Wine of the Dreamers

Nine

Dr. Sharan Inly sat at her desk, her hands pressed against her eyes, her fingernails digging into her forehead just below the hair line. She wished with all her heart that she had become a stenographer, or a housewife, or a welder.

You could deal with humans, and be interested in them as humans even when they were cases duplicating those in the texts. Yet, as you treated them, you kept a tiny bit of yourself in reserve. It was self-protection. And then you would run into a case that would break your heart, because somehow you had gotten too involved with the individual as a person, not as a case.

“I hope you’ve got an explanation,” Bard Lane said coldly as he slammed into her office.

“Shut the door and sit down, Dr. Lane,” she said with a tired smile.

He sat down. His face had a drawn look. “Dammit, Sharan, my desk is piled high. Adamson needs help. The fool committee that wants to administer the death kiss to this whole project is waiting. I know you can bring anyone here at any time, but I think you might have checked first. Just a little consideration for the amount of work I—”

“How did you sleep last night?”

He stared at her, stood up with determination. “Fine, and I eat well, too. I even take walks. Want me to make a muscle for you?”

“Sit down, Dr. Lane!” she said crisply. “I’m doing my job. Please cooperate.”

He sat down slowly, a look of fear in his eyes, growing fear. “What is this, Sharan? I guess I slept well enough. I felt tired this morning, though.”

“What time did you get to bed?”

“A little before midnight. I was up at seven.”

“Thomas Bellinger, on the routine guard report, noted that you went into your office at ten minutes after two this morning.”

Bard gasped. “The man’s mad! No! Wait a minute. If somebody could plant a man who looks like me... Have you alerted all guards?”

She slowly shook her head. Her eyes were sad. “No, Bard. That won’t work. You passed the full test series with flying colors just this week, but it still won’t work. You noticed that Bess Reilly wasn’t in your office this morning?”

He frowned. “She’s sick today. She phoned from her quarters.”

“She phoned from here, Bard. I asked her to. Bess was a little behind in her work. She went in early this morning. She went into your office and took yesterday’s tape off the dictation machine and took it out to her desk to transcribe it. When she started to listen to it, she thought you were playing some sort of joke. She listened some more and it frightened her. She very properly brought it directly to me. I’ve been over it twice. Would you care to hear it?”

He said softly, “Dictation... a funny nightmare is coming back to me, Sharan. Silly thing, like most of them are. It seems I had something that I had to get down before it went out of my mind. And I dreamed I...”

“Then you walked in your sleep, Bard. Listen to what you said.”

She moved the small speaker closer to his chair, depressed the switch on the playback machine.

It was unmistakably Bard Lane’s voice. “Dr. Lane, I am taking this method of communicating with you. Do not be alarmed and do not doubt me. I am physically nearly four and a half light-years from you at this moment. But I have projected my thoughts into your mind and I have taken over your body to serve the purposes of the moment. My name is Raul Kinson and I have been watching your project for some time. I am anxious for it to succeed, as it is your world’s only chance to free itself from those of us whose visitations are unprincipled, who only want to destroy. I do not want to destroy. I want to help you create. But there are dangers that I can warn you about, dangers which you do not, as yet, understand. Take warning from what happened when your technician, Kornal, was seized by one of us. We are the survivors on your parent planet. I do not wish to tell you too much at this moment. Be assured that my intentions are friendly. Do not be alarmed. Do not fall into the logical error of assuming that this is an indication of mental unbalance. I will attempt to communicate with you in a more direct manner a bit later. Hear me out when I do.”

Sharan clicked the switch to the off position. “You see?” she said softly. “The same delusion as before. This is just a further refinement of it. I’m both glad and sorry that Miss Reilly brought it to me. But here it is, Bard. Now do you think I should have sent for you?”

“Of course,” he whispered. “Of course.”

“What am I to do?” Sharan asked.

“Do your job,” he said. His mouth was a hard, bloodless line.

Her voice was dispassionate, but her hand trembled as she handed him the note previously prepared. “This will admit you for observation. I see no need to assign an orderly to you while you pack what you’ll need. I’ll advise Adamson that he’s acting chief until you’re replaced.”

He took the note and left her office without a word. After he closed the door softly behind him, she buried her face in the crook of her arm, her shoulders hunched over the desk. She pounded gently on the desk top with her clenched left fist.

Bard Lane walked from the hospital lounge into his room at the end of the corridor. He wore the beltless bathrobe they had issued to him, the soft plastic slippers. He lay on the bed and tried to read the magazine he had carried in from the lounge. It was a news digest, and seemed to contain nothing except hollow-sounding absurdities.

