The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72, Page 2

  He wakes, trembling, screaming.

  Falkirk’s shout still sounded in his own ears as his eyes adjusted to the light. Lieutenant Commander Rodriguez was holding his shoulders and shaking him.

  “You all right?”

  Falkirk tried to reply. Words wouldn’t come. Hallucinatory shock, he realized, as part of his mind attempted to convince the other part that the dream was over. He was trained to handle crises; he ran through a quick disciplinary countdown and calmed himself, though he was still badly shaken. “Nightmare,” he said hoarsely. “A beauty. Never had a dream with that kind of intensity before.”

  Rodriguez relaxed. Obviously he couldn’t get very upset over a mere nightmare. “You want a pill?”

  Falkirk shook his head. “I’ll manage, thanks.”

  But the impact of the dream lingered. It was more than an hour before he got back to sleep, and then he fell into a light, restless doze, as if his mind were on guard against a return of those chilling fantasies.

  Fifty minutes before his programmed wakeup time, he was awakened by a ghastly shriek from the far side of the cabin.

  Lieutenant Commander Rodriguez was having a nightmare.

  When the ship made float-down on Earth a month later it was, of course, put through the usual decontamination procedures before anyone or anything aboard it was allowed out of the starport. The outer hull got squirted with sealants designed to trap and smother any microorganism that might have hitchhiked from another world; the crew men emerged through the safety pouch and went straight into a quarantine chamber without being exposed to the air; the ship’s atmosphere was cycled into withdrawal chambers, where it underwent a thorough purification; and the entire interior of the vessel received a six-phase sterilization, beginning with fifteen minutes of hard vacuum and ending with an hour of neutron bombardment.

  These procedures caused a certain degree of inconvenience for the Vsiir. It was already at the low end of its energy phase, due mainly to the repeated discouragements it had suffered in its attempts to communicate with the six humans. Now it was forced to adapt to a variety of unpleasant environments with no chance to rest between changes. Even the most adaptable of organisms can get tired. By the time the starport’s decontamination team was ready to certify that the ship was wholly free of alien life-forms, the Vsiir was very, very tired indeed.

  The oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere entered the hold once more. The Vsiir found it quite welcome, at least in contrast to all that had just been thrown at it. The hatch was open; stevedores were muscling the cargo crates into position to be floated across the field to the handling dome. The Vsiir took advantage of this moment to extrude some legs and scramble out of the ship. It found itself on a broad concrete apron, rimmed by massive buildings. A yellow sun was shining in a blue sky; infrared was bouncing all over the place, but the Vsiir speedily made arrangements to deflect the excess. It also compensated immediately for the tinge of ugly hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, for the frightening noise level, and for the leaden feeling of homesickness that suddenly threatened its organic stability at the first sight of this unfamiliar, disheartening world. How to get home again? How to make contact, even? The Vsiir sensed nothing but closed minds—sealed like seeds in their shells. True, from time to time the minds of these humans opened, but even then, they seemed unwilling to let the Vsiir’s message get through.

  Perhaps it would be different here. Perhaps those six were poor communicators, for some reason, and there would be more receptive minds available in this place. Perhaps. Perhaps. Close to despair, the Vsiir hurried across the field and slipped into the first building in which it sensed open minds. There were hundreds of humans in it, occupying many levels, and the open minds were widely scattered. The Vsiir located the nearest one and, worriedly, earnestly, hopefully, touched the tip of its mind to the human’s.—Please listen, I mean no harm. Am nonhuman organism arrived on your planet through unhappy circumstances; wishing only quick going back to own world—

  The cardiac wing of Long Island Starport Hospital was on the ground floor, in the rear, where the patients could be given floater therapy without upsetting the gravitational ratios of the rest of the building. As always, the hospital was full—people were always coming in sick off starliners, and most of them were hospitalized right at the starport for their own safety—and the cardiac wing had more than its share. At the moment, it held a dozen infarcts awaiting implant, nine postimplant recupes, five coronaries in emergency stasis, three ventricle-regrowth projects, an aortal patch job, and nine or ten assorted other cases. Most of the patients were floating, to keep down the gravitational strain on their damaged tissues—all but the regrowth people, who were under full Earth-norm gravity so that their new hearts would come in with the proper resilience and toughness. The hospital had a fine reputation and one of the lowest mortality rates in the hemisphere.

