Tom O'Bedlam Read online

  That sounded good.

  Naresh Patel looked up from the sheaf of printouts he was studying. “Can it? Tabulations like these, do you mean? Frequencies and geographical distribution of hallucinatory events, variable-similarity scales, imagery analysis, cognitive-filtering vectors, correlation of hallucination with Gelbard-Louit stability-index rating of hallucinator? But what if this is a phenomenon totally inexplicable by scientific means?”

  What if it is, Elszabet thought. What if it isn’t? Am I supposed to say something now?

  Dan Robinson rescued her. She heard his voice, coming from what seemed like a very great distance.

  “If it is,” he said, “then we won’t be able to explain it, will we? But why should we think it is, at this point? Pardon my hopeless western-materialistic bias, Naresh, but I happen to believe that everything in the universe has an underlying quantifiable rationale, which may not necessarily be accessible to human understanding because of limits in our current investigative techniques, but which is there nevertheless. Before the invention of the spectroscope, for example, it would have been the wildest sort of fantasy to claim that we could ever know which elements the stars were composed of. But for a modern astronomer there’s no problem at all in looking at a star fifty light-years away, or, for that matter, five billion light-years away, and saying quite authoritatively that it’s made up of hydrogen, helium, calcium, potassium—”

  “Agreed,” Patel said. “Yet I think it is conceivable that a seventeenth-century astronomer could have accepted the idea that it would someday be possible to discover such information. All that was missing was the spectroscope: a matter of technological progress, refinement of technique, not a quantum leap of conceptualization. And I agree with you also that all events do have some underlying rationale. To say otherwise would be to argue that the universe allows pure randomness, and I do not think that is the case.”

  The room was turning green again. Patel, Robinson, Bill Waldstein, and the rest were taking on a shining crystalline texture. Elszabet could hear what was being said, but she had no idea what it meant. She was not quite sure where she was, or why.

  Patel went on, “…but I argue only that the event we consider here may not have a rationale that fits the dogmas of western scientific thought, and that therefore we will not approach any understanding of it by trying to measure and count.”

  “What are you really saying, Naresh?” Bill Waldstein asked.

  Patel smiled. “For example, what if these shared multiple hallucinations are not hallucinations at all, but rather the first signs of the advent upon our world of the actual numinous force, the divine spirit, the Godhead, if you will?”

  “Are you going Hindu on us now?” Waldstein said.

  Crisply Patel replied, “There is nothing specifically Hindu, I believe, in what I have just suggested. Or eastern in any way, so far as I can see. I think that if we were to consult Father Christie on the subject of the Second Coming we might find that there are Christian elements to the concept, or Jewish messianic ones. I say simply that we are attempting to approach this matter in a scientific way when in fact it may be entirely outside the scope of scientific technique.”

  Dante Corelli said, “Come on, Naresh. Are you telling us just to shrug and give up and wait to see what happens? Now that’s a Hindu notion if I ever heard one—”

  “I do agree with Naresh on one point,” Dan Robinson cut in. “Where he says these shared multiple hallucinations are not hallucinations at all.”

  Bill Waldstein leaned forward. “What do you think they are, then?”

  Robinson looked toward the head of the conference table. “Elszabet, shall I respond to that?”

  She blinked. “What, Dan?”

  “Shall I respond? To Bill’s query? Is this the time for me to explain my idea of what the space dreams really are?”

  “What the space dreams really are,” she said. She was lost. She realized that she must have been wandering in far-off realms. “Yes. Yes, of course, Dan,” she said indistinctly.

  The Green World lay just beyond the window. Rolling meadows, graceful looping leafless trees.

  “Elszabet? Elszabet?”

  “Go ahead, Dan. What’s the matter? Go on.”

  She looked around. Dan, Bill, Dante, Naresh. Dave Paolucci from the San Francisco center down at the far end of the table. Leo Kresh, all the way up from San Diego. An important meeting. You have to pay attention. She stared at the grain in the redwood-burl tabletop. God help me, she thought. What’s happening to me? What’s happening?