New Navy sub successfully withstands the pressure at the deepest point of the Pacific. Mello Noonan, creamy-tressed star of video, lands her heli-cycle on the observation deck of the new Stanson Building, smilingly pays the forty-dollar fine. Russians, through careful research, prove that man first walked erect at a spot fourteen miles east of present-day Stalingrad. Teen-age girls in Houston set new fad by shaving their heads and painting them green. When they meet on the street, they doff shoes and ‘shake hands’ with their feet. Memphis musician brains girlfriend with tuba. Widow in Victoria, Texas, claims to be receiving spirit messages from long-dead Valentino. Georgia ax killer claims, at trial, that he was ‘possessed’ — accusing mother-in-law of putting the evil eye on him. Injunctions issued against further use of new Reno slot machines which provide divorce papers for a fifty-dollar fee. Doctors unable to bring nine-year-old twins in Daytona out of trance caused by forty-one hours spent in front of their home video screen. Vote fraud in North Dakota... dope ring indicted... gambling ship sunk... bride leaves third grade... multiple murder... drives car into shoppers... jumped from eighty-third floor... minister fires church... dresses four inches shorter next year... curb service vice... hate... fear... anger... envy... lust...

He lay back on the bed. The magazine slipped to the floor, landing with the dry sound of a dead winged thing. Madness in the world. Madness tolling in his mind like a huge cracked bell in a forgotten tower, a bell swayed by the unknown winds. He shut his hands hard, squeezed his eyes shut and felt his soul as a fading focal point of certainty in this alien body, in this body of webbed nerves and muscle fiber and convoluted brain. He knew that any idea of plan or order in this mad world was pure delusion, that man was a tiny creature, knotted with the most deadly instincts, that he could look at the stars, but never attain them. In the back of his mind he stood at the edge of a distorted cliff, and he leaned toward the darkness. So easy to fall, to drop downward with a scream so vast and so solid that it would be as a smooth silver column inserted slickly in his throat. He would fall with his head tilted back, his lips drawn wide, with white-rimmed iris, with long tortured spasm that...

The bed moved. He opened his eyes. The little blond nurse from the lounge sat on the end of his bed. The stiff starched uniform had a bold life of its own, as though, inside it, her tender body recoiled from any touch against its harshness. The temple veins were violet tracery against the luminescent skin. Her large eyes were blue-purple glass beads from a costume jewelry counter.

“As bad as that, Bard Lane?” she said.

He frowned. Nurses were not supposed to sit on patients’ beds. Nurses did not speak with such casual informality. Possibly in the psych ward the nurses had special leniency from the rigid rules applying to those who nursed more obvious wounds.

“Maybe I can do a soft-shoe dance to show how gay I am,” he said.

“He didn’t tell me about you. I thought I’d take a look while he’s getting you out of here. Of course, he might not approve.”

“Who are you talking about, Nurse? And what didn’t he tell you, whoever he is?”

“Nurse is so formal. My name is Leesa.”

“Very odd name. And you seem like an odd girl. I don’t follow you very well, Leesa.”

“I don’t imagine that you’ll be able to, Bard Lane. Actually I was talking about Raul, my brother, if that means anything. Raul Kinson.”

Lane sat up, his face flushed with anger. “Nurse, I’m not so far gone that I’m going to stand still for any half-baked experiments. Go on back to Sharan and tell her that it didn’t work. I’m still rational.”

The nurse tilted her blond head to one side and smiled. “I like you when you’re angry, Bard Lane. So fierce! Anyway, Raul is sorry that he got you into this mess by being too anxious to get into communication with you. Now he’s trying to straighten things out for you. Poor Raul! He thinks that you actually exist. All of you people are so obsessed with the idea of your own reality. It gets tiresome.”

Bard stared at her. He said slowly, “Nurse, this is just friendly advice from a patient. Why don’t you go to Dr. Inly and ask to have the standard series? You know, when a person works around... mental cases for a long enough time, it sometimes happens that—”

Her laugh was raw gold, and oddly sane. “Goodness! So solemn and so kindly! In a minute you’ll be patting me on the head and kissing my forehead.”

“If this approach of yours is supposed to help me, Nurse, I...”

She became serious. “Listen to me. You’re just part of an unpleasant and rather dull dream as far as I’m concerned. Raul seems to get a certain amount of amusement out of fooling himself about you. I wanted to see what you looked like. He seems very impressed with you. But I don’t have to be. I...”

