Gateway - Frederik Pohl Page 0,34

was so unpleasant and so real that for a few moments I wasn't sure it wasn't actual fact, and so awful that I didn't dare let myself believe it was only a dream. It shook me so much that I began to write it down, as fast as I could, every bit I could remember. Then there was a P-phone call. I answered it; and, do you know, in just the minute I was on the phone, I forgot the whole thing! Couldn't remember one bit of it. Until I looked at what I had written down, and then it all came back to me.

Well, when I saw Sigfrid a day or two later, I'd forgotten it again! As though it had never happened. But I had saved the piece of paper, and I had to read it to him. That was one of the times when I thought he was most pleased with himself and with me, too. He worried over that dream for the whole hour. He found symbols and meanings in every bit of it. I don't remember what they were, but I remember that for me it wasn't any fun at all.

As a matter of fact, do you know what's really funny? I threw away the paper on the way out of his office. And now I couldn't tell you what that dream was to save my life.

"I see you don't want to talk about dreams," says Sigfrid. "Is there anything you do want to talk about?"

"Not really."

He doesn't answer that for a moment, and I know he is just biding his time to outwait me so that I will say something, I don't know, something foolish. So I say, "Can I ask you a question, Sigfrid?"

"Can't you always, Rob?" Sometimes I think he's actually trying to smile. I mean, really smile. His voice sounds like it.

"Well, what I want to know is, what do you do with all the things I tell you?"

"I'm not sure I understand the question, Robbie. If you're asking what the information storage program is, the answer is quite technical."

"No, that's not what I mean." I hesitate, trying to make sure what the question is, and wondering why I want to ask it. I guess it all goes back to Sylvia, who was a lapsed Catholic. I really envied her her church, and let her know I thought she was dumb to have left it, because I envied her the confession. The inside of my head was littered with all these doubts and fears that I couldn't get rid of. I would have loved to unload them on the parish priest. I could see that you could make quite a nice hierarchical flow pattern, with all the shit from inside my own head flushing into the confessional, where the parish priest flushes it onto the diocesan monsignor (or whoever; I don't really know much about the Church), and it all winds up with the Pope, who is the settling tank for all the world's sludge of pain and misery and guilt, until he passes it on by transmitting it directly to God. (I mean, assuming the existence of a God, or at least assuming that there is an address called "God" to which you can send the shit.)

Anyway, the point is that I sort of had a vision of the same system in psychotherapy: local drains going into branch sewers going into community trunk lines treeing out of flesh-and-blood psychiatrists, if you see what I mean. If Sigfrid were a real person, he wouldn't be able to hold all the misery that's poured into him. To begin with, he would have his own problems. He would have mine, because that's how I would get rid of them, by unloading them onto him. He would also have those of all the other unloaders who share the hot couch; and he would unload all that, because he had to, onto the next man up, who shrank him, and so on and so on until they got to — who? The ghost of Sigmund Freud?

But Sigfrid isn't real. He's a machine. He can't feel pain. So where does all that pain and slime go?

I try to explain all that to him, ending with: "Don't you see, Sigfrid? If I give you my pain and you give it to someone else, it has to end somewhere. It doesn't feel real to me that it just winds up as magnetic bubbles in a piece of quartz