Sweet Dreams Page 6

  Doctor Smith was about to excuse himself when a hush fell over the cocktail party.

  Patti Shea had appeared. The Queen of Television.

  Men’s mouths were loosely open; women’s were tightly shut. She was wearing a maroon gown, severely cut and open to just above the navel. The color of the dress did more than make her straw-gold hair stand out. It picked it up and pushed it in the crowd’s face.

  Patti Shea sighed heavily, causing her breasts to rise which created a major seismic disturbance at the front of her dress. Several matronly ladies sat down.

  Patti’s right leg moved forward to walk into the room. Her dress clung to it momentarily, then her creamy leg appeared through a slit in the garment which reached up to the thigh.

  As she moved into the room, everyone made a desperate attempt to take their eyes off her. One man blinked and sat down. Norman Belliveau was biting his lower lip so hard it bled. Another man tilted back and fanned himself.

  Some whistled silently, some winked at their friends, but no one ignored her-not until Patti had taken her seat at a table in the front of the room and the room again lapsed into normal activity. Some kept looking. Her crossing of her right leg over her left sent the man on her right reeling and the man on her left painfully remembering not to stare, at the expert elbow-in-the-ribs urging of his wife, who had decided that the teased hair on which she had spent $35 that morning looked cheap.

  Lee (Woody) Woodward, the head of College Affairs, had risen hastily from his seat at the head table and started tapping on his glass, which no one could hear because Stanley Weinbaum, Director of Admissions, was busy shouting: “Sit down everybody. That means sit down.”

  As usual, no one paid any attention. Little by little, however, they began to drift toward their seats as plates of artificial vanilla, flavored chocolate, and fake strawberry ice creams were dropped off at their tables.

  Woodward rose to deliver his opening address, one he had written himself, filled with choice tidbits about the little man of the business industry, the unsung praises they all deserved, and his fervent hope of the good write-up their respective presses would give Edgewood University when the lights went out.

  He had trouble dealing with anything substantive because Dr. Wooley had belligerently refused to tell anyone anything about what technological breakthrough he had made in the field of television. He had insisted only that “everybody be ready for the plop to hit the fan.”

  Dr. Harold Smith drummed his fingers, sitting at a table in the rear. Get on with it, he said softly to himself.

  Arthur Grassione sat across a table from Don Salvatore Massello, smiling gently at the St. Louis kingpin. Grassione was flanked by Vince Marino and Edward Leung, who kept stealing glances at their boss, hoping he would start eating his ice cream so they could begin eating theirs.

  In the front of the slowly darkening room, Patti Shea felt two hands grab her legs. She stabbed one with a plastic fork, hearing a muffled groan to her right side. Then she carefully placed a dish of ice cream on her lap. The other hand, meeting no resistance, scuttled up her leg, then closed triumphantly on a melting slab of ice cream. It withdrew hastily.

  Suddenly there was a gleam in the front of the room. It wavered in a multi-colored rectangular shape for a moment, then took form. The entire room stared at a bright, full-color motion picture of a countryside.

  It was filled with oxen and working people. Then there was a tall young man working in a water-soaked field. He straightened and the audience saw a handsome Oriental face. The strong face looked back and laughed. Another face filled the screen, an old woman chattering away in another language. The face moved out of the picture and there was a small village with yelping dogs and little yellow children playing together happily. A few men talked to one side. Women walked along the path, smiling. They were thin and dirty, but the thinness was the well-fed muscle of a good diet, and the dirt was the refreshing soil of honest, heavy labor.

  The image faded and then changed to a sunset. Seen over trees, it was full of golden promise, and peaceful, almost perfect.

  The pictures continued on the high screen mounted on the wall behind the head table, pictures of an impossibly mellow happiness.

  Suddenly a voice was heard over the buzzing noises.

  “These are views of Vietnam, a Vietnam that none of us has ever known. One that probably no Vietnamese has known in the last twenty-five years. For this is a Vietnam of the imagination. The imagination of my nineteen-year-old adopted daughter.”

