Tom O'Bedlam Read online

  “I wish I could,” he said at last, softly, tenderly. “You know, right now that’s the one thing I want more than anything. To go to the Green World with you, Elszabet. I wish I could. I wish I could.”

  “Then do it, Tom.”

  “I can’t go,” he said. “I have to stay here. But at least I can help you. Here, give me your hands.”

  Once more he reached for her. She was shaking all over. But this time she didn’t pull back. She was ready. She knew it was right.

  “Good-bye, Elszabet. And—hey, thanks for listening to me, you know?” His voice was very gentle, and there was a note in it that was close to being mournful, but not really. “That meant a lot to me,” he said. “When I’d go to your office, you’d listen to me. Nobody ever did that, really, except Charley, some of the time, and that was different, with Charley. Charley isn’t like you.”

  How sad, she thought. I can go and Tom, who has done all this for us, has to stay.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  “I can’t,” he said. “You have to go without me. Is that all right?”

  “Yes. All right.”

  “Now,” he said.

  He gripped both her hands. Elszabet drew her breath in deeply, and waited. A sense of happiness, and grace, welled up in her. She was wondrously calm and certain. She had done her best here, but now it truly was time to leave. A new life would be beginning for her on a new world. It seemed to her that she had never known such certainty before.

  She felt a sudden moment of new tension, a tension she had never before experienced, a sort of suspension of the soul; and then came a release. The last thing she saw was Tom’s taut stricken face, full of desperate love for her. Then the greenness rose up about her like a fountain of joyous light, and she felt herself setting forth, beginning the wondrous voyage outward.

  9

  IT looked like a battlefield now. The rain was coming down harder than ever, and the lawns and gardens and meadows were churned into a great sea of muck, and all the buildings were smashed or burning or both. Some people were wandering about like blind men, staggering in the storm, and some were hunkered down behind the cars and buses, shooting at each other. Tom took a last look at the smiling woman lying at his feet, and walked away, still hearing Elszabet’s voice saying, “Come with me,” and his own, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

  How could he have gone now, with the Crossing only begun?

  He wondered if he were ever going to get to go at all. There were so many to send, and he was the only one with the power, wasn’t he? Maybe he could teach others, somehow. But even so—there were so many who had to go. And he thought again, as he so often had before, of Moses, leading his people to the promised land and peering into it from the outside, and the Lord saying to him, I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. Was that what was going to happen to him?

  Tom looked up toward the sky, trying to pierce through the clouds to the stars. Those golden empires, waiting. Those godlike beings. Those shining cities, millions of years old.

  You out there, you Kusereen who planned all this…is that your plan, to use me only as the instrument, the vehicle, and then leave me behind when the world ends?

  He couldn’t believe that was so. He didn’t want to. They’d come for him right at the end. They had to, when all the others had made the Crossing. But maybe not. Maybe they’d just leave him here all by himself. How could he presume to understand the Kusereen? Well, he thought, if that’s what it is, that’s what it is. I’ll only find out when the time comes.

  Meanwhile there’s work to do.

  Charley came up to him, shrouded in mud.

  “There you are,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d ever find you again.”

  Tom smiled. “You ready for your Crossing now, Charley?”

  “You’re really doing it? Sending people? To the Green World and all?”

  “That’s right,” Tom said. “I been sending them all morning. To different worlds, Green World, Nine Suns, all of them. I even sent Stidge. He pulled his spike on me, and I sent him.”

  Charley was staring. “You sent him, did you? Where’d he go?”

  “Luiiliimeli.”

  “Loollymoolly. Good old Loollymoolly. I hope he’s happy there. That goddamn Stidge. Going to live on Loollymoolly.” Charley laughed. He looked somewhere past Tom. He seemed to be lost for a moment in his own dreams of other worlds.

  Then he focused his attention again and said in a different voice, businesslike and quick, “Okay, let’s get the hell out of here, Tom.”

  “I can’t, not yet. I got a few more things to do first—”

  “Christ. Christ, Tom, what’s wrong with you? Let’s go find the van and start moving. Before one of these crazies takes us out. Can’t you see? They’re shooting at each other all over the place.”

