Dreams by Richard A. Lupoff Read Free Book Online

graying temples and the boyish suntan—says, so help me God, he actually says," Jack rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands and giggles soundlessly the way he does when he's too amused to speak, "he says, 'Let's lay it on the floor and walk around it a few times.'"
    "That was the beginning of the end for me," Jack says, tears of repressed laughter squeezing past closed eyelids and falling on the laminated artificial wood table top.
    More than you, Jack, I thought sadly.
    Pamela wanted me to throw some coins in the juke box and play some good sides so I stood up and left her with Jack studying the fauna indigenous to a gin mill that's right across the street from a posh institution for the daughters of the moneyed classes. That was one of the things that made Jack a top illustrator. Unfortunately, it had other results.
    I grabbed Frances by the hand and led her over to the juke box, a distance of fully a yard, and we started shooting coins and punching buttons. I'll say this for Wishart: he kept his jukebox up to date. Some gin mills, they think "Blue Suede Shoes" is the latest protest song. But Wishart kept up with the new stuff. Donovan and the Byrds and the Stones and Cream and the good Beatle sides, the ones that they won't let on AM at all.
    Frances and I slotted a Kennedy half and got seven sides for it and by the time we got back to the table I was really worried about Jack and the whole thing. I tried to swing the conversation around to anything but Jack's too penetrating observations. Even tried talking shop about MPT Computers Inc., the place where I worked in my cover, and how I couldn't tolerate the stories you're always reading about intelligent computers having nervous breakdowns when confronted with logical paradoxes.
    Computers just don't work that way, I used to tell everybody I could get to listen. They don't and they never will. It just isn't a valid projection, a real personality just isn't in the nature of a computer, it would take a qualitatively different thing that would simply not be a computer any more. I used to spiel on. So.
    It didn't do any good.
    Jack waved a little fuzzily at the waiter for another round of drinks. Was it the third? Fourth? Plus a couple with dinner, earlier, in the kraut joint. But booze didn't dim his insight. Or his eyesight.
    He looked around the Esquire, obviously focusing with difficulty, but also with a new look in his eyes that made me feel very, very sad. And yet, in a way, kind of proud that Jack was my friend. I could see that he understood the whole thing. He was the first person who ever did fully, in this world or any like it.
    Oh, others had guessed before, and some had even guessed right. Some nut cults had even been founded on the idea, but they were either wild guesses or lies that happened to be true, if you can grasp that.
    But Jack really knew. He really understood . It was a shame.
    He made a circular motion with a pointing finger, vaguely including everybody in the room, the Valerian girls and their various tweedy-looking Ivy League dates and the phonies and would-be pick-ups who always hang around a place like the Esquire, and he said, "This place isn't real either."
    Uh-oh, I thought. I knew it was coming then. I hoped he'd take a big swig and pass out or that a waiter would drop something on his head or anything to distract him, but nothing happened. Hell, I should have made a crude pass at the guy's wife even, that would have distracted him and maybe saved the whole thing, but when he was talking I just froze. Damn it!
    Then the fit hit the shan as they say, and it was too late to save anything.
    Pamela asked him what he meant.
    Jack made his all around gesture again. He said, "I mean mostly—just look at the girls in this place. Look at the perfect hairdos, and the fresh-from-the-beauty-parlor complexions with just the right amount of just the right makeup. And the clothes, they're all too right, nobody's underdressed or overdressed and you can