Dean R. Koontz - The Fall Of The Dream Machine

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Dean Koontz – The Fall of the Dream Machine

[This is his second book]

[Released as “Ace double” with Kenneth Bulmer – The Star Venturers (Not

included here)]

[Scanned by BuddyDk – May 18 2003]

[Original typos hasn’t been corrected]

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

If there was a single phrase that captured the public's attention more than any other in 1967,

it was this one: “The Medium Is the Massage.” Marshall McLuhan not only made a fortune

with it, but estab-lished himself as a prophet and philosopher. When McLuhan says the

printed word is doomed in our age of electronic communication, everyone listens.

Somehow, no one seems to notice that McLuhan's own predictions are presented via the

printed word and— by his own theories—are doomed from the start.

Still, it frightens me to think of a future where all artistic outlets are electronic, where all of life

be-comes an open, sterile, and public thing. In this novel, I have tried to shape a society that

has ad-vanced along the lines of the predictions in The Medium Is the Massage . . . and

then advanced a little further—a little too far.

McLuhan says we are drawing—via electronics—to-gether again into a Village Society. A

quick look around at television, telephones, and the recorded messages of today's pop

music groups makes this seem a reasonable statement. But what will follow this Village

Stage? A Household Society? And after that what will we have—and be?

This is not truly a horror story. Not quite.

-DEAN R. KOONTZ

Turn this book over for

second complete novel

The Fall of

the Dream

Machine

Dean R.Koontz

ACE BOOKS, INC.

1120 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10036

THE FALL OF THE DREAM MACHINE

Cover by Jack Gaughan.

To Gerda

From those who love her most:

Frog,

Tang,

Worm,

Potato,

and Lester the Alligator

THE STAR VENTURERS

Printed in U.S.A.

PART ONE:

STAGINGS FOR A REVOLUTION

The world is spinning on an axis two degrees different than it was a moment ago. . . .

Her / your hair is tangled over his / your face, losing him / you in a honey world of softness, a

hay world of smells. Her / your hands are upon him / you, massaging flesh of shoulders, neck, and

thigh, playing delicate symphonies on his / your body.

lisa the lovely: Her/your eyes are blue; her/your lips are warm and red. There is a sun going

nova in her/your flesh.

mike the manly: He/you is strong; he/you is gentle. There is a sun going nova in his/your flesh

too. . . .

lisa the lusty: Tigress, clawed and clutching . . .

mike the musky: Id desires personified and magnified . . .

Thunders roar and lightnings flash and it rains stones.

Now there is a relaxing wherein they/you hold hands and say sweet things and occasionally

raise onto elbows for brief moments to kiss and be kissed, to laugh and smile and sigh. The

shadow-filled bedroom is a womb: the walls are dark and reassuring, the mattress almost a belly

in the way it enfolds them/you. It is the Time After. And though it is not as exhilarating as the

Time During, it is less frustrating than the Time Before. Everyone waits for all of Show for the

Time During. Sometimes it comes in the afternoon and in strange places. But most often, as now,

it is the late evening. And waiting until evening is a long, long time to wait.

Especially if you are a pale worm that experiences only through Show. Especially then.

“Great show, Mike,” Limey said, spitting the words a-round the edges of the cigar clamped tightly

between his teeth. “Especially some of those Time After comments to Lisa. Inspired! Damn, you'd think

you really loved her!”

Mike Jorgova straightened his tie and slipped the ends of the magnetic tack behind shirt and in front

of tie. There was no real sense in answering Limey, for no one listened to a Performer anyway. Besides,

his ability in Show was not worth commenting on, for he would not be a star much longer. He did not

wish to discuss that which was about to become past history, a part of his life worthy of forgetful-ness. If

things worked out right in the next few hours, to-day's show had been his last.

“Tomorrow we have you two doing it in a bath house on a crowded beach,” Limey said. “That was

my idea.”

Mike controlled his rising anger—and rising gorge. “Isn't that just a bit too much? I mean, what with

all those people about.”

Limey did not catch the sarcasm. Limey caught very little beyond the exact dictionary definition of a

word. Inferences and inflections were too far above him. “No. Not too much, Mike. That's the point.

You'll be frightened of all those peo-ple and the possibility they may discover you. That will be something

different—fear and sex.”

“Perhaps I'll be too afraid to—”

“Now you know that isn't possible, Mike. You'll be able.”

And he knew he would. There were drugs that would make him able even in the middle of an

elephant stampede. He would be very competent, very able indeed. If he was there. And if all plans

worked and the gods smiled favora-bly, he would not be there ever again.

