“Suddenly, and without any warning, I felt a... nudge at my mind. That’s the only way I can describe it. A nudge, and then a faint, persistent pushing. I tried to resist it, but its strength increased. There was a certain horrid... confidence about it. An utterly alien pressure, Sharan. A calm pressure. Have you ever fainted?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the way you tried to fight off the blackness, and it seemed to grow stronger? It was like that. I sat absolutely still, and even as I fought against it, one part of my mind was trying to find a reason for it. Tension, overwork, fear of failure. I used every device I could think of. I tried to focus my mind on nothing except the look of the corner of the screen. I dug my fingers into the chair arm and tried to focus on the pain. The thing in my mind increased the pressure and I had the feeling that it was fitting itself to my mind, turning as it entered, so as to find the easiest means of entrance. I lost the ability to control my own body. I could no longer dig at the chair arm with my fingers. I cannot describe how frightening that was. I have always felt... completely in control of myself, Sharan. Maybe I’ve been too confident. Possibly even contemptuous of the aberrations of others.
“My eyes were still focused at short range on the corner of the screen. My head lifted a bit and, without willing it, I found myself staring out at the Beatty One, trying to make out its outlines. It was in my mind, strongly, that I was seeing the ship for the first time. I was sensing the reaction of the thing that had entered my mind. The thing was perplexed, awed, wondrous. Sharan, in that state, I could have been forced to do... anything. Destroy the ship. Kill myself. My will and my desires would have had no part in action I might have undertaken.”
As she touched his arm, and said softly, “Easy, mister,” he realized that his voice had climbed into a higher register, threatening shrillness.
He took a deep breath. “Tell me, is there such a thing as a waking nightmare?”
“There are delusions, fantasies of the mind.”
“I felt... possessed. There, I’ve said it. The thing in my mind seemed to be trying to tell me that it was not inimical, that it wished no harm. When the pressure reached its strongest point, the moonlight faded away. I looked into blackness and I felt that all my thoughts and memories were being... handled. Fingered, picked at.
“And now, Sharan, comes the part that’s pure nightmare. The thing pressed its own thought images into my mind. It was as though it substituted its memories for mine. I looked down a long, wide corridor. The floors and walls had a muted glow. The people had an almost sexless look, frail, neuter, blue-white people, but human. It was very clear they were inbred. They walked with a tired timelessness, a semi-hypnotic sort of dedication, as though every movement was a portion of custom rather than habit. And suddenly I was looking out through a huge window, a window at an enormous distance from ground level. Six cigar-shaped, tail-finned objects that could only have been space ships pointed upward at a purple sky and a huge dying red sun that filled a quarter of the sky. I realized that I was seeing a dying world, an ancient world, and the people who were left in it. I got an impression of sadness, of a remote and weary sadness. Then the presence flicked out of my mind so quickly that it dizzied me. My own will, which seemed to have been crowded back into a tiny corner of my brain, re-expanded suddenly and I was myself again. I tried to treat it as a... as something of no importance. I went back to my quarters and undressed, as though I could go to bed with no further thought of it. But I had to come and tell you about this.”
He waited. Sharan stood up, walked to a post set into the cement porch, leaned against it with her hands in her pockets, her back to him.
“Bard,” she said, “we talked about the X factor in mental illness. In psychiatry we have a recurrent phenomenon. A mind, temporarily out of focus, will use as material for delusion something that has happened in the immediate past. Our sleeping dreams, as you know, are almost always based on some reference to the previous waking period. Recently we have talked of being possessed by devils. Silly darn phrase. Bill told us his symptoms. What is more natural than for you to borrow his symptoms and use them as your own. But, of course, you carried it a step further, due to your background and your ambition. You had to make the devils into representatives of some extra-solar super-race, because you are too practical to be satisfied with an illusion of devils. Bard, this is all due to the pressure mounting, the fear that they’ll stop the project, the needling General Sachson gave you.” She turned and faced him, hands still in the pockets of the jeans.
“Bard, go on back to bed. We’ll stop at my place and I’ll bring you down a little pink pill.”
“I haven’t made you understand, have I?”
“I think I understand.”
“Dr. Inly, tomorrow I’ll report to you for the usual tests. You will advise me if you find anything out of line. If so, I shall make my resignation effective at once.”
“Don’t be a child, Bard! Who else could carry Project Tempo on his back? Who else could get the loyalty you do out of fifteen hundred of us working out here in this Godforsaken spot on something not one in fifty of us can understand?”
“Suppose,” he said harshly, “that the next time I have this little aberration, I get as destructive as Kornal did?”
She walked slowly to him, pulled her chair closer, sat down and took his left hand in both of hers. “You won’t, Bard.”
“I believe it’s part of your job to be reassuring, isn’t it?”
“And to wash out those who show signs of incipient mental instability. Don’t forget that. Part of my job is to watch you. I have been watching you. I have a complete file on you, Bard. For one moment, look at yourself objectively. Thirty-four years old. Born in a small town in Ohio. Orphaned at eight. Raised by an uncle. Public school. At twelve you had your own ideas of the way to solve the problems in the geometry book. You were skeptical of the Euclidian solutions. You won a science scholarship based on the originality of an experiment you did in the high school physics lab. You worked for the other money you needed. Cal Tech, M.I.T. You got a reputation when you helped design the first practical application of atomic power for industrial use. Government service. Years of exhausting labor on the A-four, A-five and A-six. Now do you know why you had this little... lapse in your office?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have no ability to relax. You’ve never had time for a girl, for a lost weekend. You’ve never fallen asleep under a tree, or caught a trout. When you read for amusement, you read scientific papers and new texts. Your idea of a happy evening is either to cover fifteen pages of blank paper with little Greek chicken-tracks, or have a bull session with some men who are just as one-sided as you are.”
“Does the doctor want to prescribe?” he asked gently.
She snatched her hand away and leaned back in the chair. The moon had slanted low enough so that under the porch overhang it touched the line of her cheek, made a faint highlight on her lower lip, left her eyes shadowed.
After a long silence she said, “The doctor will prescribe the doctor, Bard. I’ll come back to your quarters with you, if... you’ll have me.”
He was aware of his own intense excitement. He let the seconds go by. He said, “I think we’d better be thoroughly honest with each other, Sharan. It’s the best way. You’ve put us into a delicate spot. Emotions are pretty well exposed at this point. I know your personal loyalty to me, and to the project. I know your capacity for loyalty. Now answer this honestly, my dear. If I had not come to you with this... trouble, would you have made that sort of offer?”