He handed her a slip of paper. Elszabet looked it over and said to the data wall, “Input Dreamlist.” The screen gave her input format and she read the new dream in:
7) Double Star Three: One report. One sun much like ours in size and color, but second sun emitting orange/red light also present, of larger size than yellow one but more faint. Intricate system of moons. No life-forms reported.
“That’s handy, having that list,” Robinson said.
“It is, yes,” Elszabet said. She said to the data wall, “Output Dreamlist, Distribution Route One.”
“What are you doing, printing it out for general reference use at the Center?”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll do that next.”
“What’s Distribution Route One, then?”
“I just sent it around to the other Northern California mindpick centers,” Elszabet said.
Dan Robinson’s eyes went wide again. “You did?”
“San Francisco, Monterey, Eureka. I called around this morning to tell them what’s going on here, and Paolucci in San Francisco said yes, they were having something along the same lines, and he had heard the same thing from Monterey. So we’re setting up a data link. Dream descriptions, tallies of incidence. We need to know what in God’s name is happening. An epidemic of identical dreams? That’s brand-new in the whole literature of mental disturbance. If mental disturbance is actually what we’re dealing with.”
“I wonder,” Robinson said. “There’s going to be some bitching, you going out to the other centers with this before bringing it up at a staff meeting here.”
“You think so?” The pounding in her skull was getting to the impossible level now. Something in there trying to get out? That was how it seemed. “Excuse me,” Elszabet said, and gave herself a buzz of alphas. She felt her cheeks reddening, doing that sort of modification in front of him. The pain eased just a little. Trying not to sound as irritated as she really was, she said to Robinson, “I didn’t think it was classified stuff. I simply wanted to know if the other centers were experiencing this phenomenon, so I started calling, and they said yes, we are, send us your data and we’ll send back ours, and—” Elszabet shut her eyes a moment and clenched her teeth hard and drew a deep breath. “Listen, can we talk about these things some other time? I need to get some fresh air. I’m going to run down to the beach, I think. This lousy headache.”
“Good idea,” Robinson said gently. “I could use some exercise too. You mind if I run with you?”
Yes, I do mind, she thought. Very much. The beach was her special place, her second office, really. She tried to escape to it a couple of times a week, whenever she had some serious thinking to do or just wanted to get away from the pressures of being in charge of the Center. It astonished her that the usually sensitive Robinson couldn’t understand that she didn’t want company right now, not even his. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that. Such a sweet man, such a good man. Elszabet didn’t want to seem to be snippy with him again. This is dumb, she told herself. All you have to say is that you need to be alone: he won’t take offense. But she couldn’t do it. She managed a smile. “Sure, why not?” she said, hating herself for caving in like this. She motioned to him. “Come on. Let’s go.”
The beach wasn’t much: a little rocky cove walled in by flat-topped cliffs covered with iceplant. It was just under four kilometers from the main part of the Center, a nice easy twenty-minute lope down a narrow unpaved road bordered on both sides by sprawling red-barked madrone trees and a low scrub of manzanita. They ran side by side, moving smoothly and well. The throbbing in her head began to diminish as the rhythm of the jog took over. She wasn’t having any trouble keeping up with him, though his legs were even longer than hers. She knew how to run. In college at Berkeley, she had been an athlete, a runner, track team, all-state champion in almost every medium-distance event, the 800 meters, 1500 meters, 1600-meter relay, and more. Those long legs, the endurance, the determination. “You ought to consider a career as a runner,” someone had told her. She had been nineteen, then. Fifteen years ago. But what did that mean, a career as a runner? It was a waste of a life, she thought, giving yourself up to something as hermetically sealed, as private, as being a runner. It was a little like saying, You ought to consider a career as a waterfall, You ought to consider a career as a fire hydrant. It was a useless thing to do with yourself, okay for a bit of private discipline or for a collegiate extracurric, but you didn’t make a career out of it. For a career, she thought, you had to make some real use of your life, which meant entering into the human race, not the 1500-meter one. You had to justify your presence on the planet by giving something to the others who were here in space and time sharing it with you, and being the fastest girl in the class wasn’t close to being enough. Working at a center for the repair of the poor bewildered burned-out Gelbard’s syndrome people, eventually coming to be in charge of it: that was more like it, Elszabet thought. She ran on and on, saying nothing, scarcely even aware of the silent, graceful, dark-skinned man running beside her.
There was a steep, tricky trail from the top of the cliff down to the beach. The beach itself had just about enough sand to spread three blankets on, side by side. In winter at high tide there was hardly any beach at all, and if you went there you had to huddle in an ocean-carved cave with the chilly waves practically lapping at your toes. But this was a warm summer afternoon, no fog, the tide low. She tossed the beach blanket that she was carrying over the edge or the cliff and went scrambling down after it. Robinson came right behind her, taking the trail in big confident bounds.
When they reached the beach she said, “I’m going to take my clothes off. I usually do here.” She looked him in the eye, a look that said, Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be provocative. It also said, You’re here but I don’t really want you to be, and I’m going to behave as if I were here by myself.
He seemed to understand. “Sure,” he said. “That’s fine with me.” He tossed his shirt aside; kept his jeans on, squatted down by the tide-pools at the upper end of the beach. “Couple of starfish here,” he said.
Elszabet nodded vaguely. She undid her halter and dropped her shorts and walked naked to the edge of the water, not looking toward him. Cold wavelets swirled up around her toes.
“Are you going in?” Robinson asked.
She laughed. “You think I’m nuts?”
She never went swimming here. No one ever did, winter or summer. The water was cold as death all year round, as it was along the whole Pacific Coast north of Santa Cruz, and a dark reef just off shore made the surf turbulent and impassable. That was all right with Elszabet. If she felt like swimming, there was a pool at the Center. The beach meant other things to her.
After a while she glanced back at Robinson and saw him looking at her. He smiled and did not look hurriedly away, as if to look hurriedly away would be an admission of guilt. Instead he kept his gaze on her another moment or two, and then he returned his attention in a deliberate way to his starfish. Maybe this is not such a good idea, Elszabet thought. Nudity was no big deal at the Center, but there were just the two of them here. And she knew Robinson was interested in her, though he had never been overt about it. She was an attractive woman, after all, and he was a healthy outgoing man, and there were professional and intellectual ties. They were a plausible couple; everyone at the Center thought that. She sometimes thought that herself. But she wanted no romantic entanglements, not with Dan Robinson, not with anyone. This was not the time for that sort of thing for her. She wondered if she had actually meant to be provocative. Or teasingly cruel. She hoped not.