Tom O'Bedlam

1

There was unexpected trouble with Nick Double Rainbow that morning, something close to a three-alarm psychotic break coming out of nowhere and more than a little violent acting-out, ugly stuff and difficult to deal with. Which was why Elszabet was late getting to the monthly staff meeting. All the others were there already—the psychiatrists, Bill Waldstein and Dan Robinson; Dante Corelli, the head of physical therapy; and Naresh Patel, the neurolinguistics man, deployed around the big redwood-burl conference table in their various relaxation modes—when she finally entered the room a little past eleven.

Dante was staring into the pumping whorls of golden light coming from a little Patternmaster in her hand. Bill Waldstein was leaning back contemplating the flask of wine sitting in front of him. Patel looked to be lost in meditation. Dan Robinson was fingering his pocket keyboard, jamming inaudible music into the recorder circuit for playback later. They all straightened up as Elszabet took her place at the head of the table.

“Finally!” Dante said stagily, overplaying it as if Elszabet were two years late for the meeting, minimum.

“Elszabet’s just been showing us that she knows how to be passive-aggressive too,” said Bill Waldstein.

“Screw you,” Elszabet told him casually. “Thirteen big minutes late.”

“Twenty,” said Patel, without appearing to break his deep trance.

“Twenty. So shoot me. You want to pass some of that wine over here, please, Dr. Waldstein?”

“Before lunch, Dr. Lewis?”

“It hasn’t been a wonderful morning,” she said. “I will thank all of you to recalibrate for a lower bullshit quotient, okay? Thank you. I love you all.” She took the wine from Waldstein, but drank only the tiniest sip. It tasted sharp, full of little needles. Her jaw was aching. She wondered if her face was going to swell. “We’ve got Double Rainbow cooled out on fifty milligrams of pax,” Elszabet said tiredly. “Bill, will you check in on him after lunch and consult with me afterward? He decided he was Sitting Bull on the warpath. Smashed up I don’t know how many hundreds of dollars of equipment and took a swing at Teddy Lansford that knocked him halfway across the room, and I think he would have made a lot more trouble than that if Alleluia hadn’t miraculously come floating into the cabin and corraled him. She’s amazingly strong, you know. Thank God she wasn’t the one who psychoed out.”

Waldstein leaned toward her, hunching over a little. He was a tall, thin man, about forty, whose dark hair was just starting to go. When he hunched his shoulders like that, Elszabet knew, it was a gesture of concern, protectiveness, even overprotectiveness. She didn’t care much for that, coming from him. Quietly Waldstein said, “The noble red-man hit you too, didn’t he, Elszabet?”

She shrugged. “I got an elbow in the mouth, more or less incidentally. Nothing detached, nothing even bent. I’m not planning to file charges.”

Scowling, Waldstein said, “The crazy bastard. He must have been out of his mind, hitting you. Poke Lansford, I can understand, but hitting you ? When you’re the one who sits up half the night listening to him sob on and on and on about his martyred ancestors?”

“I beg to remind,” said Dante. ” All these people here are crazy. That’s why they’re here. We can’t expect them to behave rationally, right? Anyway, Double Rainbow doesn’t remember how nice Elszabet’s been to him. That stuff’s been picked.”

“No excuse,” Waldstein said sourly. “We all have martyred ancestors. Fuck him and his martyred ancestors: I don’t even think he’s the Sioux he says he is.” Elszabet looked at Waldstein in dismay. He liked to think of himself as genial and mellow, even playful; but he had an astonishing capacity for irrelevant indignation. Once he got worked up he could go on quite a while. “I think he’s a phony,” Waldstein said. “A con man, like sweet Eddie Ferguson. Nick Double Rainbow! I bet his name is Joe Smith. Maybe he isn’t even crazy. This is a nice rest home, isn’t it, out here in the redwoods? He might just—”

“Bill,” Elszabet said.

“He hit you, didn’t he?”

“All right. All right. We’re running late, Bill.” She wanted to rub her throbbing jaw, but she was afraid it would touch off another volley of outrage from him. It might have been simpler, she thought, if she hadn’t turned Waldstein down when he’d made that sudden but not altogether unpredictable play for her a year or three back. She hadn’t let him get anywhere. If she had, maybe at least she wouldn’t have to endure his ponderous chivalry all the time now. But then she thought, no, it wouldn’t have made anything any simpler if she had done that. Then or ever.

Switching on the little recorder in front of her, Elszabet said, “Let’s get started, people, shall we? Monthly staff meeting for Thursday, July 27, 2103, Elszabet Lewis presiding, Drs. Waldstein and Robinson and Patel and Ms. Corelli in attendance, 1121 hours. Okay? Instead of starting with the regular progress reports, I’d like to open with a discussion of the unusual problem that’s cropped up in the past six days. I’m referring to the recurrent and overlapping dreams of a—well, fantastic nature that our patients seem to be experiencing, and I’ve asked Dr. Robinson to prepare a general rundown for us. Dan?”

Robinson flashed a brilliant smile, leaned back, crossed his legs. He was the senior psychiatrist at the Center, a slender, long-legged man with light coffee-colored skin, very capable, always wondrously relaxed: truly the mellow man that Bill Waldstein imagined himself to be. He was also probably the most reliable member of Elszabet’s staff.

He put his hand on the mnemone capsule in front of him, hit the glossy red activator stud, and waited a moment to receive the databurst. Then he pushed the little device aside and said, “Okay. The space dreams, we’re starting to call them. What we are finding, either by direct report from the patients or as we go through the daily pick data to see what it is that we’re combing out of their minds, is a pattern of vivid visionary dreams, very spacy stuff indeed. The first of these came from the synthetic woman Alleluia CX1133, who on the night of July seventeenth experienced a glimpse of a planet—she identified it as a planet in her consultation the following morning with me—with a dense green sky, a thick green atmosphere, and inhabitants of an alien form, glassy in texture and extremely elongated in bodily structure. Then, on the night of July nineteenth, Father James Christie experienced a view of a different and far more elaborate cosmological set-up, a group of suns of various colors simultaneously visible in the sky, and an imposing figure of apparent extraterrestrial nature visible in the foreground. Because of his clerical background, Father Christie interpreted his dream as a vision of divinity, regarding the alien being as God, and I gather he underwent considerable emotional distress as a result. He reported his experience the following morning to Dr. Lewis—rather reluctantly, I gather. I’ve termed Father Christie’s dream the Nine Suns dream, and Alleluia’s the Green World dream.”

Robinson paused, looking around. The room was very still.

“Okay. Now on the night of July nineteenth Alleluia had a second space dream. This one involved a double-star system, a large red sun and a smaller blue one that seems to be what astronomers call a variable star because it has a pulsating kind of energy output. This dream too was associated with an impressive extraterrestrial figure of great size—a horned being standing on a monolithic slab of white stone. I call this dream the Double Star dream. It’s possible that Alleluia has had this dream several times; she’s become a little evasive on the whole subject of space dreams.” Robinson paused again. “Where this gets interesting,” he went on, “is that on the night of July twentieth, Tomás Menendez experienced the Double Star dream also.”

“The same dream? ” Bill Waldstein asked.

“It checked in every detail. We have the pick data for both of them: of course there aren’t any visuals, but we have exactly the same adrenal-output curves, the same REM fluctuations, the same alpha boost, isomorphic all the way. I think it’s generally agreed that these things correlate very closely with dream activity, and I’d like to postulate that identical dreams will generate identical response curves.”

He glanced questioningly at Waldstein.

“I would buy identical curves meaning identical dreams,” Waldstein said, “if I could buy identical dreams. But who has identical dreams? Is there any record anywhere in the literature of such a thing?”

“In visionary experience, yes,” Naresh Patel said softly. “There are any number of examples of cases where the same vision was received by a host of—”

“I don’t mean out of the Upanishad or Revelations,” said Waldstein. “I mean documented by western observers, contemporary clinical work, twentieth century or later.”

Patel sighed, smiled, turned up the palms of his hands.

