Here, put your hands in his, she had said.Just trust me and do it. Dan. Go on. Put your hands in his.
He had no idea where he was. By now he might be at the far side of the forest, or perhaps he had just been going around in circles, crossing and recrossing his own trail. There were no landmarks here. One huge redwood looked just like the next. The sky, what little he could see of it through the tops of the giant trees, was dark now. But whether that was because evening was coming on, or simply an effect of the deepening storm, he couldn’t say.
He knew he wouldn’t be able to run much longer. But he was afraid to stop. If he stopped, he might have to think. And there was too much that he didn’t want to think about right now.
Tom will send us to the Green World, she had said. You and me. We’ll go there together. She had seemed so calm, so sure of herself. That was the worst of it, her calmness. He could still hear her saying,Now I just want to go away and make a second start somewhere else. Doesn’t that make sense? Tom will send us to the Green World. She had been beyond his reach at that moment. He had come close to snapping, seeing her like that. All he could do was turn and run from her; and he had not yet stopped running.
Suddenly there was a sound in his mind like the distant roaring of the sea. Flickering shafts of green light danced in the depths of him. So there was no escape from the visions, even out here. He was still infected with the general madness.
No, he thought. Get out of my head!
Tom will send us to the Green world, she had said. You and me.
Robinson wondered if he might have been able to keep her from doing it, if he had stayed beside her. Tried to reason with her. Dragged her away from Tom by force, if necessary. No, damn it. He couldn’t have done any of that. She had made up her mind. She had yielded completely. Maybe, he thought, it was seeing the mob smash the Center to bits that had sent her over the brink. He had wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. To tell her that it was suicidal craziness, giving herself over to whatever power Tom had—to put her hands in his, and fall down dead with that blissful damn smile on her face.
The sea-sound grew more intense: a surging, a crashing. The air was becoming heavy about him, a thick green blanket. He heard far-off music, faint, tinkling, silvery needles of sound.
He felt the tip of his shoe snag against the exposed snaky root of a colossal redwood, and he lurched and went spinning and hurtling toward the ground. Struggling for balance, arms flailing as he skidded and stumbled, the best he could do was pull his head in and try to roll with the fall as his feet went out from under him and he landed hard on his left shoulder and hip.
For a moment he lay there, stunned, face down, arms spread wide, his cheek in a cold puddle. He made no attempt to get up. For the first time now he felt the exhaustion of his long run through the rain: chills, muscular spasms, waves of nausea. The green light grew brighter in his mind. Nothing he could do could hold back that onrushing vision. The green sky, the fleecy fog, that intricate music, those shining pavilions—
“Get out of my head… ” It was a harsh, despairing sound as he pounded his fist against the rain-soaked ground.
He saw the crystalline figures moving delicately across that flawless green landscape. The long slim bodies, the glittering faceted eyes, the slender limbs bright as mirrors. Those princes and dukes, those lords and ladies. Dan remembered how eager he had been to have his first space dream, how he had longed to have these visions flood his mind, how exciting it was when at last one had come to him. Running late at night across to Elszabet’s cabin like a schoolboy to tell her all about it. Now he wanted nothing more than to be rid of it. Please, he thought. Go away. Please. Go away…
They were talking to him. Telling him their names… we are the Misilyne Triad, they were saying, and we are the Suminoors, and we are the Gaarinar, and we—
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to know anything about you. Whatever you are. You’re phantoms, hallucinations.”
We love you, they said. That eerie whispering sound echoing through his mind.
He didn’t want their love. He was choking with fury, and despair.
Someone you know is among us, they said.
“I don’t care,” he told them sullenly, almost petulantly.
She wants to talk to you, they said.
He lay there quietly, cold, wet, numb, feeling lost. But then he heard a different sort of music, richer and deeper and warmer, and a new voice, delicate and tinkling and silvery like theirs, yet somehow less alien than the others, calling out his name across the great gulf of space. He looked up in amazement. He knew that voice. Beyond any doubt he knew that voice. So she got there after all, he told himself. He could feel the wonder blossom and grow within him. She actually got there. And that changes everything, doesn’t it? He didn’t dare move. Had he really heard it? Again, he thought. Please, again.
And then came her voice in his mind once more. Calling to him again. Yes, he knew it was real. And at the sound of that voice he felt all resistance begin to leave him, and his anger and his fear and his sorrow dropping from him like a cast-off cloak. And he got up, wondering if there still was time to find Tom somewhere back in that madness, and began slowly to walk through the rain toward the bright green light that blazed before him in the heavens.