A stocky woman in white appeared in the open doorway. She scowled. “Anderson! What is the meaning of this? Number seventeen has been signaling for the last ten minutes. And I’ve been trying to find you. You know better than to sit on a patient’s bed. I’m sorry this happened, Dr. Lane, but—”

The little blond nurse gave the supervisor a solemn wink. She slid up toward the head of the bed, curled a soft arm around Lane’s neck and kissed him firmly and warmly on the lips. The supervisor gasped.

The little blond nurse straightened up. Slowly a look of horror came over her face. She jumped to her feet, holding her hands at her breast, twisting her fingers until her knuckles cracked.

“I demand an explanation, Anderson,” the supervisor said ominously.

“I... I...” Two tears spilled over her lower eyelids and ran down her cheeks. She backed away from the bed.

“I think Leesa is a little upset,” Bard said. His tone was placating.

“Her name is Elinor,” the supervisor said crisply.

The nurse turned and fled. The supervisor sighed. “More trouble. I’m shorthanded, and now I’ll have to send her up for tests.” She plodded out of the room.

Sharan Inly was staring at Major Tommy Leeber. His smooth, jocular voice was just the same, his oval face kindly, his eyes jet-hard. But his words made Sharan feel a distant thunder in her ears, a weakness that was like the lethargy that came before a dead faint.

“If this is some sort of stupid joke, Major—”

“I’ll start from the beginning again, Dr. Inly. I made a mistake. But you made one also. My name is Raul Kinson. For the moment I am using the body of this man named Leeber. That shouldn’t be too difficult to accept as a basic premise. I used Lane’s body and sent him a message. Both you and Lane apparently jumped to the conclusion that he is mentally unsound.”

“I think General Sachson would like to have Lane and myself off the project, Major Leeber. I don’t care for your way of trying to eliminate me.”

“Please, Dr. Inly. There must be some test we can make. If I could repeat the message that I left for Lane to find—”

“Bess Reilly could have told you the message.”

“I don’t know who she is, but please have her come in and ask her.”

They waited. Bess Reilly arrived within a few moments. She was a very tall girl, angular and without beauty, except for her eyes, sea-green, long-lashed, expressive.

“Bess, have you spoken to anyone about that dictation tape on Dr. Lane’s machine?”

Bess lifted her chin a fraction of an inch. “Dr. Inly, you told me not to tell anyone. And I didn’t. I’m not the sort to—”

“Have you talked to Major Leeber today?”

“I saw him once yesterday for the first time. I’ve never spoken to him.”

Sharan gave the girl a long, steady look. “Thank you, Bess. You can go.”

The door closed behind her. She turned to Major Leeber. “Now tell me what the tape said.”

Leeber repeated it. In two places he made minor changes in sentence structure, but the rest of it was completely accurate. There was a calmness and a confidence about him that disturbed her.

She said, “Major, or Raul Kinson, or whoever you are... I... this is something that I can’t bring myself to believe. This idea of taking over other people. This idea of coming from some alien planet. There are cases on record where persons have repeated the contents of sealed envelopes. You’ll have to do better.”

“Bard Lane has to be put back in charge. I am going to have to frighten you, Dr. Inly. But it will be the best proof I can give you. Without attempting to explain how, I am going to vacate this host brain and enter your brain. In the process, Major Leeber will revert to complete consciousness. But he won’t remember very much of what has gone on. I will use your voice to get rid of him.”

Sharan’s smile felt as though it had been painted across her lips with a stiff brush. “Oh, come now!”

She sat with her palms pressed flat and hard against the cool desk top. The idea, in spite of its preposterousness, gave her an odd feeling of shame, as though an alien invasion of her mind would be a violation more basic than any physical relationship could ever be. Her mind had been a temple, a place of refuge, a place of secret thoughts, some of them so abandoned as to cause, in someone without her knowledge of psychiatry, a sense of guilt. To have these secret places laid bare would be... like walking naked through the streets of a city.

She saw the shock on Leeber’s face, his confused look around the office, the way he rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. And then she had no more time to watch Leeber. She felt the probe of unseen tendrils. She felt their softness. She tried to resist. Memory fled back to a time years before. A slushy day in a northern city. She had been playing in the gutter with the boy from next door. The water from the melting snow ran swiftly down the slope. They had built dams out of snow to contain it. But it would not be contained. It snaked around the dams, ate through them, thrusting always forward with gentle inevitability.

She moved back and back, seeking a last defensive point. And suddenly there was the sensation of the entire entity within her brain, adjusting itself to the familiar neural patterns, settling itself in a way that was oddly like the manner in which a dog, before sleeping, will turn around and around.

