Wine of the Dreamers (9 page)

“Suddenly, and without any warning, I felt a … nudge at my mind. That’s the only way I can describe it. A nudge, and then a faint, persistent pushing. I tried to resist it, but its strength increased. There was a certain horrid
… confidence about it. An utterly alien pressure, Sharan. A calm pressure. Have you ever fainted?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the way you tried to fight off the blackness, and it seemed to grow stronger? It was like that. I sat absolutely still, and even as I fought against it, one part of my mind was trying to find a reason for it. Tension, overwork, fear of failure. I used every device I could think of. I tried to focus my mind on nothing except the look of the corner of the screen. I dug my fingers into the chair arm and tried to focus on the pain. The thing in my mind increased the pressure and I had the feeling that it was
fitting
itself to my mind, turning as it entered, so as to find the easiest means of entrance. I lost the ability to control my own body. I could no longer dig at the chair arm with my fingers. I cannot describe how frightening that was. I have always felt … completely in control of myself, Sharan. Maybe I’ve been too confident. Possibly even contemptuous of the aberrations of others.

“My eyes were still focused at short range on the corner of the screen. My head lifted a bit and, without willing it, I found myself staring out at the Beatty One, trying to make out its outlines. It was in my mind, strongly, that I was seeing the ship for the first time. I was sensing the reaction of the thing that had entered my mind. The thing was perplexed, awed, wondrous. Sharan, in that state, I could have been forced to do … anything. Destroy the ship. Kill myself. My will and my desires would have had no part in action I might have undertaken.”

As she touched his arm, and said softly, “Easy, mister,” he realized that his voice had climbed into a higher register, threatening shrillness.

He took a deep breath. “Tell me, is there such a thing as a waking nightmare?”

“There are delusions, fantasies of the mind.”

“I felt … possessed. There, I’ve said it. The thing in my mind seemed to be trying to tell me that it was not inimical, that it wished no harm. When the pressure reached its strongest point, the moonlight faded away. I looked
into blackness and I felt that all my thoughts and memories were being … handled. Fingered, picked at.

“And now, Sharan, comes the part that’s pure nightmare. The thing pressed its own thought images into my mind. It was as though it substituted its memories for mine. I looked down a long, wide corridor. The floors and walls had a muted glow. The people had an almost sexless look, frail, neuter, blue-white people, but human. It was very clear they were inbred. They walked with a tired timelessness, a semi-hypnotic sort of dedication, as though every movement was a portion of custom rather than habit. And suddenly I was looking out through a huge window, a window at an enormous distance from ground level. Six cigar-shaped, tail-finned objects that could only have been space ships pointed upward at a purple sky and a huge dying red sun that filled a quarter of the sky. I realized that I was seeing a dying world, an ancient world, and the people who were left in it. I got an impression of sadness, of a remote and weary sadness. Then the presence flicked out of my mind so quickly that it dizzied me. My own will, which seemed to have been crowded back into a tiny corner of my brain, re-expanded suddenly and I was myself again. I tried to treat it as a … as something of no importance. I went back to my quarters and undressed, as though I could go to bed with no further thought of it. But I had to come and tell you about this.”

He waited. Sharan stood up, walked to a post set into the cement porch, leaned against it with her hands in her pockets, her back to him.

“Bard,” she said, “we talked about the X factor in mental illness. In psychiatry we have a recurrent phenomenon. A mind, temporarily out of focus, will use as material for delusion something that has happened in the immediate past. Our sleeping dreams, as you know, are almost always based on some reference to the previous waking period. Recently we have talked of being possessed by devils. Silly darn phrase. Bill told us his symptoms. What is more natural than for you to borrow his symptoms and use them as your own. But, of course, you carried it a step further, due
to your background and your ambition. You had to make the devils into representatives of some extra-solar super-race, because you are too practical to be satisfied with an illusion of devils. Bard, this is all due to the pressure mounting, the fear that they’ll stop the project, the needling General Sachson gave you.” She turned and faced him, hands still in the pockets of the jeans.

