personal Welfare Constraint. If necessary, I’ll use drugs, as if you were a violent psychotic. Your refusal to help in a matter of this importance is, of course, psychotic. Needless to say, however, I would infinitely rather have your free, voluntary help, without legal or psychic coercion. It would make all the difference to me.”

“It really wouldn’t make any difference to you,” Orr said, without belligerence.

“Why are you fighting me—now? Why now, George? When you’ve contributed so much, and we’re so near the goal?” Your God is a reproachful God. But guilt was not the way to get at George Orr; if he had been a man much given to guilt feelings he would not have lived to thirty.

“Because the longer you go on the worse it gets. And now, instead of preventing me from having effective dreams, you’re going to start having them yourself. I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live in yours.”

“What do you mean by that: ‘the worse it gets’? Look here, George.” Man to man. Reason will prevail. If only we sit down and talk things over.... “In the few weeks that we’ve worked together, this is what we’ve done. Eliminated overpopulation; restored the quality of urban life and the ecological balance of the planet. Eliminated cancer as a major killer.” He began to bend his strong, gray fingers down, enumerating. “Eliminated the color problem, racial hatred. Eliminated war. Eliminated the risk of species deterioration and the fostering of deleterious gene stocks. Eliminated—no, say in process of eliminating—poverty, economic inequality, the class war, all over the world. What else? Mental illness, maladjustment to reality: that’ll take a while, but we’ve made the first steps already. Under HURAD direction, the reduction of human misery, physical and psychic, and the constant increase of valid individual self-expression, is an ongoing thing, a constant progress. Progress, George! We’ve made more progress in six weeks than humanity made in six hundred thousand years!”