Tom O'Bedlam Read online

  —Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song

  ELSZABET felt a dream starting to come over her while she was still awake. In the beginning it had been terrifying when that happened, when the tendrils of unreality began to invade her conscious mind. But not any more. A lot of things that once had been terrifying to her terrified her no longer. She wasn’t sure whether she ought to be troubled by that.

  She was lying in the hammock that hung from wall to wall along one corner of her cabin. Reading a little, dozing a little, not quite ready to get into bed. It was about an hour before midnight of a cool autumn evening, wind off the sea blowing through the treetops. And suddenly she was aware that the dream was there, hovering just outside the gates of her consciousness. She lay there, letting it happen, welcoming it.

  Green World again. Good. Good.

  By now she had had all the other dreams too, the complete set of seven, sometimes two or three of them the same night. It was a week now since the wandering mystery-man Tom had showed up at the Center, and all week the dreams had been coming to her thick and fast. Was there a connection? It seemed that there had to be, though it was hard for her to understand how it was possible. In the week Tom had been there Elszabet had seen Nine Suns, she had seen Double Star One and Two and Three, she had seen Sphere of Light and Blue Giant.

  But of all the dreams, Green World was the one she cherished. In the other strange worlds of the dreams she was only a disembodied observer, an invisible eye floating above the bizarre alien landscape; but when she entered Green World it was as a participant in the life of the planet, plunged deep into its rich and sophisticated culture. She was coming to know the place and its people; they were coming to know her. And so every night, drifting off to sleep, Elszabet found herself hoping she would be allowed to go once more to that lovely place where she felt—God help her—where she was starting to feel so thoroughly at home.

  Here it comes now. Green World, hello, hello.

  It was as though she had never been away—never gone off on a sojourn to that scraggly troublesome place called Earth where she spent the other part of her life. It was Double Equinox day and the triads were gathering in the viewing-chamber. Here were the Misilynes, arm in arm in arm, and just behind them came the delicious elegant Suminoors, and those, those there, weren’t they the Thilineeru? The Thilineeru had doubled with the Gaarinar, so the gossip had it, and evidently the gossip was true, for there were the Gaarinar and they glistened with an unmistakable overtone of Thilineeru texture, a sheen like the ringing of bells.

  And who was this? This heavy dusky figure with that single huge glowing eye rising like a fiery yellow dome from his broad head? He strolled serenely through the room followed by a vast entourage, and from all sides people came toward him to pay their respects. Elszabet thought she had seen him before. Or someone of his kind, at any rate. But she wasn’t sure where.

  Ah. They were announcing him now: a shimmering tremolo of silvery sound dancing through the air, telling everyone at once that this was none other than the Sapiil envoy, His Excellency Horkanniman-zai, minister plenipotentiary of the empire of the Nine Suns and high representative of the Lord Maguali-ga to all outer-sphere nations. How imposing a set of titles; how imposing a personage! Elszabet waited her turn to greet him. Come, said Vuruun, who had been ambassador to the Nine Suns himself in the time of the Skorioptin Presidium of blessed memory, let me introduce you. And brought her forward until His Excellency Horkanniman-zai noticed her. The envoy of the Sapiil extended a thick black whiplike limb in greeting; and she touched it with one of her own crystalline fingers, as she had seen the others doing, and felt herself flooded with the light of nine dazzling suns.

  It is a gift, said the envoy of the Sapiil gently.

  And then he turned away, airily remarking to one of the Suminoors that this was the finest evening he had spent since that time last year, at the investiture of the Kusereen Grand-Delegate on Vannannimolinan, when the Poro sky-dancers had impulsively dedicated a whole season’s performances to him and—

  Elszabet heard no more of that story. The Sapiil envoy had moved along. He stood with his broad back to her now, framed by throbbing green light in the faceted north window of the viewing-chamber. But no matter: there were other diversions. Visitors had come from all over the galaxy to see the Double Equinox. Some wore the bodies of their native worlds; others, not as compatible with local conditions, had donned crystalline. The room buzzed with the chatter of fifty empires. Three Blades of the Imperium and a Magister, someone was saying. Can you imagine? All in the same room. And someone else said, They were Ninth Zygerone, I’m sure of it. Have you ever seen Ninth before? And a soft whisper: She is of the Twelfth Polyarchy, under the great star Ellullimiilu. Years since one of them has been here. Well, of course, it is the Double Equinox, but even so—

  From somewhere far away a knocking sound, insistent, annoying. Rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat

  “Elszabet?”