  The lights came back up. Standing to the side of the head table was Professor William Westhead Wooley. He pulled aside a small curtain, so the audience could see a teenaged Oriental girl, sitting in front of a television set. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling even with four discs attached to her throat and temples, leading by wires to the television set.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am Dr. William Wooley. And this is the Dreamocizer. It takes your fantasies, your dreams, your hopes…and plays them on your television, just as you envision them.”

  Silence filled the hall. Don Salvatore Massello leaned forward and looked at the images on the large screen behind the head table, images that were washed out and gray because of the brightened room lights. Arthur Grassione looked at the picture for a moment, then turned away and with a smirk, shared his view with Vince Marino that the device would never sell.

  Patti Shea sipped in her breath.

  Dr. Harold Smith looked around the room, whose silence was suddenly shattered by a laugh.

  It came from the head table, from Lee (Woody) Woodward, the head of College Affairs.

  “Is that all?” he said, laughing. “Is that all? Dreams? In full color? Is that all?” He laughed aloud, began to choke on his laughter and reached for a glass of water in front of his ice cream plate.

  “Stereophonic sound is optional,” Wooley said.

  Woodward stopped choking and laughing. “Wooley,” he said, “you brought all these people here for that? For a trick?”

  The rest of the room was silent. People stared as if at a major highway accident, unable to do anything but sure that something should be done.

  “What do you call this?” Wooley said politely, pointing to the overhead picture, which was a duplicate of the image of the small television screen in front of the Oriental girl.

  “Hell. Ridiculously easy to put together a fake like that,” Woodward said.

  “Come up and try it,” Wooley said.

  Woodward wasn’t about to have Edgewood University blamed for this farce. He rose from the table. “Wooley, I’m going to have your job.”

  “After tonight, it’s yours,” Wooley said. He tapped the Oriental girl on her tee-shirted shoulder. “Come on, Leen Forth. Time to come out.”

  She opened her almond eyes sadly, then smiled at Wooley, who gently removed the discs from her forehead and throat. As he did the picture disappeared and the television screen and the wall screen both went black.

  Wooley held up the four discs with the black wires leading from them.

  “This is all it takes,” he told the audience, “to unleash your imagination.”

  He gestured for Woodward to step forward. Woodward sat in the chair vacated by the busty young Oriental girl and Wooley began to attach the discs to his head.

  “It is not necessary to get them attached to any precise points,” Wooley explained casually. “The temples and the throat, almost anywhere will do.”

  As he attached the last disc to Woodward’s right temple, Wooley saw the man close his eyes tight. “No need to concentrate,” Wooley said. “Just think the way you normally do. Think about your favorite fantasy.”

  He tightened the disc on Woodward’s right temple with a slight twist that made the suction cup stick fast.

  A picture began to appear on the screens and the people in the cafeteria leaned forward. Some giggled in anticipation.

  On the screen came a woman’s eyes. They were green and beautiful.


  As more of the picture became clear, the woman’s eyes widened with fear. Her nostrils flared and as her entire face came into focus, everyone saw a dark piece of wide friction tape stretched tightly across her mouth.

  The audience hushed and the only sound in the room were the moans and the heavy breathing coming from the woman pictured on the large overhead screen. A small trickle of blood oozed from under a corner of the tape. The beads of sweat matched those that suddenly appeared on Woodward’s own head.

  His own mouth opened as everyone saw her delicate hands fill the screen. They were bound together with manacles that were chained through an iron ring on a hard concrete floor. The view on the screen enlarged and the audience could see the woman’s miniskirted buttocks clench and unclench in pain.

  Woodward’s eyes widened as the audience saw the woman’s young body come into view, its shapely legs tied apart to two more iron rings in the floor. Then everyone saw Lee Woodward enter the picture. He came toward the woman, his hand reaching down, clinging to the hem of her skirt.