  Robinson was saying, “…Project Starprobe, which was sent toward Proxima Centauri in the year 2057, I think, and which may now be producing a response in the form of a broadcast signal from the inhabitants of that world, a signal that is increasing in intensity as it approaches the Earth. I want to suggest that a vastly superior civilization in the Alpha Centauri system—Proxima Centauri is one of the three stars of that system, you know—has quite possibly sent a Starprobe of its own toward us, using a technology presently unknown to us but not in any serious way implausible, in order to make direct contact with human minds.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Waldstein muttered.

  “Is it all right if I finish what I’m saying, Bill? This signal, let’s say, was received at first only by those here who were most sensitive to such things, which for some reason happened to be patients suffering from Gelbard’s syndrome in this sanitarium and elsewhere. But as the intensity of the signal has increased, incidence of receptivity has widened to take in a broad segment of the human population, including, as I understand it, a good many people right in this room. If I’m correct, then, what we’re confronting is not in any way an epidemic of some new mental illness, nor is it—forgive me, Naresh—any kind of metaphysical revelation, but in fact is a significant historical development, the inauguration of communication with intelligent extraterrestrial life, and as such an event neither to be feared nor to be—”

  “There’s just one problem, Dr. Robinson.” A new voice cutting in from the far end of the table, quiet, assured. “May I have the floor a moment? Dr. Robinson? Dr. Lewis?”

  Hearing her name, Elszabet looked up, startled, realizing she had been drifting again. They were all looking at her.

  “May I address this point, Dr. Lewis?” The voice from the far end again. It belonged to the man from San Diego, Elszabet realized, her counterpart, Leo Kresh, the head of the Nepenthe Center down there. A smallish man, about forty, balding, precise in movement and in speech. She stared at him but she had wandered too far from the discussion to know what to say.

  Into her silence Dan Robinson said quickly, “Of course, Dr. Kresh, go ahead, please.”

  Kresh nodded. “That these images of other worlds might in some way be connected with Project Starprobe had also occurred to me, Dr. Robinson, and in fact I’ve done considerable investigation of that possibility. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to work out. As you correctly state, the unmanned Starprobe vehicle was launched in 2057, just a few years before the outbreak of the Dust War. However, I’ve been able to determine that even at the quite extraordinary velocities that Starprobe was capable of attaining at its peak of acceleration, it would not have reached the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from Earth, until the year 2099. So you can see that there has not yet been quite enough time even for Starprobe’s own signal, which of course is a narrowband radio wave traveling at the speed of light, to have returned from Proxima, let alone for any hypothetical inhabitants of that system to have sent us any kind of signal of their own. And of course if the Proximans—if there are any—had shipped a Proximan equivalent of Starprobe in our direction, as you suggest, there’s no likelihood at all that it will be here for decades more. Therefore I think we have to rule out the hypothesis that the space dreams have an extraterrestrial origin, tempting though that notion may seem.”

  “Suppose,” Robinson said, “that the Proximans have some way of sending
a spaceship here at speeds faster than light?”

  Gently Kresh said, “Pardon me, Dr. Robinson, but I’d have to call that an excessive multiplication of hypotheses. Not only are we required to postulate Proximans, but also you ask us to assume faster-than-light transit, which under the laws of physics as we currently understand them is simply not—”

  “Hold on,” Bill Waldstein said. “What are we talking about here? Spaceships to and from other stars? Faster-than-light travel? Elszabet, for God’s sake, rule all this stuff out of order. It’s bad enough that the situation we’re coping with is fantastic in itself—can you imagine hundreds of thousands of people having identical bizarre dreams all over the West Coast, and maybe everywhere else too?—without dragging in all this imaginary speculation besides.”

  “In addition,” said Naresh Patel, “it has been over two months since the first dreams were reported. Given what Dr. Kresh has told us about the time of Starprobe’s arrival at this other star and the necessary time that must elapse before its radio signal can return to us, I believe it’s clear that there is no connection between the dreams and whatever data the Starprobe satellite will eventually send back.”