  She stirred. Looking about, turning to one of the Gaarinar to ask something about the princess of the Polyarchy, the being from Ellullimiilu.

  Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat

  “It’s me, Elszabet. Dan. I have to talk to you.”

  Dan? Dan? She sat up, blinking, muddled, still more than half-entangled in the delicate sarabandes and minuets of the Green World folk. Who was Dan? Why was he making that sound? Didn’t he know it was the night of the Double Equinox and—

  More knocking. “Are you all right? Look, if you don’t answer me I’m going to come in there and see if you’re—”

  “Dan?” she said, trying to shake free of her confusions. “Dan, what’s the matter? What time is it?”

  “It’s almost midnight. I didn’t mean to intrude or anything, but—”

  “Okay. Just a second.” She thumbed her eyes. Almost midnight. She was in the hammock, a book turned face down across her lap. Must have dozed off, then. Dreaming. The Green World—the Double Equinox, was it? An ambassador there from the Nine Suns, and someone else from Blue Giant, and a Ninth Zygerone, whatever that was—oh, God. God.

  The ragged end of the interrupted vision scraped and screeched in her brain. She put her hands to the sides of her head. The pain was almost unbearable. To have been wrenched away from all that so suddenly, so roughly—

  “Elszabet?”

  “I’m coming,” she said. She swung her legs over the side of the hammock, paused for a moment with her feet just touching the floor, took three deep breaths, wondered whether she’d be able to keep her balance when she stood up. She was shaking. To get drawn in so deeply, to become so enmeshed, so dependent—like a drug, she thought. Like a narcotic. “Just a second, Dan. I’m—waking up slowly, I guess—”

  “I’m sorry. Your light was on. I thought—”

  “It’s all right. Just a second.” She steadied herself. The last strands of green radiance were fading from her mind. She went to the door.

  He loomed in the doorway, a dark figure against the darkness, his eyes very white, very wide. When he stepped inside she saw that he was glistening with perspiration, that his face was actually flushed: a distinct undertone of light pink beneath the chocolate. She hadn’t known that it was possible. She had never seen him this agitated before. Relaxed, mellow Dan. She closed the door behind him and looked about for something to offer him, a drink, a popper, anything to calm him. He shook his head. “Mind if I?” she said, as the box of poppers wandered into her hand. Another shake. She pulled one out. The tranquilizing vapor traveled from her nostrils to her cerebral cortex in half a microsecond. Ah. Ah. That’s better.

  “What happened, Dan?”

  He was sitting on the edge of her bed, looking like a man who had just run ten kilometers and was having some trouble catching his breath. “I feel a little foolish now, getting so worked up,” he said. “It just seemed to me that I had to run in here right away and tell you, that’s all.”

  He was being exasperating, though he probably didn’t intend to be. She said, a l
ittle irritably, “Dan, what happened? Are you going to let me in on it or not?”

  Sheepishly he said, “I finally had one just now. A space dream. My first.”

  “Now I see why you’re so keyed up.”

  “After all these months trying to analyze other people’s imagery data without really having the foggiest idea what the hell they were actually experiencing—”

  “Oh, Dan. Dan, I’m so glad that it happened at last—”

  “It was Double Star One. I closed my eyes, and bang! There I was, red sun, blue sun, alabaster block. And the big thing with horns standing on top of it. Two or three more just like it a little distance away, doing something like drilling a well. But the clarity of it, Elszabet! The absolute conviction that this was reality. Hell, I don’t need to tell you. But I couldn’t help being over-whelmed—all this time, wondering whether I was ever going to experience it, wondering what was wrong, why I was blocking—” He grinned. “So I had to tell someone. You. Came running over, and your light was on, and—you’re annoyed, aren’t you? That I woke you up for something so trivial?”

