Astounding British Edition, Vol. 6, No. 8 — page 27: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

DREAMS ARE SACRED “Tll take you to see him. He won't see ou.. Because the thing that snapped was is conscious control over his imagination. It went into high gear, and now instead of writing his stories, he’s living them—quite literally, for him. “Far-off worlds, strange creatures, weird adventures—the detailed phantasmagoria of- a brilliant mind driving itself into insanity through the® sheer complexity of its own invention. He’s escaped from the harsh reality of his strained existence into a dream world. But he may make it real enough to. kill himself, “He’s the hero of course,” Steve con- tinued, opening the door into a private ward. “But even heroes sometimes die. My fear is that his morbidly overactive imagination working through his subconscious mind will evoke in this dream world in which he is living a situation wherein the hero must die. “You probably know that the sympathetic magic of witchcraft acts largely through the imagination. A person imagines he is being hexed to death—and dies. If Marsham Cras- well imagines that one of his fantastic creations kills the hero—himself—then he just won’t wake up again. “Drugs won’t touch him. Listen.” Steve looked at me across Marsham’s bed. I leaned down to hear the mutterings from the writer’s bloodless lips. *“. . . We must search the Plains of Istak for the Diamond. I, Multan, who now have the Sword, will lead thee; for the Snake must die and only in virtue of the Diamond can his death be encompassed. Come.” Craswell’s right hand, lying limp on the coverlet, twitched. He was beckoning his followers. “Still the Snake and the Diamond?” asked Steve. “He’s been living that dream for two days. We only know what’s happening when he speaks in his role of hero. Often it’s quite unintelligible. Sometimes a spark of consciousness filters through, and he fights to wake up. It’s pretty horrible to watch him squirming and trying to pull himself back into reality. Have you ever tried to pull yourself out of a nightmare and failed?” It was then that I remembered Billy, the Colt .45. I told Steve about it, back in his office. He said: “Sure. Your Pop had the right idea. In fact, I’m hoping to save Marsham by an application of the same principle. To do it, I need the co-operation of someone who combines a lively imagination with a severely practical streak, hoss-sense—and a sense of humor. Yes—you.” “Uh? How can I help? I don’t even know the guy.” — “You will,” said Steve, and the significant way he said it sent a trickle of ice water down my back. “You're going to get closer 25 - to Marsham Craswell than one man has ever been to another. “I'm going to project you—the essential you, that is, your mind and personality— into Craswell’s tortured brain.” I made pop-eyes, then thumbed at the magazine-lined wall. “Too much of yonder, bang Steve,” I said. “What you need is a rink.” : Steve lit his pipe, draped his long legs over the arm of his chair. “Miracles and witchcraft are out. What I propose to do is basically no more miraculous than the way your Pop put that gun into your dreams so you weren’t afraid any more. It’s merely more complex scientifically. “You've heard of the encephalograph? You know it picks up the surface neural currents of the brain, amplifies and records them, showing the degree—or absence—of mental activity. It can’t indicate the kind or. quality of such activity save in very general terms. By using comparison-graphs and other statistical methods to analyze its data, we can sometimes diagnose in- cipient insanity, for instance. But that’s all —until we started work on it, here at Pentagon. “We improved the penetration and in- duction pickup and needled the selectivity until we could probe any known portion of the brain. What we were looking for was a recognizable pattern among the millions of tiny electric currents that go to make up the imagery of thought, so that if the subject thought of something—a number, maybe— the instruments would react accordingly, give a pattern for it that would be repeated every time he thought of that number. “We failed, of course. The major part of the brain acts as a unity, no one part being responsible for either simple or complex imagery, but the activity of one portion inducing activity in other portions—with the exception of those parts dealing with auto- matic impulses. So if we were to get a pattern we should need thousands of pick- ups—a practical impossibility. It was as if we were trying to divine the pattern of a colored sweater by putting one tiny stitch of it under a microscope. “Paradoxically, our machine was too selective. We needed, not a probe, but an all-encompassing field, receptive simultane- ously to the multitudinous currents that make up a thought-pattern. “We found such a field. But we were no further forward. In a sense, we were back where we started from—because to analyze what the field picked up would have en- tailed the use of thousands of complex instruments. We had amplified thought, but we could not analyze it. “There was only one single instrument sufficiently sensitive and complex to do that —~another human brain.” I waved for a pause. COLA “I’m home.” I ichookssco