“Hold on,” Dan Robinson said. “There’s more. We have a fourth dream that I call the Sphere of Light dream, where the sky is a globe of total radiance and no astronomical features are evident at all because of the high level of illumination. Against this background extremely complex extraterrestrial figures are seen, what appear to be some unusually intricate life-forms with a great many limbs and appendages, so complicated that our patients are having trouble describing them in detail. So far the Sphere of Light dream has been experienced by these patients: Nick Double Rainbow on July twenty-second, Tomás Menendez July twenty-third, April Cranshaw July twenty-fourth. Father Christie experienced the Double Star dream on July twenty-fourth; once again he interpreted it as a divine manifestation, God in yet another guise—the horned being, I mean. That makes three of our people who have had that dream so far. The Green World dream was reported by Philippa Bruce on the twenty-fifth. Last night it reached Martin Clare. That’s three Green Worlds here too.”

“Four,” Elszabet said. “Nick Double Rainbow last night, too.”

Robinson said, “That’s not the full list. There’s an epidemic of overlapping space dreams. They’re being reported all over the Center. Except, I think, from Ed Ferguson. I believe he’s the only patient who hasn’t said a word about them to any therapist.”

“Isn’t he the man who got convicted for selling real estate on other planets?” Dante asked.

“Planets of other stars, no less,” Bill Waldstein said.

“Ironic that he’s the only one who doesn’t get to visit other worlds when he’s asleep, then,” Dante said.

“Unless he’s concealing the dreams,” Dan Robinson suggested. “That’s always a possibility with him. Ferguson monkeys around with his data something fierce.”

“I suspect he’s got a recorder of some kind, too,” Waldstein said. “Somehow he doesn’t seem to pick clean—there’s always a continuity that shouldn’t be there—”

“Please,” Elszabet said. “We’re getting a little off the track. Dan, you say there are other space dreams on your list?”

“A couple. At the moment the reports are just fragmentary on those, and I’d prefer to skip them for now. But I think I’ve made the basic point.”

“All right,” said Elszabet. “We have a mystery here. A phenomenon. How do we deal with it?”

“Obviously they’re telling each other their dreams,” Bill Waldstein said.

“You think so?” Dan Robinson asked, startled.

“Obviously that’s it. They’re trying to screw us over. They all see us in an adversary position, anyway. So they’re in cahoots, passing their dreams around, coaching each other—”

“We pick them,” Naresh Patel said. “Then the dreams are gone. Do they meet at dawn before pick time to rehearse?”

“Alleluia doesn’t always seem to lose her dreams to the pick,” Dan Robinson said.

Patel nodded. “We know that is a problem, the synthetic woman’s dream retention. But the others? We suspect Ferguson of making recordings, but he doesn’t report dreams. Surely Father Christie is not engaged in any sort of deception, and—”

“Naresh’s right about Father Christie,” Elszabet said. “His dreams are real. I’d stake anything on that.”

“Telepathy?” Dante said.

“Not a shred of evidence, ever,” said Bill Waldstein.

“Maybe we’re getting the evidence now,” Dan Robinson said. “Some kind of communion going on among them—maybe it’s even a pick phenomenon, an unsuspected artifact of the process—”

“Balls, Dan. What kind of wild speculation is that?” Waldstein asked.

“A speculative one,” Robinson replied mildly. “We’re just fishing around, aren’t we? Who knows what the hell’s going on here? But if we try all sorts of ideas—”

“I’m not yet convinced it is going on,” Waldstein retorted. “We need to run reliable crosschecks to eliminate the possibility of patient collusion. After that you can talk to me about overlapping dreams, okay?”

“Absolutely,” Robinson said. “No quarrel there.”

“We need more data,” said Patel. “We must find out all there is to know about this matter. Yes, Dr. Waldstein?”

Waldstein nodded uncertainly. “If it’s really happening, yes, we need to explain it. If it’s a fraud, we need to get control of it. Yes. More data. Yes.”

“Fine,” Elszabet said. “We’re starting to reach some understanding here. Does anyone else want to say anything about this space-dream business now?”

Apparently no one did. She looked around the table twice, and there was silence on all sides. The meeting moved on to more mundane Center business. But afterward, when everyone was beginning to leave, Naresh Patel remained in his seat. The dapper neurolinguistics expert, small and fine-boned, ordinarily serene to the point of impassivity, looked oddly troubled.

“You want to see me, Naresh?” Elszabet asked.

“Yes. Please. Just for a moment.”

“Go ahead.” She rubbed her jaw. It was definitely beginning to puff up where Nick Double Rainbow had belted her.

Patel said in the softest possible voice, “This is a thing I did not want to say during the general meeting, though perhaps it would have been useful. This is a thing I am not yet ready to share with all my colleagues, and especially not with Dr. Waldstein in his present frame of mind. But with your permission I would like to share it with you, and only with you.”

She had never seen him this disturbed. Gently she said, “You can count on my discretion, Naresh.”

The little man smiled faintly. “Very well. It is this only, Dr. Lewis. I too have had what Dr. Robinson calls the Green World dream. Two nights ago. A sky like a heavy green curtain. Crystalline beings of extreme grace and beauty.” He gave her a rueful look. “I am not part of the conspiracy that Dr. Waldstein insists is taking place. May we accept the truth of that declaration? I am not in league with the patients to upset the equilibrium of the Center. Please believe me, Dr. Lewis. Please. But nevertheless I tell you this, that I have had the Green World dream. Indeed. I have had the Green World dream.”

2

“It isn’t much,” Jaspin said. “Don’t expect much. It just isn’t much at all.”

“That’s all right,” the blonde girl told him. “You don’t expect much, do you, times like these?”

Her name was Jill. Her last name hadn’t stuck, one of those bland nice American names, Clark, Walters, Hancock, something like that. He’d find some way of getting her to say it again. Somehow she had stayed with him after the tumbondé ceremony, holding his head against her skinny chest while he was having those weird hysterics, helping him down from the hillside when he was so shaky in that scorching heat. And now somehow they were standing outside his little place in University Heights. Apparently they were going to spend the night together, or at least the evening. What the hell, it had been a long time. But part of him wished he had managed to shake her off back there in the countryside. That was the part that still was resonating to the drums of the tumbondé folk; that was the part that still saw the titanic form of Chungirá-He-Will-Come, absolutely and unquestionably real on his throne of alabaster on the planet of some far star. Having this girl around was only a distraction, a sort of a buzz, when there were things like that throbbing in his soul. Still, he had not done much by way of getting free of her after the ceremony. What the hell.

He put his thumb on the doorplate and the door asked him who he was, and he said, “It’s your lord and master. Open the hell up, fast!”

She laughed. “You’ve got a very individual style, Dr. Jaspin.”

“Barry. Please. Barry, okay? I don’t even have a doctorate, hard as it is for you to accept that fact.” The door, having scanned his vocal contour and found it acceptable, slid back. He gestured grandly. “Entrez-vous!” They stepped inside.

He hadn’t deceived her any. It wasn’t much. Two rooms, fold-out kitchenette, a little terrace facing south. The building was a decent one, Spanish style, whitewashed walls, red tile roof, lush California plants crawling all over everything—purple bougainvillea, red and white hibiscus, great spiky clumps of aloes, some agaves, sago palms, all that subtropical whatnot. Probably the place had been a nice luxury condo development before the war. But now it was divided into a million tiny apartments, and of course there was no maintenance being done any more, so the property was running down very seriously. What the hell: it was home. He had wandered into it at random his first day in San Diego after he had decided he ought to get out of Los Angeles, and he was starting to feel almost comfortable in it by now, fourteen months later.

“You live in San Diego?” he asked.

She managed not to answer that. He had asked it before, when they were going to the parking lot, and she had managed not to answer it then, either. Now she was drifting around the place, agog at his library: a considerable data resource, he had to admit, cubes and tapes and chip-clusters and disks and even books, good old ancient-but-not-yet-obsolete books.

“Look!” she cried. “You’ve got Kroeber! And Mead! And Levi-Strauss, and Haverford, and Schapiro, and everybody. I’ve never seen anything like this except in a library! Do you mind?” She was pulling things off the shelves, caressing them, fondling them, the books, the tapes, the cubes. Then she turned to him. Her eyes were bright and glowing.

Jaspin had seen that look of rapture before, from girls in his classes, in the days when he had had classes. It was pure love, abstract love. It had nothing particularly to do with him, the real him; they adored him because he was the fount of learning, because he walked daily with Aristotle and Plato. And also because he was older than they were and could, if he cared to, open the gates of wisdom for them with the merest gesture of his finger. Jaspin had used his finger on a number of them, and not just his finger, either, and he suspected that some of them had actually come away the wiser for it, though perhaps not in the way they had been expecting. He figured he was past all that stuff now.