  Losing two patients the same morning was a shock to the entire staff.

  At 0917 the monitor flashed the red light for Mrs. Maldonado, 87, postimplant and thus far doing fine. She had developed acute endocarditis coming back from a tour of the Jupiter system; at her age there wasn’t enough vitality to sustain her through the slow business of growing a new heart with a genetic prod, but they’d given her a synthetic implant, and for two weeks it had worked quite well. Suddenly, though, the hospital’s control center was getting a load of grim telemetry from Mrs. Maldonado’s bed: valve action zero, blood pressure zero, respiration zero, pulse zero, everything zero, zero, zero. The EEG tape showed a violent lurch—as though she had received some abrupt and intense shock—followed by a minute or two of irregular action, followed by termination of brain activity. Long before any hospital personnel had reached her bedside, automatic revival equipment, both chemical and electrical, had gone to work on the patient, but she was beyond reach: a massive cerebral hemorrhage, coming totally without warning, had done irreversible damage.

  At 0928 came the second loss: Mr. Guinness, 51, three days past surgery for a coronary embolism. The same series of events. A severe jolt to the nervous system, an immediate and fatal physiological response. Resuscitation procedures negative. No one on the staff had any plausible explanation for Mr. Guinness’ death. Like Mrs. Maldonado, he had been sleeping peacefully, all vital signs good, until the moment of the fatal seizure.

  “As though someone had come up and yelled boo in their ears,” one doctor muttered, puzzling over the charts. He pointed to the wild EEG track. “Or as if they’d had unbearably vivid nightmares and couldn’t take the sensory overload. But no one was making noise in the ward. And nightmares aren’t contagious.”

  Dr. Peter Mookherji, resident in neuropathology, was beginning his morning rounds on the hospital’s sixth level when the soft voice of his annunciator, taped behind his left ear, asked him to report to the quarantine building immediately. Dr. Mookherji scowled. “Can’t it wait? This is my busiest time of day, and—”

  “You are asked to come at once.”

  “Look, I’ve got a girl in a coma here, due for her teletherapy session in fifteen minutes, and she’s counting on seeing me. I’m her only link to the world. If I’m not there when—”

  “You are asked to come at once, Dr. Mookherji.”

  “Why do the quarantine people need a neuropathologist in such a hurry? Let me take care of the girl, at least, and in forty-five minutes they can have me.”

  “Dr. Mookherji—”

  It didn’t pay to argue with a machine. Mookherji forced his temper down. Short tempers ran in his family, along with a fondness for torrid curries and a talent for telepathy. Glowering, he grabbed a data terminal, identified himself, and told the hospital’s control center to reprogram his entire morning schedule. “Build in a half-hour postponement somehow,” he snapped. “I can’t help it—see for yourself. I’ve been requisitioned by the quarantine staff.”

  The computer was thoughtful enough to have a rollerbuggy waiting for him when he emerged from the hospital. It whisked him ac
ross the starport to the quarantine building in three minutes, but he was still angry when he got there. The scanner at the door ticked off his badge and one of the control center’s innumerable voice outputs told him solemnly, “You are expected in Room 403, Dr. Mookherji.”

  Room 403 turned out to be a two-sector interrogation office. The rear sector of the room was part of the building’s central quarantine core, and the front sector belonged to the public-access part of the building, with a thick glass wall in between. Six haggard-looking spacemen were slouched on sofas behind the wall, and three members of the starport’s quarantine staff paced about in the front. Mookherji’s irritation ebbed when he saw that one of the quarantine men was an old medical-school friend, Lee Nakadai. The slender Japanese was a year older than Mookherji—29 to 28; they met for lunch occasionally at the starport commissary, and they had double-dated a pair of Filipino twins earlier in the year, but the pressure of work had kept them apart for months. Nakadai got down to business quickly now: “Pete, have you ever heard of an epidemic of nightmares?”

