“Like an allergic reaction. Adrenaline surge.”
“Absolutely. She weaved around a little and told me she was feeling upset. About what, I said, and she said it was on account of her dreams, her visions, that lately they were coming much more closely together and they were more vivid.”
“Proximity effect. Tom.”
“Said she was having trouble thinking straight. Sometimes hard for her to tell which was the real world and which was the dream.”
“You made a similar remark last night.”
“Yes,” Elszabet said. “I remember. Hearing it from April was—well, disturbing. Her speech became slurred and she swayed back and forth. Then she started to pass out. Tom and I caught her just in time and managed to lower her to the floor. The rest you know.”
“Okay,” Robinson said. “Seems pretty conclusive that Tom’s presence here is hyping up the hallucination level.”
“Yet the dreams have been experienced across enormous distances. Proximity seems to intensify, but it’s not essential.”
“I suppose.”
“We’ve got the distribution charts. Space dreams reported simultaneously from all over the place. If he’s the source then he must be a tremendously powerful transmitter.”
“Transmitter of dreams,” Robinson said softly, shaking his head. “Doesn’t all this sound completely buggy to you, Elszabet?”
“Let’s just work with it,” she said. “A hypothesis. He boils with images, fantasies, hallucinations. He boils over. Broadcasts them from the Rockies to the Pacific, San Diego to Vancouver, as far as we know. Susceptibility varies from practically none at all to extreme. Perhaps some correlation with emotional disturbance level… victims of Gelbard’s syndrome appear to pick up the stuff much more readily than others. But that’s not a complete correlation, because people like Naresh Patel and Dante Corelli are definitely not emotionally disturbed, and they’ve been getting the space dreams almost as long as some of the patients, whereas someone like Ed Ferguson, who is a patient, has proved completely resistant to—”
“Do you really think Ferguson has Gelbard’s, Elszabet?”
“He’s got something, I’d say.”
“He’s got a bad case of scruple deficiency, that’s all. The more I observe him, the more convinced I become that the guy’s simply a con artist who wangled treatment here because it sounded better to him than being tossed in jail for Rehab Two. Now, if you want to tell me that anybody as casual about matters of morality as Ferguson mustipso facto be emotionally disturbed, you might have a case, but even so, I think—” Robinson paused. “Which reminds me, have you run a check on whether Ferguson’s showing any proximity effects? He had breakfast with Tom last week, and he’s been seen talking with him a couple of times since.”
Elszabet said, “I had Naresh run through Ferguson’s pick reports for space-dream symptomata. Evidently there have been no dreams per se, but the night before last Ferguson did turn up with a trace of something. Just the merest shadowy outline of a bit of Green World imagery. I tried to call him in for a conference this afternoon but he wasn’t around. Went off for a walk in the woods, they told me.”
“Another escape attempt, you think?”
“No, although I’m having him monitored closely anyway. But he’s out there with Tom. Been out there quite a while.”
Robinson’s eyes narrowed. “A very odd couple, those two. The saint and the sinner.”
“You think Tom’s a saint?”
“Just a quick glib phrase.”
“Because I do. It’s an idea that’s been tickling at me the last few days. He’s so strange, so innocent—like a holy fool, like the chosen of God, you know? Like an Old Testament prophet. Saint’s not a bad label for him either. He wanders in the wilderness—what’s the line, ‘despised and rejected of men—’ ”
“’A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.’”
“That’s it,” she said. “And all the time he’s carrying inside him this tremendous gift, this power, this blessing—he’s like an ambassador from all the worlds of the universe—”
“Hey,” Robinson said. “Hold on a little, there. A saint, you say. A messiah, actually, is what you seem to mean. But now you’re talking as though the stuff he’s giving out, if indeed he’s the one who’s giving it out, is an authentic vision of actual and literal other worlds.”
“Maybe it is, Dan. I don’t know.”
“Are you serious?”
She tapped the little mnemone capsule on her desk. “I’ve been interviewing him. He’s been filling me in on the background of the places in the dreams—the names of the worlds, the races that inhabit them, the empires, the dynasties, fragments of the history, a whole vast intricate interwoven structure of galactic civilization, tremendously dense in detail, internally consistent so far as I’ve been able to follow what he’s saying, which I confess is not really very far. But what emerges nevertheless is very damned convincing, Dan. He’s definitely not improvising. He’s lived with that stuff a long time.”
“So he has a rich fantasy life. He’s spent twenty-five years dreaming up those details. Why shouldn’t it be intricate? Why shouldn’t it be convincing? But does that mean those empires and dynasties actually exist?”
“The things he says coincide in every detail with things that I’ve experienced myself while undergoing space dreams.”
“No. Not relevant, Elszabet. If he’s transmitting images and concepts and you and a lot of other people are receiving them, that still doesn’t mean that what he’s transmitting is anything but hallucinatory in origin.”
“Granted,” Elszabet said. “Okay, we have a phenomenon here. But of what kind? If Tom is indeed the source, then it would appear that he possesses some sort of extrasensory power that allows him to transmit images to other people by mind-to-mind contact.”
“Sounds a little farfetched. But not inconceivable.”
“I can make out a valid case for the ESP angle. He told me this morning that he was born right after the outbreak of the Dust War, and that his mother was in Eastern Nevada when she was carrying him. Right on the edge of the radiation zone.”
“Telepathic mutation, is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s a reasonable hypothesis, isn’t it?”
“Bill Waldstein should only hear all this stuff. He thinks I’m prone to cooking up wild theories,” Dan said.
“This one doesn’t seem so wild to me. If there’s an explanation for Tom’s abilities, a light touch of radiation at the time of conception isn’t the most fantastic possible idea.”
“All right. A telepathic mutant, then.”
“A phenomenon, anyway. Okay. Now, as to the content of the material that he’s producing, perhaps he’s in the grip of some powerful fantasy of his own invention that by virtue of his extrasensory abilities he’s able to scatter around to any susceptible mind within reach. Or, on the other hand, perhaps he’s uniquely sensitive to messages being beamed our way telepathically by actual civilizations in the stars.”
“You want to believe that very much, don’t you, Elszabet?”
“Believe what?”
“That what Tom is transmitting is real.”
“Maybe I do. Does that worry you, Dan?”
He studied her for a long moment. “A little,” he said at last.
“You think I’m going around the bend?”
“I didn’t say that. I do think you’ve got a powerful need to find out that the Green World and the Nine Suns planet and the rest are actual places.”
“And therefore that I’m being drawn into Tom’s psychosis?”