Something Wild Is Loose

The Vsiir got aboard the Earthbound ship by accident. It had absolutely no plans for taking a holiday on a wet, grimy planet like Earth. But it was in its metamorphic phase, undergoing the period of undisciplined change that began as winter came on, and it had shifted so far up-spectrum that Earthborn eyes couldn’t see it. Oh, a really skilled observer might notice a slippery little purple flicker once in a while, a kind of snore, as the Vsiir momentarily dropped down out of the ultraviolet; but he’d have to know where to look, and when. The crewman who was responsible for putting the Vsiir on the ship never even considered the possibility that there might be something invisible sleeping atop one of the crates of cargo being hoisted into the ship’s hold. He simply went down the row, slapping a floater-node on each crate and sending it gliding up the gravity wall toward the open hatch. The fifth crate to go inside was the one on which the Vsiir had decided to take its nap. The spaceman didn’t know that he had inadvertently given an alien organism a free ride to Earth. The Vsiir didn’t know it, either, until the hatch was scaled and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere began to hiss from the vents. The Vsiir did not happen to breathe those gases, but, because it was in its time of metamorphosis, it was able to adapt itself quickly and nicely to the sour, prickly vapors seeping into its metabolic cells. The next step was to fashion a set of full-spectrum scanners and learn something about its surroundings. Within a few minutes, the Vsiir was aware—

—that it was in a large, dark place that held a great many boxes containing various mineral and vegetable products of its world, mainly branches of the greenfire tree but also some other things of no comprehensible value to a Vsiir—

—that a double wall of curved metal enclosed this place—

—that just beyond this wall was a null-atmosphere zone, such as is found between one planet and another—

—that this entire closed system was undergoing acceleration—

—that this therefore was a spaceship, heading rapidly away from the world of Vsiirs and in fact already some ten planetary diameters distant, with the gap growing alarmingly moment by moment—

—that it would be impossible, even for a Vsiir in metamorphosis, to escape from the spaceship at this point—

—and that, unless it could persuade the crew of the ship to halt and go back, it would be compelled to undertake a long and dreary voyage to a strange and probably loathsome world, where life would at best be highly inconvenient, and might present great dangers. It would find itself cut off painfully from the rhythm of its own civilization. It would miss the Festival of Changing. It would miss the Holy Eclipse. It would not be able to take part in next spring’s Rising of the Sea. It would suffer in a thousand ways.

There were six human beings aboard the ship. Extending its perceptors, the Vsiir tried to reach their minds. Though humans had been coming to its planet for many years, it had never bothered making contact with them before; but it had never been in this much trouble before, either. It sent a foggy tendril of thought, roving the corridors, looking for traces of human intelligence. Here? A glow of electrical activity within a sphere of bone: a mind, a mind! A busy mind. But surrounded by a wall, apparently; the Vsiir rammed up against it and was thrust back. That was startling and disturbing. What kind of beings were these, whose minds were closed to ordinary contact? The Vsiir went on, hunting through the ship. Another mind: again closed. Another. Another. The Vsiir felt panic rising. Its mantle fluttered; its energy radiations dropped far down into the visible spectrum, then shot nervously toward much shorter waves. Even its physical form experienced a series of quick involuntary metamorphoses, to the Vsiir’s intense embarrassment. It did not get control of its body until it had passed from spherical to cubical to chaotic, and had become a gridwork of fibrous threads held together only by a pulsing strand of ego. Fiercely it forced itself back to the spherical form and resumed its search of the ship, dismally realizing that by this time its native world was half a stellar unit away. It was without hope now, but it continued to probe the minds of the crew, if only for the sake of thoroughness. Even if it made contact, though, how could it communicate the nature of its plight, and even if it communicated, why would the humans be disposed to help it? Yet it went on through the ship. And—

Here: an open mind. No wall at all. A miracle! The Vsiir rushed into close contact, overcome with joy and surprise, pouring out its predicament. Please listen. Unfortunate nonhuman organism accidentally transported into this vessel during loading of cargo. Metabolically and psychologically unsuited for prolonged life on Earth. Begs pardon for inconvenience, wishes prompt return to home planet recently left, regrets disturbance in shipping schedule but hopes that this large favor will not prove impossible to grant. Do you comprehend my sending? Unfortunate nonhuman organism accidentally transported—

Lieutenant Falkirk had drawn the first sleep-shift after floatoff. It was only fair; Falkirk had knocked himself out processing the cargo during the loading stage, slapping the floater-nodes on every crate and feeding the transit manifests to the computer. Now that the ship was spaceborne he could grab some rest while the other crewmen were handling the floatoff chores. So he settled down for six hours in the cradle as soon as they were on their way. Below him, the ship’s six gravity-drinkers spun on their axes, gobbling inertia and pushing up the acceleration, and the ship floated Earthward at a velocity that would reach the galactic level before Falkirk woke. He drifted into drowsiness. A good trip: enough greenfire bark in the hold to see Earth through a dozen fits of the molecule plague, and plenty of other potential medicinals besides, along with a load of interesting mineral samples, and—Falkirk slept. For half an hour he enjoyed sweet slumber, his mind disengaged, his body loose.

Until a dark dream bubbled through his skull.

Deep purple sunlight, hot and somber. Something slippery tickling the edges of his brain. He lies on a broad white slab in a scorched desert. Unable to move. Getting harder to breathe. The gravity—a terrible pull, bending and breaking him, ripping his bones apart. Hooded figures moving around him, pointing, laughing, exchanging blurred comments in an unknown language. His skin melting and taking on a new texture: porcupine quills sprouting inside his flesh and forcing their way upward, poking out through every pore. Points of fire all over him. A thin scarlet hand, withered fingers like crab claws, hovering in front of his face. Scratching. Scratching. Scratching. His blood running among the quills, thick and sluggish. He shivers, struggling to sit up—lifts a hand, leaving pieces of quivering flesh stuck to the slab—sits up—

Wakes, trembling, screaming.

Falkirk’s shout still sounded in his own ears as his eyes adjusted to the light. Lieutenant Commander Rodriguez was holding his shoulders and shaking him.

“You all right?”

Falkirk tried to reply. Words wouldn’t come. Hallucinatory shock, he realized, as part of his mind attempted to convince the other part that the dream was over. He was trained to handle crises; he ran through a quick disciplinary countdown and calmed himself, though he was still badly shaken. “Nightmare,” he said hoarsely. “A beauty. Never had a dream with that kind of intensity before.”

Rodriguez relaxed. Obviously he couldn’t get very upset over a mere nightmare. “You want a pill?”

Falkirk shook his head. “I’ll manage, thanks.”

But the impact of the dream lingered. It was more than an hour before he got back to sleep, and then he fell into a light, restless doze, as if his mind were on guard against a return of those chilling fantasies. Fifty minutes before his programmed wake-up time, he was awakened by a ghastly shriek from the far side of the cabin.

Lieutenant Commander Rodriguez was having a nightmare.

When the ship made floatdown on Earth a month later it was, of course, put through the usual decontamination procedures before anyone or anything aboard it was allowed out of the starport. The outer hull got squirted with sealants designed to trap and smother any microorganism that might have hitchhiked from another world; the crewmen emerged through the safety pouch and went straight into a quarantine chamber without being exposed to the air; the ship’s atmosphere was cycled into withdrawal chambers, where it underwent a thorough purification, and the entire interior of the vessel received a six-phase sterilization, beginning with fifteen minutes of hard vacuum and ending with an hour of neutron bombardment.