  Gently she said, “It’s only that I was right in the middle of a dream myself. You know how it is when someone pulls you out of a dream. Any dream?”

  “And it was a space dream?”

  “Green World. Richer and more complex than ever before.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “I’m glad for you. I’m glad you came to tell me. And don’t call it trivial. Whatever else these dreams are, they aren’t trivial.”

  “Why do you think I finally had one tonight, Elszabet?”

  “I guess it was finally your turn.”

  “A random process, you mean? No, no, I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was silent a moment. “I’m always a fast man with a theory. But a lot of times my theories don’t stand up so well, do they?”

  “I’m not the Board of Examiners. What are you thinking, Dan?”

  “Tom.”

  “Tom?”

  “His being here. A proximity effect. Look, have you gone over the stats for the week? The frequency of space dreams has tripled since he’s been here. You’ve experienced that yourself, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “And you said just now that the dream you were having, the one I busted into, was the richest, the most complex you’ve had. Right? So what do we have? The frequency of dreams has increased among dream-susceptible subjects. The intensity of dreams has heightened too, apparently. And now someone who has demonstrated one hundred percent dream-nonsusceptibility since the whole thing began finally gets one too. Something’s going on. And what’s the variable factor that’s changed here this week? Tom. A very strange, probably schizophrenic individual wanders in, someone who we all agree gives off a distinct aura, a definite vibration of psychic force—am I right, weren’t you the first to remark on it, hasn’t every conversation you’ve had with him left you feeling that he has some kind of peculiar power?”

  “Absolutely,” Elszabet said. “But what are you getting at? That Tom’s the source of the space dreams?”

  “It makes more sense than my last idea, that they’re some kind of broadcast from an incoming extragalactic spaceship, doesn’t it?”

  “You want my honest opinion?”

  “Go on.”

  “The same thing occurred to me, I have to admit. That there’s some link between Tom’s presence at the Center and the way the dreams have been coming more often. But all the same, I think I’d rather believe the spaceship theory.”

  “Leo Kresh punctured that one. There hasn’t been time for our Starprobe to reach its destination and generate a response from the inhabitants of—”

  “Why does Starprobe have to have anything to do with it, Dan? Suppose it’s unrelated. A spaceship, all right, coming in from God knows where, beaming us movies of other solar systems. Not in any way connected with the fact that we sent out an interstellar probe a generation or so ago.”

  “Now you’re the one who’s multiplying hypotheses,” Robinson said. “Sure, that’s what it could be, but we’ve got no reason in the world to think that that’s actually what’s going on. Whereas we do have Tom right here at a time when the pattern of dreams is definitely changing.”

  “Coincidence,” Elszabet suggested. “Why should proximity to Tom have the slightest relevance?”

  “Are you just playing devil’s advocate, or do you have some reason for not wanting to accept the Tom hypothesis?”

  “I don’t know. Part of me says yes, yes, it has to be Tom, isn’t that obvious? And the other part says that it makes no sense. Even assuming it’s at all possible for somebody to transmit images into someone else’s mind…and where’s the substantiation for that?…don’t forget that the dreams have been going on all across the West, Dan. He can’t be everywhere at once. San Diego, Denver, San Francisco—”

  “Maybe there are several sources. Several Toms roaming around out here.”

  “Dan, for God’s sake—”

  “Or maybe not. I don’t know. What I think is that this man is in the grip of a psychosis so powerful that he’s somehow able to broadcast it to others. A kind of psychic Typhoid Mary capable of scattering hallucinations across thousands of kilometers. And the closer you get to him, Elszabet, the more intense and the more frequent the hallucinations are, although I’ll concede that proximity may be just one determining factor, more significant in the case of low-susceptibility types like me. But what about someone like April Cranshaw, who seems to have unusually high susceptibility? She’s been snarled up in dream after dream all week, awake or asleep.”

