Tom O’Bedlam
by Robert Silverberg
To consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field sown with millet only one grain will grow.
This one’s for Don
One
1
This time something had told Tom to try going westward. West was a good direction, he figured. You head for the sunset, maybe you can walk right off the edge into the stars.
Late on a July afternoon he came struggling up the slope of a steep dry wash and paused in a parched field to catch his breath and look around. This was about a hundred, hundred-fifty miles east of Sacramento, on the thirsty side of the mountains, in the third year of the new century. They said this was the century in which all the miseries were supposed finally to end. Maybe they really would, Tom thought. But you couldn’t count on it.
Just up ahead he saw seven or eight men in ragged clothes, gathered around an old ground-effect van with jagged red-and-yellow lightning bolts painted on its rusting flanks. It was hard to tell whether they were repairing the van or stealing it, or both. Two of them were underneath, with their heads and shoulders poking into the propeller gearbox, and one was fiddling with the air intake filter. The rest were leaning against the van’s rear gate in a cozy proprietary way. All of them were armed. No one paid any attention to Tom at all.
“Poor Tom,” he said tentatively, testing the situation. “Hungry Tom.” There didn’t seem to be any danger, though out here in the wild country you could never be sure. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, hoping one of them would notice him. He was a tall, lean, sinewy man with dark, tangled hair, somewhere around thirty-three, thirty-five years old: he gave various answers when he was asked, which wasn’t often. “Anything for Tom?” he ventured. “Tom’s hungry.”
Still no one as much as glanced toward him. He might as well have been invisible. He shrugged and took his finger-piano from his pack, and began to strum the little metal keys. Quietly he sang:
They went on ignoring him. That was all right with Tom. It was a lot better than being beaten up. They could see he was harmless, and most likely they’d help him out, sooner or later, if only to get rid of him. People generally did, even the really wild ones, the killer bandidos: not even they would want to hurt a poor crazy simpleton. Sooner or later, he figured, they’d let him have a bit of bread and a gulp or two of beer, and he’d thank them and move onward, westward, toward San Francisco or Mendocino or one of those places. But five minutes more went by, and they continued not to acknowledge his presence. It was almost like a game they were playing with him.
Just then a hot, biting wind rose up suddenly out of the east. They paid attention to that. “Here comes the bad news breeze,” muttered a short thick-featured red-haired man, and they all nodded and swore. “God damn, just what we need, a wind full of hard garbage,” the red-haired man said. Scowling, glaring, he hunched himself down into his shoulders as if that would protect him from whatever radioactivity the wind might be carrying.
“Turn on the props, Charley,” said one with blue eyes and rough, pitted skin. “Let’s blow the stuff back into Nevada where it came from, hey?”
“Yeah. Sure,” one of the others said, a little sour-faced Latino. “That’s what we oughta do. Sure. Christ, blow it right back there.”
Tom shivered. The wind was a mean one. The east wind always was. But it felt clean to him. He could usually tell when radiation was sailing on the wind that blew out of the dusted places. It set up a tingling sensation inside his skull, from an area just above his left ear to the edge of his eyebrow ridge. He didn’t feel that now.
He felt something else, though, something that was getting to be very familiar. It was a sound deep in his brain, the roaring rush of sound that told him that one of his visions was starting to stir in him. And then cascades of green light began to sweep through his mind.
He wasn’t surprised that it was happening here, now, in this place, at this hour, among these men. An east wind could do it to him, sometimes. Or a particular kind of light late in the day, or the coming of cold, clear air after a rainstorm. Or when he was with strangers who didn’t seem to like him. It didn’t take much. It didn’t take anything at all, a lot of the time. His mind was always on the edge of some sort of vision. They were boiling inside him, ready to seize control when the moment came. Strange images and textures forever churned in his head. He never fought them any longer. At first he had, because he thought they meant he was going crazy. But by now he didn’t care whether he was crazy or not, and he knew that fighting the visions would give him a headache at best, or if he struggled really hard he might get knocked to his knees, but in any case there was nothing he could do to keep the visions from coming on. It was impossible to hold them back, only to bang and jangle them around a little, and when he tried that he was the one who got most of the banging and jangling. Besides, the visions were the best thing that had ever happened to him. By now he loved his visions.
One was happening now, all right. Yeah. Yeah. Coming on now, for sure. The green world again. Tom smiled. He relaxed and yielded himself to it.
Hello, green world! Coming for to carry me home?
Golden-green sunlight glimmered on smooth alien hills. He heard the surging and crashing of a distant turquoise sea. The heavy air was thick as velvet, sweet as wine. Shining elegant crystalline forms, still indistinct but rapidly coming into sharp focus, were beginning to glide across the screen of Tom’s souclass="underline" tall fragile figures that seemed to be fashioned of iridescent glass of many colors. They moved with astonishing grace. Their bodies were long and slender, with mirror-bright limbs sharp as spears. Their faceted eyes, glittering with wisdom, were set in rows of three on each of the four sides of their tapering diamond-shaped heads. It wasn’t the first time Tom had seen them. He knew who they were: the aristocrats, the princes and dukes and countesses and such, of that lovely green place.
Through the vision he could still dimly make out the seven or eight scruffy men clustered around the ground-effect van. He had to tell them what he was seeing. He always did, whenever he was with other people when a vision struck. “It’s the green world,” he said. “You see the light? Can you? Can you? It’s like a flood of emeralds pouring down from the sky.” He stood with his legs braced far apart, his head thrown back, his shoulders curving around as if they were trying to meet behind him. Words spilled from his lips. “Look, there are seven crystallines walking toward the Summer Palace. Three females, two males, two of the other kind. Jesus, how beautiful! Like diamonds all up and down their skins. And their eyes, their eyes! Oh, God, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”