These procedures caused a certain degree of inconvenience for the Vsiir. It was already at the low end of its energy phase, due mainly to the repeated discouragements it had suffered in its attempts to communicate with the six humans. Now it was forced to adapt to a variety of unpleasant environments with no chance to rest between changes. Even the most adaptable of organisms can get tired. By the time the starport’s decontamination team was ready to certify that the ship was wholly free of alien life-forms, the Vsiir was very, very tired indeed.

The oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere entered the hold once more. The Vsiir found it quite welcome, at least in contrast to all that had just been thrown at it. The hatch was open; stevedores were muscling the cargo crates into position to be floated across the field to the handling dome. The Vsiir took advantage of this moment to extrude some legs and scramble out of the ship. It found itself on a broad concrete apron, rimmed by massive buildings. A yellow sun was shining in a blue sky; infrared was bouncing all over the place, but the Vsiir speedily made arrangements to deflect the excess. It also compensated immediately for the tinge of ugly hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, for the frightening noise level, and for the leaden feeling of homesickness that suddenly threatened its organic stability at the first sight of this unfamiliar, disheartening world. How to get home again? How to make contact, even? The Vsiir sensed nothing but closed minds—sealed like seeds in their shells. True, from time to time the minds of these humans opened, but even then they seemed unwilling to let the Vsiir’s message get through.

Perhaps it would be different here. Perhaps those six were poor communicators, for some reason, and there would be more receptive minds available in this place. Perhaps. Perhaps. Close to despair, the Vsiir hurried across the field and slipped into the first building in which it sensed open minds. There were hundreds of humans in it, occupying many levels, and the open minds were widely scattered. The Vsiir located the nearest one and, worriedly, earnestly, hopefully, touched the tip of its mind to the human’s. Please listen, I mean no harm. Am nonhuman organism arrived on your planet through unhappy circumstances, wishing only quick going back to own world.

The cardiac wing of Long Island Starport Hospital was on the ground floor, in the rear, where the patients could be given floater therapy without upsetting the gravitational ratios of the rest of the building. As always, the hospital was full—people were always coming in sick off starliners, and most of them were hospitalized right at the starport for their own safety—and the cardiac wing had more than its share. At the moment it held a dozen infarcts awaiting implant, nine postimplant recupes, five coronaries in emergency stasis, three ventricle-regrowth projects, an aortal patch job, and nine or ten assorted other cases. Most of the patients were floating, to keep down the gravitational strain on their damaged tissues—all but the regrowth people, who were under full Earthnorm gravity so that their new hearts would come in with the proper resilience and toughness. The hospital had a fine reputation and one of the lowest mortality rates in the hemisphere.

Losing two patients the same morning was a shock to the entire staff.

At 0917 the monitor flashed the red light for Mrs. Maldonado, 87, postimplant and thus far doing fine. She had developed acute endocarditis coming back from a tour of the Jupiter system; at her age there wasn’t enough vitality to sustain her through the slow business of growing a new heart with a genetic prod, but they’d given her a synthetic implant and for two weeks it had worked quite well. Suddenly, though, the hospital’s control center was getting a load of grim telemetry from Mrs. Maldonado’s bed: valve action zero, blood pressure zero, respiration zero, pulse zero, everything zero, zero, zero. The EEG tape showed a violent lurch—as though she had received some abrupt and intense shock—followed by a minute or two of irregular action, followed by termination of brain activity. Long before any hospital personnel had reached her bedside, automatic revival equipment, both chemical and electrical, had gone to work on the patient, but she was beyond reach: a massive cerebral hemorrhage, coming totally without warning, had done irreversible damage.

At 0928 came the second loss: Mr. Guinness, 51, three days past surgery for a coronary embolism. The same series of events. A severe jolt to the nervous system, an immediate and fatal physiological response. Resuscitation procedures negative. No one on the staff had any plausible explanation for Mr. Guinness’ death. Like Mrs. Maldonado, he had been sleeping peacefully, all vital signs good, until the moment of the fatal seizure.

“As though someone had come up and yelled boo in their ears,” one doctor muttered, puzzling over the charts. He pointed to the wild EEG track. “Or as if they’d had unbearably vivid nightmares and couldn’t take the sensory overload. But no one was making noise in the ward. And nightmares aren’t contagious.”

Dr. Peter Mookherji, resident in neuropathology, was beginning his morning rounds on the hospital’s sixth level when the soft voice of his annunciator, taped behind his left ear, asked him to report to the quarantine building immediately. Dr. Mookherji scowled. “Can’t it wait? This is my busiest time of day, and—”

“You are asked to come at once.”

“Look, I’ve got a girl in a coma here, due for her teletherapy session in fifteen minutes, and she’s counting on seeing me. I’m her only link to the world. If I’m not there when—”

“You are asked to come at once, Dr. Mookherji.”

“Why do the quarantine people need a neuropathologist in such a hurry? Let me take care of the girl, at least, and in forty-five minutes they can have me.”

“Dr. Mookherji—”

It didn’t pay to argue with a machine. Mookherji forced his temper down. Short tempers ran in his family, along with a fondness for torrid curries and a talent for telepathy. Glowering, he grabbed a data terminal, identified himself, and told the hospital’s control center to reprogram his entire morning schedule. “Build in a half-hour postponement somehow,” he snapped. “I can’t help it—see for yourself. I’ve been requisitioned by the quarantine staff.’ The computer was thoughtful enough to have a rollerbuggy waiting for him when he emerged from the hospital. It whisked him across the starport to the quarantine building in three minutes, but he was still angry when he got there. The scanner at the door ticked off his badge and one of the control center’s innumerable voice-outputs told him solemnly, “You are expected in Room 403, Dr. Mookherji.”

Room 403 turned out to be a two-sector interrogation office. The rear sector of the room was part of the building’s central quarantine core, and the front sector belonged to the public-access part of the building, with a thick glass wall in between. Six haggard-looking spacemen were slouched on sofas behind the wall, and three members of the starport’s quarantine staff paced about in the front. Mookherji’s irritation ebbed when he saw that one of the quarantine men was an old medical-school friend, Lee Nakadai. The slender Japanese was a year older than Mookherji—29 to 28; they met for lunch occasionally at the starport commissary, and they had double-dated a pair of Filipina twins earlier in the year, but the pressure of work had kept them apart for months. Nakadai got down to business quickly now: “Pete, have you ever heard of an epidemic of nightmares?”

“Eh?”

Indicating the men behind the quarantine wall, Nakadai said, “These fellows came in a couple of hours ago from Norton’s Star. Brought back a cargo of greenfire bark. Physically they check out to five decimal places, and I’d release them except for one funny thing. They’re all in a bad state of nervous exhaustion, which they say is the result of having had practically no sleep during their whole month-long return trip. And the reason for that is that they were having nightmares—every one of them—real mind-wrecking dreams, whenever they tried to sleep. It sounded so peculiar that I thought we’d better run a neuropath checkup, in case they’ve picked up some kind of cerebral infection.”

Mookherji frowned. “For this you get me out of my ward on emergency requisition, Lee?”

“Talk to them,” Nakadai said. “Maybe it’ll scare you a little.”

Mookherji glanced at the spacemen. “All right,” he said. “What about these nightmares?”

A tall, bony-looking officer who introduced himself as Lieutenant Falkirk said, “I was the first victim—right after floatoff. I almost flipped. It was like, well, something touching my mind, filling it with weird thoughts. And everything absolutely real while it was going on—I thought I was choking, I thought my body was changing into something alien, I felt my blood running out my pores—” Falkirk shrugged. “Like any sort of bad dream, I guess, only ten times as vivid. Fifty times. A few hours later Lieutenant Commander Rodriguez had the same kind of dream. Different images, same effect. And then, one by one, as the others took their sleep-shifts, they started to wake up screaming. Two of us ended up spending three weeks on happy-pills. We’re pretty stable men, doctor—we’re trained to take almost anything. But I think a civilian would have cracked up for good with dreams like those. Not so much the images as the intensity, the realness of them.”

