Lathe of Heaven, The by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page B

they.
    Indeed the automatic-elevator parking structure had been invented in Portland, long long ago; and before the private car strangled in its own exhaust, ramp-style parking buildings had gone up to fifteen and twenty stories. Not all these had been torn down since the eighties to make room for high-rise office and apartment buildings; some had been converted. This one, 209 S.W. Burnside, still smelled of ghostly gasoline fumes. Its cement floors were stained with the excreta of innumerable engines, the wheelprints of the dinosaurs were fossilized in the dust of its echoing halls. All the floors had a curious slant, a skewness, due to the basic helical-ramp construction of the building; in the offices of Forman, Esserbeck, Goodhue and Rutti, one was never entirely convinced that one was standing quite upright.
    Miss Lelache sat behind the screen of bookcases and files that semi-separated her semi-office from Mr. Pearl's semi-office, and thought of herself as a Black Widow.
    There she sat, poisonous; hard, shiny, and poisonous; waiting, waiting.
    And the victim came.
    A born victim. Hair like a little girl's, brown and fine, little blond beard; soft white skin like a fish's belly; meek, mild, stuttering. Shit! If she stepped on him he wouldn't even crunch.
    "Well I, I think it's a, it's a matter of, of rights of privacy sort of," he was saying.
    "Invasion of privacy, I mean. But I'm not sure. That's why I wanted advice."
    "Well. Shoot," said Miss Lelache. The victim could not shoot. His stuttering pipe had dried up.
    "You're under Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment," Miss Lelache said, referring to the note Mr. Esserbeck had sent in previously, "for infraction of Federal regulations controlling dispensation of medications at autodrugstores."
    "Yes. If I agree to psychiatric treatment I won't get prosecuted."
    "That's the gist of it, yes," the lawyer said dryly. The man struck her as not exactly feeble-minded, but revoltingly simple. She cleared her throat.
    He cleared his throat. Monkey see, monkey do. Gradually, with a lot of backing and filling, he explained that he was undergoing a therapy which consisted essentially of hypnotically induced sleep and dreaming. He felt that the psychiatrist, by ordering him to dream certain dreams, might be infringing upon his rights of privacy as defined in the New Federal Constitution of 1984.
    "Well. Something like this came up last year in Arizona," said Miss Lelache. "Man under VTT tried to sue his therapist for implanting homosexual tendencies in him. Of course the shrink was simply using standard conditioning techniques, and the plaintiff actually was a terrific repressed homo; he got arrested "for trying to bugger a twelve-year-old boy in broad daylight in the middle of Phoenix Park, before the case even got to court He wound up in Obligatory Therapy in Tehachapi. Well. What I'm getting at is that you've got to be cautious in making this sort of allegation. Most psychiatrists who get Government referrals are cautious men themselves, respectable practitioners. Now if you can provide any instance, any occurrence, that might serve as real evidence; but mere suspicions won't do. In fact, they might land you in Obligatory, that's the Mental Hospital in Linnton, or in jail."
    "Could they . . . maybe just give me another psychiatrist?"
    "Well. Not without real cause. The Medical School referred you to this Haber; and they're good, up there, you know. If you brought a complaint against Haber the men who heard it as specialists would very likely be Med School men, probably the same ones that interviewed you. They won't take a patient's word against a doctor's with no evidence. Not in this kind of case."
    "A mental case," the client said sadly.
    "Exactly."
    He said nothing for a while. At last he raised his eyes to hers, clear, light eyes, a look without anger and without hope; he smiled and said, "Thank you very much, Miss Lelache. I'm sorry to have wasted your time."
    "Well, wait!" she said.