“Look, Jill,” he wanted to say into that adoring gaze, “it’s a real mistake to romanticize me like this. Whatever you may think I might have to offer, it just isn’t there. Honestly.” But he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

Instead he went toward her as if he meant to sweep her into his arms; but at the last moment he simply took the book she was holding from her and fondled it as she had been doing. A true rarity, Cordry on Mexican masks, a hundred thirty years old and the color plates still bright. He was gradually selling off his library to a professor at the La Jolla campus to pay for food and rent, the same way he had acquired most of this stuff ten and fifteen years ago when he was the one with money and somebody else had been down and out.

“It’s one of my great treasures,” Jaspin said. “Look at these masks!” He flipped the pages. Diabolical horned faces, nightmare creatures.Chungirá-He-Will-Come? Maguali-ga? He heard the drums beginning to beat in his head again.

“And this. And this. And this.” She was going into ecstasy. “Such a wonderful library! What an amazing person you must be, to have gathered all this knowledge, Dr. Jaspin!”

“Barry.”

“Barry.”

She went out on the terrace, reached into the hibiscus, pulled off a bright red flower to stick into her hair. Just a waif, he thought, a stray. Probably a little older than he had first guessed—twenty-seven, maybe. “You live in a very nice place,” she said. “For times like these. We’re lucky, aren’t we, being in coastal California? It’s not so good inland, is it?”

“They say it’s pretty rough in there. And the farther from the coast you get, the worse it is. Of course the worst is the states on the edge of the dusted zone. I hear that’s an absolute jungle, bandidos everywhere and nobody gives a damn, everyone dying of radiation sickness anyway.” He shook his head. It sickened him to think of it, the mess that the Dust War had made. No bombs, not a single bomb dropped, you couldn’t use bombs without touching off the ultimate holocaust that everybody agreed would mean mutual annihilation, so they just used the controlled radiation clouds instead, taking out the agricultural states, wiping out the whole heartland, breaking the country in half, in thirds, even. As we did to them, only worse. And now thirty years later we crawl around in the remains of western civilization, pruning our bougainvilleas and playing our music cubes and going to anthropology class and pretending that we have rebuilt the world out here in the sunshine of California while for all we know people have turned into cannibals five hundred miles east of here. He said aloud, “That’s what I was going to write about. The modern world from an anthropological view: almost sociology, sort of. The world as high-tech jungle. Of course I won’t do that now.”

“You won’t?”

“I doubt it. I’m not with the university any longer. I have no sponsorship. Sponsorship’s important.”

“You could do it on your own, Barry. I know you could.”

“That’s very kind,” he said. “Listen, are you hungry? I’ve got a little stuff here, and the prickly pears growing on that cactus in the courtyard are actually edible, so we could—”

“Do you mind if I just take a shower? I feel real sticky, and there’s this paint all over me, the Maguali-ga markings—”

“Sure,” he said. “What day is it? Friday? Sure, we have shower water on Fridays”

She was out of her clothing in a moment. No shame. No breasts, either, no hips, buttocks flat as a boy’s. What the hell. She was female, anyway. He was pretty sure of that, although you couldn’t always tell for certain, the way they did transplants and implants and such nowadays. He showed her into the shower cubicle and found a towel for her. Then—what the hell—he stripped off and went in with her. “We don’t have much of a water quota,” he said. “We’d better double up.”

She turned to him when they were under the spray and wrapped her legs around him, and he backed her up against the tiled wall, holding her with his hands under her buttocks. His eyes were closed most of the time, but once he opened them and he saw that hers were open and that she still had that adoring glowing rapturous look. Like he was putting fifty encyclopedias into her with each thrust.

It was all very fast, but very satisfying, too. There was no getting away from that, the satisfaction of it. But afterward came the sadness, the guilt, the shame, and there was no getting away from that, either. Making love, somebody had called it, long ago. What love, where? Two pathetic strangers, jamming parts of their bodies together for a few minutes: love?

Jaspin thought, I have to try to be honest with this girl. It would have been nicer if I had tried to be honest before we did it, but then maybe we wouldn’t have done it, and I guess I wanted to do it too much. That’s honest too, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Leaning calm and dejected on the edge of the sink, he said, looking at her little pink-tipped breasts, her boyish hips, her damp stringy hair, “I’ve got to tell you this flat out. You think I’m some sort of noble romantic intellectual figure, don’t you? Well, I’m not, okay? I’m nobody. I’m a phony. I’m a failure, Jill.”

“So am I,” she said.

He looked at her, startled. It was the first authentic thing he had heard out of her mouth since he had met her.

He said, “I used to be somebody. Bright kid, rich L.A. family, lots of promise. Going to be one of the great anthropologists, but somewhere along the way I became farblondjet. ” A mystified look. “You don’t know it? Yiddish word. Means confused, bewildered, totally mixed up. The cafard of the soul, the great early-twenty-second-century disease, what I think they’re calling Gelbard’s syndrome now. I fell apart, is what I did. And I didn’t even know why. It became too much trouble to get up in the morning. It became much too much trouble to go to classes. I wasn’t exactly depressed, you understand—Gelbard’s syndrome is something a little different from clinical depression, they tell me, it’s deeper, it’s a response to the whole human mess, a sort of cultural exhaustion, a burnout phenomenon—but I was farblondjet Still am. I have no career. I have no future. I am not the heroic demigod of culture that you probably imagine me to be.”

“I sat in on your course. You were very profound.”

“Repeating the stuff I had found in these books. What’s profound about a glib tongue? What’s profound about a good memory? I sounded profound to you because you didn’t know any better. What was your major at UCLA, anyway?”

“I didn’t have one. I just audited courses.”

“No degree?”

A shrug. “I wanted to learn everything. But there was so much, I didn’t know where to start. So I guess I never started. But now I’ll have a second chance, won’t I?”

“What do you mean?”

There was a strange bright edge on her voice, like thin copper wires scraping together. “To learn. From you. I’ll do the cleaning, the shopping, whatever, all the jobs. And we’ll study together. That’s all right, isn’t it? I’ll help you with your book. I don’t actually have a place to live right now, you know. But I don’t take up a lot of room, and I’m very neat, and—”

It surprised him that he had not seen it coming. He felt his forehead beginning to throb. He imagined that Chungirá-He-Will-Come had reached out with one enormous paw and had closed it around his entire head, and was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing—

“I’m not going to write the book,” Jaspin said. “And I’m not going to stay here in San Diego.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I won’t be here much longer at all.”

He was startled beyond measure by what he had just said. That came as news to him, that he was leaving San Diego.

“Where will you go?” she asked.

He waited a beat for his mouth to supply the answer, and then he heard himself say, “I’m going to go wherever Senhor Papamacer goes. To the Seventh Place, I guess. Following the tumbondé people to the North Pole if I have to.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I suppose I do,” Jaspin said. “I have to do it.”

“To study them?”

“No. To wait for Chungirá-He-Will-Come.”

“You believe in Him, then.” He could hear the capital H.

“I do now. Since today, on that hillside. I saw something, Jill. And it changed me. I felt literally knocked to my knees, the true conversion experience. Maybe conversion’s too pretentious a word, but—” This is preposterous, he thought, a couple of naked people who don’t even know each other, sitting in a tiny bathroom talking nonsense like this. “I’ve never been a religious man,” he said. “Jewish, at least my parents were, but that was just a cultural thing, nobody actually went to synagogue, you understand. But this is different. What I felt today—I want to feel it again. I want to go wherever I stand a chance of feeling it again. It’s the times, Jill, the era, the Zeitgeist, you know? In times of total despair, revelatory religion has always held the answer. And now it’s happened even to me, cynical urban you-name-it Barry Jaspin. I’m going to follow Senhor Papamacer and wait for Maguali-ga to open the gateway for Chungirá-He-Will-Come.” There was fire pumping through his veins. Do I really mean all this, he wondered? Yes. Yes. I actually do. Amazing, he thought. I actually mean what I’m telling her.

“Can I come with you?” she asked timidly, reverently.

3

Charley said, “Now tell me about the one you saw yesterday, the one where the starlight lights up the sky like day.”

“The world of the Eye People, that’s what you mean?” Tom asked.

“Is that it?”

“The Eye People, yes. Of the Great Starcloud.”

“Tell me,” Charley said. “I love to listen to you when you’re seeing this stuff. I think you’re a real prophet, man, you’re something straight out of the Bible.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Tom said.