  “Eh?”

  Indicating the men behind the quarantine wall, Nakadai said, “These fellows came in a couple of hours ago from Norton’s Star. Brought back a cargo of greenfire bark. Physically they check out to five decimal places, and I’d release them except for one funny thing. They’re all in a bad state of nervous exhaustion, which they say is the result of having had practically no sleep during their whole month-long return trip. And the reason for that is that they were having nightmares—every one of them—real mind-wrecking dreams, whenever they tried to sleep. It sounded so peculiar that I thought we’d better run a neuropath checkup, in case they’ve picked up some kind of cerebral infection.”

  Mookherji frowned. “For this you get me out of my ward on emergency requisition, Lee?”

  “Talk to them,” Nakadai said. “Maybe it’ll scare you a little.”

  Mookherji glanced at the spacemen. “All right,” he said. “What about these nightmares?”

  A tall, bony-looking officer who introduced himself as Lieutenant Falkirk said, “I was the first victim—right after float-off. I almost flipped. It was like, well, something touching my mind, filling it with weird thoughts. And everything absolutely real, while it was going on—I thought I was choking; I thought my body was changing into something alien; I felt my blood running out my pores—” Falkirk shrugged. “Like any sort of bad dream, I guess, only ten times as vivid. Fifty times. A few hours later Lieutenant Commander Rodriguez had the same kind of dream. Different images, same effect. And then, one by one, as the others took their sleep shifts, they started to wake up screaming. Two of us ended up spending three weeks on happy pills. We’re pretty stable men, Doctor—we’re trained to take almost anything. But I think a civilian would have cracked up for good with dreams like those. Not so much the images as the intensity, the realness of them.”

  “And these dreams recurred throughout the voyage?” Mookherji asked.

  “Every shift. It got so we were afraid to doze off, because we knew the devils would start crawling through our heads when we did. Or we’d put ourselves real down on sleeper tabs. And even so we’d have the dreams, with our minds doped to a level where you wouldn’t imagine dreams would happen. A plague of nightmares, Doctor. An epidemic.”

  “When was the last episode?”

  “The final sleep shift before float-down.”

  “You haven’t gone to sleep, any of you, since leaving ship?”

  “No,” Falkirk said.

  One of the other spacemen said, “Maybe he didn’t make it clear to you, doctor. These were killer dreams. They were mind crackers. We were lucky to get home sane. If we did.”

  Mookherji drummed his fingertips together, rummaging through his experience for some parallel case. He couldn’t find any. He knew of mass hallucinations, plenty of them, episodes in which whole mobs had persuaded themselves they had seen gods, demons, miracles, the dead walking, fiery symbols in the sky. But a series of hallucinations coming in sequence, shift after shift, to an entire crew of tough, pragmatic spacemen? It didn’t make sense.

  Nakadai said, “Pete, the men had a guess about what might have done it to them. Just a wild idea, but maybe—”

  “What is it?”

  Falkirk laughed uneasily. “Actually, it’s pretty fantastic.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, that something from the planet came aboard the ship with us. Something, well, telepathic. Which fiddled around with our minds, whenever we went to sleep. What we felt as nightmares was maybe this thing inside our heads.”

  “Possibly it rode all the way back to Earth with us,” another spaceman said. “It could still be aboard the ship. Or loose in the city by now.”

  “The Invisible Nightmare Menace?” Mookherji said, with a faint smile. “I doubt that I can buy that.”

  “There are telepathic creatures,” Falkirk pointed out.

