"Of course. How could you have what you call nightmares without a little proper life in you to give them to you? As the proper life grows, you will cease to fight so against the 'nightmares' . . ."
Communicator continued to talk earnestly. But Jerry's spinning brain was flying off on a new tangent. What was it he had been thinking earlier about tranquilizers – that he had not taken any himself for some time? Then, what about the nightmares in his last four hours of sleep?
He must have had them – he remembered now that he had had them. But evidently they had not bothered him as much as before – at least, not enough to send him scrambling for tranquilizers to dull the dreams' weird impact on him.
"Communicator!" Jerry grabbed at the thin, leathery-skinned arm of the native. "Have I been chang – growing?"
"I do not know, of course," said the native, courteously. "I profoundly hope so. Have you?"
"Excuse me –" gulped Jerry. "I've got to get oot of here – back to th' ship!"
Illustration by RICK BRYANT
He turned, and raced back up the trail. Some twenty minutes later, he burst into the clearing before the ship to find an ominous silence hanging over everything. Only the faint rustle and hissing from the ever-growing jungle swallowing up the ship sounded on his eardrums.
"Milt – Ben!" he shouted, plunging into the ship. A hail from farther down the main corridor reassured him, and he followed it up to find all three unrestrained members of the crew in the sick bay. But – Jerry brought himself up short, his throat closing on him – there was a figure on the table.
"Who . . ." began Jerry. Milt Johnson turned around to face him. The captain's big body mercifully hid most of the silent form on the table.
"Wally Blake," said Milt emptily. "He managed to strangle himself after all. Got twisted up in his restraint jacket. Ben and I heard him thumping around in there, but by the time we got to him, it was too late. Art's doing an autopsy."
"Not exactly an autopsy," came the soft, Virginia voice of the medician from beyond Milt. "Just looking for something I suspected . . . and here it is!"
Milt spun about and Jerry pushed between the big captain and Ben. He found himself looking at the back of a human head from which a portion of the skull had been removed. What he saw before him was a small expanse of whitish, soft inner tissue that was the brainstem; and fastened to it almost like a grape growing there, was a small, purplish mass.
Art indicated the purple shape with the tip of a sharp, surgical instrument.
"There," he said. "And I bet we've each got one."
"What is it?" asked Ben's voice, hushed and a little nauseated.
"I don't know," said Art harshly. "How the devil would I be able to tell? But I found organisms in the bloodstreams of those of us I've taken blood samples from – organisms like spores, that look like this, only smaller, microscopic in size."
"You didn't tell me that!" said Milt, turning quickly to face him.
"What was the point?" Art turned toward the Team captain. Jerry saw that the medician's long face was almost bloodless. "I didn't know what they were. I thought if I kept looking, I might know more. Then I could have something positive to tell you, as well as the bad news. But – it's no use now."
"Why do you say that?" snapped Milt.
"Because it's the truth." Art's face seemed to slide apart, go loose and waxy with defeat. "As long as it was something nonphysical we were fighting, there was some hope we could throw it off. But – you see what's going on inside us. We're being changed physically. That's where the nightmares come from. You can't overcome a physical change with an effort of will!"
"What about the Grotto at Lourdes?" asked Jerry. His head was whirling strangely with a mass of ideas. His own great-grandfather – the family story came back to mind – had been judged by his physician in 1896 to have advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. Going home from the doctor's office, Simon Fraser McWhin had decided that he could not afford to have tuberculosis at this time. That he would not, therefore, have tuberculosis at all. And he had dismissed the matter fully from his mind.
One year later, examined by the same physician, he had no signs of tuberculosis whatsoever.
But in this present moment, Art, curling up in his chair at the end of the table, seemed not to have heard Jerry's question. And Jerry was suddenly reminded of the question that had brought him pelting back from the native village.
"Is it growing – I mean was it growing when Wally strangled himself – that growth on his brain?" he asked.
Art roused himself.
"Growing?" he repeated dully. He climbed to his feet and picked up an instrument. He investigated the purple mass for a moment.
"No," he said, dropping the instrument wearily and falling back into his chair. "Looks like its outer layer has died and started to be reabsorbed – I think." He put his head in his hands. "I'm not qualified to answer such questions. I'm not trained . . ."
"Who is?" demanded Milt, grimly, looming over the table and the rest of them. "And we're reaching the limit of our strength as well as the limits of what we know –"
"We're done for," muttered Ben. His eyes were glazed, looking at the dissected body on the table. "It's not my fault –"
"Catch him! Catch Art!" shouted Jerry, leaping forward.
But he was too late. The medician had been gradually curling up in his chair since he had sat down in it again. Now, he slipped out of it to the floor, rolled in a ball, and lay still.
"Leave him alone." Milt's large hand caught Jerry and held him back. "He may as well lie there as someplace else." He got to his feet. "Ben's right. We're done for."