“Bard, go on back to bed. We’ll stop at my place and I’ll bring you down a little pink pill.”

“I haven’t made you understand, have I?”

“I think I understand.”

“Dr. Inly, tomorrow I’ll report to you for the usual tests. You will advise me if you find anything out of line. If so, I shall make my resignation effective at once.”

“Don’t be a child, Bard! Who else could carry Project Tempo on his back? Who else could get the loyalty you do out of fifteen hundred of us working out here in this Godforsaken spot on something not one in fifty of us can understand?”

“Suppose,” he said harshly, “that the next time I have this little aberration, I get as destructive as Kornal did?”

She walked slowly to him, pulled her chair closer, sat down and took his left hand in both of hers. “You won’t, Bard.”

“I believe it’s part of your job to be reassuring, isn’t it?”

“And to wash out those who show signs of incipient mental instability. Don’t forget that. Part of my job is to watch you. I have been watching you. I have a complete file on you, Bard. For one moment, look at yourself objectively. Thirty-four years old. Born in a small town in Ohio. Orphaned at eight. Raised by an uncle. Public school. At twelve you had your own ideas of the way to solve the problems in the geometry book. You were skeptical of the Euclidian solutions. You won a science scholarship based on the originality of an experiment you did in the high school physics lab. You worked for the other money you needed. Cal Tech, M.I.T. You got a reputation when you helped design the first practical application of atomic power for industrial use. Government service. Years of exhausting
labor on the A-four, A-five and A-six. Now do you know why you had this little … lapse in your office?”

“What do you mean?”

“You have no ability to relax. You’ve never had time for a girl, for a lost weekend. You’ve never fallen asleep under a tree, or caught a trout. When you read for amusement, you read scientific papers and new texts. Your idea of a happy evening is either to cover fifteen pages of blank paper with little Greek chicken-tracks, or have a bull session with some men who are just as one-sided as you are.”

“Does the doctor want to prescribe?” he asked gently.

She snatched her hand away and leaned back in the chair. The moon had slanted low enough so that under the porch overhang it touched the line of her cheek, made a faint highlight on her lower lip, left her eyes shadowed.

After a long silence she said, “The doctor will prescribe the doctor, Bard. I’ll come back to your quarters with you, if … you’ll have me.”

He was aware of his own intense excitement. He let the seconds go by. He said, “I think we’d better be thoroughly honest with each other, Sharan. It’s the best way. You’ve put us into a delicate spot. Emotions are pretty well exposed at this point. I know your personal loyalty to me, and to the project. I know your capacity for loyalty. Now answer this honestly, my dear. If I had not come to you with this … trouble, would you have made that sort of offer?”

“No,” she whispered.

“And if I had asked you, in the casual way that seems to have become a custom these past few years?”

“I don’t know. Probably no, Bard. I’m sorry.”

“Then let’s drop the subject, with no harm done. I’ll settle for a pink pill and an appointment in the morning.”

“And after you are tested, Bard, I am going to send you out into the hills with a scope rifle I can borrow from a friend of mine. You are going to spend a full day potting varmints and thinking of something beside this damnable project. That’s an order.”

“Yes,
sir!
” he said, standing up and saluting.

“Please, Bard. You must understand that it was just weakness which made you feel that you had the symptoms Bill Kornal described. A weakness born of tension and strain. It was auto-hypnosis, pure and simple. It can happen to any of us.”

“Whatever it was, Sharan, I didn’t like it. Come on. I’ll walk you back.”

They went slowly down the road. There was no need for conversation between them. She had partially comforted him. After he was in bed, waiting for the mild drug to take effect, he wondered why he had been so reluctant to permit her to sacrifice her own integrity for the sake of the project. He thought of the slim clean look of her in the moonlight, of her young breasts against the fabric of her jacket. He smiled at his own reservations, at his reluctance to accept such a gift. They had both sensed that they were almost—but not quite—right for each other. And “not quite” was not enough for either of them.