He slipped into his greatcoat, the prototype of the model that was currently so popular with the

viewing public. He wondered, briefly, how much Show got in royalties from the manufacturer of the

Jorgova Greatcoat.

“Fredrick!” Limey called out in his gravelly voice.

The door to the small dressing room opened and the bodyguard came in. “Mr. Jorgova will be

going home,” Limey said. “See that he arrives there safely.”

“Yes sir,” Fredrick said. His bulging muscles seemed to ripple, visible even under all those layers of

clothes. The vibra-pistol was an ugly lump on his breast, cancerous.

“Tomorrow, Mike,” Limey said, stepping into the hall and disappearing around a rack of sequined

costumes.

Mike resisted an urge to speak comradely with Fredrick. It was Fredrick who would help him

escape, and the excite-ment of the fast approaching break stirred his tongue. As if anticipating Jorgova's

thoughts, the bodyguard pointed to the four corners of the room where the beetle-like bodies of

microphones dotted the crevices. Mike pulled his gloves on, smiling. He could wait to talk. Actually, he

had only spoken with Fredrick twice before. The first time had been two weeks earlier. They had left the

studios, were crossing the macadamed parking lot. When the big man had begun to speak in whispered

tones, Mike had thought that it was because he was a new bodyguard and did not understand that

security forbade him to speak to his charge. Then the words had begun to seep into his ears: “I'm with

the Re-volution. We want to free you. Will you cooperate? Think about it and answer me tomorrow

night when we cross the lot; there are microphones everywhere else.” The second time, Mike had done

the talking: “Help me.”

He could have answered the first night. There was ab-solutely no need to think anything over. It was

not fun to share one's life with the rest of the world. There were seven hundred million subscribers to

Show. Seven hundred mil-lion people watched over his shoulder, felt what he felt, knew what he knew

(or most of what he knew, anyway), were what he was. All those goddamned people wherever he went,

doing his thing with him. It wasn't even funny to speculate that Lisa had made love to three hundred or so

million men tonight—and not just to him. It was not really humorous in the least.

“Let's go,” Fredrick said, walking briskly to the door.

“Yes, let's,” he answered, following and going through the portal the other held out of his way.

He had had a bodyguard now for four weeks—ever since the Revolutionists had freed Tom Storm,

the star of the second shift. A new boy had to be moved in to take Storm's place, a sixteen year old with

little experience, hard-ly in command of his emotions.

They passed the racks of clothes, the old props gathering dust, the card tables where stage helpers

got a few minutes of relaxation and lost most of their weekly pay. They came, eventually, to the set for

the first portion of the second shift show. The new boy, Ben Banner, sat with the ridiculously older Ellen

Heart at a dimly lighted table in an out-of-the-way cafe, his hand on her knee—kneading it instead of

caressing it. Mike would not have paused to watch, except for the Fade Out. Ellen began to grow hazy.

A gray-black film glowed over and immediately around her. She was a ghost person for a brief

moment—there and not there, real and unreal. Then, just as quickly as it had begun, it ended. All the

technicians were on their feet, running, listening to the dials tell them what the delicate instruments

recorded. The dials were not really dials, for they spoke, they did not show. But they were still called

dials. No one knew why. There were a number of shrugged shoulders but no I've-got-it! expressions.

Fredrick pressed on his shoulder to remind him that they had a time schedule to meet if they were to

bring off his escape. He continued walking, turning into the main corri-dor that led to the large

simu-wood doors at the end of the blue-tiled tunnel. Fade Outs were a relatively recent development, he

mused as he walked. They had begun two months before when the toto-experience relays had been

inserted to replace the ninety percent relays that had been in use. There were now half a dozen Fade

Outs a week, at a minimum. Each time, the Performer appeared to get fuzzy, frayed at the edges, a

smokeman. One moment there was a real actor, the next there was a phantom—like (re-portedly) the

image on an ancient television screen during a thunderstorm. The Performer did not remember those

seconds of Fade Out at all. His mind was a blank except for what seemed to be snatches of talking that

had not been spoken on the stage or anywhere in the studio. Aside from that—the partially heard babble

of voices—there was nothing. It was an eerie blank. He knew. He had Faded Out twice.

The door opened automatically at their approach, and they stepped out into the cold wind that spit

bits of snow and ice at them, stinging their faces. Far above, a yellow moon glowed briefly between

clouds, was gone into dark-ness. Jorgova stepped into the back of his limousine floater, slid to the end of

the seat to give Fredrick room, and re-minded himself that the car was bugged just as the dressing room

had been. Just as his bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom were.

