Infinite Dreams Read Online Free PDF

drops into a cushion and experimentally pushes at the floor with a finger. “What is it you want us to do?”
    Trying to move slowly, Three-phasing lowers himself into a cushion and gestures at a nearby one, for Sarah. “It’s very simple, really. Your being here is most of it.
    “We’re celebrating the millionth anniversary of the written word.” How to phrase it? “Everyone is interested in this anniversary, but … nobody reads any more.”
    Bob nods sympathetically. “Never have time for it myself.”
    “Yes, uh … you
do
know how to read, though?”
    “He knows,” Sarah says. “He’s just lazy.”
    “Well, yeah.” Bob shifts uncomfortably in the cushion.
    “Sarah’s the one you want. I kind of, uh, prefer to listen to the radio.”
    “I read all the time,” Sarah says with a little pride. “Mostly mysteries. But sometimes I read good books, too.”
    “Good, good.” It was indeed fortunate to have found this pair, Three-phasing realizes. They had used the metal of the ancient books to “tune” the time-caster, so potential subjects were limited to those living some eighty years before and after 2012 A.D. Internal evidence in the books indicated that most of the Earth’s population was illiterate during this period.
    “Allow me to explain. Any one of us can learn how to read. But to us it is like a code; an unnatural way of communicating. Because we are all natural telepaths. We can read each other’s minds from the age of one year.”
    “Golly!” Sarah says. “Read minds?” And Three-phasing sees in her mind a fuzzy kind of longing, much of which is love for Bob and frustration that she knows him only imperfectly. He dips into Bob’s mind and finds things she is better off not knowing.
    “That’s right. So what we want is for you to read some of these books, and allow us to go into your minds while you’re doing it. This way we will be able to recapture an experience that has been lost to the race for over a half-million years.”
    “I don’t know,” Bob says slowly. “Will we have time for anything else? I mean, the world must be pretty strange. Like to see some of it.”
    “Of course; sure. But the rest of the world is pretty much like my place here. Nobody goes outside any more. There isn’t any air.” He doesn’t want to tell them how the air was lost, which might disturb them, but they seem to accept that as part of the distant future.
    “Uh, George.” Sarah is blushing. “We’d also like, uh,some time to ourselves. Without anybody … inside our minds.”
    “Yes, I understand perfectly. You will have your own room, and plenty of time to yourselves.” Three-phasing neglects to say that there is no such thing as privacy in a telepathic society.
    But sex is another thing they don’t have any more. They’re almost as curious about that as they are about books.
    So the kindly men of the future gave Bob and Sarah Graham plenty of time to themselves: Bob and Sarah reciprocated. Through the Dawn couple’s eyes and brains, humanity shared again the visions of Fielding and Melville and Dickens and Shakespeare and almost a dozen others. And as for the 98% more, that they didn’t have time to read or that were in foreign languages—Three-phasing got the hang of it and would spend several millenia entertaining those who were amused by this central illusion of literature: that there could be order, that there could be beginnings and endings and logical workings-out in between; that you could count on the third act or the last chapter to tie things up. They knew how profound an illusion this was because each of them knew every other living human with an intimacy and accuracy far superior to that which even Shakespeare could bring to the study of even himself. And as for Sarah and as for Bob:
    Anxiety can throw a person’s ovaries ’way off schedule. On that beach in California, Sarah was no more pregnant than Bob was. But up there in the future, some somatic tension finally