Dreams by Richard A. Lupoff Read Free Book Online Page A

tell that they're all expensive and all new.
    "They can't be real. They're straight out of Mary McCarthy or someplace."
    It was the or someplace that got me. That was Jack. He had those Valerian girls pegged to the last decimal place but he wouldn't admit it, he had to put on that or someplace . It was like Einstein saying that E equals MC squared, "I guess." Modest Jack.
    We finished our drinks and settled the tab and went and got in the car, our car not theirs, and I drove down College Avenue to Randolph and turned on Randolph headed toward where Jack and Fran had left their station wagon. I turned on the radio loud still hoping to keep Jack from dropping the other shoe, even though I really knew it was too late. It was. He said:
    "Wait a minute. If all those Mad Ave types aren't real, and the Valerian girls aren't real . . . I guess maybe we aren't either. In our own way. In fact I don't think that anybody is." Pause. You could almost hear the heavy thinking. "Or anything!"
    I told the truth then.
    Frances and Pamela took it better than I thought they would. Like real troupers.
    But Jack was best of all. That man never wanted to stop learning, understanding new things all the time. I used a simile to MPT computers and studying mathematical models, and of course his agency background prepared him for understanding things like market research and test studies.
    He understood it, and he didn't flinch a bit. I thought he was entitled to something for that, I don't care what the rules say about no exceptions.
    So I cut over control and took the car up high, and looking out the windshield it seemed even to me that we were suspended there, completely surrounded by bright points of light, the stars above us and the lights of the Valerian campus and the town of Asbury below. I let him watch the first few lights wink out before he did.

Nothing Personal

    The flashes on the surface of Yuggoth were so brilliant that they shorted out every bit of electronic equipment on Beijing 11-11. Dr. Chen Jing-quo was the sole occupant of the observation satellite at the time, and her own eyes were spared only through a lucky break. She had been showering when the flashes occurred, sealed off from the outer universe.
    Still, she had a devil of time extricating herself from the shower-stall, now that the fractional horsepower motor that rolled the door open and shut as well as the touch-sensitive keypad that controlled the motor were dead.
    Dr. Chen found the manual override control by touch, got the door open, slipped into a jumpsuit and made her way to one of Beijing 11-11's visual ports. The series of flashes had jolted the ports' photosensitive intracoating to darken dramatically. Dr. Chen stared at Yuggoth, a pulsing, oblate globe that filled the sky above Beijing 11-11. Dr. Chen studied the planet's surface and the flashes briefly; she intuited that the observatory's electron telescopes would be useless. Fortunately the station was also fitted with an array of old-style optical telescopes. Dr. Chen made her way to one of these, a 500-millimeter Zeiss-Asahi model, and trained it upon the site of the most recent flashes.
    The flashes continued. Dr. Chen, at first alarmed and confused by the unexpected events, was regaining her calm. She focused the Zeiss-Asahi on the apparent epicenter of the flashes and was rewarded by the sight of another flash. This time she observed a bright dot moving away from the surface of the planet. It flashed away into the black trans-Neptunian space, toward the tiny, distant jewel that she knew was the sun. She followed the brilliant dot as long as she could. When it disappeared from sight she set about repairing the assaulted electronics of Beijing 11-11.
    As soon as she could do so she set up a hyperlightspeed link with her superiors on Earth's moon. Even as she did so she trained one of Beijing 11-11's powerful electron telescopes on Yuggoth's surface. She knew the planet's cities as well as—no, better