The Dream Master

They were back atop the hill overlooking the junkheap. It was filled with tractors and bulldozers and steamshovels, with cranes and diggers and trucks. It was piled high with twisted metal, rusted metal, broken metal. Frames and

plates and springs and beams lay about, and the blades and shovels and drills were all smashed. It was the Boot Hill of the tool, the Potter's Field of the machine.

"What... ?" she said.

"Scrap," said he. "This is the part Walt didn't sing about —the things that step on his blades of grass, the things that tear them up by the roots."

They made their way through the place of dead mach­inery.

"Haunted, too," he added, "in a way.

"This machine bulldozed an Indian burial mound, and this one cut down the oldest tree on the continent. This one dug a cha

"You're being very unfair," she said.

"Of course," said Render. "You should always try for a large point if you want to make a small one. Remember, I took you where the panther walks to and fro on the limb overhead, and where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, and where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou. Do you recall what I said when you asked, 'Why these things?' "

"You said, 'More than the idyllic must you know.' "

"Right, and since you were once again so eager to take over, I decided that a little more pain and a little less pleasure might strengthen my position. You've already got whatever goes wrong. I catch it."

"Yes," she said, "I know. But this picture of mechanism paving the road to hell... Black or white, really? Which is it?"

"Gray," he told her. "Come a little further."

They rounded a heap of cans and bottles and bedsprings. He stooped beneath a jutting piece of metal and pulled open a hatch.

"Behold hidden in the belly of this great tank truck against the ages of ages!"

Its fantastic glow filled the dark cavity with a soft green light, spreading from where it blazed within a tool box he had flung open.

"Oh..."

"The Holy Grail," he a

"None is given," she said.

"Ah, but there is a tradition, a legend that Rothman knew: The Grail was handed down by Melchisadek, High Priest of Israel, and destined to reach the hands of the Messiah. But where did Melchisadek get it? He carved it from a gigantic emerald he had found in the wilderness, an emerald which had fallen from the crown of Shmael, Angel of Darkness, as he was cast down from On High. There is your Grail, from light to darkness to light to darkness to who knows? What is the point of it all? Enantiadromia, my dear. —Good-bye, Grail."

He closed the lid and all was darkness.

Then, as he walked on through Winchester Cathedral, flat ceilings everywhere, a statue beheaded (said the guide) by Cromwell, off to his right, he recalled the follow­ing session. He remembered his almost-unwilling Adam-at­titude as he had named all the animals passing before them, led, of course, by the one she had wanted to see, colored fearsome by his own unease. He had felt pleasantly bucolic after boning up on an old Botany text and then proceeding to Shape and name the flowers of the fields.

So far they had stayed out of the cities, far away from the machines. Her emotions were still too powerful at the

sight of the simple, carefully introduced objects to risk plunging her into so complicated and chaotic a wilderness yet; he would build her city slowly.

Something passed rapidly, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render took Jill's hand in his for a moment and smiled as she looked up at him. Knowing she verged upon beauty, Jill normally took great pains to achieve it. But today her hair was simply drawn back and knotted behind her head, and her lips and her eyes were pale; and her exposed ears were tiny and white and somewhat pointed.

"Observe the scalloped capitals," he whispered. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif."

"Faugh!" said she.

"Shh!" said a sunburnt little woman nearby, whose face seemed to crack and fall back together again as she pursed and unpursed her lips.

Later, as they strolled back toward their hotel, Render said, "Okay on Winchester?"

"Okay on Winchester."

"Happy?"

"Happy."

"Good; then we can leave this afternoon."

"All right."

"For Switzerland ..."

She stopped and toyed with a button on his coat.

"Couldn't we just spend a day or two looking at some old chateaux first? After all, they're just across the Cha

"Okay," he said.

She looked up—a trifle surprised.

"What? No argument?" She smiled. "Where is your fighting spirit?—to let me push you around like this?"

She took his arm then and they walked on as he said, "Yesterday, while we were galloping about in the i

my fighting spirit, because I'm certain it was my voice. I've

given up der geist der stets verneint. Pax vobiscum! Let us

be gone to France. Alors!"

"Dear Rendy, it'll only be another day or two..." "Amen," he said, "though my skis that were waxed are

already waning."

So they did that, and on the morn of the third day, when she spoke to him of castles in Spain, he reflected aloud that while psychologists drink and only grow angry, psychiatrists have been known to drink, grow angry, and break things. Construing this as a veiled threat aimed at the Wedgewoods she had collected, she acquiesced to his desire to skiing.

Free! Render almost screamed it.

His heart was pounding inside his head. He leaned hard. He cut to the left. The wind strapped at his face; a shower of ice crystals, like bullets of emery, fired by him, scraped against his cheek.

He was moving. Aye—the world had ended at Weissflu-joch, and Dorftali led down and away from this portal.

His feet were two gleaming rivers which raced across the stark, curving plains; they could not be frozen in their course. Downward. He flowed. Away from all the rooms of the world. Away from the stifling lack of intensity, from the day's hundred spoon-fed welfares, from the killing pace of the forced amusements that hacked at the Hydra, leisure; away.

And as he fled down the run he felt a strong desire to look back over his shoulder, as though to see whether the world he had left behind and above had set one fearsome embodiment of itself, like a shadow, to trail along after him, hunt him down, and to drag him back to a warm and well-lit coffin in the sky, there to be laid to rest with a spike of aluminum driven through his will and a garland of alternating currents smothering his spirit.