I rose slowly. The muscles of arms and legs and shoulders felt stiff and sore, as if they had actually been tested and strained in the ordeal of which I had dreamt. I glanced at the luminous clock face built into the wall just to the left of the bedroom telescreen. It was after three in the morning.
The floor of the trailer creaked gently as I plodded barefoot into the tiny kitchenette. The creak always gave me the impression that the trailer was moving, like a ship that groans protestingly even as it rides with no apparent sway on smooth waters. I pressed the coffee button and then, because I was too tired to move into the living area when I would only have to come back in a minute, I stood beside the sink, staring at the glowing red button as if hypnotized by it. I couldn't shake off the depression brought by the recurrence of the dream.
The red button blinked off, a green one flared, and a coffee cup dropped into the slot beneath the spout from which coffee poured in a hot black stream. I added a sugar pill and carried the cup into the living room.
This was a small room about seven feet wide and ten feet long. All of the furniture was built in—a sofa across the narrow wall under the picture window, two flanking plastic chairs on pedestal bases, a coffee table and a desk with its contour pedestal stool. Cramped quarters, but they were comfortable enough for one. The kitchenette in the center of the trailer had a small dining area. Beyond it were the bath, utility closets, and the small bedroom. I had never completely got over my luck in finding a place so close to the university.
Particularly one with a view.
I pressed the wall button and the draperies parted slowly and silently across the picture window to frame a panoramic view of the west basin of the San Fernando Valley. It was a clear moonlit night. The trailer community I lived in was on a knoll above Mulholland Drive near the crest of the Santa Monica mountains. Behind me, at the southern foot of the hills, were the massive buildings of the University of California at Los Angeles. My trailer faced northwest. In the distance I could see the glow which was always visible over the spaceport of the Western Space Command, though I could not now make out the bullet-shaped noses of the shuttle rockets pointing skyward, dominant landmarks which could easily be seen in the daytime projecting above an intervening ridge of hills at the far western end of the valley. The ever-present glow came from the atomic reactor factory where the power plants were produced for the interplanetary space ships. These days the bullet-nosed rockets were thundering skyward daily, carrying parts to the space station where the interplanetary ships were being assembled.
Thinking of the coming moment less than a month away when man would be leaving on his second flight to Mars, I felt some of my depression lifting. The good hot coffee had quieted the quivering muscles in my stomach. I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
At last I permitted my mind to return to the dream. It was the third time I had experienced it, the same dream in every detail, with its latent death wish, its peculiar delusion of extraordinary mental powers, its mysterious unknown enemy, its strange water fear. The terrifying reality of the dream, coupled with the unshakable conviction that it was in some way a portent, only partly explained why it left me so shaken.
For the dream was not the only symptom I had had. There were also the voices—and the clear sense of someone plotting against me. Sometimes the voices were extraordinarily vivid, whispering in my ear with as much clarity as if I were wearing earphones and tuning in a broadcast. I would stand at the window overlooking the valley, or even in my cubicle of an office at the university, and I would hear the meaningless fragments of thought—phrases, words and half-words jumping into my mind with an eerie suddenness, bringing the peculiar sensation that the thoughts in my own mind were being formed by someone else. For over a year I had heard the elusive voices, but it was only recently that I had begun to entertain the delusion that they were plotting against me.
"Someone is listening."