  “How about Ed Ferguson?” Elszabet asked. “So far as I know, he’s the only one on the premises outside of you who’s never shown any susceptibility at all. I’ll be more willing to buy your idea if it turns out that Ferguson’s finally getting dreams too.”

  “What do you want to do, wake him up right now and ask him?”

  “Tomorrow morning’s early enough, Dan.”

  “Sure. Sure, that makes sense. And we ought to interview April, too. Get her into the same room with Tom and watch what happens. Whether there are any hypersensitivity effects under direct proximity. That should be easy enough to arrange.” He leaned forward, peering intently at the bare wooden floor. After a time he said, “You know, Elszabet, I thought the dream I had was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. That weird landscape—those colors—the sky, lit up in four or five colors, like the greatest sunset that’s ever been—”

  “Wait until you see the rest of them,” Elszabet said. “The Sphere of Light. The Nine Suns. The Green World. Especially the Green World.”

  “More beautiful even than Double Star One?”

  “Frighteningly beautiful,” she said in a very quiet voice.

  “Frighteningly?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The dream I was having when you came knocking on the door—I was annoyed with you, yes, for interrupting it. The way Coleridge must have been annoyed, when he was dreaming ‘Kubla Khan’ and the person from Porlock came and bothered him. Do you know that story? But in a way I’m glad you broke in on it. Those dreams are like drugs. Half the time now I’m not sure whether I’m living here and dreaming about there, or the other way around. Do you understand me, Dan? It scares me that I’m so drawn in. Any kind of fantasy that draws you so deeply, that becomes so real for you—I hardly need to say it, do I, Dan? There are times I think, coming up from one of those dreams, that I’m gradually losing my own sanity, what little sanity I may have.” She shivered and folded her arms across her chest. “Chilly in here. Summer’s just about over, I guess. Do you know what else, Dan? Now the dreams are beginning to overlap for me. Tonight I saw figures out of Nine Suns and Blue Giant mixing in a party on Green World. As though it’s all flowing together in one big lunatic movie-show. That’s new. That’s really bewildering.”

  “It’s all v
ery bewildering, Elszabet.”

  She nodded. “I wish I had even the faintest idea what the hell’s going on. An epidemic of identical dreams involving hundreds of thousands of people? How? How? Broadcasts from an alien spaceship? An itinerant psychotic scattering wild visions around at random? Maybe we’re all going psycho. The last gaudy convulsion of western industrial society: we all go nuts and disappear into our own dreams.”

  “Elszabet—”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

  “It’s late. We should try to get some sleep. In the morning we’ll start doing some further checking up on all this, okay?”

  Robinson got up and walked toward the door. Elszabet felt a sudden rush of fear—of what, she wasn’t sure. In a hoarse voice that was little more than a whisper she said, suddenly, unexpectedly, “Don’t go, Dan. Please. Will you stay here with me?”

  2

  THE woman, this Elszabet, hadn’t slept well last night. Tom could see that right away. She was all jangled up, the fist inside her heart closed even tighter than usual. And dark rings under her eyes, and her cheeks all drawn and hollow. Too bad, he thought. He didn’t like to see anyone unhappy, especially not Elszabet. She was so kind, good, wise: why should she have to be this troubled?

  “You know,” he said to her, “you remind me a little of my mother. I just now realized that.”

  “Did you like your mother, Tom?”

  “You always ask stuff like that, don’t you?”

  “Well, if you say I remind you of her, I want to know how you felt about her. So I know how you feel about me. That’s all.”

  Tom said, “Is that it? Oh. How I feel about you is very good. That you listen to me, that you pay attention, that you like me. I don’t really remember very much about my mother. Her hair was fair, I think, like yours, maybe. What I mean is that you’re the sort of person I would have liked my mother to be, if I knew what my mother was like. You know what I mean?”

  She seemed to know what he meant. She smiled; and the smile softened some of the tightness that was within her. She ought to smile more often, Tom thought.