that night i had another bad dream. only it didn't really seem so bad as it should have been. a blind man was talking to me. then i dreamed that a blind girl with a seeing-eye dog was looking at me. she was about fifteen, maybe younger, dressed in a plain flowered dress tied in back with a ribbon. she had a soft round face and her eyes were wide and opaque. the girl and dog seemed to come out of a mist and they whispered to me. it was frightening, but important, and i didn't remember what it was.
i woke up shivering. i seemed to smell wet hair, and the window was open. i couldn't remember whether i had shut the window before i went to sleep or not.
mesner called me early the next morning.
he looked the same in his wrinkled suit with the food stains on the lapels, and peeling an apple.
"fred, have you ever heard a phrase sounding like '... and the blind shall lead them?'"
i appeared to be trying to think about it, then said i had never heard anything like that.
"you're positive about that?"
"i don't remember it."
"you mean you might have, but you just can't remember it."
"i didn't say that. i doubt if i ever heard such a phrase."
"what about this one, '... and the blind shall see again.'"
"no, i said.
"you're sure?"
i looked directly at him and he stopped peeling the apple. "if i'm supposed to have such a damn high quiescent iq, why not let me in on a few things?"
"what few things?"
"these references to the blind. the dirksons. some blind girl named elsa. what are you trying to find out?"
"i thought maybe you remembered something, that's all. i'm pretty much in the dark myself. all i have are a few clues and theories."
"clues, theories, about what?"
"eggheads. sabotage. what the crackpots could build, they can best destroy. they're blowing up factories, manufacturing and power plants, machines, production."
"that's sabotage? i thought the whole idea in bringing about the era of normalcy was to do away with all mechanization. do everything with the hands, like in the good old days."
"that's an ultimate goal, fred. drudges don't think. they're happier. but the transition has to be more gradual. the eggheads want to take away all mechanization at once, create chaos and anarchy. they figure that will cause the bottleheads to revolt against the government. we can't catch the saboteurs. the saboteurs inside a blown-up factory, for example, we never know who they are. we bip every worker, not a sign of a saboteur. so whoever does the dirty work is a mindless tool of the egghead underground, having no memory of having committed sabotage. who are the couriers, the ones who make vital contact between the egghead underground and the saboteurs? the dumb saboteur has to get his highly complex directives from the eggheads. who are the couriers?"
"why ask me?"
"i know this much, fred. blind people are used as couriers."
my knees felt weak. i couldn't say anything. all i could think about was my dreams.
"i want to show you something, fred." mesner led me through the other door. a bleak concrete cubicle, no windows, a damp walled gray cell. two naked men lay on slabs. stroboscopes on their heads. behind them, styluses recorded brain-wave patterns on moving white strips. one of the men, the one on the left, was blind. his eyes staring up into the flicker were opaque.
"look at those brain-wave recordings, fred. they're getting the same stimulus. we can give a thousand bottleheads this stimulus with the flicker, and get identical responses. but not the blind boys. we can't successfully bip a blind boy. the brain-waves are radically different and we've never figured out a way of codifying them. a blind bastard's never seen anything. the seeing eyes are trackers, like radar. but a blind boy takes in reality and records it and keeps it in a different way. we can't get at the code easily. but i'm getting it. i've bipped plenty of blind boys and i'm getting it, fred. the blind are used for couriers. i know that much. for the simple reason that we can't bip meaningful info out of their scrambled think-tanks."
the naked men on the slabs moaned. one of them opened his mouth and a bloody foam spread over his chin.
"what i'm looking for now is a known courier who is also blind. then i can bip him, and check the info with the code i've worked out."
he unbuttoned his coat and took a black hand-gun out of a holster strapped beneath his arm. "meanwhile, fred, these bottleheads have had it. they're burned out."