“And these dreams recurred, throughout the voyage?” Mookherji asked.

“Every shift. It got so we were afraid to doze off, because we knew the devils would start crawling through our heads when we did. Or we’d put ourselves real down on sleeper-tabs. And even so we’d have the dreams, with our minds doped to a level where you wouldn’t imagine dreams would happen. A plague of nightmares, doctor. An epidemic.”

“When was the last episode?”

‘The final sleep-shift before floatdown.”

“You haven’t gone to sleep, any of you, since leaving ship?”

‘No,” Falkirk said.

One of the other spacemen said, “Maybe he didn’t make it clear to you, doctor. These were killer dreams. They were mind-crackers. We were lucky to get home sane. If we did.”

Mookherji drummed his fingertips together, rummaging through his experience for some parallel case. He couldn’t find any. He knew of mass hallucinations, plenty of them, episodes in which whole mobs had persuaded themselves they had seen gods, demons, miracles, the dead walking, fiery symbols in the sky. But a series of hallucinations coming in sequence, shift after shift, to an entire crew of tough, pragmatic spacemen? It didn’t make sense.

Nakadai said, “Pete, the men had a guess about what might have done it to them. Just a wild idea, but maybe—”

“What is it?”

Falkirk laughed uneasily. “Actually, it’s pretty fantastic, doctor.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, that something from the planet came aboard the ship with us. Something, well, telepathic. Which fiddled around with our minds whenever we went to sleep. What we felt as nightmares was maybe this thing inside our heads.”

“Possibly it rode all the way back to Earth with us,” another spaceman said. “It could still be aboard the ship. Or loose in the city by now.”

“The Invisible Nightmare Menace?” Mookherji said, with a faint smile. “I doubt that I can buy that.”

“There are telepathic creatures,” Falkirk pointed out.

“I know,” Mookherji said sharply. “I happen to be one myself.”

“I’m sorry, doctor, if—”

“But that doesn’t lead me to look for telepaths under every bush. I’m not ruling out your alien menace, mind you. But I think it’s a lot more likely that you picked up some kind of inflammation of the brain out there. A virus disease, a type of encephalitis that shows itself in the form of chronic hallucinations.” The spacemen looked troubled. Obviously they would rather be victims of an unknown monster preying on them from outside than of an unknown virus lodged in their brains. Mookherji went on, “I’m not saying that’s what it is, either. I’m just tossing around hypotheses. We’ll know more after we’ve run some tests.” Checking his watch, he said to Nakadai, “Lee, there’s not much more I can find out right now, and I’ve got to get back to my patients. I want these fellows plugged in for the full series of neuropsychological checkouts. Have the outputs relayed to my office as they come in. Run the tests in staggered series and start letting the men go to sleep, two at a time, after each series—I’ll send over a technician to help you rig the telemetry. I want to be notified immediately if there’s any nightmare experience.”

“Right.”

“And get them to sign telepathy releases. I’ll give them a preliminary mind-probe this evening after I’ve had a chance to study the clinical findings. Maintain absolute quarantine, of course. This thing might just be infectious. Play it very safe.”

Nakadai nodded. Mookherji flashed a professional smile at the six somber spacemen and went out, brooding. A nightmare virus? Or a mind-meddling alien organism that no one can see? He wasn’t sure which notion he liked less. Probably, though, there was some prosaic and unstartling explanation for that month of bad dreams—contaminated food supplies, or something funny in the atmosphere recycler. A simple, mundane explanation.

Probably.

The first time it happened, the Vsiir was not sure what had actually taken place. It had touched a human mind; there had been an immediate vehement reaction; the Vsiir had pulled back, alarmed by the surging fury of the response, and then, a moment later, had been unable to locate the mind at all. Possibly it was some defense mechanism, the Vsiir thought, by which the humans guarded their minds against intruders. But that seemed unlikely since the humans’ minds were quite effectively guarded most of the time anyway. Aboard the ship, whenever the Vsiir had managed to slip past the walls that shielded the minds of the crewmen, it had always encountered a great deal of turbulence—plainly these humans did not enjoy mental contact with a Vsiir—but never this complete shutdown, this total cutoff of signal. Puzzled, the Vsiir tried again, reaching toward an open mind situated not far from where the one that had vanished had been. Kindly attention, a moment of consideration for confused other-worldly individual, victim of unhappy circumstances, who—

Again the violent response: a sudden tremendous flare of mental energy, a churning blaze of fear and pain and shock. And again, moments later, complete silence, as though the human had retreated behind an impermeable barrier. Where are you? Where did you go? The Vsiir, troubled, took the risk of creating an optical receptor that worked in the visible spectrum—and that therefore would itself be visible to humans—and surveyed the scene. It saw a human on a bed, completely surrounded by intricate machinery. Colored lights were flashing. Other humans, looking agitated, were rushing toward the bed. The human on the bed lay quite still, not even moving when a metal arm descended and jabbed a long bright needle into his chest.

Suddenly the Vsiir understood.

The two humans must have experienced termination of existence!

Hastily the Vsiir dissolved its visible-spectrum receptor and retreated to a sheltered corner to consider what had happened. Datum: two humans had died. Datum: each had undergone termination immediately after receiving a mental transmission from the Vsiir. Problem: had the mental transmission brought about the terminations?

The possibility that the Vsiir might have destroyed two lives was shocking and appalling, and such a chill went through its body that it shrank into a tight, hard ball, with all thought-processes snarled. It needed several minutes to return to a fully functional state. If its attempts at communicating with these humans produced such terrible effects, the Vsiir realized, then its prospects of finding help on this planet were slim. How could it dare risk trying to contact other humans, if—

A comforting thought surfaced. The Vsiir realized that it was jumping to a hasty conclusion on the basis of sketchy evidence, while overlooking some powerful arguments against that conclusion. All during the voyage to this world the Vsiir had been making contact with humans, the six crewmen, and none of them had terminated. That was ample evidence that humans could withstand contact with a Vsiir mind. Therefore contact alone could not have caused these two deaths.

Possibly it was only coincidental that the Vsiir had approached two humans in succession that were on the verge of termination. Was this the place where humans were brought when their time of termination was near? Would the terminations have happened even if the Vsiir had not tried to make contact? Was the attempt at contact just enough of a drain on dwindling energies to push the two over the edge into termination? The Vsiir did not know. It was uncomfortably conscious of how many important facts it lacked. Only one thing was certain: its time was running short. If it did not find help soon, metabolic decay was going to set in, followed by metamorphic rigidity, followed by a fatal loss in adaptability, followed by…termination.

The Vsiir had no choice. Continuing its quest for contact with a human was its only hope of survival. Cautiously, timidly, the Vsiir again began to send out its probes, looking for a properly receptive mind. This one was walled. So was this. And all these: no entrance, no entrance! The Vsiir wondered if the barriers these humans possessed were designed merely to keep out intruding nonhuman consciousnesses, or actually shielded each human against mental contact of all kinds, including contact with other humans. If any human-to-human contact existed, the Vsiir had not detected it, either in this building or aboard the spaceship. What a strange race!