The driver, an anemic slug of a man in a blue and yel-low Show uniform, pulled from the parking lot

onto the broad expanse of the superway, catching the eastbound auto-guide and flipping the controls to

robo. They flut-tered along in silence, flakes of snow cracking against the glass like soft bullets, some

louder than others as the tem-perature neared the underside of the freezing mark, coming from zero.

Sleet. The orange-topped guard rails flicked past, tiny sentinels, each with a bright phosphorescent cap,

al-ways at attention.

At the first exit, the chauffeur flipped off the robo, pulled the floater off the guide beam, and

descended the twisting ramp. At the very bottom, Mike braced himself, following Fredrick's example. In

a moment, he saw why they had braced. A light pickup rammed the nose of their own ve-hicle and

tumbled both craft into an open drainage ditch full of mud and slush that slopped over the windows, then

fell back into smaller waves that lapped at the doors.

Fredrick reached across the back of the front seat, brought the barrel of his vibra-pistol down solidly

on the skull of the driver. The man slumped sideways onto the seat, too meek to offer even a moan.

“C'mon,” Fredrick said.

A third vehicle, a nondescript Champion, dull gray, pulled up beside them. The doors swung open;

they climbed in. “Welcome to freedom,” the driver called over his shoulder. He was a red-faced man

with a great number of freckles, and broad, white teeth.

Freedom. But they had not gone a hundred yards before the helicopter flitted down over the trees,

beating its dragon wings fiercely, focusing its luminous eyes on them, washing them with almost liquid

brilliance.

Fredrick opened his door, placed the gun on the top of it and sighted on the aircraft. A thin, green

pencil beam, almost invisible, flowed from his weapon, ended in a puff of blue-white smoke, blinding the

dragon in one eye. An answering beam smashed the glass out of the wrap-around rear window. Fredrick

fired again, hit again. But the gun-man in the helicopter returned the fire, catching Fredrick squarely on

the temple and ripping his skull apart like a muskmelon.

“Close the door!” the driver shouted.

But Mike found he was paralyzed. He could not force his fingers to move, let alone his arms. His

body was locked in a fear grip, and the fingernails of that imaginary hand were biting into him, hurting. He

could not move, merely look. The headless corpse lay across the seat, blood gushing from torn veins.

Fredrick was dead. And Fredrick had been the only one of these people he knew even remotely. And he

had spoken to Fredrick only twice in his life! Suddenly it all seemed rather wild, rather improbable. He

was run-ning away from something he knew into something he could never conceive of. He had never

been free. He had, from birth, been raised and groomed for Show. He had been taught how to sharpen

his emotions for transmission. He had been taught complete control of his sensitivities. He had been,

shortly, spoon fed. Death had been only a rumor. Here it was a reality; and from the driver's lack of

shock, it seemed to be a common reality. He wanted to leap from the car, but his legs denied him.

The driver cursed, shoved the corpse from the seat, then turned back to the wheel. He slammed

down on the ac-celerator, pulled onto the adjoining secondary road that branched away from streetlights

and into darkness. The heli-copter, though it now had no spotlights, was following. The pounding of its

rotors shook the roof, made the floater bobble up and down on its own air cushion. The driver cut the

headlamps, swerved into another side road that veered off toward a dense forest. Still, the helicopter was

there.

A fountain of flames sprang up in front of them. Purple and cinnabar. Pretty, Jorgova thought and

was immediately shocked that he could think of anything beautiful so soon after the corpse without a

head had spewed blood over him.

. . . On his face. . . .

He wiped the wet droplets from his cheeks and looked at them, his hands moving freely now. He had

not noticed the dampness until this moment when he felt something trickle toward his chin. Fredrick's

blood was all over his face. There was a sticky pool of it on the floor. Gray-white brain matter and

chunks of hair-matted bone stuck to his coat and trousers. He was, very suddenly, sick on the floor.

When he could manage to look up again, he could see flames bursting nearer and nearer the car. The

tunnel of the forest loomed ahead. If the helicopter pilot realized what they were speeding toward, the

shots would no longer just be warnings. He was not particularly frightened by that thought. He was not

scared of Death so much as Uncer-tainty. Death would be better than going through all of this to face

something and someone he had never been raised to cope with. That was frightening. That was

terrifying!

The flames struck the hood, washed over the windscreen, roared across the roof.

The floater slipped off the smooth path of the road, bobbled across the drainage ditch and a number

of boul-ders, coming within an inch or so of a few of them, then swung back onto the road

again—successfully avoiding the fire. That time. The second time the flames struck, they bit at the roof. It

was so violent a burst that the interior padding caught fire from contact with the metal roof. Mike began

pounding at it with his hand, burned himself.