Words had always been planned a few seconds in advance. Her lips parted and the knowledge of the meaning of her words was simultaneous with the utterance of the words themselves.

“The sun is bad here, Major. It has made you a little dizzy. Drink a lot of water today and take salt tablets. You can get them at the dispensary. Stay out of the sun and you’ll be all right by morning.”

Leeber stood up. “Uh... thanks,” he said. He paused at the door, looked back at her with a puzzled expression, shook his head and went out.

The thought came to her. It was not written out inside her mind. It was not expressed in words, and yet the words formed to match the thought. “Now you understand? Now you believe? I will relax controls. To communicate with me, speak aloud.”

“I’ve gone mad!”

“That is what the others think. No. No, you’re not insane, Sharan. Watch your hand.”

She looked down. Her head reached out and took a pencil. It moved over toward the scratch pad. Without volition, she wrote her own name. “Sharan.” And then the room dimmed and faded and she knew nothing. As sight came back she saw that she had written another word under her own name. At least she imagined that it was a word.

“Yes, a word, Sharan. Your name in my own writing. I had to force you far back away from the threshold of consciousness in order to write it.”

It was written with bolder strokes than her own handwriting. It looked as Arabic might look if written with cursive style rather than individual word signs.

“Mad, mad, mad,” she said aloud.

Anger in her mind. Alien anger. “No. Don’t be a fool! Believe! Wait, Sharan. I’ll find your thoughts and your beliefs. I’ll learn all there is to know of you, Sharan.”

“No,” she said.

She sat rigid, and tiny soft combs moved through all parts of her mind. Memory came to her, days long passed, hopelessly cluttered and out of sequence. The music at her mother’s funeral. A passage from her doctor’s thesis. A man’s insistent lips. The song she wrote once. Discontent. Pride in her profession. Endless minutes and she felt as though she were pinned flat on a vast specimen board...

“Now I know you, Sharan. I know you well. Now do you believe?”

“Mad.”

No more anger. Resignation. Fading. Gone — dwindling slowly away, a song half heard in the far sweet dusk of summer.

She sat alone. She pulled open a drawer, took out one of the slips like the one she had given to Bard Lane. She started to fill it in. Name. Symptoms. Partial diagnosis. Prognosis.

The door opened and Jerry Delane, the young dispensary doctor, came in. She frowned at him and said, “Isn’t it customary to knock, Dr. Delane?”

He sat down facing her across the desk. He said, “I told you that I would leave Leeber’s mind and enter yours, and I did. Of course you can call me a fantasy your sick mind has dreamed up, so I’ll give you physical proof.” He pulled her dictating machine toward him, set the switch, smiled at her and spoke into it. “Fantasies cannot record their words, Sharan.”

To Sharan, all light seemed to fade in the room with the exception of the light around his smiling mouth. It seemed to grow larger, rushing toward her, overpoweringly large. And then it was as though she were moving swiftly toward the smile. Roaring down a tunnel toward the white even teeth, the murderous redness of the lips...

She was on the leather couch and he was kneeling beside her. He held a cold wet compress against the left side of her forehead. His eyes were tender.

“What...”

“You fainted and fell. You toppled against the edge of the file cabinet.”

She frowned. “I... I think I’m ill, Jerry. I had odd thoughts... delusions about—”

He stilled her words with a gentle finger against her lips. “Sharan, please. I want you to believe me. I am Raul Kinson. You must believe me.”

She stared at him. Slowly she pushed the hand away from her forehead. She walked to the desk, wavering slightly. She switched the dictation machine to play back, set it a fraction ahead. The voice, thin and metallic, said, “Fantasies cannot record their words, Sharan.”

She turned and faced him. In a dead voice she said, “I believe you now. There is no choice, is there? No choice at all.”

“No choice. Release Bard Lane. Get him over here. The three of us will talk.”

They sat and waited for Bard Lane. Raul stared at her. He said softly, “Odd, odd.”

“You can use that word?”

“I was thinking of your mind, Sharan. I have avoided the minds of women. They have all had a shifting, unfocused, intuitive pattern. Not your mind, Sharan. Every facet and phase seemed... familiar to me. As though I have always known you. As though your every emotional response to any situation would be the feminine parallel of my own reaction.”

She looked away from him. “You haven’t left me much privacy, you know.”

“Is privacy necessary? I know of a world where words are not used. Where a man and a woman, mated, can dwell within each other’s minds at will. They have true closeness, Sharan. In your mind I found... another reason for making certain that this project succeeds.”

She felt annoyance as the flush made her cheeks feel warm. “This is a brand new approach,” she said with acid tone. “Maybe you’d like to fingerprint me too.”