Perhaps it would be best to try a different level of this building. The Vsiir flowed easily under a closed door and up a service staircase to a higher floor. Once more it sent forth its probes. A closed mind here. And here. And here. And then a receptive one. The Vsiir prepared to send its message. For safety’s sake it stepped down the power of its transmission, letting a mere wisp of thought curl forth. Do you hear? Stranded extraterrestrial being is calling. Seeks aid. Wishes—

From the human came a sharp, stinging displeasure-response, wordless but unmistakably hostile. The Vsiir at once withdrew. It waited, terrified, fearing that it had caused another termination. No: the human mind continued to function, although it was no longer open, but now surrounded by the sort of barrier humans normally wore. Drooping, dejected, the Vsiir crept away. Failure, again. Not even a moment of meaningful mind-to-mind contact. Was there no way to reach these people? Dismally, the Vsiir resumed its search for a receptive mind. What else could it do?

The visit to the quarantine building had taken forty minutes out of Dr. Mookherji’s morning schedule. That bothered him. He couldn’t blame the quarantine people for getting upset over the six spacemen’s tale of chronic hallucinations, but he didn’t think the situation, mysterious as it was, was grave enough to warrant calling him in on an emergency basis. Whatever was troubling the spacemen would eventually come to light; meanwhile they were safely isolated from the rest of the starport. Nakadai should have run more tests before asking him. And he resented having to steal time from his patients.

But as he began his belated morning rounds, Mookherji calmed himself with a deliberate effort: it wouldn’t do him or his patients any good if he visited them while still loaded with tensions and irritations. He was supposed to be a healer, not a spreader of anxieties. He spent a moment going through a de-escalation routine, and by the time he entered the first patient’s room—that of Satina Ransom—he was convincingly relaxed and amiable.

Satina lay on her left side, eyes closed, a slender girl of sixteen with a fragile-looking face and long, soft straw-colored hair. A spidery network of monitoring systems surrounded her. She had been unconscious for fourteen months, twelve of them here in the starport’s neuropathology ward and the last six under Mookherji’s care, As a holiday treat, her parents had taken her to one of the resorts on Titan during the best season for viewing Saturn’s rings; with great difficulty they succeeded in booking reservations at Galileo Dome, and were there on the grim day when a violent Titanquake ruptured the dome and exposed a thousand tourists to the icy moon’s poisonous methane atmosphere. Satina was one of the lucky ones: she got no more than a couple of whiffs of the stuff before a dome guide with whom she’d been talking managed to slap a breathing mask over her face. She survived. Her mother, father, and young brother didn’t. But she had never regained consciousness after collapsing at the moment of the disaster. Months of examination on Earth had shown that her brief methane inhalation hadn’t caused any major brain damage; organically there seemed to be nothing wrong with her, but she refused to wake up. A shock reaction, Mookherji believed: she would rather go on dreaming forever than return to the living nightmare that consciousness had become. He had been able to reach her mind telepathically, but so far he had been unable to cleanse her of the trauma of that catastrophe and bring her back to the waking world.

Now he prepared to make contact. There was nothing easy or automatic about his telepathy; “reading” minds was strenuous work for him, as difficult and as taxing as running a cross-country race or memorizing a lengthy part in Hamlet. Despite the fears of laymen, he had no way of scanning anyone’s intimate thoughts with a casual glance. To enter another mind, he had to go through an elaborate procedure of warming up and reaching out, and even so it was a slow business to tune in on somebody’s “wavelength”, with little coherent information coming across until the ninth or tenth attempt. The gift had been in the Mookherji family for at least a dozen generations, helped along by shrewdly planned marriages designed to conserve the precious gene; he was more adept than any of his ancestors, yet it might take another century or two of Mookherjis to produce a really potent telepath. At least he was able to make good use of such talent for mind-contact as he had. He knew that many members of his family in earlier times had been forced to hide their gift from those about them, back in India, lest they be classed with vampires and werewolves and cast out of society.

Gently he placed his dark hand on Satina’s pale wrist. Physical contact was necessary to attain the mental linkage. He concentrated on reaching her. After months of teletherapy, her mind was sensitized to his; he was able to skip the intermediate steps, and, once he was warmed up, could plunge straight into her troubled soul. His eyes were closed. He saw a swirl of pearly-gray fog before him: Satina’s mind. He thrust himself into it, entering easily. Up from the depths of her spirit swam a question mark.

—Who is it? Doctor?

—Me, yes. How are you today, Satina?

—Fine. Just fine.

—Been sleeping well?

—It’s so peaceful here, doctor.

—Yes. Yes, I imagine it is. But you ought to see how it is here. A wonderful summer day. The sun in the blue sky. Everything in bloom. A perfect day for swimming, eh? Wouldn’t you like a swim? He puts all the force of his concentration into images of swimming: a cold mountain stream, a deep pool at the base of a creamy waterfall, the sudden delightful shock of diving in, the crystal flow tingling against her warm skin, the laughter of her friends, the splashing, the swift powerful strokes carrying her to the far shore—

—I’d rather stay where I am, she tells him.

—Maybe you’d like to go floating instead? He summons the sensations of free flight: a floater-node fastened to her belt, lifting her serenely to an altitude of a hundred feet, and off she goes, drifting over fields and valleys, her friends beside her, her body totally relaxed, weightless, soaring on the updrafts, rising until the ground is a checkerboard of brown and green, looking down on the tiny houses and the comical cars, now crossing a shimmering silvery lake, now hovering over a dark, somber forest of thick-packed spruce, now simply lying on her back, legs crossed, hands clasped behind her head, the sunlight on her cheeks, three hundred feet of nothingness underneath her—

But Satina doesn’t take his bait. She prefers to stay where she is. The temptations of floating are not strong enough.

Mookherji does not have enough energy left to try a third attempt at luring her out of her coma. Instead he shifts to a purely medical function and tries to probe for the source of the trauma that has cut her off from the world. The fright, no doubt; and the terrible crack in the dome, spelling the end to all security; and the sight of her parents and brother dying before her eyes; and the swampy reek of Titan’s atmosphere hitting her nostrils—all of those things, no doubt. But people have rebounded from worse calamities. Why does she insist on withdrawing from life? Why not come to terms with the dreadful past, and accept existence again?

She fights him. Her defenses are fierce; she does not want him meddling with her mind. All of their sessions have ended this way: Satina clinging to her retreat, Satina blocking any shot at knocking her free of her self-imposed prison. He has gone on hoping that one day she will lower her guard. But this is not to be the day. Wearily, he pulls back from the core of her mind and talks to her on a shallower level.

—You ought to be getting back to school, Satina.

—Not yet. It’s been such a short vacation!

—Do you know how long?

—About three weeks, isn’t it?

—Fourteen months so far, he tells her.

—That’s impossible. We just went away to Titan a little while ago—the week before Christmas, wasn’t it, and—

—Satina, how old are you?

—I’ll be fifteen in April.

—Wrong, he tells her. That April’s been here and so has the next one. You were sixteen two months ago. Sixteen, Satina.

—That can’t be true, doctor. A girl’s sixteenth birthday is something special, don’t you know that? My parents are going to give me a big party. All my friends invited. And a nine piece robot orchestra with synthesizers. And I know that that hasn’t happened yet, so how can I be sixteen?

His reservoir of strength is almost drained. His mental signal is weak. He cannot find the energy to tell her that she is blocking reality again, that her parents are dead, that time is passing while she lies here, that it is too late for a Sweet Sixteen party.

—We’ll talk about it…another time, Satina. I’ll…see…you…again… tomorrow…Tomorrow…morning…

—Don’t go so soon, doctor! But he can no longer hold the contact, and lets it break.

Releasing her, Mookherji stood up, shaking his head. A shame, he thought. A damned shame. He went out of the room on trembling legs and paused a moment in the hall, propping himself against a closed door and mopping his sweaty forehead. He was getting nowhere with Satina. After the initial encouraging period of contact, he had failed entirely to lessen the intensity of her coma. She had settled quite comfortably into her delusive world of withdrawal, and, telepathy or no, he could find no way to blast her loose.