Softly Charley said, “I wish you’d stop saying that. Do I tell you that I think you’re crazy?”

“I am crazy, Charley. Poor Tom. Poor crazy Tom. Ran away from one madhouse right into another one.”

“A madhouse? Really? An honest-to-Christ nuthatch?”

“Pocatello,” Tom said. “You know where that is? They had me locked up a year and a half.”

Charley smiled. “Plenty of sane men locked up like that, plenty of crazy ones outside. Don’t mean a thing. I try to tell you, I respect you, I admire you. I think you’re phenomenal. And you sit here saying I think you’re crazy. Come on. Tell me about the Eye People, man!”

Charley seemed sincere. He isn’t just making fun of me, Tom thought. It’s because he’s seen the green world himself. I hope he gets to see some of the other ones. He really wants to see. He really wants to know about these worlds. He’s a scratcher, maybe even used to be a bandido, I bet he’s killed twenty people, and yet he wants to know, he’s curious, he’s almost gentle, in his way. I’m lucky to be traveling with him, Tom told himself.

“The Eye People don’t exist yet,” he said. “They’re maybe a million, maybe three million years from now, or maybe it’s a billion, that’s very hard to know. I get confused when these past and future things come in. You understand, all the thought impulses, they float around the universe back and forth, and the speed of thought is much faster than the speed of light, so the visions overtake the light, they pass it right by, you can get a vision out of a place that doesn’t even exist yet, and maybe a million or a billion years from now the light of that sun will finally get to Earth. You follow what I’m saying?”

“Sure,” Charley said doubtfully.

“The Eye People live—or will live—on a planet that has maybe ten thousand stars right close around it, or a hundred thousand, who can even count them, one next to another all jammed together so that from this planet they look like one single wall of light that fills the whole sky. You go out any time of day or night, what you see is this tremendous light blazing away from all sides. You don’t see any one star, just a lot of light. All white, like the sky is white-hot.”

Mujer came over. “Charley?”

“Be with you five minutes.”

“Can you talk to me now, Charley?”

Charley looked up, annoyed. “Okay, go ahead.”

The scratchers were camped a little way east of Sacramento, toward the coastal side of the Valley. There still were some working farms around there, and most of them were very well defended. The scratching was lousy here; Charley and his men were getting hungry; he had sent a bunch of them out scouting that afternoon.

Mujer said, “Stidge and Tamale just came back. They say they found a farm down in the river fork that they think can be taken, and they want to go in as soon as it gets dark.”

“Why you the one telling me, then, and not Stidge?”

“Buffalo said you’d gone off with Tom and didn’t want to be bothered, and Stidge decided not to bother you.”

“But you did?”

Mujer said, “I wanted to talk to you before Stidge and Tamale did. You know, Tamale’s always wrong about everything. And that Stidge, he’s a wild man. I don’t trust them a lot.”

“You think I do?”

“When Stidge says a place can be taken, and Tamale says it too, then I don’t know, Charley, I think maybe we ought to keep away. That’s all. I wanted to tell you before Stidge got to you.”

“Okay, man. I understand what you’re saying.”

“I wouldn’t have bothered you otherwise,” Mujer said.

“Sure. But we need to eat, Mujer. I think what I’ll do, I’ll take a look at this place of Stidge and Tamale’s. Maybe they’re right for once and we can take it, and if I think so, we will. And if I don’t think so, we won’t. Okay, Mujer?”

“Okay. Sorry I bothered you.”

“Nothing, man.” Charley waved Mujer away. Turning to Tom again, he said, “Okay. The Eye People.”

Charley doesn’t have much trouble, Tom thought, shifting gears like that. One minute he’s talking about raiding somebody’s farm, the next he wants to be told about worlds in the stars. He didn’t seem like a killer. His eyes were deep and somber, and there was something close to kind and almost poetic about him sometimes. And other times not. He really was a killer, Tom knew. Underneath the kind, underneath the poetic. But what was underneath that?

Tom said, “They live in a world of light that never goes dark and it’s so thick and dense that they can’t see the rest of the universe. In fact, they can’t really see anything at all, because the light of the Great Starcloud is so bright that there’s no contrast, there’s no way to pick out one thing against another. It like blinds you, there’s so much of it. You overdose on light. Instead of seeing, they sense, and every part of their body picks up images. All over their skins. That’s why they’re called the Eye People, because they’re like one big eye all over. You understand, they don’t exist yet. But they will; they’re one of the coming races. There are a thousand four hundred coming races listed in the Book of Moons, but naturally that’s just the ones in the Book of Moons. In fact there are billions and billions of coming races, but the universe is so big that even the Zygerone and the Kusereen don’t know a thousandth of it. But there they are, the Eye People, and their minds are so sensitive that they can reach out and feel the rest of the universe. They know about suns and stars and planets and galaxies and all that, but it’s by guess and feel and intuition, the way a blind man knows about red and blue and green. Their minds are in contact with the other worlds of the Sacred Imperium, past and future. They learn about the outside universe, and in return they show other people the Great Starcloud, which is holy because its light is so powerful, so complete. It’s like the light of the Buddha, you know? It fills the whole void. And so the Eye People—”

“Charley? They said you were through talking to him.”

Stidge.

“I’m not quite,” Charley said. Then he stood up. “Shit. All right. We’ll finish some other time. What is it, Stidge?”

“Farmhouse. Seven hundred meters down, in the fork. Man, woman, three sons. They got screens up but the electronics is lousy. We can go right in.”

“You sure of that?”

“Absolutely. Tamale saw it too.”

“Yeah,” Charley said. “Tamale’s got terrific judgment.”

“I’m telling you, Charley—”

“Okay. Okay, Stidge. Let’s go down and have a look at this place, you and me? Okay?”

“Sure,” Stidge said.

Tom stayed where he was, under a big plane tree at the side of a little mostly dried-up stream that probably flowed only in winter. He watched Charley and Stidge go off into the late afternoon shadows; and then after a while they came back and spoke with the others, and then all eight of them went off together. Tom wondered about that, what was going to happen down at the farm in the river fork. After a while he found himself wandering over that way to find out.

The farmhouse came into view in just a few minutes. It was a small white wooden building that looked about a hundred fifty years old, with dark green shingles and a huge fat-trunked palm tree out front overshadowing the porch. The red glow of a protective screen surrounded the house. Just as Tom got there the screen winked out, and then he heard shouts and screams and one very loud scream above all the rest of the noise. After that it was quiet for a moment; then there were shouts again, angry ones. Tom went to the door, thinking, Be strong and of a good courage, be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee, whithersoever thou goest.

He looked in. Two people, a man and a woman, were sprawled on the floor in that peculiar twisted herky-jerk way that indicated they had been killed with a spike. A third person—boy, rather, maybe sixteen, seventeen—was pressed up against the wall, white-faced, bug-eyed, and Stidge had his spike against his throat.

“Stidge!” Charley yelled, just as Tom entered. “Stidge, you crazy son of a bitch!”

“I got him,” Mujer said, coming up behind Stidge and smoothly grabbing the red-haired man’s wrist with one hand while locking his other arm around Stidge’s throat. Stidge growled in surprise. Mujer, who seemed incredibly strong for the wiry little guy he was, bent Stidge’s arm outward until the spike in Stidge’s hand was practically touching Stidge’s right ear. “Let me kill him this time,” Mujer begged. “He’s no good, Charley. He’s a wild man. Look what he just did, the farmer and his wife.”

“Hey, no, Charley,” Stidge cried in a strangled voice thick with terror. “Hey, make him let go!”

“You didn’t need to do that, Stidge,” Charley said. His face looked bleak and stormy. “Now we got two deads on our hands and two of the sons got loose, and what for? What for?”

“Should I do him, Charley?” Mujer asked eagerly.

Charley seemed to be considering it. Tom stepped forward. No one had noticed him come in; now they all looked at him in amazement, all but Stidge, whose face was to the wall. Tom touched Mujer’s arm. His eyes felt strange. He was having trouble seeing straight: everything looked glazed and blurred, as if it were coated with ice.

“No,” Tom said. “Let him be. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Not yours, Mujer. Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath. Let him be.” Tom took firm hold of Mujer’s arm and pulled it back until the spike was well away from Stidge’s face.