  “What’s more,” Dante Corelli offered, “we’re getting views of at least seven different solar systems in these dreams, right? Starprobe went to just one system, as I understand it. So even allowing for these problems of transmission time that Dr. Kresh’s been pointing out, how can it be sending back so many different sorts of scenes? I think—”

  “Point of order,” Bill Waldstein shouted. “Elszabet, will you please let us move on to something more rational? We’ve got people here from San Francisco and San Diego who want to tell us what’s going on at their centers, and…Elszabet? Elszabet? Is there something the matter with you?”

  She struggled to understand what he was telling her. Her mind was full of green fog. Crystalline figures moved gracefully to and fro, introducing themselves to her, inviting her to incomprehensible social events, a cataclysm symphony, a four-valley splendor, a sensory retuning. Everyone will be there, dear Elszabet. Your poet will present his latest, you know. And there is hope of another green aurora, the second one this year, and then no more again for at least fifteen tonal cycles, so they say—

  “Elszabet? Elszabet?”

  “I think I’d like to go to the four-valley splendor,” she said. “And maybe the cataclysm symphony. But not the sensory returning, I think. Will that be all right, to skip the sensory returning?”

  “What’s she talking about?”

  She smiled. She looked from one to the other, Dan, Bill, Dante, Naresh, Dave Paolucci, Leo Kresh. Green light blazed upward from the center of the huge redwood table. It’s all right, she wanted to say. I’ve gone out of my mind, that’s all. But you don’t need to worry about me. It’s not unusual for people to go out of their minds these days.

  “You aren’t well, Elszabet?”

  Dan Robinson. Standing beside her, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “No,” she said. “I’m really not very well at all. I don’t think I have been all morning. Would you excuse me, everyone? I’m terribly sorry but I think I should lie down. Would you excuse me? Thank you. Thank you. I’m terribly sorry. Please don’t interrupt the meeting. But I think I should lie down.”

  5

  FERGUSON said, “What did I tell you? There’s nothing to it. You just slip away through the forest and keep on going east, and you’ll hit civilization sooner or later.”

  “You have any idea where we are?” Alleluia asked.

  “On our way to Ukiah.”

  “Ukiah. Where’s that?”

  “East of Mendo, maybe thirty miles from the coast. You forget? They pick it out of you?”

  “I don’t know much about this part of California,” she said. “We’re going to walk thirty miles, Ed?”

  He looked at her. “You’re a superwoman, right? What’s the big deal about walking thirty miles? Little less than thirty, maybe. We do it in two days, tops. You can’t handle that?”

  “Not me. You. Are you in shape for that kind of hike?”

  Ferguson laughed and rubbed his hand against the flawless skin of her upper arm. “Don’t worry about me, baby. I’m in terrific shape for a man my age. I’m in terrific shape, period. Anyway, I get tired, we can always stop a couple hours. Nobody going to be coming after us here.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Sure I’m sure,” he said. He grinned. “Imagine,” he said. “No pick tomorrow morning. No more head-scrambling. We’ll go through a whole goddamn day remembering everything that happened to us the day before.”

  “And what we dreamed the night before too.”

  “What we dreamed, yeah.” The grin, which had slowly been fading, turned into a frown. “You dream last night? A space dream?”

  “I think so.”

  “You get them just about every night.”

  “Do I?” she asked.

  “That’s what you’ve been telling me every morning before pick. I’ve got it all down, right here on my little ring. A different planet every night, the nine suns, the green world, the one where the whole sky’s full of stars. Last night it was the big blue star in the sky and the shining bubbles floating in the air.”

  “I don’t remember,” Alleluia said.

  “Well, sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t.”

  “And you? You never get the dreams, do you?”

  “Never once,” he said, and felt the bitterness starting to rise. “Everybody gets them but me. I don’t know. I’d like to see those places just once. I’d like to know what the hell is going on in everybody’s mind. I’ve got it on my ring that first thing in the morning I have to ask myself, Did you dream a space dream? And I never have. Christ, I hate not feeling what other people feel.”

