Tom O'Bedlam Part 23

"PROXIMITY, that definitely appears to be the key thing," Elszabet said. "Or at least one of the key things." She was in her office, early afternoon, looking up at Dan Robinson, who was leaning in a loose-jointed way against the wall by the window. He seemed to be all arms and legs, standing like that. The sky, as much of it as was visible through the tiny north-facing window, was graying up, heavy clouds beginning to move in. She said, "You were right. If what happened to April is any indicator, proximity has to be a significant factor. I'm prepared to concede that now."

"You are. Well, that's something."

"How's she doing?"

"She'll be okay," Robinson said. He had just come from the infirmary. "We've got her paxed out, hundred milligrams. Lordy, that girl is big! She had a little surge, is all. Rush of blood to the head, essentially."

"More like a hot flash, I'd say. You should have seen her. Red as a beet. As a tomato."

Robinson chuckled. "Some tomato. Exactly what happened, anyway?"

"Well, as you and I discussed, I cooked things up so there'd be an occasion for her to come into my office while Tom was here. The moment she saw him, she started to hyperventilate."

"Hippopotamus in heat?"

"Dan."

"Just a flash image. Sorry."

"It wasn't a s.e.xual thing with her, I'm pretty certain. Even though she was blushing like a girl who'd been goosed on her first date. Tom doesn't seem to arouse s.e.xual feelings in people, did you notice that?"

"Not in me, at any rate," Robinson said.

"No, I wouldn't think so. Not in anyone, apparently. He seems-well, as.e.xual, somehow.

He's very masculine but nevertheless it's hard to imagine him with a woman, wouldn't you say? There are men like that. But he stirred some sort of excitement in April, and it was afast change of breathing, mottled blotches on her cheeks, then this bright red flush."

"Like an allergic reaction. Adrenaline surge." "Absolutely. She weaved around a little and told me she was feeling upset. About what, I said, and she said it was on account of her dreams, her visions, that lately they were coming much more closely together and they were more vivid."

"Proximity effect. Tom."

"Said she was having trouble thinking straight. Sometimes hard for her to tell which was the real world and which was the dream."

"You made a similar remark last night."

"Yes," Elszabet said. "I remember. Hearing it from April was - well, disturbing. Her speech became slurred and she swayed back and forth. Then she started to pa.s.s out.

Tom and I caught her just in time and managed to lower her to the floor. The rest you know."

"Okay," Robinson said. "Seems pretty conclusive that Tom's presence here is hyping up the hallucination level."

"Yet the dreams have been experienced across enormous distances. Proximity seems to intensify, but it's not essential."

"I suppose."

"We've got the distribution charts. s.p.a.ce dreams reported simultaneously from all over the place. If he's the source then he must be a tremendously powerful transmitter."

"Transmitter of dreams," Robinson said softly, shaking his head. "Doesn't all this sound completely buggy to you, Elszabet?"

"Let's just work with it," she said. "A hypothesis. He boils with images, fantasies, hallucinations. He boils over. Broadcasts them from the Rockies to the Pacific, San Diego to Vancouver, as far as we know. Susceptibility varies from practically none at all to extreme. Perhaps some correlation with emotional disturbance level . . . victims of Gelbard's syndrome appear to pick up the stuff much more readily than others. But that's not a complete correlation, because people like Naresh Patel and Dante Corelli are definitely not emotionally disturbed, and they've been getting the s.p.a.ce dreams almost as long as some of the patients, whereas someone like Ed Ferguson, whois a patient, has proved completely resistant to -"

"Do you really think Ferguson has Gelbard's, Elszabet?"

"He's got something, I'd say."

"He's got a bad case of scruple deficiency, that's all. The more I observe him, the more convinced I become that the guy's simply a con artist who w.a.n.gled treatment here because it sounded better to him than being tossed in jail for Rehab Two. Now, if you want to tell me that anybody as casual about matters of morality as Ferguson mustipso facto be emotionally disturbed, you might have a case, but even so, I think -"

Robinson paused. "Which reminds me, have you run a check on whether Ferguson's showing any proximity effects? He had breakfast with Tom last week, and he's been seen talking with him a couple of times since."

Elszabet said, "I had Naresh run through Ferguson's pick reports for s.p.a.ce-dream symptomata. Evidently there have been no dreams per se, but the night before last Ferguson did turn up with a trace of something. Just the merest shadowy outline of a bit of Green World imagery. I tried to call him in for a conference this afternoon but he wasn't around. Went off for a walk in the woods, they told me."

"Another escape attempt, you think?"

"No, although I'm having him monitored closely anyway. But he's out there with Tom.

Been out there quite a while."

Robinson's eyes narrowed. "A very odd couple, those two. The saint and the sinner."

"You think Tom's a saint?"

"Just a quick glib phrase."

