The Dream Master Read Free

walk unscathed amidst the chimarae of perversions, force dark Mother Medusa to close her eyes before the caduceus of his art. His own analysis had not been difficult. Nine years before (it seemed much longer) he had suffered a willing injection of novacain into the most painful area of his spirit. It was after the auto wreck, after the death of Ruth and of Miranda, their daughter, that he had begun to feel detached. Perhaps he did not want to recover certain empathies; perhaps his own world was now based upon a certain rigidity of feeling. If this was true, he was wise enough in the ways of the mind to realize it, and perhaps he had decided that such a world had its own compensations.
    His son Peter was now ten years old. He was attending a school of quality, and he penned his father a letter every week. The letters were becoming progressively literate, showing signs of a precociousness of which Render could not but approve. He would take the boy with him to Europe in the summer.
    As for Jill—Jill DeVille (what a luscious, ridiculous name!—he loved her for it)—she was growing, if anything, more interesting to him. (He wondered if this was an indication of early middle age.) He was vastly taken by her unmusical nasal voice, her sudden interest in architecture, her concern with the unremovable mole on the right side of her otherwise well-designed nose. He should really call her immediately and go in search of a new restaurant. For some reason though, he did not feel like it.
    It had been several weeks since he had visited his club, The Partridge and Scalpel , and he felt a strong desire to eat from an oaken table, alone, in the split-level dining room with the three fireplaces, beneath the artificial torches and the boars’ heads like gin ads. So he pushed his perforated membership card into the phone-slot on bis desk and there were two buzzes behind the voice-screen.
    “Hello, Partridge and Scalpel” said the voice. “May I help you?”
    “Charles Render,” he said. “I’d like a table in about half an hour.”
    “How many will there be?”
    “Just me.”
    “Very good, sir. Half an hour, then. That’s ‘Render’?—R-e-n-d-e-r?”
    “Right.”
    “Thank you.”
    He broke the connection, rose from his desk. Outside, the day had vanished.
    The monoliths and the towers gave forth their own light now. A soft snow, like sugar, was sifting down through the shadows and transforming itself into beads on the window-pane.
    Render shrugged into his overcoat, turned off the lights, locked the inner office. There was a note on Mrs. Hedge’s blotter.
    Miss DeVille called , it said.
    He crumpled the note and tossed it into the waste-chute. He would call her tomorrow and say he had been working until late on his lecture.
    He switched off the final light, clapped his hat onto his head and passed through the outer door, locking it as he went. The drop took him to the sub-subcellar where his auto was parked.
    It was chilly in the sub-sub, and his footsteps seemed loud on the concrete as he passed among the parked vehicles. Beneath the glare of the naked lights, his S-7 Spinner was a sleek gray cocoon from which it seemed turbulent wings might at any moment emerge. The double row of antennae which fanned forward from the slope of its hood added to this feeling. Render thumbed open the door.
    He touched the ignition and there was the sound of a lone bee awakening in a great hive. The door swung soundlessly shut as he raised the steering wheel and locked it into place. He spun up the spiral ramp and came to a rolling stop before the big overhead.
    As the door rattled upward he lighted his destination screen and turned the knob that shifted the broadcast map. Left to right, top to bottom, section by section he shifted it, until he located the portion of Carnegie Avenue he desired. He punched out its coordinates and lowered the wheel. The car switched over to monitor and moved out onto the highway marginal. Render lit a