"Done for?" Jerry stared at the big man. The words he had just heard were words he would never have imagined hearing from Milt.
"Yes," said Milt. He seemed somehow to be speaking from a long distance off.
"Listen –" said Jerry. The tigerishness inside him had woken at Milt's words. It tugged and snarled against the words of defeat from the captain's lips. "We're winning. We aren't losing!"
"Quit it, Jerry," said Ben dully, from the far end of the room.
"Quit it – ?" Jerry swung on the engineer. "You lost your temper with me before I went down to the village, about the way I said 'oot'! How could you lose your temper if you were full of tranquilizers? I haven't been taking any myself, and I feel better because of it. Don't tell me you've been taking yours! – and that means we're getting stronger than the nightmares."
"The tranquilizers've been making me sick, if you must know! That's why I haven't been taking them –" Ben broke off, his face graying. He pointed a shaking finger at the purplish mass. "I'm being changed, that's why they made me sick! I'm changing already!" His voice rose toward a scream. "Don't you see, it's changing me –" He broke off, suddenly screaming and leaping at Milt with clawing fingers. "We're all changing! And it's your fault for bringing the ship down here. You did it –"
Milt's huge fist slammed into the side of the smaller man's jaw, driving him to the floor beside the still shape of the medician, where he lay quivering and sobbing.
Slowly Milt lifted his gaze from the fallen man and faced Jerry. It was the standard seventy-two degrees centigrade in the room, but Jerry saw perspiration standing out on Milt's calm face as if he had just stepped out of a steam bath.
"But he may be right," said Milt, emotionlessly. His voice seemed to come from the far end of some lightless tunnel. "We may be changing under the influence of those growths right now – each of us."
"Milt!" said Jerry, sharply. But Milt's face never changed. It was large, and calm, and pale – and drenched with sweat. "Now's the last time we ought to give up! We're starting to understand it now. I tell you, the thing is to meet Communicator and the other natives head on! Head to head we can crack them wide open. One of us has to go down to that village."
"No. I'm the captain," said Milt, his voice unchanged. "I'm responsible, and I'll decide. We can't lift ship with less than five men and there's only
two of us – you and I – actually left. I can't risk one of us coming under the influence of the growth in him, and going over to the alien side."
"Going over?" Jerry stared at him.
"That's what all this has been for – the jungle, the natives, the nightmare. They want to take us over." Sweat ran down Milt's cheeks and dripped off his chin, while he continued to talk tonelessly and gaze straight ahead. "They'll send us – what's left of us – back against our own people. I can't let that happen. We'll have to destroy ourselves so there's nothing for them to use."
"Milt –" said Jerry.
"No." Milt swayed faintly on his feet like a tall tree under a wind too high to be felt on the ground at its base. "We can't risk leaving ship or crew. We'll blow the ship up with ourselves in it –"
"Blow up my ship!"
It was a wild-animal scream from the floor at their feet; and Ben Akham rose from almost under the table like a demented wildcat, aiming for Milt's jugular vein. So unexpected and powerful was the attack that the big captain tottered and fell. With a noise like worrying dogs, they rolled together under the table.
The changed tiger inside Jerry broke its bonds and flung free.
He turned and ducked through the door into the corridor. It was a heavy pressure door with a wheel lock, activating metal dogs to seal it shut in case of a hull blow-out and sudden loss of air. Jerry slammed the door shut, and spun the wheel.
The dogs snicked home. Snatching down the portable fire extinguisher hanging on the wall alongside, Jerry dropped the foam container on the floor and jammed the metal nozzle of its hose between a spoke of the locking wheel and the unlocking stop on the door beneath it.
He paused. There was silence inside the sick-bay lab. Then the wheel jerked against the nozzle and the door tried to open.
"What's going on?" demanded the voice of Milt. There was a pause. "Jerry, what's going on out there? Open up!"
A wild, crazy impulse to hysterical laughter rose inside Jerry without warning. It took all his will power to choke it back.
"You're locked in, Milt," he said.
"Jerry!" The wheel spoke clicked against the jamming metal nozzle, in a futile effort to turn. "Open up! That's an order!"
"Sorry, Milt," said Jerry softly and lightheadedly. "I'm not ready yet to burn the hoose about my ears. This business of you wanting to blow up the ship's the same sort of impulse to suicide that got Wally and the rest. I'm off to face the natives now and let them have their way with me. I'll be back later, to let you oot."
"Jerry!"
Jerry heard Milt's voice behind him as he went off down the corridor.
"Jerry!" There was a fusillade of pounding fists against the door, growing fainter as Jerry moved away. "Don't you see? – that growth in you is finally getting you! Jerry, come back! Don't let them take over one of us! Jerry . . ."