  “Don’t you want to make the Crossing, Charley?”

  “Thanks all the same,” Charley said. “That’s not what I’ve got in mind right now.”

  “I’ll give you the Green World for sure.”

  “Thanks all the same,” Charley said again. And then he said something else, but Tom wasn’t able to make it out. All this noise, the shouting, the drumming of the rain. The crowd came surging by again and Charley was swept away. Tom shrugged. Well, maybe it wasn’t Charley’s time yet. He wandered on. Around him, people were slipping and sliding and falling down everywhere. Now and then someone turned toward him with what seemed an appeal in his eyes, and Tom would touch him and send him to one of the welcoming worlds. After a while he saw another familiar face come looming up out of the confusion, a man with rough pitted skin, hard blue eyes. “Hello, Buffalo,” Tom said. “How’s it going?”

  “Tom. Hey. That’s Charley over there, isn’t it?”

  Tom turned. For a moment he caught a glimpse of Charley once more, trying to shove his way through seven or eight frantic people. “Yeah,” Tom said. “That’s Charley. I was with him before but we got separated. Look, here he comes.”

  Charley burst through the crowd and ran up to them, breathing hard, face shiny with rain and exertion. “Hey, Buffalo,” he said, “Christ, am I glad to see you.”

  “Charley. Hey. Who else’s around?”

  “Nobody. There’s none of us left but you and me. Maybe Mujer, I’m not sure. Let’s go look for the van, okay? We got to get ourselves the hell away from this place.”

  “You bet,” Buffalo said.

  “And you, Tom?” Charley said. “You come with us. We’ll ride away south, just like we talked about.”

  Tom nodded. “Maybe in a little while, a few hours.”

  “We’re going now,” Charley said. “Staying here any more is crazy.”

  “Then you go without me.”

  “For Christ’s sake—”

  “I got to stay a few more hours,” Tom said. “People here, they need me. I can’t go yet. In a little while, sure. Maybe by dark.” Yes, he thought, maybe by dark. By then he would have done all that he needed to do here, and he could move along. He had made friends here and he had sent them to the stars. Now he would send some of these other people, the ones who had followed the little black man from San Diego, the taxi driver. And then he’d find Charley and Buffalo and ride off with them. He’d go somewhere else. Make other friends. Send them too. “You go find the van,” Tom said. “That’ll take you a little while. Later on, maybe, I’ll go back there in the woods and catch up with you, okay? Okay?”

  He looked through and past them and it seemed to him that he could see Elszabet over there. Smiling. Come with me, she had said. I can’t, he had said. Okay. Whatever. Poor Tom. He could hardly bear to think about her. Wherever she was now. Green World, that was it. At least he had told her he loved her. At least he had managed to say that much. Come with me, that was what she had said. When he thought about that, what she had said, he felt like crying. But he couldn’t allow himself that, He didn’t have time to cry today. Maybe lat
er. There was too much work to do. Walk down there where all those people were, touch them, help them to go. Elszabet glowed in his mind with the brightness of a new sun. Come with me, come with me. I can’t, he had said. He shook his head.

  Charley and Buffalo were still standing there, staring at him.

  “You really going to stay?” Charley asked.

  “Only a few more hours,” he said again, very softly. “Then maybe I’ll catch up with you. You go look for the van. Okay, Charley? You go look for the van.”

  10

  IT seemed to Dan Robinson that he had been running for hours: on and on in effortless strides, his heart pumping like some sort of untiring machine, his legs driving him over the sodden ground. It was the anger, he knew, that kept him going this way. He boiled with a rage so intense that he could contain it only by this blind, furious flight into the forest. Bizarre lunacy loose in the world, the Center in ruins, Elszabet gone…Elszabet gone…

  Here, put your hands in his, she had said. Just trust me and do it. Dan. Go on. Put your hands in his.

  He had no idea where he was. By now he might be at the far side of the forest, or perhaps he had just been going around in circles, crossing and recrossing his own trail. There were no landmarks here. One huge redwood looked just like the next. The sky, what little he could see of it through the tops of the giant trees, was dark now. But whether that was because evening was coming on, or simply an effect of the deepening storm, he couldn’t say.