SIX

Raul Kinson realized that eight years had proved Fedra correct. One never forgets those first few dreams, those first three dreams—one for each alien world de-marked on the dial at the head of the dream case.

Fedra had borne his child during that first year of the dreams. Sometimes he watched the children at their games, and wondered which one was his. He looked in vain for any sign of resemblance. He wondered at this curiosity, which the others did not seem to share.

Yes, the first dreams could never be forgotten. Even after eight years he remembered every moment of the second dream.

In his second dream he had a new certainty of contact,
a new assurance born of the practice during the first dream. He was eager to see this second world. In his initial eagerness he had grasped the first contact mind, had thrust with all the power of intellect, motivated by strong curiosity.

And at once he had found himself in an alien body which writhed in bright hot light on a hard surface. He could not control the muscles or the senses of the captive body. Vision was broken fragments. Muscle spasms could not be controlled. He tried to withdraw pressure, but the host mind would not take over the body again. The brain he touched was shattered, irrational, sending messages of spasm to uncontrolled muscles. At first he thought he had inhabited a mind already broken, and then he began to guess that perhaps the full, uncontrolled thrust of his own mind had broken the host mind. He gave up all efforts at control and slid out of the host, impelling himself very gently toward the nearest contact.

He slid with restraint into this new mind, never taking over control, merely waiting and watching and listening at a sufficiently high level so that the language became clear. The new host was a brawny man in a blue uniform. He was saying, “Move back there! You! Give the guy air! Give him a chance, folks.”

A second man in uniform came over. “What you got, Al?”

“Fella with a fit or something. I sent in an ambulance call. You there, did I hear you say you’re a doctor? Take a look at him, will you?”

A man in gray bent over and wedged a pencil between the teeth of the man who writhed on the sidewalk. He looked up at the policeman. “Epileptic, I think. Better send for an ambulance.”

“Thanks, Doc. I already did.”

Raul looked curiously through the eyes of the man who called himself Al, who thought of himself as a policeman, as the metal machine on four wheels came down the street, making shrill screamings. It backed up over the curbing. Men in white examined the figure on the sidewalk,
lifted him onto a stretcher and put him in the vehicle. It screamed into the distance.

Al took a small box from his jacket pocket, pressed a button and spoke with it close to his lips. He made a report and finally said, “I don’t feel so great. Like maybe a headache. If it gets worse I’m going to call in and ask off.”

He put the speaker back into his pocket. Raul looked out through Al’s eyes at a broad street full of hurrying people and strange objects on wheels guided by other people. The people were similar in form and coloring to the people of the first world. But their clothing was different. He searched through Al’s mind for words of identification and found that this city was called Syracuse, in a bigger area called New York State. The street was South Salina.

Raul also learned that Al’s feet hurt, that he was thirsty, and that his “wife” had gone to visit in some faraway place. He sensed that the “wife” was a mating partner, but it was unexpectedly more than that. It was a sharing of lives as well as a mating, and a living together in a specific non-community structure called a “home.” Soon he found a familiar relationship in another one of Al’s random thoughts. He thought of “money,” and Raul was able to identify it as the same kind of mysterious and apparently useless pieces of metal which had been pressed into his hand when he had been a water vendor on the first world. He learned that Al was given money in return for his services as a policeman, and the money went to provide food, clothing and the “home.” He inserted into Al’s mind the thought that no one would ever again give him any money and he was shocked by the strength of the wave of fear which followed the suggestion.

He looked through Al’s eyes into the store windows, trying to guess the possible uses for objects he had never seen in any of his years in the rooms of learning. When Al looked at something of his own accord, Raul could interpret the thoughts, identify the object and learn what it was used for. A thin stick with a metal spool at one end
was used to trick a creature that lived under water and was called “bass.” When the hook was in the flesh of “bass,” it was reeled in and lifted into the boat and later eaten. When he saw the mental picture of a bass in Al’s mind, the thought of eating it made him feel queasy. When he forced Al to look at something, the man’s shock and fear at finding himself doing something without awareness or purpose was so great that his mind would freeze and Raul would learn nothing.