Bess Reilly came in. She slammed the door, yawned, hitched her bony hips onto the edge of the desk. She grinned at Jerry and said lazily, “Time’s running short, Raul. And I can’t say I’m sorry. You don’t have much fun in your dreams, do you? I’ve had to change hosts forty times to find you again.”

“I felt you near a few moments ago,” Raul said. He turned to Sharan. “I present my sister, Leesa Kinson.”

Sharan looked blankly at Bess Reilly’s familiar face. Bess stared at her. She said, “Does she believe you, Raul?”

“Yes, she does.”

“It gives me a funny feeling to have one of them understand how it is with us. I never had it happen before. Once, for a gag, I tried to make a man understand who I was when I took over the body of his bride. It took him just about an hour and a half to go crazy. I haven’t tried since. That is, until today. I took over a little blond nurse and tried to introduce myself to your friend, Bard Lane. He got a bit confused. Are you in any danger of going crazy, girl?”

“Yes,” Sharan said. “If this keeps up.”

Bess laughed. “Don’t take yourself too seriously.”

Bard Lane came in slowly and shut the door behind him. He glanced curiously at Jerry Delane and Bess Reilly. He addressed himself to Sharan. “You sent for me.”

“This is your old friend, Leesa,” Bess said. “How did the little nurse act after I moved away from her?”

Sharan saw the color leave Bard’s face. She spoke hurriedly. “Bard, we were wrong. Just believe me. They’ve proven it to me. It is impossible, I know. But it’s true. Some sort of long-range hypnosis, I guess. But there is a Raul Kinson. He had... he is using Jerry Delane’s body. He wants to talk to us. And his sister, Leesa, is... Bess is Leesa. Jerry and Bess won’t remember what has happened. That recording you made. Everything is true, Bard. I think one moment I’ve gone mad and the next moment I know it’s the truth.”

Bard Lane dropped heavily into a chair and held his hand across his eyes. No one spoke. When at last he looked up, his expression was bleak. He stared at Jerry. “What is this test you have to say to me?”

Speaking slowly, pausing at times, Raul Kinson told of the Watchers, the Leaders, the Migrations, the dream machines, and of the perversion, over fifty centuries, of what had once been a logical plan. He told of the one Law which governed all of those who dreamed.

Bess sat on the edge of the desk, a bored look on her face.

Bard looked down at the knuckles of his clenched fist. “And so,” he said softly, “if we can believe you, you give us the answer to why, with most of the techniques under control, every attempt to conquer deep space has been a miserable failure.”

There was no answer. He looked up. Jerry Delane stood with an odd expression on his face. “What am I doing in here? How did I get in here?”

Bess slid quickly off the desk. “Did you call me, Dr. Inly?” she asked in a shrill, frightened voice.

Sharan forced a smile. “The conference is over, kids. You can go. You will stay, Bard?”

Jerry and Bess left the office.

“Have we gone mad?” Bard asked.

“There is no such thing as shared delusion, mutual fantasy, Bard,” Sharan said in a tired voice. “And either you are still in the ward and all this is taking place in your mind — or else I have gone off completely and I only imagine you are here. Or, what seems the most difficult of all — it is all true.” She stood up. “Dammit, Bard! If I close my mind to this thing, it means that my mind is too little and too petty to encompass it. But try — just try — to swallow this tale of alien worlds, Leaders, Migrations. No, it won’t wash. I have a better idea.”

“Which I will be delighted to hear.”

“Sabotage. A new and very clever variety. Some of our friends on the other side of this world have managed to develop hypnotic technique to a new level of efficiency. Maybe they use some form of mechanical amplification. They’re trying to discredit us if they can’t drive us mad. That has to be it.”

Lane frowned. “If their technique is that good, why do it the hard way? Why not just take over Adamson and Bill Kornal and a few other key men and have them spend a few hours damaging the Beatty One?”

“You forget. They already took over Kornal. It gave them a few months of grace. Now they’re experimenting. Maybe they will try to talk us into leaving here and going to another country. You can’t tell what they have in mind. Bard, the one who calls himself Raul Kinson warned me that he was going to enter my mind. And then he did. It was... degrading and horrible. We’ve got to get in touch with our own people who might know something about this. Maybe some of the ESP men. And then there’s Lurdorff. He’s done some amazing things with hypnosis. Hemorrhage control. That sort of thing. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m trying to picture just how you’d state the problem without ending up on the receiving end of some fancy shock therapy, Sharan.”

She sat down slowly. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s no way we can warn them. No way in the world.”