Wine of the Dreamers

Five

Bard Lane sat on the edge of his bed. It was after midnight on the same day that he had taken Major Leeber on the tour of inspection.

He sat and little rivulets of fear ran through his mind the way that rain will trickle erratically down a window-pane. The night was cool and the wind that came through the screen touched his naked chest and shoulders, but it did not stop the perspiration that made an oiled sheen on his face.

It was like a return to childhood, to the long-dead nights of terror. The scream. “Mommy, Mommy! It was a moldy man and he was sitting on my bed!”

“It’s all right. It was just a dream, dear.”

“He was here! He was! I saw him, Mommy.”

“Shh, you’ll wake your father. I’ll sit here and hold your hand until you get back to sleep.”

Sleep voice. “Well he was here.”

He shivered violently. Now there was no one to call. There was someone you should call, but that might mean... defeat.

You can fight all the outside enemies in the world, but what if the enemy is in your own mind? What then?

It was a decision to make. He made it. He dressed quickly, snatched a leather jacket from the closet hook, shouldered his way into it as he left his quarters. From the slope he looked down on the project buildings. A thin moon rode high, silvering the dark buildings. He knew that inside the darkness there were lights, hum of activity, night shifts in the labs in the caves.

Sharan Inly had a room in the women’s barracks. He walked down the slope and across the street. The girl at the switchboard was reading a magazine. She glanced up and smiled, “Good evening, Dr. Lane.”

“Good evening. Dr. Inly, please. Would you connect the call in the booth?”

He shut himself in. Her voice was sleepy. “Hello, Bard.”

“Did I wake you up?”

“Ten seconds later and you would have. What is it, Bard?”

He glanced through the booth door. The girl had returned to her magazine. “Sharan, would you please get dressed and come down. I must talk to you.”

“You sound... upset, Bard. I’ll be down in five minutes.”

She was better than her word. He was grateful for her promptness. She came out beside him, asking no questions, letting him choose time and place. He led her over to the porch of the club. It was after hours and the chairs had been stacked on the tables. He set two of them on their legs. A dog howled in the hills. Over near the labor barracks someone laughed loudly.

“I want to consult you as a patient, Sharan.”

“Of course. Who are you worried about?”

“Me.”

“That sounds... absurd. Go ahead.”

He made his voice flat, emotionless. “Tonight I had dinner with Major Leeber. I went back to my office to finish up some of the paperwork. It took a bit longer than I expected. When I finished, I was tired. I turned out the light and sat there in the dark for a few moments, waiting for enough energy to get up and go back to my quarters. I turned my chair and looked out the window. Enough moonlight came through the screen so that I could just make out the shape of the Beatty One.

“Suddenly, and without any warning, I felt a... nudge at my mind. That’s the only way I can describe it. A nudge, and then a faint, persistent pushing. I tried to resist it, but its strength increased. There was a certain horrid... confidence about it. An utterly alien pressure, Sharan. A calm pressure. Have you ever fainted?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the way you tried to fight off the blackness, and it seemed to grow stronger? It was like that. I sat absolutely still, and even as I fought against it, one part of my mind was trying to find a reason for it. Tension, overwork, fear of failure. I used every device I could think of. I tried to focus my mind on nothing except the look of the corner of the screen. I dug my fingers into the chair arm and tried to focus on the pain. The thing in my mind increased the pressure and I had the feeling that it was fitting itself to my mind, turning as it entered, so as to find the easiest means of entrance. I lost the ability to control my own body. I could no longer dig at the chair arm with my fingers. I cannot describe how frightening that was. I have always felt... completely in control of myself, Sharan. Maybe I’ve been too confident. Possibly even contemptuous of the aberrations of others.

“My eyes were still focused at short range on the corner of the screen. My head lifted a bit and, without willing it, I found myself staring out at the Beatty One, trying to make out its outlines. It was in my mind, strongly, that I was seeing the ship for the first time. I was sensing the reaction of the thing that had entered my mind. The thing was perplexed, awed, wondrous. Sharan, in that state, I could have been forced to do... anything. Destroy the ship. Kill myself. My will and my desires would have had no part in action I might have undertaken.”

As she touched his arm, and said softly, “Easy, mister,” he realized that his voice had climbed into a higher register, threatening shrillness.

He took a deep breath. “Tell me, is there such a thing as a waking nightmare?”

“There are delusions, fantasies of the mind.”

“I felt... possessed. There, I’ve said it. The thing in my mind seemed to be trying to tell me that it was not inimical, that it wished no harm. When the pressure reached its strongest point, the moonlight faded away. I looked into blackness and I felt that all my thoughts and memories were being... handled. Fingered, picked at.

“And now, Sharan, comes the part that’s pure nightmare. The thing pressed its own thought images into my mind. It was as though it substituted its memories for mine. I looked down a long, wide corridor. The floors and walls had a muted glow. The people had an almost sexless look, frail, neuter, blue-white people, but human. It was very clear they were inbred. They walked with a tired timelessness, a semi-hypnotic sort of dedication, as though every movement was a portion of custom rather than habit. And suddenly I was looking out through a huge window, a window at an enormous distance from ground level. Six cigar-shaped, tail-finned objects that could only have been space ships pointed upward at a purple sky and a huge dying red sun that filled a quarter of the sky. I realized that I was seeing a dying world, an ancient world, and the people who were left in it. I got an impression of sadness, of a remote and weary sadness. Then the presence flicked out of my mind so quickly that it dizzied me. My own will, which seemed to have been crowded back into a tiny corner of my brain, re-expanded suddenly and I was myself again. I tried to treat it as a... as something of no importance. I went back to my quarters and undressed, as though I could go to bed with no further thought of it. But I had to come and tell you about this.”

