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Read Ebook: No Substitutions by Harmon Jim Johnson Illustrator
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Ebook has 200 lines and 9313 words, and 4 pages
NO SUBSTITUTIONS
Illustrated by JOHNSON
If it was happening to him, all right, he could take that ... but what if he was happening to it?
Putting people painlessly to sleep is really a depressing job. It keeps me awake at night thinking of all those bodies I have sent to the vaults, and it interferes to a marked extent with my digestion. I thought before Councilman Coleman came to see me that there wasn't much that could bother me worse.
Coleman came in the morning before I was really ready to face the day. My nerves were fairly well shot from the kind of work I did as superintendent of Dreamland. I chewed up my pill to calm me down, the one to pep me up, the capsule to strengthen my qualities as a relentless perfectionist. I washed them down with gin and orange juice and sat back, building up my fortitude to do business over the polished deck of my desk.
But instead of the usual morning run of hysterical relatives and masochistic mystics, I had to face one of my superiors from the Committee itself.
Councilman Coleman was an impressive figure in a tailored black tunic. His olive features were set off by bristling black eyes and a mobile mustache. He probably scared most people, but not me. Authority doesn't frighten me any more. I've put to sleep too many megalomaniacs, dictators, and civil servants.
"Warden Walker, I've been following your career with considerable interest," Coleman said.
"I've followed it from the first. I know every step you've made."
I didn't know whether to be flattered or apprehensive. "That's fine," I said. It didn't sound right.
"Tell me," Coleman said, crossing his legs, "what do you think of Dreamland in principle?"
I waited for Coleman's reaction. He merely nodded.
"Of course, it's barbaric to think of a prison as a place of punishment," I continued. "A prison is a place to keep a criminal away from society for a specific time so he can't harm that society for that time. Punishment, rehabilitation, all of it is secondary to that. The purpose of confinement is confinement."
The councilman edged forward an inch. "And you really think Dreamland is the most humane confinement possible?"
"Well," I hedged, "it's the most humane we've found yet. I suppose living through a--uh--movie with full sensory participation for year after year can get boring."
That was a question that made all of us in the Dreamland service uneasy. "No, Councilman, they don't. They know they aren't really Alexander of Macedonia, Tarzan, Casanova, or Buffalo Bill. They are conscious of all the time that is being spent out of their real lives; they know they have relatives and friends outside the dream. They know, unless--"
Coleman lifted a dark eyebrow above a black iris. "Unless?"
I cleared my throat. "Unless they go mad and really believe the dream they are living. But as you know, sir, the rate of madness among Dreamland inmates is only slightly above the norm for the population as a whole."
"How do prisoners like that adjust to reality?"
Was he deliberately trying to ask tough questions? "They don't. They think they are having some kind of delusion. Many of them become schizoid and pretend to go along with reality while secretly 'knowing' it to be a lie."
Coleman removed a pocket secretary and broke it open. "About these new free-choice models--do you think they genuinely are an improvement over the old fixed-image machines?"
"I'm glad you said that, Walker," Councilman Coleman told me warmly. "As I said, I've been following your career closely, and if you get through the next twenty-four-hour period as you have through the foregoing part of your Dream, you will be awakened at this time tomorrow. Congratulations!"
I sat there and took it.
Hadn't I thought about it ever since I had been appointed warden and transferred from my personnel job at the plant?
Whenever I had come upon two people talking, and it seemed as if I had come upon those same two people talking the same talk before, hadn't I wondered for an instant if it couldn't be a Dream, not reality at all?
Once I had experienced a Dream for five or ten minutes. I was driving a ground car down a spidery road made into a dismal tunnel by weeping trees, a dank, lavender maze. I had known at the time it was a Dream, but still, as the moments passed, I became more intent on the difficult road before me, my blocky hands on the steering wheel, thick fingers typing out the pattern of motion on the drive buttons.
I could remember that. Maybe I couldn't remember being shoved into the prison vault for so many years for such and such a crime.
I didn't really believe this, not then, but I couldn't afford to make a mistake, even if it were only some sort of intemperate test--as I was confident it was, with a sweet, throbbing fury against the man who would employ such a jagged broadsword for prying in his bureaucratic majesty.
"I've always thought," I said, "that it would be a good idea to show a prisoner what the modern penal system was all about by giving him a Dream in which he dreamed about Dreamland itself."
"Yes, indeed," Coleman concurred. Just that and no more.
I leaned intimately across my beautiful oak desk. "I've thought that projecting officials into the Dream and letting them talk with the prisoners might be a more effective form of investigation than mere observation."
"I should say so," Coleman remarked, and got up.
"I'll see you tomorrow at this time then, Walker." The councilman nodded curtly and turned to leave my office.
I held onto the sides of my desk to keep from diving over and teaching him to change his concept of humor.
The day was starting. If I got through it, giving a good show, I would be released from my Dream, he had said smugly.
But if this was a dream, did I want probation to reality?
Horbit was a twitchy little man whose business tunic was the same rodent color as his hair. He had a pronounced tic in his left cheek. "I have to get back," he told me with compelling earnestness.
"Mr. Horbit--Eddie--" I said, glancing at his file projected on my desk pad, "I can't put you back into a Dream. You served your full time for your crime. The maximum."
"But I haven't adjusted to society!"
"Eddie, I can shorten sentences, but I can't expand them beyond the limit set by the courts."
A tear of frustration spilled out of his left eye with the next twitch. "But Warden, sir, my psychiatrist said that I was unable to cope with reality. Come on now, Warden, you don't want a guy who can't cope with reality running around loose." He paused, puzzled. "Hell, I don't know why I can't express myself like I used to."
I looked up from the file. "I'm sorry, Eddie."
His eyes narrowed, both of them, on the next twitch. "Warden, I can always go out and commit another anti-social act."
"I'm afraid not, Eddie. The file shows you are capable of only one crime. And you don't have a wife any more, and she doesn't have a lover."
Horbit laughed. "Your files aren't infallible, Warden."
With one gesture, he ripped open his tunic and tore into his own flesh. No, not his own flesh. Pseudo-flesh. He took out the gun that was underneath.
"The beamer is made of X-ray-transparent plastic, Warden, but it works as well as one made of steel and lead."
"Now that you've got it in here," I said in time with the pulse in my throat, "what are you going to do with it?"
"I'm going to make you go down to the vaults and put me back to sleep, Warden."
I nodded. "I suppose you can do that. But what's to prevent me from waking you up as soon as I've taken away your gun?"
"This!" He tossed a sheet of paper onto my desk.
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