  With a roar, Lee (Woody) Woodward, Harvard ’46, Columbia University School of Education, M.A., ’48, Ph.D., ’50, ripped the discs off his head and jumped to his feet. The image vanished from the screen. Woodward panted.

  “Hey,” said Stanley Weinbaum, Director of Admissions, “why’d you stop it? It was just getting good.”

  Woodward looked at the audience which looked at him, then glanced left and right, like a small animal trying to escape a forest fire. There was no escape. He looked back at Professor Wooley, a pleading anguished look on his face.

  “As I said,” Wooley explained coldly, “stereophonic sound is optional.”

  Wooley looked up at the crowd again. “This is the Dreamocizer, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow, I will be available at my home on campus to answer your questions.”

  He reached down to the television set and from its back unsnapped a small plastic box to which the four electrical leads were attached. Then he put his arm around the shoulder of the Oriental girl, and they left the cafeteria through a back door.

  Woody Woodward still stood in silent panic before the audience, but no one looked at him. They were busy talking with each other. The room was abuzz with whispered conversations.

  Patti Shea got quickly to her feet and, not worrying about her image, lifted her long dress and ran to find a telephone.

  Massello nodded at Grassione who whispered instructions to Vince Marino. Marino and Leung got to their feet and ran across the floor, toward the door Dr. Wooley and the girl had just gone through.

  Dr. Harold Smith watched all this and thought. He considered, for a flickering moment, the financial value of the Dreamocizer as an entertainment device, then rejected the whole question as being none of his business. But he instantly saw its value in the field of law enforcement and intelligence. No secret could ever be safe again. No one, no matter how well-trained, no matter how close-mouthed could be hooked up to that machine and not reveal what a clever questioner wanted him to reveal.

  In full color.

  With stereophonic sound an optional extra.

  CHAPTER NINE

  REVENGE WAS SWEET. It had been a long time coming for Dr. William Westhead Wooley, five long years since Lee (Woody) Woodward had gotten the position Wooley had wanted, as head of college affairs. Five years in which Woodward had browbeaten him and denigrated his work. Five years in which Woodward had taken every opportunity to criticize Wooley, to undercut him with university officials, five years of trying to make Wooley a laughing stock on the campus and off.

  Wooley understood why Woodward acted that way. It was the age-old conflict between the administrator and the artist, between the technician and the inventor. Woodward had been jealous of Wooley’s genius and had tried to drag him down into the intellectual gutter of Woodward’s own brain.

  Five long years.

  And all of it was repaid tonight, in twenty seconds of televised fantasy.

  Wooley could not contain a smile. His adopted daughter, Leen Forth, looked at him quizzically. “What’s so funny, Dad?” she said.

  He shushed her by pressing his right index finger to her lips.

  They sat in a darkened office upstairs from the cafeteria where the Dreamocizer had just been displayed. Downstairs, Wooley could hear the scuffling feet of men who had followed him from the cafeteria, wanting to talk to him, to be the first to try to buy the Dreamocizer from him. Perhaps even to try to steal it.

  Unconsciously, he pulled the translator, the small device which was able to convert fantasy thoughts into television images, closer to his chest.

  Let them all wait. A night of sleeping on what they had seen and tomorrow the offers would be that much higher, the deal that much sweeter.

  Not only money but recognition. To be something, to be someone, the purpose that had directed Dr. William Westhead Wooley’s entire life.

  He didn’t want his name in lights. But he wanted a table at the best restaurants at 7:45 o’clock on Saturday nights and he didn’t want to wait. He wanted to be recognized and pointed out on the streets.

  He wanted Pearl Bailey to point him out in the audience during curtain calls.

  Was that too much to ask?

  His wife had never understood and that was why she was now his ex-wife.

  She couldn’t understand the driven hour after driven hour he had spent working on his invention—“tinkering” she called it. Why couldn’t he just be content with being another professor at Edgewood U.? Why couldn’t he enjoy his wife and their adopted daughter and their neat little house on campus and be like other people?