He waited. Sharan stood up, walked to a post set into the cement porch, leaned against it with her hands in her pockets, her back to him.

“Bard,” she said, “we talked about the X factor in mental illness. In psychiatry we have a recurrent phenomenon. A mind, temporarily out of focus, will use as material for delusion something that has happened in the immediate past. Our sleeping dreams, as you know, are almost always based on some reference to the previous waking period. Recently we have talked of being possessed by devils. Silly darn phrase. Bill told us his symptoms. What is more natural than for you to borrow his symptoms and use them as your own. But, of course, you carried it a step further, due to your background and your ambition. You had to make the devils into representatives of some extra-solar super-race, because you are too practical to be satisfied with an illusion of devils. Bard, this is all due to the pressure mounting, the fear that they’ll stop the project, the needling General Sachson gave you.” She turned and faced him, hands still in the pockets of the jeans.

“Bard, go on back to bed. We’ll stop at my place and I’ll bring you down a little pink pill.”

“I haven’t made you understand, have I?”

“I think I understand.”

“Dr. Inly, tomorrow I’ll report to you for the usual tests. You will advise me if you find anything out of line. If so, I shall make my resignation effective at once.”

“Don’t be a child, Bard! Who else could carry Project Tempo on his back? Who else could get the loyalty you do out of fifteen hundred of us working out here in this Godforsaken spot on something not one in fifty of us can understand?”

“Suppose,” he said harshly, “that the next time I have this little aberration, I get as destructive as Kornal did?”

She walked slowly to him, pulled her chair closer, sat down and took his left hand in both of hers. “You won’t, Bard.”

“I believe it’s part of your job to be reassuring, isn’t it?”

“And to wash out those who show signs of incipient mental instability. Don’t forget that. Part of my job is to watch you. I have been watching you. I have a complete file on you, Bard. For one moment, look at yourself objectively. Thirty-four years old. Born in a small town in Ohio. Orphaned at eight. Raised by an uncle. Public school. At twelve you had your own ideas of the way to solve the problems in the geometry book. You were skeptical of the Euclidian solutions. You won a science scholarship based on the originality of an experiment you did in the high school physics lab. You worked for the other money you needed. Cal Tech, M.I.T. You got a reputation when you helped design the first practical application of atomic power for industrial use. Government service. Years of exhausting labor on the A-four, A-five and A-six. Now do you know why you had this little... lapse in your office?”

“What do you mean?”

“You have no ability to relax. You’ve never had time for a girl, for a lost weekend. You’ve never fallen asleep under a tree, or caught a trout. When you read for amusement, you read scientific papers and new texts. Your idea of a happy evening is either to cover fifteen pages of blank paper with little Greek chicken-tracks, or have a bull session with some men who are just as one-sided as you are.”

“Does the doctor want to prescribe?” he asked gently.

She snatched her hand away and leaned back in the chair. The moon had slanted low enough so that under the porch overhang it touched the line of her cheek, made a faint highlight on her lower lip, left her eyes shadowed.

After a long silence she said, “The doctor will prescribe the doctor, Bard. I’ll come back to your quarters with you, if... you’ll have me.”

He was aware of his own intense excitement. He let the seconds go by. He said, “I think we’d better be thoroughly honest with each other, Sharan. It’s the best way. You’ve put us into a delicate spot. Emotions are pretty well exposed at this point. I know your personal loyalty to me, and to the project. I know your capacity for loyalty. Now answer this honestly, my dear. If I had not come to you with this... trouble, would you have made that sort of offer?”

“No,” she whispered.

“And if I had asked you, in the casual way that seems to have become a custom these past few years?”

“I don’t know. Probably no, Bard. I’m sorry.”

“Then let’s drop the subject, with no harm done. I’ll settle for a pink pill and an appointment in the morning.”

“And after you are tested, Bard, I am going to send you out into the hills with a scope rifle I can borrow from a friend of mine. You are going to spend a full day potting varmints and thinking of something beside this damnable project. That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir!” he said, standing up and saluting.

“Please, Bard. You must understand that it was just weakness which made you feel that you had the symptoms Bill Kornal described. A weakness born of tension and strain. It was auto-hypnosis, pure and simple. It can happen to any of us.”

“Whatever it was, Sharan, I didn’t like it. Come on. I’ll walk you back.”

They went slowly down the road. There was no need for conversation between them. She had partially comforted him. After he was in bed, waiting for the mild drug to take effect, he wondered why he had been so reluctant to permit her to sacrifice her own integrity for the sake of the project. He thought of the slim clean look of her in the moonlight, of her young breasts against the fabric of her jacket. He smiled at his own reservations, at his reluctance to accept such a gift. They had both sensed that they were almost — but not quite — right for each other. And “not quite” was not enough for either of them.