She decided not to worry about it. Cautiously she waded out until the water was ankle-deep on her. The cold drew a hiss from her, but it seemed to purge the throbbing in her temples.
Robinson said, still poking in the tide-pools, “I’ve been thinking about the dreams. One possible explanation. Which may sound weird to you but it seems less weird to me than trying to argue that a lot of people are having identical bizarre dreams through sheer coincidence.”
Elszabet didn’t feel much like talking about the problem of the dreams just now, or about anything else. But all the same she said politely enough, “What’s your theory?”
“That we’re getting some kind of broadcasts from an approaching alien space vessel.”
“What?”
“Does that sound crazy to you?”
“A little farfetched, let’s say.”
“I’d say so too. But I’ve got a rationale to fit behind it. Do you know what Project Starprobe was?”
She was beginning to feel awkward, standing there naked, half turned toward him with her feet in the cold water. She walked a little way up the beach, not as far as her blanket, and sat down in the sand with her back against an upjutting rock and her knees drawn up to her chest. The warm sun felt good against her skin. She didn’t put her clothes back on but she felt a bit less exposed, sitting down. It seemed to her that the headache might be returning. Just the merest tickle of it, across her brow. “Project Starprobe?” she said. “Wait a second. That was some kind of unmanned space expedition, wasn’t it?”
“To Proxima Centauri, yes. The star system closest to Earth. It was sent off a little way before the Dust War—oh, around 2050, 2060. I could look it up. The idea being to get to the vicinity of Proxima Centauri in twenty, thirty, forty years, go into surveillance orbit, search for planets, send back pictures—”
The headache again, yes. Definitely.
“I don’t see what that has to do with—”
“Try this,” Robinson said. “I haven’t checked it out, but I figure Starprobe must have reached Proxima ten or fifteen years ago. About four light-years away, and I think the ship was supposed to reach a pretty hefty acceleration after a while, peak velocity close to a quarter the speed of light or so, and—anyway… let’s say the probe got there. And Proxima Centauri has intelligent life-forms living on one of its planets. They come out in their little spaceships and they inspect the probe, they determine that it comes from Earth and is full of spy equipment, and they get kind of nervous. So they dismantle the probe, which maybe is why we’ve never received any messages back from it, and then they send out an expedition of their own to see what this place Earth is like, whether it’s dangerous to them and so forth.”
“And this spy mission announces its arrival by bombarding the Earth with random hallucinations of other worlds?” Elszabet asked. Dan was a sweet man, but she wished he would leave her alone for a little while. “It doesn’t sound very plausible to me.” She closed her eyes and tipped her face toward the sun and prayed that he’d let the discussion drop.
But he didn’t seem to pick up the hint. He said, “Well, maybe they’re not coming to spy, or to invade. Just as ambassadors, let’s say.”
Please, she thought. Make him stop. Make him stop.
“And somehow they give off telepathic emanations—they’re alien, remember, we can’t possibly figure how their thought processes would work—telepathic emanations that stir up pictures of distant solar systems in the minds of those most susceptible to receiving them.” There was no stopping him, was there? She opened her eyes and stared at him, still too gracious to tell him to go away. The drumming in her head was building up. Before it had felt like something trying to get out. Now it felt like something trying to get in. “Or maybe sending the images is their way of softening us up for conquest by spreading confusion, fear, panic,” he went on. “Yes? No. You still don’t like it, do you? Well, that’s okay. I’m just speculating a little, is all. To me it sounds goofy too, but not beyond all possibility. Go ahead, tell me what you think.”
Robinson grinned at her like an abashed sixteen-year-old. Plainly he wanted some sort of reassurance from her, wanted to be told that his notion wasn’t totally wild. But she could not give him that reassurance. Suddenly she did not care at all about his idea, about him, about anything except the spike of incredible pain that had erupted between her eyes.
“Elszabet?”
She lurched to her feet, rocked, nearly toppled forward. Everything looked green and fuzzy. She felt as though a thick blindfold of green wool had been tied around her forehead. And the wool was trying to poke its way into her mind—woolly green tendrils like a dense fog, invading her consciousness—
“Dan? I don’t know what’s happening, Dan!”
But she did. It’s the Green World, she said to herself. Trying to break through into my mind. A waking dream, a crazy hallucination. Could that be it? The Green World?
I’m going crazy, she thought.
Gasping, sobbing, she stumbled down the little narrow beach and out into the water. It rose about her like ice, like flame, to her thighs, to her breasts. She tried to push at the thing that was creeping into her mind. She scrabbled at her scalp with her fingertips as if she could scrape it away. Then she blundered into a submerged rock, slipped, fell to her knees. A wave hit her in the face. She was freezing. She was drowning. She was going crazy.
And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun.
She was standing in shin-deep water, shivering. Dan Robinson was beside her. He had his arm around her shoulders and he was leading her to shore, guiding her up the strip of sand, wrapping her blanket around her. She was goosebumps all over, and the fierce cold had made her nipples rise and grow so hard that her cheeks flamed when she saw them. She turned away from him. “Hand me my clothes,” she said, groping for her halter.
“What was it? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “Something hit me all of a sudden. Some kind of freakout. I don’t know. Something weird, just for a second or two, and I guess I blanked out.” She didn’t want to tell him about the woolly green fog. Already the concept that it had been an image out of the Green World trying to break through into her consciousness seemed absurd to her, a silly horror-fantasy. And even if it had happened, she didn’t dare confess it to Dan Robinson. He would be sympathetic, sure. He’d even be envious. She thought of how he had said sorrowfully only half an hour ago that he had never been lucky enough to experience one of the space dreams. But her own outlook on all this was altogether different. For the first time, the dreams frightened her. Let Father Christie have them; let April Cranshaw have them; let Nick Double Rainbow have them. They were emotionally disturbed people: hallucinations were routine stuff to them. Let Dan have them too, if he wants. But not me. Please, God, not me.
She was dressed, now. But she was still chilled bone-deep by that plunge into the Pacific. Robinson stood five or six meters away, staring at her, working hard at seeming not to be too worried about her. She forced a smile. “Maybe I just need a vacation,” she said. “I’m sorry I upset you.”
“Are you okay now?”
“I’m fine. It was just a quick thing. I don’t know. Wow, that water is cold!”
“Shall we go back to the Center?”
“Yes. Yes, please.”
He offered her a hand to help her climb up the cliff. Elszabet shook him off angrily and went up the trail like a mountain goat. At the top she paused only a moment to adjust the beach blanket around her waist, then took off without waiting for him, running at sprint speed down the unpaved road to the Center. “Hey, I’m coming!” he called, but she refused to let up and pushed herself without mercy down the road, going all out. She would not let him catch her. When she arrived at the Center she was dizzy and fighting for breath but she got there a hundred meters ahead of him. People stared at her in amazement as she thundered past.