  “You ought to try being artificial for a while, then. See what it’s like being really different.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Just what I need.” Ferguson smiled. “Well, at least I won’t get picked tomorrow. They won’t stick their goddamn electronic scalpels into my head. Maybe two or three days away from those bastards and I’ll start to dream, you think? What do you think, Allie?”

  “The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you want it too bad. You have to stop wanting it if you hope to get it. You see that, Ed?”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “A lot of hard things are simple.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “I can live without the goddamn dreams. I’m just glad to be away from that place.”

  “So am I,” she said, and gave his forearm a squeeze that he supposed was meant to be joyful and affectionate. It sent such a jolt of pain through him that he wondered for an instant if she had broken his arm.

  They were about three hours out of the Center now. It was late afternoon, still a couple of hours to go before dark. The air was still warm, though there was the first hint in it of the oncoming evening chill. They were in dense redwood forest, moist and soft underfoot even after the long months of summer drought. There were ground squirrels running around everywhere, and now and then some shy skittish little deer peered at them from behind one of the giant trees.

  Getting away had been easy, just as Ferguson had expected. After lunch, during free-time, they had simply wandered off into the woods on the inland side of the Center. Nothing unusual about that. Kept right on wandering, that was the unusual part. Stopping in his favorite little screwing-glade to pick up the canvas bag he had stashed there the day before. He had filled the bag with bread, apples, some squeeze-cans of juice, and he had put a detailed memo about it on his recorder-ring, telling his post-pick self of the next day exactly where to find it. And now they were on their way. Christ, it felt good to be free! Out of the pokey at last. Well, the Center wasn’t exactly like a prison—more like a strict boarding school, Ferguson thought—but he had never been much for boarding school either. Or anyplace else where people could tell him what he w
as supposed to do twelve, sixteen hours a day.

  He had a sort of plan. Get to Ukiah, first: that was a fair-sized town, his recorder said, thirty, forty thousand people. A downright metropolis these days, post-Dust War days, when kids were few and far between and the population was way down, off as much as eighty-five percent from twentieth-century peaks. Sometimes Ferguson tried to imagine the world with all those people in it, five or six million in L.A. alone, more than that in New York. They said sixteen million in Mexico City. Could you believe it? Wasn’t anyone in Mexico City now, zero, nada, everybody scattering when the Nicas dusted the place. And maybe a million in L.A., if you counted in every town from Santa Barbara down to Newport Beach as being L.A. Well, so we get to Ukiah, he thought, find ourselves a motel, tidy up, regroup, and reorganize. Then phone Lacy and have her wire some money to me from San Fran. She’d be liquid enough to advance him something, he hoped. Christ knows she made a pile when she was working for me: must have hung on to enough to spare me a little. He wasn’t carrying any, of course. There was no need for it at the Center, and they didn’t encourage you to keep it on hand; when you had a weekend’s external leave they simply set up a credit line for you at the place where you’d be staying and at the place where you’d be eating. They didn’t want their inmates getting beyond reach.

  He’d get beyond reach, all right. Couple days in Ukiah making arrangements, then off to Idaho—no visa needed to get into Idaho, right?—and from there, after maybe six weeks’ residence to make it official, apply for entry into Oregon. They had some sort of republic in Oregon now, Oregon and maybe half of what had been Washington State, and once he was across the line there’d be no way of getting him back to California. A matter of sovereign independence, and the way Oregon felt about the Californios, they’d never extradite anybody. So then with Oregon as his base he could start making some profitable use of the space dreams. He wasn’t exactly sure how just yet, probably some variation on the former Betelgeuse Five scam, guaranteed transmission to the newly developing other worlds, the seven planets so widely being exhibited in your nightly dreams. It would help some if he could see the dreams himself, but that wasn’t essential so long as he had Alleluia beside him. And Alleluia beside him at night, too, that tremendous panther body of hers every night—