"Because I do. It's an idea that's been tickling at me the last few days. He's so strange, so innocent - like a holy fool, like the chosen of G.o.d, you know? Like an Old Testament prophet. Saint's not a bad label for him either. He wanders in the wilderness - what's the line, 'despised and rejected of men - '"

"'A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.'"

"That's it," she said. "And all the time he's carrying inside him this tremendous gift, this power, this blessing - he's like an amba.s.sador from all the worlds of the universe -"

"Hey," Robinson said. "Hold on a little, there. A saint, you say. A messiah, actually, is what you seem to mean. But now you're talking as though the stuff he's giving out, if indeed he's the one who's giving it out, is an authentic vision of actual and literal other worlds."

"Maybe it is, Dan. I don't know."

"Are you serious?"

She tapped the little mnemone capsule on her desk. "I've been interviewing him. He's been filling me in on the background of the places in the dreams - the names of the worlds, the races that inhabit them, the empires, the dynasties, fragments of the history, a whole vast intricate interwoven structure of galactic civilization, tremendously dense in detail, internally consistent so far as I've been able to follow what he's saying, which I confess is not really very far. But what emerges nevertheless is very d.a.m.ned convincing, Dan. He's definitely not improvising. He's lived with that stuff a long time."

"So he has a rich fantasy life. He's spent twenty-five years dreaming up those details.

Why shouldn't it be intricate? Why shouldn't it be convincing? But does that mean those empires and dynasties actually exist?" "The things he says coincide in every detail with things that I've experienced myself while undergoing s.p.a.ce dreams."

"No. Not relevant, Elszabet. If he's transmitting images and concepts and you and a lot of other people are receiving them, that still doesn't mean that what he's transmitting is anything but hallucinatory in origin."

"Granted," Elszabet said. "Okay, we have a phenomenon here. But of what kind? If Tom is indeed the source, then it would appear that he possesses some sort of extrasensory power that allows him to transmit images to other people by mind-to-mind contact."

"Sounds a little farfetched. But not inconceivable."

"I can make out a valid case for the ESP angle. He told me this morning that he was born right after the outbreak of the Dust War, and that his mother was in Eastern Nevada when she was carrying him. Right on the edge of the radiation zone."

"Telepathic mutation, is that what you're saying?"

"It's a reasonable hypothesis, isn't it?"

"Bill Waldstein should only hear all this stuff. He thinksI'm p.r.o.ne to cooking up wild theories," Dan said.

"This one doesn't seem so wild to me. If there's an explanation for Tom's abilities, a light touch of radiation at the time of conception isn't the most fantastic possible idea."

"All right. A telepathic mutant, then."

"A phenomenon, anyway. Okay. Now, as to the content of the material that he's producing, perhaps he's in the grip of some powerful fantasy of his own invention that by virtue of his extrasensory abilities he's able to scatter around to any susceptible mind within reach. Or, on the other hand, perhaps he's uniquely sensitive to messages being beamed our way telepathically by actual civilizations in the stars."

"You want to believe that very much, don't you, Elszabet?"

"Believe what?"

"That what Tom is transmitting is real."

"Maybe I do. Does that worry you, Dan?"

He studied her for a long moment. "A little," he said at last.

"You think I'm going around the bend?"

"I didn't say that. I do think you've got a powerful need to find out that the Green World and the Nine Suns planet and the rest are actual places." "And therefore that I'm being drawn into Tom's psychosis?"

"And therefore that you're a little more deeply committed to escapist fantasies than might be altogether healthy," he said.

"Well, I feel the same way, okay?" Elszabet told him. "If you're worried about me, that makes two of us. But it's such a d.a.m.ned attractive notion, isn't it, Dan? These beautiful other worlds beckoning to us?"

"Dangerous. Seductive."

"Seductive, yes. But sometimes it's necessary to let yourself get seduced. We've got such a s.h.i.tty deal, Dan, this poor broken-down civilization of ours, living like this in the ruins and remnants of the prewar world. All these shabby little countries that used to be pieces of the United States, and the anarchy that's going on outside California and even inside a lot of it, and the sense that everybody has that things are just going to go on getting worse and worse, uglier and uglier, shabbier and shabbier, that progress has absolutely come to an end and that we're simply going to keep slipping farther back into barbarism - is it any wonder that if I start dreaming that I'm living on a beautiful green world where everything is graceful and civilized and elegant I'm going to want to find out that it really exists? And that we're soon going to be able to go to that green world and live there? It's such an irresistible fantasy, Dan. Surely we need some fantasies like that to sustain us."

"Go there?" he said, looking startled. "What do you mean?"

"I didn't tell you Tom's whole notion. When I play you his capsule, you'll hear it. It's an apocalyptic concept: the Last Days are at hand, and we're going to drop our bodies - that's his phrase, drop our bodies - and be translated to the worlds of the s.p.a.ce dreams and live there forever and ever, amen."

Robinson whistled. "Is that what he's peddling?"

"The Time of Crossing, he calls it. Yes."