He took a deep breath. Fighting back a growing mood of bleak discouragement, he went toward the next patient’s room.

The operation was going smoothly. The dozen third-year medical students occupied the observation deck of the surgical gallery on the starport hospital’s third floor, studying Dr. Hammond’s expert technique by direct viewing and by simultaneous microamplified relay to their individual desk-screens. The patient, a brain-tumor victim in his late sixties, was visible only as a head and shoulders protruding from a life-support chamber. His scalp had been shaved; blue lines and dark red dots were painted on it to indicate the inner contours of the skull, as previously determined by short-range sonar bounces; the surgeon had finished the job of positioning the lasers that would excise the tumor. The hard part was over. Nothing remained except to bring the lasers to full power and send their fierce, precise bolts of light slicing into the patient’s brain. Cranial surgery of this kind was entirely bloodless; there was no need to cut through skin and bone to expose the tumor, for the beams of the lasers, calibrated to a millionth of a millimeter, would penetrate through minute openings and, playing on the tumor from different sides, destroy the malignant growth without harming a bit of the surrounding healthy brain tissue. Planning was everything in an operation like this. Once the exact outlines of the tumor were determined, and the surgical lasers were mounted at the correct angles, any intern could finish the job.

For Dr. Hammond it was a routine procedure. He had performed a hundred operations of this kind in the past year alone. He gave the signal; the warning light glowed on the laser rack; the students in the gallery leaned forth expectantly—

And, just as the lasers’ glittering fire leaped toward the operating table, the face of the anesthetized patient contorted weirdly, as though some terrifying dream had come drifting up out of the caverns of the man’s drugged mind. His nostrils flared; his lips drew back; his eyes opened wide; he seemed to be trying to scream; he moved convulsively, twisting his head to one side. The lasers bit deep the patient’s left temple, far from the indicated zone of the tumor. The right side of his face began to sag, all muscles paralyzed. The medical students looked at each other in bewilderment. Dr. Hammond, stunned, retained enough presence of mind to kill the lasers with a quick swipe of his hand. Then, gripping the operating table with both hands in his agitation, he peered at the dials and meters that told him the details of the botched operation. The tumor remained intact; a vast sector of the patient’s brain had been devastated. “Impossible,” Hammond muttered. What could goad a patient under anesthesia into jumping around like that? “Impossible. Impossible.” He strode to the end of the table and checked the readings on the life-support chamber. The question now was not whether the brain tumor would be successfully removed; the immediate question was whether the patient was going to survive.

By four that afternoon Mookherji had finished most of his chores. He had seen every patient; he had brought his progress charts up to date; he had fed a prognosis digest to the master computer that was the starport hospital’s control center; he had found time for a gulped lunch. Ordinarily, now, he could take the next four hours off, going back to his spartan room in the residents’ building at the edge of the starport complex for a nap, or dropping in at the recreation center to have a couple rounds of floater-tennis, or looking in at the latest cube-show, or whatever. His next round of patient-visiting didn’t begin until eight in the evening. But he couldn’t relax: there was that business of the quarantined spacemen to worry about. Nakadai had been sending test outputs over since two o’clock, and now they were stacked deep in Mookherji’s data terminal. Nothing had carried an urgent flag, so Mookherji had simply let the reports pile up; but now he felt he ought to have a look. He tapped the keys of the terminal, requesting printouts, and Nakadai’s outputs began to slide from the slot.

Mookherji ruffled through the yellow sheets. Reflexes, synapse charge, degree of neural ionization, endocrine balances, visual response, respiratory and circulatory, cerebral molecular exchange, sensory percepts, EEG both enhanced and minimated…No, nothing unusual here. It was plain from the tests that the six men who had been to Norton’s Star were badly in need of a vacation—frayed nerves, blurred reflexes—but there was no indication of anything more serious than chronic loss of sleep. He couldn’t detect signs of brain lesions, infection, nerve damage, or other organic disabilities.

Why the nightmares, then?

He tapped out the phone number of Nakadai’s office. “Quarantine,” a crisp voice said almost at once, and moments later Nakadai’s lean, tawny face appeared on the screen. “Hello, Pete. I was just going to call you.”

Mookherji said, “I didn’t finish up until a little while ago. But I’ve been through the outputs you sent over. Lee, there’s nothing here.”

“As I thought.”

“What about the men? You were supposed to call me if any of them went into nightmares.”

“None of them have,” Nakadai said. “Falkirk and Rodriguez have been sleeping since eleven. Like lambs. Schmidt and Carroll were allowed to conk out at half past one. Webster and Schiavone hit the cots at three. All six are still snoring away, sleeping like they haven’t slept in years. I’ve got them loaded with equipment and everything’s reading perfectly normal. You want me to shunt the data to you?”

“Why bother? If they aren’t hallucinating, what’ll I learn?”

“Does that mean you plan to skip the mind-probes tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Mookherji said, shrugging. “I suspect there’s no point in it, but let’s leave that part open. I’ll be finishing my evening rounds about eleven, and if there’s some reason to get into the heads of those spacemen then, I will.” He frowned. “But look—didn’t they say that each one of them went into the nightmares on every single sleep-shift?”

“Right.”

“And here they are, sleeping outside the ship to for the first time since the nightmares started, and none of them having any trouble at all. And no sign of possible hallucinogenic brain lesions. You know something, Lee? I’m starting to come around to a very silly hypothesis that those men proposed this morning.”

“That the hallucinations were caused by some unseen alien being?” Nakadai asked.

“Something like that. Lee, what’s the status of the ship they came in on?”

“It’s been through all the routine purification checks, and now it’s sitting in an isolation vector until we have some idea of what’s on.”

“Would I be able to get aboard it?” Mookherji asked.

“I suppose so, yes, but—why—?”

“On the wild shot that something external caused those nightmares and that that something may still be aboard the ship. And perhaps a lowlevel telepath like myself will be able to detect its presence. Can you set up clearance fast?”

“Within ten minutes,” Nakadai said. “I’ll pick you up.”

Nakadai came by shortly in a rollerbuggy. As they headed toward the landing field, he handed Mookherji a crumpled spacesuit and told him to put it on.

“What for?”

“You may want to breathe inside the ship. Right now it’s full of vacuum—we decided it wasn’t safe to leave it under atmosphere. Also it’s still loaded with radiation from the decontamination process. Okay?”

Mookherji struggled into the suit.

They reached the ship: a standard interstellar null-gravity-drive job, looking small and lonely in its corner of the field. A robot cordon kept it under isolation, but, tipped off by the control center, the robots let the two doctors pass. Nakadai remained outside; Mookherji crawled into the safety pouch and, after the hatch had gone through its admission cycle, entered the ship. He moved cautiously from cabin to cabin, like a man walking in a forest that was said to have a jaguar in every tree. While looking about, he brought himself as quickly as possible up to full telepathic receptivity, and, wide open, awaited telepathic contact with anything that might be lurking in the ship.

—Go on. Do your worst.

Complete silence on all mental wavelengths. Mookherji prowled everywhere: the cargo hold, the crew cabins, the drive compartments. Everything empty, everything still. Surely he would have been able to detect the presence of a telepathic creature in here, no matter how alien; if it was capable of reaching the mind of a sleeping spaceman, it should be able to reach the mind of a waking telepath as well. After fifteen minutes he left the ship, satisfied.

“Nothing there,” he told Nakadai. “We’re still nowhere.”