  “I know,” Mookherji said sharply. “I happen to be one myself.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor, if—”

  “But that doesn’t lead me to look for telepaths under every bush. I’m not ruling out your alien menace, mind you. But I think it’s a lot more likely that you picked up some kind of inflammation of the brain out there. A virus disease, a type of encephalitis that shows itself in the form of chronic hallucinations.” The spacemen looked troubled. Obviously, they would rather be victims of an unknown monster preying on them from outside than of an unknown virus lodged in their brains. Mookherji went on, “I’m not saying that’s what it is, either. I’m just tossing around hypotheses. We’ll know more after we’ve run some tests.” Checking his watch, he said to Nakadai, “Lee, there’s not much more I can find out right now, and I’ve got to get back to my patients. I want these fellows plugged in for the full series of neuropsychological checkouts. Have the outputs relayed to my office as they come in. Run the tests in staggered series and start letting the men go to sleep, two at a time, after each series—I’ll send over a technician to help you rig the telemetry. I want to be notified immediately if there’s any nightmare experience.”

  “Right.”

  “And get them to sign telepathy releases. I’ll give them a preliminary mind-probe this evening after I’ve had a chance to study the clinical findings. Maintain absolute quarantine, of course. This thing might just be infectious. Play it very safe.”

  Nakadai nodded. Mookherji flashed a professional smile at the six somber spacemen and went out, brooding. A nightmare virus? Or a mind-meddling alien organism that no one can see? He wasn’t sure which notion he liked less. Probably, though, there was some prosaic and unstartling explanation for that month of bad dreams—contaminated food supplies, or something funny in the atmosphere recycler. A simple, mundane explanation.

  Probably.

  The first time it happened, the Vsiir was not sure what had actually taken place. It had touched a human mind; there had been an immediate vehement reaction; the Vsiir had pulled back, alarmed by the surging fury of the response, and then, a moment later, had been unable to locate the mind at all. Possibly it was some defense mechanism, the Vsiir thought, by which the humans guarded their minds against intruders. But that seemed unlikely, since the humans’ minds were quite effectively guarded most of the time anyway. Aboard the ship, whenever the Vsiir had managed to slip past the walls that shielded the minds of the crew men, it had always encountered a great deal of turbulence—plainly these humans did not enjoy mental contact with a Vsiir—but never this complete shutdown, this total cutoff of signal. Puzzled, the Vsiir tried again, reaching toward an open mind situated not far from where the one that had vanished had been.—Kindly attention, a moment of consideration for confused other-worldly individual, victim of unhappy circumstances, who—

  Again the violent response: a sudden tremendous flare of mental energy, a churning blaze of fear and pain and shock. And again, moments later, complete silence, as though the human had retreated behind an impermea
ble barrier.—Where are you? Where did you go? The Vsiir, troubled, took the risk of creating an optical receptor that worked in the visible spectrum—and that therefore would itself be visible to humans—and surveyed the scene. It saw a human on a bed, completely surrounded by intricate machinery. Colored lights were flashing. Other humans, looking agitated, were rushing toward the bed. The human on the bed lay quite still, not even moving when a metal arm descended and jabbed a long bright needle into his chest.

  Suddenly, the Vsiir understood.

  The two humans must have experienced termination of existence!

  Hastily the Vsiir dissolved its visible-spectrum receptor and retreated to a sheltered corner to consider what had happened. Datum: Two humans had died. Datum: Each had undergone termination immediately after receiving a mental transmission from the Vsiir. Problem: Had the mental transmission brought about the terminations?

  The possibility that the Vsiir might have destroyed two lives was shocking and appalling, and such a chill went through its body that it shrank into a tight, hard ball, with all thought processes snarled. It needed several minutes to return to a fully-functional state. If its attempts at communicating with these humans produced such terrible effects, the Vsiir realized, then its prospects of finding help on this planet were slim. How could it dare risk trying to contact other humans, if—

  A comforting thought surfaced. The Vsiir realized that it was jumping to a hasty conclusion on the basis of sketchy evidence, while overlooking some powerful arguments against that conclusion. All during the voyage to this world the Vsiir had been making contact with humans, the six crew men, and none of them had terminated. That was ample evidence that humans could withstand contact with a Vsiir mind. Therefore, contact alone could not have caused these two deaths.