"The opposite of what this other bunch, these Brazilian voodoo people, are saying. The way they have it, the s.p.a.ce G.o.ds are coming tous, isn't that what Leo Kresh told us?

Whereas Tom -"

Elszabet's telephone made a little bleeping sound. "Excuse me," she said, and glanced behind her at the data wall to see who was calling.Dr. Kresh, the wall screen said,calling from San Diego.

They exchanged looks of surprise. "Speak of the devil," Elszabet murmured, and thumbed the phone. Kresh's face blossomed on the screen. He had gone back to Southern California late the previous week, and right now he seemed as though he had been through some changes since his visit to Nepenthe: he was uncharacteristically rumpled-looking, flushed, plainly excited. "Dr. Lewis," he blurted, "I'm glad I was able to reach you. Quite an astonishing development -"

"Dr. Robinson is with me here," Elszabet said.

"Yes, that's fine. He'll want to hear this too, I know."

"What's happened, Dr. Kresh?"

"It's the most amazing thing. Especially in view of some of the ideas I heard Dr.

Robinson propose while I was up there. In relation to Project Starprobe, I mean. Are you aware, Dr. Robinson, Dr. Lewis, that there's a ground station in Pasadena that has been tuned all these years to receive signals from the Starprobe vehicle? It's operated by Cal Tech, and somehow they've kept it maintained, just in case -"

"And there's been a signal?" Robinson said.

"It began coming in late last night. As you know, Dr. Robinson, the Starprobe hypothesis had occurred to me independently, and in the course of my investigation I learned about the Cal Tech facility and established contact with it. So when the signal began arriving - it's a tight-beam radio transmission at 1390 megacycles per second, coming to us from Proxima Centauri via a series of relay stations previously established at intervals of -"

"For Christ's sake," Robinson broke in, "are you going to tell us what it was that came in or aren't you?"

Kresh looked fl.u.s.tered. "Sorry. You understand, this has been a very confusing experience for me, for everyone -" He caught his breath. "I'll put the images on the screen. You're aware, I think, that the probe was programmed to enter the Proxima Centauri system, scan for planets that might be habitable, take up orbit around any that it found and drop down into the atmosphere of any planet that showed clear indication of life-forms. The nine hours of transmission that have come in so far actually cover a real-time period of about two months. This is Proxima Centauri, viewed at a distance of point-five astronomical units."

Kresh disappeared from the screen. In his place appeared the image of a small, pallid- looking red star. Two other stars, much brighter, were visible in a corner of the screen.

"The red dwarf is Proxima," Kresh said. "Those are its companion stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, which are similar in spectral type to our sun. The Cal Tech people tell me that all three stars appear to have planetary systems. However, the Starprobe vehicle found the planets of Proxima to be of the greatest interest, and so -"

On the screen now appeared a featureless green ball.

"My G.o.d," Robinson muttered.

Kresh said, "This is the second planet of the Proxima Centauri system, located point- eighty-seven astronomical units from the star. Proxima Centauri is a flare star, I'm told, subject to fluctuations of brightness that would be dangerous to life-forms at any closer range. But the Starprobe vehicle detected signs of life on Proxima Two, and reconformed itself for a planetary approach -"

On the screen, thick swirling mists, heavy, impenetrable-looking. Green.

Green.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Robinson said again. Elszabet sat tensely, hands balled into fists, teeth digging against her lower lip.

Another shot. Below the cloud cover.

"You will see," said Kresh, "that even though Proxima Centauri is a red star, the cloud cover is so dense that from the surface of the second planet it appears green. The cloud cover also, the Cal Tech people tell me, sets up a sort of greenhouse effect to keep the temperature of the planet within a range suitable for the metabolism of living creatures, despite the low energy output of the primary star Proxima Centauri -"

Another shot. Low orbit now, virtually skimming the clouds. High-resolution cameras coming into play. A focus shift; then new images, fantastically detailed. A gentle landscape, lush green hills, shining green lakes. Buildings down below, mysterious structures of disturbingly alien design, unexpected angles, baffling architectural convolutions. Another increment of camera capacity. Figures moving about on a lawn: long, tapering, frail-looking, with crystalline bodies bright as mirrors, rows of faceted eyes set on each of the four sides of their diamond-shaped heads. "My G.o.d," Dan Robinson said over and over again. Elszabet did not move, scarcely even breathed, would not let herself so much as blink. That is the Misilyne Triad, she thought. Those must be the Suminoors, and those, the Gaarinar. Oh. Oh. Oh. She was numb with awe and wonder. She wanted to cry; she wanted to drop to her knees and pray; she wanted to run outside and cry hallelujah. But she was unable to move. She remained perfectly still, frozen with astonishment, as image succeeded green image on the screen. Everything unbearably strange. Everything bizarrely alien.

Everything also completely and utterly and entirelyfamiliar, as though she were looking at photographs of the town where she had lived when she was a child.

Seven.