The Vsiir was growing desperate. It had been roaming this building all day; judging by the quality of the solar radiation coming through the windows, night was beginning to fall now. And, though there were open minds on every level of the structure, the Vsiir had had no luck in making contact. At least there had been no more terminations. But it was the same story here as on the ship: whenever the Vsiir touched a human mind, the reaction was so negative as to make communication impossible. And yet the Vsiir went on and on and on, to mind after mind, unable to believe that this whole planet did not hold a single human to whom it could tell its story. It hoped it was not doing severe damage to these minds it was approaching; but it had its own fate to consider.

Perhaps this mind would be the one. The Vsiir started once more to tell its tale—

Half past nine at night. Dr. Peter Mookherji, bloodshot, tense, hauled himself through his neuropathological responsibilities. The ward was full: a schizoid collapse, a catatonic freeze, Satina in her coma, half a dozen routine hysterias, a couple of paralysis cases, an aphasic, and plenty more, enough to keep him going for sixteen hours a day and strain his telepathic powers, not to mention his conventional medical skills, to their limits. Some day the ordeal of residency would be over; some day he’d be quit of this hospital, and would set up private practice on some sweet tropical isle, and commute to Bombay on weekends to see his family, and spend his holidays on planets of distant stars, like any prosperous medical specialist…Some day. He tried to banish such lavish fantasies from his mind. If you’re going to look forward to anything, he told himself, look forward to midnight. To sleep. Beautiful, beautiful sleep. And in the morning it all begins again, Satina and the coma, the schizoid, the catatonic, the aphasic…

As he stepped into the hall, going from patient to patient, his annunciator said, “Dr. Mookherji, please report at once to Dr. Bailey’s office.”

Bailey? The head of the neuropathology department, still hitting the desk this late. What now? But of course there was no ignoring such a summons. Mookherji notified the control center that he had been called off his rounds, and made his way quickly down the corridor to the frosted-glass door marked SAMUEL F. BAILEY, M.D.

He found at least half the neuropath staff there already: four of the other senior residents, most of the interns, even a few of the high-level doctors. Bailey, a puffy-faced, sandy-haired, fiftyish man of formidable professional standing, was thumbing a sheaf of outputs and scowling. He gave Mookherji a faint nod by way of greeting. They were not on the best of terms; Bailey, somewhat old-school in his attitudes, had not made a good adjustment to the advent of telepathy as a tool in the treatment of mental disturbance. “As I was just saying,” Bailey began, “these reports have been accumulating all day, and they’ve all been dumped on me, God knows why. Listen: two cardiac patients under sedation undergo sudden violent shocks, described by one doctor as sensory overloads. One reacts with cardiac arrest, the other with cerebral hemorrhage. Both die. A patient being treated for endocrine restabilization develops a runaway adrenaline flow while asleep, and gets a six-month setback. A patient undergoing brain surgery starts lurching around on the operating table, despite adequate anesthesia, and gets badly carved up by the lasers. Et cetera. Serious problems like this all over the hospital today. Computer check of general EEG patterns shows that fourteen patients, other than those mentioned, have experienced exceptionally severe episodes of nightmare in the last eleven hours, nearly all of them of such impact that the patient has sustained some degree of psychic damage and often actual physiological harm. Control center reports no case histories of previous epidemics of bad dreams. No reason to suspect a widespread dietary imbalance or similar cause for the outbreak. Nevertheless, sleeping patients are continuing to suffer, and those whose condition is particularly critical may be exposed to grave risks. Effective immediately, sedation of critical patients has been interrupted where feasible, and sleep schedules of other patients have been rearranged, but this is obviously not an expedient that is going to do much good if this outbreak continues into tomorrow.”

Bailey paused, glanced around the room, let his gaze rest on Mookherji. “Control center has offered one hypothesis: that a psychopathic individual with strong telepathic powers is at large in the hospital, preying on sleeping patients and transmitting images to them that take the form of horrifying nightmares. Mookherji, what do you make of that idea?”

Mookherji said, “It’s perfectly feasible, I suppose, although I can’t imagine why any telepath would want to go around distributing nightmares. But has control center correlated any of this with the business over at the quarantine building?”

Bailey stared at his output slips. “What business is that?”

“Six spacemen who came in early this morning, reporting that they’d all suffered chronic nightmares on their voyage homeward. Dr. Lee Nakadai’s been testing them; he called me in as a consultant, but I couldn’t discover anything useful. I imagine there are some late reports from Nakadai in my office, but—”

Bailey said, “Control center seems only to be concerned about events in the hospital, not in the starport complex as a whole. And if your six spacemen had their nightmares during their voyage, there’s no chance that their symptoms are going to find their way onto—”

“That’s just it!” Mookherji cut in. “They had their nightmares in space. But they’ve been asleep since morning, and Nakadai says they’re resting peacefully. Meanwhile an outbreak of hallucinations has started over here. Which means that whatever was bothering them during their voyage has somehow got loose in the hospital today—some sort of entity capable of stirring up such ghastly dreams that they bring veteran spacemen to the edge of nervous breakdowns and can seriously injure or even kill someone in poor health.” He realized that Bailey was looking at him strangely, and that Bailey was not the only one. In a more restrained tone, Mookherji said, “I’m sorry if this sounds fantastic to you. I’ve been checking it out all day, so I’ve had some time to get used to the concept. And things began to fit together for me just now. I’m not saying that my idea is necessarily correct. I’m simply saying that it’s a reasonable notion, that it links up with the spacemen’s own idea of what was bothering them, that it corresponds to the shape of the situation—and that it deserves a decent investigation, if we’re going to stop this before we lose some more patients.”

“All right, doctor,” Bailey said. “How do you propose to conduct the investigation?”

Mookherji was shaken by that. He had been on the go all day; he was ready to fold. Here was Bailey abruptly putting him in charge of this snark-hunt, without even asking! But he saw there was no way to refuse. He was the only telepath on the staff. And, if the supposed creature really was at large in the hospital, how could be tracked except by a telepath?

Fighting back his fatigue, Mookherji said rigidly, “Well, I’d want a chart of all the nightmare cases, to begin with, a chart showing the location of each victim and the approximate time of onset hallucination—”

They would be preparing for the Festival of Changing, now, the grand climax of the winter. Thousands of Vsiirs in the metamorphic phase would be on their way toward the Valley of Sand, toward that great natural amphitheater where the holiest rituals were performed. By now the firstcomers would already have taken up their positions, facing the west, waiting for the sunrise. Gradually the rows would fill as Vsiirs came in from every part of the planet, until the golden valley was thick with them, Vsiirs that constantly shifted their energy levels, dimensional extensions, and inner resonances, shuttling gloriously through the final joyous moments of the season of metamorphosis, competing with one another in a gentle way to display the great variety of form, the most dynamic cycle of physical changes—and, when the first red rays of the sun crept past the Needle, the celebrants would grow even more frenzied, dancing and leaping and transforming themselves with total abandon, purging themselves of the winter’s flamboyance as the season of stability swept across the world. And finally, in the full blaze of sunlight, they would turn to one another in renewed kinship, embracing, and—

The Vsiir tried not to think about it. But it was hard to repress that sense of loss, that pang of nostalgia. The pain grew more intense with every moment. No imaginable miracle would get the Vsiir home in time for the Festival of Changing, it knew, and yet it could not really believe that such a calamity had befallen it.

Trying to touch minds with humans was useless. Perhaps if it assumed a form visible to them, and let itself be noticed, and then tried to open verbal communication—

But the Vsiir was so small, and these humans were so large. The dangers were great. The Vsiir, clinging to a wall and carefully keeping its wavelength well beyond the ultraviolet, weighed one risk against another, and, for the moment, did nothing.

