The Dream Master Read Online Free

permitted a special arrangement for labs. I’ve been guided through the dissection of cadavers by lab assistants, and I’ve had everything described to me. I can tell things by touch… and I have a memory like yours with the menu.” She smiled. ”
    “The quality of psycho-participation phenomena can only be gauged by the therapist himself, at that moment outside of time and space as we normally know it, when he stands in the midst of a world erected from the stuff of another man’s dreams, recognizes there the non-Euclidian architecture of aberrance, and then: takes his patient by the hand and tours the landscape… If he can lead him back to the common earth, then his judgments were sound, his actions valid.’”
    “From Why No Psychometrics in This Place,” reflected Render.
    “—by Charles Render, M.D.”
    “Our dinner is already moving in this direction,” he noted, picking up his drink as the speed-cooked meal was pushed toward them in the kitchen-buoy.
    “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet you,” she continued, raising her glass as the dishes rattled before her. “I want you to help me become a Shaper.”
    Her shaded eyes, as vacant as a statue’s, sought him again.
    “Yours is a completely unique situation,” he commented. “There has never been a congenitally blind neuroparticipant—for obvious reasons. I’d have to consider all the aspects of the situation before I could advise you. Let’s eat now, though. I’m starved.”
    “All right. But my blindness does not mean that I have never seen.”
    He did not ask her what she meant by that, because prime ribs were standing in front of him now and there was a bottle of Chambertin at his elbow. He did pause long enough to notice though, as she raised her left hand from beneath the table, that she wore no rings.
    “I wonder if it’s still snowing,” he commented as they drank their coffee. “It was coming down pretty hard when I pulled into the dome.”
    “I hope so,” she said, “even though it diffuses the light and I can’t ‘see’ anything at all through it. I like to feel it falling about me and blowing against my face.”
    “How do you get about?”
    “My dog, Sigmund—I gave him the night off,” she smiled—“he can guide me anywhere. He’s a mutie Shepherd.”
    “Oh?” Render grew curious. “Can he talk much?”
    She nodded.
    “That operation wasn’t as successful on him as on some of them, though. He has a vocabulary of about four hundred words, but I think it causes him pain to speak. He’s quite intelligent. You’ll have to meet him sometime.”
    Render began speculating immediately. He had spoken with such animals at recent medical conferences, and had been startled by their combination of reasoning ability and their devotion to their handlers. Much chromosome tinkering, followed by delicate embryo-surgery, was required to give a dog a brain capacity greater than a chimpanzee’s. Several followup operations were necessary to produce vocal abilities. Most such experiments ended in failure, and the dozen or so puppies a year on which they succeeded were valued in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars each. He realized then, as he lit a cigarette and held the light for a moment, that the stone in Miss Shallot’s medallion was a genuine ruby. He began to suspect that her admission to a medical school might, in addition to her academic record, have been based upon a sizable endowment to the college of her choice. Perhaps he was being unfair though, he chided himself.
    “Yes,” he said, “we might do a paper on canine neuroses. Does he ever refer to his father as “that son of a female Shepherd’?”
    “He never met his father,” she said, quite soberly. “He was raised apart from other dogs. His attitude could hardly be typical. I don’t think you’ll ever learn the functional psychology of the dog from a mutie.”
    “I imagine you’re right,” he dismissed it. “More