“What…?” Mujer was astonished. “The lunatic?” He whirled, ripping the spike from Stidge’s hand and bringing it around as if he meant to jab it into Tom’s chest.

“The Lord my God is with me, whithersoever I go,” said Tom mildly. His eyes were still out of focus. He saw two Mujers and just a red-topped blob instead of Stidge.

“Jesus,” said Mujer. “Jesus, what do we have here?”

“All right,” Charley said, irritated. “Enough of this goddamn stuff. Mujer, give Stidge back his spike.”

“But—”

“ Give it back. ” To Stidge, Charley said, “You’re lucky Tom walked in here when he did. I had a half a mind to let Mujer do you. You’re a liability to us, Stidge.”

“I’m the one turned the screen off, didn’t I?” Stidge shot back. “I’m the one got us in here!”

“Yeah,” Charley said. “But we could have gotten in and out without killing. Now we got two deads lying here and two missing. Stidge, you got to keep control of those weapons of yours. You don’t let yourself get out of hand again, you hear? Next time we’re gonna do you, you run wild. Hear?” Charley waved his hand at the others. “All right, start packing up anything we can use. Food, weapons, whatever. We can’t hang around.”

“I don’t believe it,” Mujer muttered, staring at Tom. “He hates you, you know? Stidge. I’m about to do him, and you come over and grab my arm. I don’t believe it.”

“Come out, come out, thou bloody man, thou son of Belial,” Tom said.

“The Bible again,” said Mujer disgustedly. “Damn looney.”

Tom smiled. They were all staring at him. Let them stare. He could not have countenanced killing in cold blood. Even Stidge. Tom glanced toward him. There was a cold baleful glare on Stidge’s face. He hates me even more now, Tom realized. Now that he knows he owes his life to me. But I am not afraid. Love your enemies, that’s what He taught us, do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you. He realized that he was seeing straight again, calming down some. “Thank you,” Tom said to Charley. “For sparing him.”

“Yeah,” Charley grunted. “Jesus, Tom. You had no business. That was crazy, what you did. Walking in like that. Mujer, he might have put the spike right through you and Stidge both. You know that?”

“I would not let another life be taken. The Lord is the only judge.”

“You had no call messing in. It wasn’t your place to decide things here. It was crazy, Tom. Doing what you did just then. Okay? That’s what I call it, crazy. It wasn’t your place at all. Now get the hell out of here until we’re finished. Go on, get out.”

“Okay,” Tom said. He went out. But he looked back through the window, just long enough to see Charley lift the laser bracelet on his wrist and aim a shaft of fiery light at the terrified farmboy cowering against the wall. The boy fell, most likely dead before he hit the ground. Tom winced and muttered a prayer. A little while later Charley came out of the house. “I saw that,” Tom said. “How could you do that? I don’t make sense out of it. You got angry when Stidge killed the man and the woman. And then you yourself—”

Charley spat. “Once there’s killing, there got to be more killing. Kill the parents, you better kill the son too, or he’ll track you down no matter where you go. The other two boys got away, and I hope to hell they didn’t see our faces.” Then, shaking his head, he said, “What’s the matter? I told you not to stick around. You had to look, didn’t you? Well, so you saw. You think I’m a goddamn saint, Tom?” He laughed. “This ain’t no time for being a saint. Come on, now. Come on. Tell me some more about the Eye People. You really see all this shit, don’t you? Like it’s really real to you. You’re amazing, you crazy son of a bitch. Tell me. Tell me what you see.”

4

Ferguson said to April Cranshaw, “You’re honest to God not making all this up? The sky full of light? The flying jellyfish beings? Hey, hey, do me a favor and own up to it. It’s all just a big joke, right? Right?”

“Ed,” she said reproachfully, as if he had just peed on her party dress. “Stop trying to do that to me, Ed. I’m going to walk away from you if you keep messing with my head. Be nice, Ed.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be nice.”

The bastards were all in a sweat over this stuff. Talked of almost nothing else. First thing in the morning when you went in for your pick, they wanted to know about your dreams. Then they had meetings all afternoon. People being summoned for special testing, questioning, whatnot.

Not him. Never him. He didn’t get the dreams, not ever. That puzzled them. Puzzled him, too. Made him wonder why he was singled out, the only one. Made him wonder if the dreams were happening at all. Bastards, the bunch of them. Trying to cut him out, trying to fool him all the time.

“Just give me a straight answer,” he said. “You aren’t making this up? You really do have dreams like that?”

“Every night,” she said. “I swear.”

He studied her face like it was a prospectus for an oceanfront development scheme. She looked like a pudding, bland and jiggly. She looked sincere as hell. Sweet wide smile, gentle blue-green eyes. Ferguson didn’t see how she could be capable of lying. Not this one. The others, sure, but not this one.

“Sometimes even during the day,” she went on. “I close my eyes a minute, still awake, and I get pictures under my eyelids.”

“You do? Daytimes?”

“This very day. The jellyfish people, middle of the morning.”

“After you were picked, then.”

“That’s right. It’s still fresh.”

“Go on. Tell me what you saw.”

“You know we aren’t supposed to tell each other—”

“Tell me,” he said.

He wondered if he had ever slept with her. Probably not: she was eighty, a hundred pounds overweight, not his type at all. His recorder didn’t have any information on the subject, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, only that he hadn’t bothered to feed the data about it into the recorder, and now it was too late to know. He could have shtupped her ten times last month and neither of them would have any way of knowing it now. Things came and went. That time last month when Mariela had visited—she had been like a stranger to him, he didn’t really know her at all. Or want to. His own wife. If he hadn’t put it on the recorder he wouldn’t even know she’d been here.

Uncomfortably April said, “Dr. Lewis told me I must absolutely not reveal my dream content except during the interrogatory sessions, that it would contaminate the data.”

“You always do whatever you’re told?”

“I’m here to be healed, Ed.”

“You give me a pain, April. You and that sea wind that blows all the time.”

“Let’s walk a little,” she said.

They were at the edge of the woods, going along the trail through the redwood forest just east of the Center. It was the free-time part of the afternoon. The wind, cool and strong, was coming in off the ocean like a fist, the way it always did this time of day. Every afternoon they gave you an hour or two of free time. No therapy in the afternoon; they wanted you to go out and stroll in the forest, or play skill games in the rec room, or just futz around with your fellow inmates.

Ferguson would rather have been with Alleluia right now. But he didn’t know where she was, and somehow April had found him. She had a way of doing that, somehow, during free-time.

“You’re really obsessed with the space dreams, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Isn’t everybody?”

“But you keep asking all the time, what are they like, what are they like.”

“It’s because I don’t get them myself.”

“You will,” she said softly. “It just isn’t your turn, yet. But your turn will come.”

Yeah, he thought. When? This had been going on, what, two weeks now? Three? Hard to keep track of time in this place. After you had had a little picking, each day started to flow seamlessly into the one before, the one after. But the dreams, everyone was having them, the inmates and at least one of the staff technicians, that queer Lansford, and maybe even a few of the doctors. Everyone but him. That was the thing of it: everyone but him. It was almost like they were all getting together behind his back to fake up a gigantic mountain of bullshit to pile on top of him, this space-dream stuff.

“I know your turn will come,” she said. “Oh, Ed, the dreams are so beautiful!”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Let’s go this way. Into the woods.”

She giggled nervously. Almost a whinny.

Ferguson didn’t think he’d slept with her. So far as his ring-recorder indicated, Alleluia was the only one since he’d been here. Women April’s size had never been his thing, though he could certainly see the potential prettiness deep down inside all that flesh, the buried cheekbones, the nice nose and lips. About thirty-five, came from L.A. like him, very screwed up like everybody here. What bothered him more than the fat was the way her head worked, so ready to believe all sorts of fantastic things. That we all had lived lots of lives and could get in touch with our previous selves, and that some people really were able to read minds, and that gods and spirits and maybe even witches and elves were real and existed all around us, and so on. It made no sense to him, all her goofy beliefs. The real world hadn’t treated her very well so she lived in a bunch of imaginary ones. She had showed him pictures of herself dressed up in costumes, medieval clothes, even one in a suit of armor, a fat lady knight ready to go off to the Crusades. Jesus. No wonder she loved the space dreams.

But he had to know if this crap was really happening.

It was quiet here in the forest. Wind in the treetops, nothing else. Good clean redwood smell. He was starting to like it here a little.

“Why don’t you believe we really have the dreams?” she asked.