“All right,” Mookherji said foggily, a little before midnight. “I think we’ve got the trail clear now.” He sat before a wall-sized screen on which the control center had thrown a three-dimensional schematic plan of the hospital. Bright red dots marked the place of each nightmare incident, yellow dashes the probable path of the unseen alien creature. “It came in the side way, probably, straight off the ship, and went into the cardiac wing first. Mrs. Maldonado’s bed here, Mr. Guinness’ over here, eh? Then it went up to the second level, coming around to the front wing and impinging on the minds of patients here and here and here between ten and eleven in the morning. There were no reported episodes of hallucination in the next hour and ten minutes, but then came that nasty business in the third-level surgical gallery, and after that—” Mookherji’s aching eyes closed a moment; it seemed to him that he could still see the red dots and yellow dashes. He forced himself to go on, tracing the rest of the intruder’s route for his audience of doctors and hospital security personnel. At last he said, “That’s it. I figure that the thing must be somewhere between the fifth and eighth levels by now. It’s moving much more slowly than it did this morning, possibly running out of energy. What we have to do is keep the hospital’s wings tightly sealed to prevent its free movement, if that can be done, and attempt to narrow down the number of places whom it might be found.”

One of the security men said, a little belligerently, “Doctor, just how are we supposed to find an invisible entity?”

Mookherji struggled to keep impatience out of his voice. “The visible spectrum isn’t the only sort of electromagnetic energy in the universe. If this thing is alive, it’s got to be radiating somewhere along the line. You’ve got a master computer with a million sensory pickups mounted all over the hospital. Can’t you have the sensors scan for a point-source of infrared or ultraviolet moving through a room? Or even X-rays, for God’s sake: we don’t know where the radiation’s likely to be. Maybe it’s a gamma emitter, even. Look, something wild is loose in this building, and we can’t see it, but the computer can. Make it search.”

Dr. Bailey said, “Perhaps the energy we ought to be trying to trace it by is, ah, telepathic energy, doctor.”

Mookherji shrugged. “As far as anybody knows, telepathic impulses propagate somewhere outside the electromagnetic spectrum. But of course you’re right that I might be able to pick up some kind of output, and I intend to make a floor-by-floor search as soon as this briefing session is over.” He turned toward Nakadai. “Lee, what’s the word from your quarantined spacemen?”

“All six went through eight-hour sleep periods today without any sign of a nightmare episode: there was some dreaming, but all of it normal. In the past couple of hours I’ve had them on the phone talking with some of the patients who had the nightmares, and everybody agrees that the kind of dreams people have been having here today are the same in tone, texture, and general level of horror as the ones the men had aboard the ship. Images of bodily destruction and alien landscapes, accompanied by an overwhelming, almost intolerable, feeling of isolation, loneliness, separation from one’s own kind.”

“Which would fit the hypothesis of an alien being as the cause,” said Martinson of the psychology staff. “If it’s wandering around trying to communicate with us, trying to tell us it doesn’t want to be here, say, and its communications reach human minds only in the form of frightful nightmares—”

“Why does it communicate only with sleeping people?” an intern asked.

“Perhaps those are the only ones it can reach. Maybe a mind that’s awake isn’t receptive,” Martinson suggested.

“Seems to me,” a security man said, “that we’re making a whole lot of guesses based on no evidence at all. You’re all sitting around talking about an invisible telepathic thing that breathes nightmares in people’s ears, and it might just as easily be a virus that attacks the brain, or something in yesterday’s food, or—”

Mookherji said, “The ideas you’re offering now have already been examined and discarded. We’re working on this line of inquiry now because it seems to hold together, fantastic though it sounds, and because it’s all we have. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to start checking the building for telepathic output, now.” He went out, pressing his hands to his throbbing temples.

Satina Ransom stirred, stretched, subsided. She looked up and saw the dazzling blaze of Saturn’s rings overhead, glowing through the hotel’s domed roof. She had never seen anything more beautiful in her life. This close to them, only about 750,000 miles out, she could clearly make out the different zones of the rings, each revolving about Saturn at its own speed, with the blackness of space visible through the open places. And Saturn itself, gleaming in the heavens, so bright, so huge—

What was that rumbling sound? Thunder? Not here, not on Titan. Again: louder. And the ground swaying. A crack in the dome! Oh, no, no, no, feel the air rushing out, look at that cold greenish mist pouring in—people falling down all over the place—what’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening? Saturn seems to be falling toward us. That taste in my mouth—oh—oh—oh—

Satina screamed. And screamed. And went on screaming as she slipped down into darkness, and pulled the soft blanket of unconsciousness over her, and shivered, and gave thanks for finding a safe place to hide.

Mookherji had plodded through the whole building accompanied by three security men and a couple of interns. He had seen whole sectors of the hospital that he didn’t know existed. He had toured basements and sub-basements and sub-sub-basements; he had been through laboratories and computer rooms and wards and exercise chambers. He had kept himself in a state of complete telepathic receptivity throughout the trek, but he had detected nothing, not even a fit of mental current anywhere. Somehow that came as no surprise to him. Now, with dawn near, he wanted nothing more than sixteen hours or so of sleep. Even with nightmares. He was tired beyond all comprehension of the meaning of tiredness.

Yet something wild was loose, still, and the nightmares still were going on. Three incidents, ninety minutes apart, had occurred during the night: two patients on the fifth level and one on the sixth awakened in states of terror. It had been possible to calm them quickly, and apparently no lasting harm had been done, but now the stranger was close to Mookherji’s neuropathology ward, and he didn’t like the thought of exposing a bunch of mentally unstable patients to that kind of stimulus. By this time, the control center had reprogrammed all patient-monitoring systems to watch for the early stages of nightmare—hormone changes, EEG tremors, respiration rate rise, and so forth—in the hope of awakening a victim before the full impact could be felt. Even so, Mookherji wanted to see that thing caught and out of the hospital before it got to any of his own people.

But how?

As he trudged back to his sixth-level office, he considered some of the ideas people had tossed around in that midnight briefing session. Wandering around trying to communicate with us, Martinson had said. Its communications reach human minds only in the form of frightful nightmares. Maybe a mind that’s awake isn’t receptive. Even the mind of a human telepath, it seemed, wasn’t receptive while awake. Mookherji wondered if he should go to sleep and hope the alien would reach him, and then try to deal with it, lead it into a trap of some kind—but no. He wasn’t that different from other people. If he slept, and the alien did open contact, he’d simply have a hell of a nightmare and wake up, and nothing gained. That wasn’t the answer. Suppose, though, he managed to make contact with the alien through the mind of a nightmare victim—someone he could use as a kind of telepathic loudspeaker—someone who wasn’t likely to wake up while the dream was going on—

Satina.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Of course, he’d have to make sure the girl was shielded from possible harm. She had enough horrors running free in her head as it was. But if he lent her his strength, drained off the poison of the nightmare, took the impact himself via their telepathic link, and was able to stand the strain and still speak to the alien mind—that might just work. Might.

He went to her room. He clasped her hand between his.

—Satina?

—Morning so soon, doctor?

—It’s still early, Satina. But things are a little unusual here today. We need your help. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I think you can be of great value to us, and maybe even to yourself. Listen to me very carefully, and think it over before you say yes or no—

God help me if I’m wrong, Mookherji thought, far below the level of telepathic transmission.

Chilled, alone, growing groggy with dismay and hopelessness, the Vsiir had made no attempts at contact for several hours now. What was the use? The results were always the same when it touched a human mind; it was exhausting itself and apparently bothering the humans, to no purpose. Now the sun had risen. The Vsiir contemplated slipping out of the building and exposing itself to the yellow solar radiation while dropping all defenses; it would be a quick death, an end to all this misery and longing. It was folly to dream of seeing the home planet again. And—

What was that?