  He knew he wouldn’t be able to run much longer. But he was afraid to stop. If he stopped, he might have to think. And there was too much that he didn’t want to think about right now.

  Tom will send us to the Green World, she had said. You and me. We’ll go there together. She had seemed so calm, so sure of herself. That was the worst of it, her calmness. He could still hear her saying, Now I just want to go away and make a second start somewhere else. Doesn’t that make sense? Tom will send us to the Green World. She had been beyond his reach at that moment. He had come close to snapping, seeing her like that. All he could do was turn and run from her; and he had not yet stopped running.

  Suddenly there was a sound in his mind like the distant roaring of the sea. Flickering shafts of green light danced in the depths of him. So there was no escape from the visions, even out here. He was still infected with the general madness.

  No, he thought. Get out of my head!

  Tom will send us to the Green world, she had said. You and me.

  Robinson wondered if he might have been able to keep her from doing it, if he had stayed beside her. Tried to reason with her. Dragged her away from Tom by force, if necessary. No, damn it. He couldn’t have done any of that. She had made up her mind. She had yielded completely. Maybe, he thought, it was seeing the mob smash the Center to bits that had sent her over the brink. He had wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. To tell her that it was suicidal craziness, giving herself over to whatever power Tom had—to put her hands in his, and fall down dead with that blissful damn smile on her face.

  The sea-sound grew more intense: a surging, a crashing. The air was becoming heavy about him, a thick green blanket. He heard far-off music, faint, tinkling, silvery needles of sound.

  He felt the tip of his shoe snag against the exposed snaky root of a colossal redwood, and he lurched and went spinning and hurtling toward the ground. Struggling for balance, arms flailing as he skidded and stumbled, the best he could do was pull his head in and try to roll with the fall as his feet went out from under him and he landed hard on his left shoulder and hip.

  For a moment he lay there, stunned, face down, arms spread wide, his cheek in a cold puddle. He made no attempt to get up. For the first time now he felt the exhaustion of his long run through the rain: chills, muscular spasms, waves of nausea. The green light grew brighter in his mind. Nothing he could do could hold back that onrushing vision. The green sky, the fleecy fog, that intricate music, those shining pavilions—

  “Get out of my head…” It was a harsh, despairing sound as he pounded his fist against the rain-soaked ground.

  He saw the crystalline figures moving delicately across that flawless green landscape. The long slim bodies, the glittering faceted eyes, the slender limbs bright as mirrors. Those princes and dukes, those lords and ladies. Dan remembered how eager he had been to have his first space dream, how he had longed to have these visions flood his mind, how exciting it was when at last one had come to him. Running late at night across to Elszabet’s cabin like a schoolboy to tell her all about it. Now he wanted nothing more than to be rid of it. Please, he thought. Go away. Please. Go away…

  They were talking to him. Telling him their names…we are the Misilyne Triad, they were saying, and we are the Suminoors, and we are the Gaarinar, and we—

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to know anything about you. Whatever you are. You’re phantoms, hallucinations.”

  We love you, they said. That eerie whispering sound echoing through his mind.

  He didn’t want their love. He was choking with fury, and despair.

  Someone you know is among us, they said.

  “I don’t care,” he told them sullenly, almost petulantly.

  She wants to talk to you, they said.

  He lay there quietly, cold, wet, numb, feeling lost. But then he heard a different sort of music, richer and deeper and warmer, and a new voice, delicate and tinkling and silvery like theirs, yet somehow less alien than the others, calling out his name across the great gulf of space. He looked up in amazement. He knew that voice. Beyond any doubt he knew that voice. So she got there after all, he told himself. He could feel the wonder blossom and grow within him. She actually got there. And that changes everything, doesn’t it? He didn’t dare move. Had he really heard it? Again, he thought. Please, again. And then came her voice in his mind once more. Calling to him again. Yes, he knew it was real. And at the sound of that voice he felt all resistance begin to leave him, and his anger and his fear and his sorrow dropping from him like a cast-off cloak. And he got up, wondering if there still was time to find Tom somewhere back in that madness, and began slowly to walk through the rain toward the bright green light that blazed before him in the heavens.