Ferguson looked at her. “Two things,” he said. “One is that all my life I been dealing with people who experience things I don’t experience. The ones who go to church, the ones who hang tinsel on their Christmas trees, the ones who think that prayers are answered. Those people have assurances. You know what I mean? I never had an assurance of any damn thing, except that I had to make my own luck because there was no one out there going to make it for me. You follow me? Sometimes I’d like to pray too, just like everybody else, only I know there’s no use in it. So I feel myself sitting outside what a lot of people know for certain. And when these sort of weird dreams come along, and everyone says how beautiful, how wonderful, and I don’t get them you know how I feel? Go on, tell me I’m paranoid. Maybe I am, or I wouldn’t be in a place like this, but I never could believe in anything I couldn’t touch with my own hands, and I’m not touching these dreams.”

“You said there were two things, Ed.”

“The other one is, you know I was supposed to go to jail?” He wondered why he was telling her so much about himself. There might be some way she could use this stuff to hurt him. No, he thought, not her. Sweet April. “Convicted of fraud is what I was. Selling trips to the planet Betelgeuse Five is what I was doing. We’d promise to send you I forget how many light-years, fifteen, fifty, not in the actual flesh but just your mind, by a process of metem—metem—”

“Metempsychosis?” April said.

“That’s it, yeah. People signed up in droves. I’m surprised you weren’t on our list. Christ, maybe you were. Everybody wanting to go, but of course it was just bullshit, we were going to have trouble with the process and refund all the deposits later on, but meanwhile we were making interest on the cash, you see? Plenty of it, millions. And then they got us. Me. I took the fall, some of the others got off. But what eats me, April, is now the scam is coming true, in reverse, goddamn Betelgeuse Five is metempsychosing to Earth. That’s what’s so unbelievable to me, that suddenly people’s minds are in tune with other stars, the very thing I was peddling. I knew I was phony. But this—”

“No, it’s real, Ed.”

“How do I know? How do I know? Sometimes I think the bastards are just fooling me. Making it all up just to mess up my head.” They were deep in the forest now. Just the two of them. Is that really what I believe, he asked himself? That it’s like a conspiracy? Even Lacy, back in San Francisco, seeing the big golden thing with horns: Alleluia had seen the same thing. Could Lacy possibly be in on the deal too? No, how could Lacy have managed to tell her dream to Alleluia? She didn’t even know that Alleluia existed. Even he had to admit that it was crazy to doubt the dreams. But all the same he did doubt. “Tell me about what you saw this morning,” he said. “The jellyfish people.”

“I’m not supposed to discuss—”

“Jesus,” he said. They were all alone, nobody around but the chipmunks. He smiled and came close to her. For an instant she gave him a worried, frightened look. “You could be very attractive, you know?” Ferguson told her, and drew her up against him. She was wearing a blue cashmere pullover, fuzzy, soft. He slipped his hand up under it and felt her breast, bare within, so big that he couldn’t cover the whole of it with his outspread fingers. She closed her eyes and began to sigh. He found her nipple and rubbed his thumb against it slowly, and in an instant it was hard as a pebble. She pushed the lower half of her body against him again and again and made little sighing sounds.

Then he took his hand away.

“Don’t stop,” she said.

“I want to know. I need to know. Tell me what you saw.”

“Ed—”

He smiled. He put his mouth over hers and slid his tongue between her lips, and touched her breast again, outside the sweater. “Tell me.”

With a sigh she said, “All right. Don’t stop and I’ll tell you. The sky on this world I dreamed is all lit up, it’s a million billion stars surrounding the planet, so there’s daytime all the time, brilliant daytime. And these beings float through the atmosphere. They’re gigantic, and they look something like enormous jellyfish, transparent, with dangling stuff, very intricate. Oh, Ed, I shouldn’t be telling you this!”

He massaged her stiff nipple. “You’re doing terrific. Keep going.”

“Each entity is a colony of beings, like. There’s the dark brain in the middle, and then there are the coiling dangling things that hunt for food, and the ones with little oar-legs that propel the colony, and the ones that—that do the reproductive things, and—and, oh, I don’t know, there must be fifty other kinds, all bound together, writhing clusters and tangles of them, each one with a sort of mind of its own, but all connected to the main mind. And on the outside of the whole thing are the perceptors that function in all this dazzling light like eyes, but they aren’t really eyes because they’re all over every bit of the outside—”

He said, “Did it look the same the other time you saw it?”

“I don’t know, Ed. They picked me, remember? I lost it then. But I think it must have been the same, because it’s a real projection of a real world, so how can it be different each time?”

He didn’t know about real projection of a real world. But her description was the same, for sure. She was using some of the exact phrases she had the other day, two, three, four days ago, when she had first told remember what she had said that day any more than she could, but he had it all down on his recorder. And that was what she had said and he had transcribed, writhing clusters and tangles and a dark brain inside the transparent body.

“You mustn’t say I told you, Ed.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Hold me again, won’t you please?”

He nodded. Her face came up toward his, eyes bright and misty, lips parted, tongue-tip visible. Poor fat broad. Probably wishes she could leave her body behind and jump to that other world tomorrow and live like a jellyfish-being with dangling clusters of stuff. Happily ever after.

“Oh, Ed—Ed—”

Goddamn, he thought. There’s no hiding from it: they all do have these dreams, everybody but me, sharing the same dreams, Christ only knows how. The bastards, the bastards. Everybody but me. He asked himself what use he could make out of all this. There had to be a use. All his life he had turned to his own use the fact that he missed out on a lot of things that other people experienced. All right, this too. Maybe they’ll have some special need for somebody who’s immune to the dreams and I can trade that for an end to the goddamn daily mindpicking, or something. Maybe.

April pressed herself close, pistoning her hips against him.

“Yeah,” he said softly. A deal was a deal. She had told him what he wanted to know; now he had to come through for her. He slipped his hand under her sweater again.

5

Elszabet said, “Output Dreamlist,” and the data wall in her office lit up like a stock-exchange ticker display.

“Data entry,” Elszabet said.

She began to post the morning’s haul of dream reports.

Poor Father Christie. He took the dreams worse than any of the others, always interpreting each one as God’s personal message to him. He still hated to give them up. Every morning she had to go through the same struggle with him, usually needing to double-pick him to get him clean. Maybe if we weren’t picking him, she thought, the dreams would lose some of their transcendental power for him, and he’d be easier about the whole thing. On the other hand, if he weren’t getting picked he’d have to contend with the notion that God had come to him in half a dozen different bizarre alien guises over the past few weeks. And most likely he’d be in deep schiz by now, far beyond retrieval, if he had access to more than one dream at a time. Better that he should think each one was his first.

Elszabet continued with the day’s entries.

She felt something that seemed like a headache beginning to invade her, just the ghost of it, a tickling little throb around her temples. Strange. She never got headaches. Hardly ever. Time of the month, maybe? No, she thought. After-effects of getting punched by Nick Double Rainbow? But that was over a week ago. General tension and stress, then? All this puzzling over weird dreams? Whatever, the sensation was getting a little worse. Pressure behind her eyes, unfamiliar, nasty. She touched the neutralizer node on her watch and gave herself a buzz of alpha sound. First time she’d done that in ages. The pressure eased off a little.

Going onward. Teddy Lansford, Nine Suns.

A knock at the door. Elszabet frowned and glanced at the view-screen. She saw Dan Robinson outside, lounging amiably against the frame of the door.

“You spare a minute?” he asked. “Got something new for you.”

She let him in. He had to stoop crossing the threshold. Robinson was an elongated man, basketball-player physique, all arms and legs. He practically filled the little room. Elszabet’s office was nothing more than a small bare functional cubicle, floor of rough gray planks, tiny window, orange glow-light floating overhead. Not even a desk or a computer terminal, just a couple of chairs facing the floor-to-ceiling data wall. She liked it that way.

Robinson peered at the data wall. The Teddy Lansford entry was still showing. He nodded toward it.

“That’s his fourth one, isn’t it?”

“Third,” Elszabet said.

“Third. Even so, why does he get the dreams and not the rest of us? It doesn’t figure, that only one staff member should get the dreams.”

“Teddy’s the only one willing to admit it, maybe,” she said. She didn’t amplify the statement. Naresh Patel’s lone Green World dream was still a confidential matter between him and Elszabet, and would stay that way as long as Patel wanted it that way.