“Your coat!” the freckled driver shouted.

He struggled out of the bulky garment, wrapped it about his arm, began thumping it against the

ceiling. There was a great deal of smoke. The fire, however, seemed to be smothered. He kept thumping

to be certain.

The forest was close.

The trees looked like beneficent gods to him.

Flames coughed over the trunk. A full blast struck them broadside, fused the control wires of the

underslung air system, and sent the car rolling into the cavernous maw of the trees that swallowed the

road. They were not so much as a leaf in October wind, spinning, tumbling, tossing. There was a clanging

of things falling loose and rattling across the road into darkness. There was the squeal and crunch of

metal collapsing beneath its own weight.

Mike clutched the rear of the front seat, tried to remem-ber to keep his body limp so that the crashes

would damage him as little as possible. When the floater finally came to a halt, lying on its roof under a

canopy of pine boughs, he was uninjured, save for a few bruises. His largest pro-blem was the thick

splotches of blood and upchuck on his clothes. He shucked off his sport jacket, trying to rid him-self of

the overwhelming stench.

Someone was at the door. He prepared himself for Limey's face, Limey's cigar glowing insanely in

the cool, dark air. But it was not Limey. It was not even anyone in Show uni-form. “You okay in there,

you three?”

There was a grunt from the direction of the front seat. The freckled face appeared, strained in

something that might have been pain, might have been fear, might have been both. “Fredrick was killed

back at the underpass. I think my arm is broken.”

“You?” the stranger said, turning to Mike.

“Okay. I think.”

“Well, let's get out of here. They're landing that damn whirligig now.”

Mike stepped through the door, helped the new stranger wrench the dented front door open and

extract the driver. The man's arm was definitely broken. Bone jutted through in one place, sharp and

white and bloody.

They ran to a larger limousine waiting with its lights out a few hundred feet down the lane. Just as they

climbed in, a vibra-beam tore at the earth in front of the car, set the ground steaming. To Mike's surprise,

the driver turned the floater to face the Show guards instead of running. The beams crackled against the

windscreen, glanced off the hood and fenders without doing damage.

“Vibra-proof,” the new stranger said, smiling.

“And expensive,” Jorgova added.

The blades of the air system stuttered, and the car jolted for a moment as one of the guards went

under. The other Show man jumped to the side of the road, kept firing. The chauffeur swung the car

around, veered toward the man. He was an excellent driver. His hands worked as smoothly as a concert

violinist's, plucking and drawing at the wheel. The limousine clipped the remaining guard with its front

bumper, sent him in a death plunge over a hundred foot drop onto spiked rocks.

“We're behind schedule,” the newcomer said. “Let's move.”

The chauffeur accelerated. Trees flashed by, gray shad-ows against the darker shadows of the night.

Immediate danger behind, Mike began to think, once again, of his situation, his apartness. He turned

to the man who seemed to be in charge. “What is expected of me?”

“What?” the other asked, looking at him, more than curi-osity clouding his dark eyes.

“What do I do to earn this freedom?”

“Nothing,” the other man said. “We have freed you be-cause—”

Mike forced self-assurance into his voice and into his own heart. “Don't give me any propaganda line.

You are leading some sort of revolution against Show. It's supposed to be taboo, but the stories float

through the studios, fast and thick. What do you want of me?”

The stranger remained silent a moment, then sighed. “There is no sense leading you in slowly. And I

don't blame you for being determined to know where you stand. You will be behind a desk throughout

the Revolution—when it comes. You will never go back into Show again. Other men will do that.”

He felt as if he were being shoved along, carried with the tide instead of riding atop it. “I want to be in

the front lines,” he snapped. He did not want to be in the front lines, really, but he had to gain some

control over what was happening to him or he'd be nothing more than he had been in Show—a puppet, a

tool.

“That's impossible! We need you too much to risk—”

“Either I work in the front lines or I get out here,” he said, taking hold of the door handle.

They stared at each other, one trying to outlast the other. There was no sound but the purring of the

air system, the whoof of an occasional gust of air sweeping across the car. The chauffeur and the man

with the broken arm were lis-tening, waiting.

“You really mean it,” the other man said at last.

“You're damn right I do.”

More silence. At length: “All right. You win.” He turned to the chauffeur. “Blake, take us to Dr.

McGivey's instead.”

“Then I'm on the front lines?”

“Exactly.”

It had not been heroism or anything remotely like it that had driven him to demand to be in the thick

of action. He had been sinking again into a swamp where the currents twisted him without any regard to

where he wished to go. Had they demanded he fight, he would have demanded a desk job. He felt as if

he were guiding his fate now. And he felt, very slightly, better. “What will I do, specifically?”