A call. Clear, intelligible, unmistakable. Come to me. An open mind somewhere on this level, speaking neither the human language nor the Vsiir language, but using the wordless, universally comprehensible communion that occurs when mind speaks directly to mind. Come to me. Tell me everything. How can I help you?

In its excitement the Vsiir slid up and down the spectrum, emitting a blast of infrared, a jagged blurt of ultraviolet, a lively blaze of visible light, before getting control. Quickly it took a fix on the direction of the call. Not far away: down this corridor, under this door, through this passage. Come to me. Yes. Yes. Extending its mind-probes ahead of it, groping for contact with the beckoning mind, the Vsiir hastened forward.

Mookherji, his mind locked to Satina’s, felt the sudden crashing shock of the nightmare moving in, and even at second remove the effect was stunning in its power. He perceived a clicking sensation of mind touching mind. And then, into Satina’s receptive spirit, there poured—

A wall higher than Everest. Satina trying to climb it, scrambling up a smooth white face, digging fingertips into minute crevices. Slipping back one yard for every two gained. Below, a roiling pit, flames shooting up, foul gases rising, monsters with needle-sharp fangs waiting for her to fall. The wall grows taller. The air is so thin she can barely breathe, her eyes are dimming, a greasy hand is squeezing her heart, she can feel her veins pulling free of her flesh like wires coming out of a broken plaster ceiling, and the gravitational pull is growing constantly—pain, her lungs crumbling, her face sagging hideously—a river of terror surging through her skull—

—None of it is real, Satina. They’re just illusions. None of it is really happening.

—Yes, she says, yes, I know, but still she resonates with fright, her muscles jerking at random, her face flushed and sweating, her eyes fluttering beneath the lids. The dream continues. How much more can she stand?

—Give it to me, he tells her. Give me the dream!

She does not understand. No matter. Mookherji knows how to do it. He is so tired that fatigue is unimportant; somewhere in the realm beyond collapse he finds unexpected strength, and reaches into her numbed soul, and pulls the hallucinations forth as though they were cobwebs. They engulf him. No longer does he experience them indirectly; now all the phantoms are loose in his skull, and, even as he feels Satina relax, he braces himself against the onslaught of unreality that he has summoned into himself. And he copes. He drains the excess of irrationality out of her and winds it about his consciousness, and adapts, learning to live with the appalling flood of images. He and Satina share what is coming forth. Together they can bear the burden; he carries more of it than she does, but she does her part, and now neither of them is overwhelmed by the parade of bogeys. They can laugh at the dream monsters; they can even admire them for being so richly fantastic. That beast with a hundred heads, that bundle of living copper wires, that pit of dragons, that coiling mass of spiky teeth—who can fear what does not exist?

Over the clatter of bizarre images Mookherji sends a coherent thought, pushing it through Satina’s mind to the alien.

—Can you turn off the nightmares?

—No, something replies. They are in you, not in me. I only provide the liberating stimulus. You generate the images.

—All right. Who are you, and what do you want here?

—I am a Vsiir.

—A what?

—Native life form of the planet where you collect the greenfire branches. Through my own carelessness I was transported to your planet. Accompanying the message is an overriding impulse of sadness, a mixture of pathos, self-pity, discomfort, exhaustion. Above this the nightmares still flow, but they are insignificant now. The Vsiir says, I wish only to be sent home. I did not want to come here.

And this is our alien monster? Mookherji thinks. This is our fearsome nightmare-spreading beast from the stars?

—Why do you spread hallucinations?

—This was not my intention. I was merely trying to make mental contact. Some defect in the human receptive system, perhaps—I do not know. I do not know. I am so tired, though. Can you help me?

—We’ll send you home, yes, Mookherji promises. Where are you? Can you show yourself to me? Let me know how to find you, and I’ll notify the starport authorities, and they’ll arrange for your passage home on the first ship out.

Hesitation. Silence. Contact wavers and perhaps breaks.

Well? Mookherji says, after a moment. What’s happening? Where are you?

From the Vsiir an uneasy response:

—How can I trust you? Perhaps you merely wish to destroy me. If I reveal myself—

Mookherji bites his lip in sudden fury. His reserve of strength is almost gone; he can barely sustain the contact at all. And if he now has to find some way of persuading a suspicious alien to surrender itself, he may run out of steam before he can settle things. The situation calls for desperate measures.

—Listen, Vsiir. I’m not strong enough to talk much longer, and neither is this girl I’m using. I invite you into my head. I’ll drop all defenses if you can look at who I am, look hard, and decide for yourself whether you can trust me. After that it’s up to you. I can help you get home, but only if you produce yourself right away.

He opens his mind wide. He stands mentally naked.

The Vsiir rushes into Mookherji’s brain.

A hand touched Mookherji’s shoulder. He snapped awake instantly, blinking, trying to get his bearings. Lee Nakadai stood above him. They were in—where?—Satina Ransom’s room. The pale light of early morning was coming through the window; he must have dozed only a minute or so. His head was splitting.

“We’ve been looking all over for you, Pete,” Nakadai said.

“It’s all right now,” Mookherji murmured. “It’s all right.” He shook his head to clear it. He remembered things. Yes. On the floor, next to Satina’s bed, squatted something about the size of a frog, but very different in shape, color, and texture from any frog Mookherji had ever seen. He showed it to Nakadai. “That’s the Vsiir,” Mookherji said. “The alien terror. Satina and I made friends with it. We talked it into showing itself. Listen, it isn’t happy here, so will you get hold of a starport official fast, and explain that we’ve got an organism here that has to be shipped back to Norton’s Star at once, and—”

Satina said, “Are you Dr. Mookherji?”

“That’s right. I suppose I should have introduced myself when—you’re awake?”

“It’s morning, isn’t it?” The girl sat up, grinning. “You’re younger than I thought you were. And so serious-looking. And I love that color of skin. I—”

“You’re awake?”

“I had a bad dream,” she said. “Or maybe a bad dream within a bad dream—I don’t know. Whatever it was, it was pretty awful but I felt so much better when it went away—I just felt that if I slept any longer I was going to miss a lot of good things, that I had to get up and see what was happening in the world—do you understand any of this, doctor?”

Mookherji realized his knees were shaking. “Shock therapy,” he muttered. “We blasted her loose from the coma—without even knowing what we were doing.” He moved toward the bed. “Listen, Satina. I’ve been up for about a million years, and I’m ready to burn out from overload. And I’ve got a thousand things to talk about with you, only not now. Is that okay? Not now. I’ll send Dr. Bailey in—he’s my boss—and after I’ve had some sleep I’ll come back and we’ll go over everything together, okay? Say, five, six this evening. All right?”

“Well, of course, all right,” Satina said, with a twinkling smile. “If you feel you really have to run off, just when I’ve—sure. Go. Go. You look awfully tired, doctor.”

Mookherji blew her a kiss. Then, taking Nakadai by the elbow, he headed for the door. When he was outside he said, “Get the Vsiir over to your quarantine place pronto and try to put it in an atmosphere it finds comfortable. And arrange for its trip home. And I guess you can let your six spacemen out. I’ll go talk to Bailey—and then I’m going to drop.”

Nakadai nodded. “You get some rest, Pete. I’ll handle things.”

Mookherji shuffled slowly down the hall toward Dr. Bailey’s office, thinking of the smile on Satina’s face, thinking of the sad little Vsiir, thinking of nightmares—

“Pleasant dreams, Pete,” Nakadai called.