“You suspect that other staff people are hiding them?” Robinson asked. His eyes were suddenly very wide, very white in his chocolate toned face. “You think I am, maybe?”

“Are you?”

“You serious?”

“Well, are you?” she asked, a little too sharply. She wondered why she was being so sharp with him. He was wondering too, obviously.

“Hey. Come off it, Elszabet.”

The headache was back. She felt the pressure again, stronger than before, a heavy throbbing at the temples. She shook her head, trying to clear it.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

“You know I’m dying to experience one of those dreams. But so far it seems Lansford’s the only lucky one.”

“So far, yes.”

Except for Naresh Patel, she thought. And that had been just one time.

“Why do you think that is?” Robinson asked.

“Not a clue.” Elszabet hesitated and said—a stab in the dark—” Could it be that the dreaming or lack of it is a function of emotional resilience? The patients are extremely wobbly around the psyche, otherwise they wouldn’t be here, after all. That must lay them open to any manner of disturbances that staff people wouldn’t be vulnerable to. Such as these dreams.”

“And is Teddy Lansford wobbly around the psyche?”

“Well, he’s homosexual.”

“So what?”

She rubbed her forehead lightly. Something hammering away in there. It embarrassed her to press for an alpha buzz in front of Dan Robinson.

“So nothing, I guess,” she said. “A silly hypothesis.” And Naresh Patel isn’t particularly wobbly around the psyche either, Elszabet told herself. Or gay, for that matter. “Lansford’s actually pretty sturdy emotionally, don’t you think?”

“I’d say so.”

She said, “I can’t tell you, then. Maybe when we have more data we’ll be able to figure it better. Right now I don’t know.” Brusquely she added, “You said there was something new you wanted to talk to me about?”

He looked at her. “Are you okay, Elszabet?”

“Sure. No, not really. Beginnings of a headache.” Something beyond just beginnings, now. It was really banging away. “Why, does it show that much?”

“You seem a little touchy, is all. Impatient. Sharp. Short. Not much like your usual self.”

Elszabet shrugged. “One of those days, I guess. One of those weeks. Look, I told you I was sorry for snapping at you like that before, didn’t I?” Then she said more softly, “Let’s start this all over, okay? You wanted to see me. What’s up, Dan?”

“There’s a new dream. Number Seven. Double Star Three.”

“How’s that? I thought we had all the reports for today.”

“Well, now there’s one more. This one courtesy of April Cranshaw, half an hour ago.”

With a shake of her head Elszabet said, “We’ve already got April’s entry. She reported the Blue Giant dream for last night.”

“This isn’t last night,” Robinson said. “It’s this morning, after pick.”

That was startling. “What? A daytime dream?”

“So it seems. April was shy about admitting it. I think she was afraid we’d send her back for a second picking this morning. But it was on her conscience and she finally came in with it. This may not be the first daytime dream she’s had.”

“She’s now had more dreams than anyone,” Elszabet said.

“Right at the top of the sensitivity curve, yes. I think she knows that too. And is a little troubled about it.”

“What kind of dream was this?”

“This is what I jotted down,” Robinson said.

He handed her a slip of paper. Elszabet looked it over and said to the data wall, “Input Dreamlist.” The screen gave her input format and she read the new dream in:

“That’s handy, having that list,” Robinson said.

“It is, yes,” Elszabet said. She said to the data wall, “Output Dreamlist, Distribution Route One.”

“What are you doing, printing it out for general reference use at the Center?”

“That’s a good idea. I’ll do that next.”

“What’s Distribution Route One, then?”

“I just sent it around to the other Northern California mindpick centers,” Elszabet said.

Dan Robinson’s eyes went wide again. “You did?”

“San Francisco, Monterey, Eureka. I called around this morning to tell them what’s going on here, and Paolucci in San Francisco said yes, they were having something along the same lines, and he had heard the same thing from Monterey. So we’re setting up a data link. Dream descriptions, tallies of incidence. We need to know what in God’s name is happening. An epidemic of identical dreams? That’s brand-new in the whole literature of mental disturbance. If mental disturbance is actually what we’re dealing with.”

“I wonder,” Robinson said. “There’s going to be some bitching, you going out to the other centers with this before bringing it up at a staff meeting here.”

“You think so?” The pounding in her skull was getting to the impossible level now. Something in there trying to get out? That was how it seemed. “Excuse me,” Elszabet said, and gave herself a buzz of alphas. She felt her cheeks reddening, doing that sort of modification in front of him. The pain eased just a little. Trying not to sound as irritated as she really was, she said to Robinson, “I didn’t think it was classified stuff. I simply wanted to know if the other centers were experiencing this phenomenon, so I started calling, and they said yes, we are, send us your data and we’ll send back ours, and—” Elszabet shut her eyes a moment and clenched her teeth hard and drew a deep breath. “Listen, can we talk about these things some other time? I need to get some fresh air. I’m going to run down to the beach, I think. This lousy headache.”

“Good idea,” Robinson said gently. “I could use some exercise too. You mind if I run with you?”

Yes, I do mind, she thought. Very much. The beach was her special place, her second office, really. She tried to escape to it a couple of times a week, whenever she had some serious thinking to do or just wanted to get away from the pressures of being in charge of the Center. It astonished her that the usually sensitive Robinson couldn’t understand that she didn’t want company right now, not even his. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that. Such a sweet man, such a good man. Elszabet didn’t want to seem to be snippy with him again. This is dumb, she told herself. All you have to say is that you need to be alone: he won’t take offense. But she couldn’t do it. She managed a smile. “Sure, why not?” she said, hating herself for caving in like this. She motioned to him. “Come on. Let’s go.”

The beach wasn’t much: a little rocky cove walled in by flat-topped cliffs covered with iceplant. It was just under four kilometers from the main part of the Center, a nice easy twenty-minute lope down a narrow unpaved road bordered on both sides by sprawling red-barked madrone trees and a low scrub of manzanita. They ran side by side, moving smoothly and well. The throbbing in her head began to diminish as the rhythm of the jog took over. She wasn’t having any trouble keeping up with him, though his legs were even longer than hers. She knew how to run. In college at Berkeley, she had been an athlete, a runner, track team, all-state champion in almost every medium-distance event, the 800 meters, 1500 meters, 1600-meter relay, and more. Those long legs, the endurance, the determination. “You ought to consider a career as a runner,” someone had told her. She had been nineteen, then. Fifteen years ago. But what did that mean, a career as a runner? It was a waste of a life, she thought, giving yourself up to something as hermetically sealed, as private, as being a runner. It was a little like saying, You ought to consider a career as a waterfall, You ought to consider a career as a fire hydrant. It was a useless thing to do with yourself, okay for a bit of private discipline or for a collegiate extracurric, but you didn’t make a career out of it. For a career, she thought, you had to make some real use of your life, which meant entering into the human race, not the 1500-meter one. You had to justify your presence on the planet by giving something to the others who were here in space and time sharing it with you, and being the fastest girl in the class wasn’t close to being enough. Working at a center for the repair of the poor bewildered burned-out Gelbard’s syndrome people, eventually coming to be in charge of it: that was more like it, Elszabet thought. She ran on and on, saying nothing, scarcely even aware of the silent, graceful, dark-skinned man running beside her.

There was a steep, tricky trail from the top of the cliff down to the beach. The beach itself had just about enough sand to spread three blankets on, side by side. In winter at high tide there was hardly any beach at all, and if you went there you had to huddle in an ocean-carved cave with the chilly waves practically lapping at your toes. But this was a warm summer afternoon, no fog, the tide low. She tossed the beach blanket that she was carrying over the edge or the cliff and went scrambling down after it. Robinson came right behind her, taking the trail in big confident bounds.

When they reached the beach she said, “I’m going to take my clothes off. I usually do here.” She looked him in the eye, a look that said, Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be provocative. It also said, You’re here but I don’t really want you to be, and I’m going to behave as if I were here by myself.

He seemed to understand. “Sure,” he said. “That’s fine with me.” He tossed his shirt aside; kept his jeans on, squatted down by the tide-pools at the upper end of the beach. “Couple of starfish here,” he said.

Elszabet nodded vaguely. She undid her halter and dropped her shorts and walked naked to the edge of the water, not looking toward him. Cold wavelets swirled up around her toes.

“Are you going in?” Robinson asked.

She laughed. “You think I’m nuts?”

