The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny Page B

doesn’t bother you.”
    “Blood bother a doctor?” She laughed softly. “Well, it was late, right before the last act…”
    Render leaned back and smiled, lit a cigarette, listened.
    Outside, the country settled down to a smooth plain and he coasted across it like a bowling ball, right in the groove all the way to the pocket.
    He passed a walking man.
    Beneath high wires and above buried cables, he was walking again, beside a great branch of the road-tree, walking through snow-specked air and broadcast power.
    Cars sped by, and a few of their passengers saw him.
    His hands were in the pockets of his jacket and his head was low, because he looked at nothing. His collar was turned up and heaven’s melting contributions, the snowflakes, were collected on the brim of his hat.
    He wore rubbers. The ground was wet and a little muddy.
    He trudged on, a stray charge within the field of a great generator.
    “… Dinner tonight at the P & S?”
    “Why not?” said Render.
    “Say eight?”
    “‘Eight.’ Tally-ho!”
    Some of them dropped down out of the sky, but mainly they came spinning in off the roads…
    The cars released their people onto platforms within the great car-hives. The air-taxis set theirs free in landing areas, near to the kiosks of the underground belt-way.
    But whatever the means by which they arrived, the people toured Exhibit Hall on foot.
    The building was octagonal, its roof an inverted soup bowl. Eight non-functional triangles of black stone provided decoration at each corner, without.
    The soup bowl was a selective filter. Right now, it was sucking all the blue out of the gray evening and was glowing faintly on the outside—whiter than all the dirty snows of yesterday. Its ceiling was a cloudless summer sky at eleven o’clock in the a.m., without a sun to mar its Morning Glory frosting.
    The people flowed beneath this sky, passed among the exhibits, moved like a shallow stream through a place of rocks.
    They moved in ripples and random swirlings. They eddied; they churned, bubbled, babbled. Occasionally, there was a sparkle…
    They poured steadily from the parked machines beyond the blue horizon.
    After they had run their course, they completed the circuit by returning to the metal clouds which had borne them to the running.
    It was Outward that they passed.
    Outward was the Air Force-sponsored Exhibit which had been open for the past two weeks, twenty-four hours a day, and which had drawn spectators from all over the world.
    Outward was a survey of Man’s achievements in Space.
    Heading Outward was a two-star general, with a dozen colonels, eighteen lieutenant colonels, many majors, numerous captains, and countless lieutenants on his staff. Nobody ever saw the general, excepting the colonels and the people from Exhibits, Incorporated. Exhibits, Incorporated owned Exhibit Hall, there by the spaceport, and they set things up in good taste for all the exhibitionists who employed them.
    First, to the right, as you entered Toadstool Hall (as it had been dubbed by some Vite), was the Gallery.
    In the Gallery were the mural-sized photos that a spectator could almost walk off into, losing himself in the high, slender mountains behind Moonbase III (which looked as if they would sway in the wind, were there any wind to sway them); or wander through the bubble-cap of that undermoon city, perhaps running a hand along one of the cold lobes of the observational cerebrum and feeling its rapid thoughts clicking within; or, passing by, enter that rusty desert beneath the greenish sky, cough once or twice, spit bloody spittle, circle the towering walls of the above-ground Port Complex—bluegray, monolithic, built upon the ruins of God knows what—and enter into that fortress where men move like ghosts in a Martian department store, feel the texture of those glassite walls, and make some of the soft and only noises in the whole world; or pass across Mercury’s Acre of Hell in the cool of the imagination,