Tom O'Bedlam Part 8

"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 h.o.m.os.e.xual."

"So what?"

She rubbed her forehead lightly. Something hammering away in there. It embarra.s.sed 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 st.u.r.dy 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:

7) Double Star Three One report One sun much like ours in size and color, but second sun emitting orange/red light also present, of larger size than yellow one but more faint.

Intricate system of moons.

No life-forms reported.

'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 G.o.d'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 b.i.t.c.hing, 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 cla.s.sified 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 s.p.a.ce and time sharing it with you, and being the fastest girl in the cla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e made the surf turbulent and impa.s.sable. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ceships 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 amba.s.sadors, 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 getin. "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 rea.s.surance from her, wanted to be told that his notion wasn't totally wild. But she could not give him that rea.s.surance. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 sh.o.r.e, guiding her up the strip of sand, wrapping her blanket around her. She was gooseb.u.mps 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 s.p.a.ce 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, G.o.d, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 signedPaolucci, San Francisco.

Three.