She never went swimming here. No one ever did, winter or summer. The water was cold as death all year round, as it was along the whole Pacific Coast north of Santa Cruz, and a dark reef just off shore made the surf turbulent and impassable. That was all right with Elszabet. If she felt like swimming, there was a pool at the Center. The beach meant other things to her.

After a while she glanced back at Robinson and saw him looking at her. He smiled and did not look hurriedly away, as if to look hurriedly away would be an admission of guilt. Instead he kept his gaze on her another moment or two, and then he returned his attention in a deliberate way to his starfish. Maybe this is not such a good idea, Elszabet thought. Nudity was no big deal at the Center, but there were just the two of them here. And she knew Robinson was interested in her, though he had never been overt about it. She was an attractive woman, after all, and he was a healthy outgoing man, and there were professional and intellectual ties. They were a plausible couple; everyone at the Center thought that. She sometimes thought that herself. But she wanted no romantic entanglements, not with Dan Robinson, not with anyone. This was not the time for that sort of thing for her. She wondered if she had actually meant to be provocative. Or teasingly cruel. She hoped not.

She decided not to worry about it. Cautiously she waded out until the water was ankle-deep on her. The cold drew a hiss from her, but it seemed to purge the throbbing in her temples.

Robinson said, still poking in the tide-pools, “I’ve been thinking about the dreams. One possible explanation. Which may sound weird to you but it seems less weird to me than trying to argue that a lot of people are having identical bizarre dreams through sheer coincidence.”

Elszabet didn’t feel much like talking about the problem of the dreams just now, or about anything else. But all the same she said politely enough, “What’s your theory?”

“That we’re getting some kind of broadcasts from an approaching alien space vessel.”

“What?”

“Does that sound crazy to you?”

“A little farfetched, let’s say.”

“I’d say so too. But I’ve got a rationale to fit behind it. Do you know what Project Starprobe was?”

She was beginning to feel awkward, standing there naked, half turned toward him with her feet in the cold water. She walked a little way up the beach, not as far as her blanket, and sat down in the sand with her back against an upjutting rock and her knees drawn up to her chest. The warm sun felt good against her skin. She didn’t put her clothes back on but she felt a bit less exposed, sitting down. It seemed to her that the headache might be returning. Just the merest tickle of it, across her brow. “Project Starprobe?” she said. “Wait a second. That was some kind of unmanned space expedition, wasn’t it?”

“To Proxima Centauri, yes. The star system closest to Earth. It was sent off a little way before the Dust War—oh, around 2050, 2060. I could look it up. The idea being to get to the vicinity of Proxima Centauri in twenty, thirty, forty years, go into surveillance orbit, search for planets, send back pictures—”

The headache again, yes. Definitely.

“I don’t see what that has to do with—”

“Try this,” Robinson said. “I haven’t checked it out, but I figure Starprobe must have reached Proxima ten or fifteen years ago. About four light-years away, and I think the ship was supposed to reach a pretty hefty acceleration after a while, peak velocity close to a quarter the speed of light or so, and—anyway… let’s say the probe got there. And Proxima Centauri has intelligent life-forms living on one of its planets. They come out in their little spaceships and they inspect the probe, they determine that it comes from Earth and is full of spy equipment, and they get kind of nervous. So they dismantle the probe, which maybe is why we’ve never received any messages back from it, and then they send out an expedition of their own to see what this place Earth is like, whether it’s dangerous to them and so forth.”

“And this spy mission announces its arrival by bombarding the Earth with random hallucinations of other worlds?” Elszabet asked. Dan was a sweet man, but she wished he would leave her alone for a little while. “It doesn’t sound very plausible to me.” She closed her eyes and tipped her face toward the sun and prayed that he’d let the discussion drop.

But he didn’t seem to pick up the hint. He said, “Well, maybe they’re not coming to spy, or to invade. Just as ambassadors, let’s say.”

Please, she thought. Make him stop. Make him stop.

“And somehow they give off telepathic emanations—they’re alien, remember, we can’t possibly figure how their thought processes would work—telepathic emanations that stir up pictures of distant solar systems in the minds of those most susceptible to receiving them.” There was no stopping him, was there? She opened her eyes and stared at him, still too gracious to tell him to go away. The drumming in her head was building up. Before it had felt like something trying to get out. Now it felt like something trying to get in. “Or maybe sending the images is their way of softening us up for conquest by spreading confusion, fear, panic,” he went on. “Yes? No. You still don’t like it, do you? Well, that’s okay. I’m just speculating a little, is all. To me it sounds goofy too, but not beyond all possibility. Go ahead, tell me what you think.”

Robinson grinned at her like an abashed sixteen-year-old. Plainly he wanted some sort of reassurance from her, wanted to be told that his notion wasn’t totally wild. But she could not give him that reassurance. Suddenly she did not care at all about his idea, about him, about anything except the spike of incredible pain that had erupted between her eyes.

“Elszabet?”

She lurched to her feet, rocked, nearly toppled forward. Everything looked green and fuzzy. She felt as though a thick blindfold of green wool had been tied around her forehead. And the wool was trying to poke its way into her mind—woolly green tendrils like a dense fog, invading her consciousness—

“Dan? I don’t know what’s happening, Dan!”

But she did. It’s the Green World, she said to herself. Trying to break through into my mind. A waking dream, a crazy hallucination. Could that be it? The Green World?

I’m going crazy, she thought.

Gasping, sobbing, she stumbled down the little narrow beach and out into the water. It rose about her like ice, like flame, to her thighs, to her breasts. She tried to push at the thing that was creeping into her mind. She scrabbled at her scalp with her fingertips as if she could scrape it away. Then she blundered into a submerged rock, slipped, fell to her knees. A wave hit her in the face. She was freezing. She was drowning. She was going crazy.

And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun.

She was standing in shin-deep water, shivering. Dan Robinson was beside her. He had his arm around her shoulders and he was leading her to shore, guiding her up the strip of sand, wrapping her blanket around her. She was goosebumps all over, and the fierce cold had made her nipples rise and grow so hard that her cheeks flamed when she saw them. She turned away from him. “Hand me my clothes,” she said, groping for her halter.

“What was it? What happened?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “Something hit me all of a sudden. Some kind of freakout. I don’t know. Something weird, just for a second or two, and I guess I blanked out.” She didn’t want to tell him about the woolly green fog. Already the concept that it had been an image out of the Green World trying to break through into her consciousness seemed absurd to her, a silly horror-fantasy. And even if it had happened, she didn’t dare confess it to Dan Robinson. He would be sympathetic, sure. He’d even be envious. She thought of how he had said sorrowfully only half an hour ago that he had never been lucky enough to experience one of the space dreams. But her own outlook on all this was altogether different. For the first time, the dreams frightened her. Let Father Christie have them; let April Cranshaw have them; let Nick Double Rainbow have them. They were emotionally disturbed people: hallucinations were routine stuff to them. Let Dan have them too, if he wants. But not me. Please, God, not me.

She was dressed, now. But she was still chilled bone-deep by that plunge into the Pacific. Robinson stood five or six meters away, staring at her, working hard at seeming not to be too worried about her. She forced a smile. “Maybe I just need a vacation,” she said. “I’m sorry I upset you.”

“Are you okay now?”

“I’m fine. It was just a quick thing. I don’t know. Wow, that water is cold!”

“Shall we go back to the Center?”

“Yes. Yes, please.”

He offered her a hand to help her climb up the cliff. Elszabet shook him off angrily and went up the trail like a mountain goat. At the top she paused only a moment to adjust the beach blanket around her waist, then took off without waiting for him, running at sprint speed down the unpaved road to the Center. “Hey, I’m coming!” he called, but she refused to let up and pushed herself without mercy down the road, going all out. She would not let him catch her. When she arrived at the Center she was dizzy and fighting for breath but she got there a hundred meters ahead of him. People stared at her in amazement as she thundered past.

She didn’t pause until she had reached her office. When she was inside she slammed the door behind her, dropped to her knees, crouched there trembling until she was sure that she was not going to throw up. Gradually her heart stopped pounding and her breathing returned to normal. Terrible things were happening in her thigh muscles. She glanced up at her data wall. There was a message waiting for her, it said. She called it up.Thanks for info. Our list of dreams exactly the same, detailed analysis to follow. Rumor of similar dream occurrence as far south as San Diego: am checking. More later. What in Cod’s name is going on, anyhow? It was signed Paolucci, San Francisco.