The stranger offered his hand, shook. “First, I am Andrew Flaxen. I'm some sort of officer in this

whole thing; I'm not sure what exactly.” They stopped shaking. “Your mis-sion, since you demand action,

will be to rescue Lisa Mon-vasa from Show.”

The night rushed past like coal dust

She undressed without turning the lights on. She sus-pected them of having planted cameras recently.

She made a game of seeing things in the shadows: a dog's head, ears flattened in rage, teeth gritted; a

matronly woman bending over a loaf of homemade bread, sticking— what?—toothpicks into the

product; a spider. . . .

Something else . . .

But she could not see herself.

She crawled onto the humming Lull Cushion of the bed and listened to the notes that slithered over its

million fi-bers, abandoned herself to the massaging tingle of its babel tongues. . . .

She was tired.

She thought about Mike and about Show. And, in the pit of her mind, somewhere deep down, they

were two dif-ferent things.

She fell asleep.

III

Anaxemander Cockley was not a man to be sneered at. He controlled, figuratively and literally, seven

hundred mil-lion people. He owned Show. It had been his from the start —his invention, his crusade, his

success. He had first con-ceived of it while in his twenties. But no one would back him then; all the

financiers so stuck on the idea of tradi-tional television that they could not see beyond their red noses.

Wherever he went, he was rebuked. There were no investors for “crackpot schemes.”

That had been two hundred years ago. Not only had he made a success of Show and lived to gloat

about it, but his vast sums of money enabled him to set up the most complete, most detailed set of

computer surgeons in the world. He was able to buy from the UN organ bank to replace whatever wore

out. Then he began building his own organ bank and forgot the UN; he was completely self-contained.

He had lived to gloat—and had been gloating for two hundred years.

His early years pointed to his later success. He had, when young, dedicated his life to making money.

He had several good character traits to help him along; imagina-tion, ruthlessness, greed, and a will of

purest iron. When his father died, leaving him in charge of the small electron-ics firm that had produced

conservative things for conserva-tive businesses, it was Anaxemander who turned the plant into a

laboratory. Risking all the profits and holdings, it was Cockley Electronics that turned out the first

workable robot—a robosweep that could sweep any floor, sliding its compact body under the lowest

obstacles that would force a housewife to get down on her pretty hands and knees. Realizing that the

greatest area open to ideas was the undeveloped field of housework and home repair machines, Cockley

next produced the robomower which sped across the grass (pre-programmed for that individual lawn in

the expensive models and simply radio-controlled in the cheaper make) snipping away without aid. The

company moved from a low six figure company to one of the top hundred in three years. In five years, it

was grossing thirty-nine million dollars per quarter—thanks to the robopainter and the roboironer.

The robopainter was, perhaps, the most complex machine devised by Cockley Electronics. It was a

spider-like appara-tus that wielded four rollers for interior work and a roller and three brushes for

exterior painting. Each leg was capped with a suction cup that allowed it to climb easily where a man

would be in danger. In fact, the original promotion gimmick was the machine's climbing up the bald face

of Racatacha Peak, that sheer and featureless cliff recognized as the tallest on the moon.

The money had come. Eventually, he handed over the production of all the robomechs to Ford, GM,

and General Electric. Then the big boom came with the mass production. He received monthly royalty

checks in the hundreds of thousands. With his money, he devoted himself to the build-ing of the Cockley

Laboratories for Mind Studies. It was this institution and its hundreds of workers who crystallized Show

into a reality.

It took eleven years from the birth of the idea to its per-fection.

He would never forget that night in 1991 when the fifty reporters, by special invitation, had set

themselves warily into the mind-sharing chairs and flicked on—warily again —the mind-sharing auras,

and had felt just what it was like for Algernon Fowler to stick his head in a lion's mouth. They

experienced his fear, his arrogance, his sexual stimulation. They also sat entranced as the acrobats left

their perches and glided through empty air to waiting hands; and most spectacularly—and, Cockley

thought, most luckily—they had even experienced death when that lovely young girl (what had her name

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DeanKoontz–TheFalloftheDreamMachine[Thisishissecondbook][Releasedas“Acedouble”withKennethBulmer–TheStarVenturers(Notincludedhere)][ScannedbyBuddyDk–May182003][Originaltyposhasn’tbeencorrected]AUTHOR'SFOREWORDIftherewasasinglephrasethatcapturedthepublic'sattentionmorethananyotherin1967,itwasthisone:“...

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Dean R. Koontz - The Fall Of The Dream Machine

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