Free The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris Page A

twaddle, a plague take it. It would be better to stay awake and put an end to such foolishness. I am not very sleepy anyhow. I turn over inside the warm skin bag, settle my limbs into place, and doze off or half-doze again, but this time with a difference. Through a trick I learned long ago as a boy, and practice now and then as other men practice with dumbbells or playing cards, I enter fully conscious into the storehouse of my dream matter and select exactly those pictures that I choose rather than those that blind seeking of the blood happens to stumble over, so that sleep becomes something like one of those stereopticon viewers that fasten on your nose and enable you to see with a vivid roundness, more powerful than life, whichever of those cardboard images you choose from the box on the table. In short, it is possible to dream what one will, although it requires some effort, just as it is possible to remember
what one will
, a street number or the formula for saltpeter.
    But it is necessary to be hard, as hard as an angel. Steely, gripping the memory in my will’s fingers, I pierce downward through layers that shimmer as they partand close again behind me, their soft torn edges clinging to my limbs. In a stratum not far from the surface I encounter a yellow room in a villa, Stresa. Then a carriage on rue de Rivoli, a balloon flight over Suomi, an angry white face in the twilight in the Bois. Finally, deeper than all these and a good deal more vague and evanescent, there comes into focus the hall of the Musée Carnavalet on the occasion of the Fifth Congress of the Paraphysical Society in 1895, where I was lecturing on electromagnetic phenomena in the atmosphere. I had just embarked on the possibility of extraterrestrial sources of the waves when I caught sight of an extraordinary face in the audience. A rather long, pale, and absolutely motionless visage with eyes fixed intently on me, a lofty brow, a mouth that gave the impression of being held in place only by a conscious effort of the will so that two little creases formed below it on the chin. Immaculately groomed, gown from Worth’s, soft hair gathered into a knot at the back. Incredibly enough, at that time she was only nineteen. Following the lecture she presented herself at the podium and engaged me in a discussion of the Female Question.
    â€œCaptain” (I was a captain in those days), “these matters, emanations or whatever you call them, do you believe they are susceptible of investigation by women?”
    I looked up from my notes and hardly knew what to answer. Was this an attack or some kind of an overture of friendship, of admiration? “Why? On the other hand, why not?”
    â€œIt seems—I mean—I gather from what you say that they are an ethereal kind of thing.” Did she always speak this rapidly, and not quite looking at the person she was addressing? “C’est à dire, subtle, and perhaps women, being creatures of intuition and especially good at invisible things, might be particularly fitted to investigate them. Also they can be studied in one’s own home with very little apparatus, and they don’t get one’s hands dirty.”
    Or she said something like this, I don’t remember exactly. I do remember that she spoke with a great assurance and even a challenging air, a faint touch of contempt, and yet that she blushed as she did so, a kind of pink spider forming on her throat and moving upward into the paleness under her chin. The little speech on feminism evidently came from one part of her being, the vascular reaction from another.
    â€œIn fact,a good deal of apparatus is required,” I countered as moderately as I could, “electrostatic generators, coils of wire, Leyden jars, and things of this sort, many of which are expensive. Not only do they get your hands dirty, but frequently there is danger involved; for example, a good many observations can be made only from airships. I