  And he tried to tell her that teaching a course in “Technology of Cinema and Television” wasn’t the way he wanted to spend his life. He tried to tell her about the students’ experimental films—all nothing more than a series of arty ways to get their girlfriends to take off their clothes. That was all he saw day after day. Young girls taking off their clothes while the proud filmmaker exclaimed: “I experimented with the light sources.”

  Last term, the highlight had been three minutes of a young woman throwing up into a toilet while the camera zoomed in and out of her bloody private parts. When Wooley asked him what it was all about, the student filmmaker said it was a statement for legalized abortion.

  And when Wooley asked what emotion he thought the film might evoke from an audience, the student went into a hysterical fifteen-minute dissertation on the holy integrity of the filmmaking process.

  Before the sex films, there had been the musicals, all played in the nude. Before that, the students had done Macbeth as a western. Banjoes and all.

  A man could go crazy from all that. And Wooley tried to explain to his wife, but she just wouldn’t or couldn’t understand, and then she was no longer Mrs. William Westhead Wooley. And Wooley took a shabby apartment in town where the prying eyes of his university fellows could not spy on his experiments with brainwaves.

  And tonight, all the work had paid off, all the dreams were coming true.

  Tonight, St. Louis, Missouri. Tomorrow, the world.

  And the world could wait until tomorrow. The wait would just drive the price up.

  Wooley and Leen Forth sat in the darkness until long after they no longer heard any sounds from the cafeteria. Then they sneaked quietly down the back stairs, walked across campus to Wooley’s car, and got in for the drive to his St. Louis apartment.

  When he opened his apartment door with a key, the first thing Wooley noticed was that the piles of dirt and laundry seemed to have grown since the last time he looked. He wished Janet Hawley hadn’t just disappeared from his life. Not that she cleaned up his apartment—she would never have stooped so low—but she needled and nagged him into keeping it in some semblance of order.

  He wondered why she never answered her telephone anymore.

  Then Wooley noticed something else in the room. It was an odor, a rich pungent smell of tobacco smoke, the smell of a fine handmade cigar.

/>   He stepped back toward the door, putting his arm around Leen Forth. But a lamp came on behind him and a soft gentle voice said: “It’s good to see you, Doctor Wooley.”

  Wooley turned. Sitting on the couch was a dignified looking man with silver hair and piercing black eyes, wearing a dark pin-striped suit. Dr. Wooley had been frightened when he had first realized someone was in the apartment but when he saw the man, the gentility and nobility of his fine-featured face, the smooth, warm smile he flashed toward Wooley and his daughter, Wooley’s uneasiness vanished. He didn’t know his visitor but obviously such a man meant no harm to Wooley or Leen Forth.

  The man rose.

  “I am pleased to meet you, Professor. I am Salvatore Massello.”

  · · ·

  “Remo, wake up.” Smith’s voice was like ice in the darkened hotel room.

  He heard a snicker from Chiun, sleeping on his grass mat in the center of the floor. Then Remo’s voice:

  “You came up the steps, instead of using the elevator. Probably so you wouldn’t make any noise. You tripped on the second step from the top of the landing. Just before you opened the door to this floor you coughed. You jingled in your pocket looking for the room key before you found out the door was open. And now you tell me, wake up. I ask you. How’s somebody supposed to sleep if you keep making all this racket?”

  “Do not abuse the emperor,” Chiun told Remo in the dark. “He was very quiet.”

  “Yeah? Then why are you awake?”

  “I heard your breathing change,” Chiun said. “I thought perhaps you had been attacked by a flying hamburger. I was going to come to your rescue.”

  “Oh, blow it out your ears, Little Father,” Remo said. “Well, what is it, Smitty?”

  “Do you mind if I turn on a light? I don’t like to talk to people I can’t see.”

  “Learn to see in the dark,” Remo said. “Oh, go ahead, turn on the light. My night’s sleep is shot anyway.”

  When Smith turned on the light, Remo sat up on the couch and turned toward him. Like a slow puff of steam, Chiun rose from his steeping mat until he was in a lotus position looking at Smith.