Jerry left the noise and the ship together behind hint as he stepped out of the air lock. The jungle, he saw, was covering the slip's hull again, already hiding it for the most part. He went on out to the translator console and began taking off his clothes. When he was completely undressed, he unhooked the transceiver he had brought back from the native village, slung it on a loop of his belt, and hung the belt around his neck.
He headed off down the trail toward the village, wincing a little as the soles of his shoeless feet came into contact with pebbles along the way.
When he got to the village clearing, a naked shape he recognized as that of Communicator tossed up its arms in joy and came running to him.
"Well'" said Jerry. "I've grown. I've got rid of the poison of dead things and the sickness. Here I am to join you!"
"At last!" gabbled Communicator. Other natives were running up. "Throw away the dead thing around your neck!"
"I still need it to understand you," said Jerry. "I guess I need a little help to join you all the way."
"Help? We will help!" cried Communicator. "But you must throw that away. You have rid yourself of the dead things that you kept wrapped around your limbs and body," gabbled Communicator. "Now rid yourself of the dead thing hanging about your neck."
"But I tell you, if I do that," objected Jerry, "I won't be able to understand you when you talk, or make you understand me!"
"Throw it away. It is poisoning you! Throw it away!" said Communicator. By this time three or four more natives had come up and others were headed for the gathering. "Shortly you will understand all, and all will understand you. Throw it away!"
"Throw it away!" chorused the other natives.
"Well . . ." said Jerry. Reluctantly, he took off the belt with the transceiver, and dropped it. Communicator gabbled unintelligibly.
". . . come with me . . ." translated the transceiver like a faint and tinny echo from the ground where it landed.
Communicator took hold of Jerry's hand and drew him toward the nearest whitish structure. Jerry swallowed unobtrusively. It was one thing to make up his mind to do this; it was something else again to actually do it. But he let himself be led to and in through a crack in the structure.
Inside, the place smelled rather like a mixture of a root cellar and a hayloft – earthy and fragrant at the same time. Communicator drew him in among the waist-high tangle of roots rising and reentering the packed earth floor. The other natives swarmed after them. Close to the center of the floor they reached a point where the roots were too thick to allow them to pick their way any further. The roots rose and tangled into a mat, the irregular surface of which was about three feet off the ground. Communicator patted the root surface and gabbled agreeably.
"You want me to get up there?" Jerry swallowed again, then gritted his teeth as the chained fury in him turned suddenly upon himself. There was nothing worse, he snarled at himself, than a man who was long on planning a course of action; but short on carrying it out.
Awkwardly, he clambered up onto the matted surface of the roots. They gave irregularly under him and their rough surfaces scraped his knees and hands. The natives gabbled, and he felt leathery hands urging him to stretch out and lie down on his back.
He did so. The root scored and poked the tender skin of his back. It was exquisitely uncomfortable.
"Now what – ?" he gasped. He turned his head to look at the natives and saw that green tendrils, growing rapidly from the root mass, were winding about and garlanding the arms and legs of Communicator and several other of the natives standing by. A sudden pricking at his left wrist made him look down.
Careen garlands were twining around his own wrists and ankles, sending wire-thin tendrils into his skin. In unconscious reflex of panic he tried to heave upward, but the green bonds held him fast.
"Gabble-gabble-gabble . . ." warbled Communicator, reassuringly.
With sudden alarm, Jerry realized that the green tendrils were growing right into the arms and legs of the natives as well. He was abruptly conscious of further prickings in his own arms and legs.
"What's going on –" he started to say, but found his tongue had gone unnaturally thick and unmanageable. A wave of dizziness swept over him as if a powerful general anesthetic was taking hold. The interior of the structure seemed to darken; and he felt as if he was swooping away toward its ceiling on the long swing of some monster pendulum . . .
It swung him on into darkness. And nightmare.
It was the same old nightmare, but more so. It was nightmare experienced awake instead of asleep; and the difference was that he had no doubt about the fact that he was experiencing what he was experiencing, nor any tucked-away certainty that waking would bring him out of it.
Once more he floated through a changing soup of uncertainty, himself a changing part of it. It was not painful, it was not even terrifying. But it was hideous – it was an affront to nature. He was not himself. He was a thing, a part of the whole – and he must reconcile himself to being so. He must accept it.
Reconcile himself to it – no! It was not possible for the unbending, solitary, individualistic part that was hi
m to do so. But accept it – maybe.
Jerry set a jaw that was no longer a jaw and felt the determination in him to blast through, to comprehend this incomprehensible thing, become hard and undeniable as a sword-point of tungsten steel. He drove through –
And abruptly the soup fell into order. It slid into focus like a blurred scene before the gaze of a badly myopic man who finally gets his spectacles before his eyes. Suddenly, Jerry was aware that what he observed was a scene not just before his eyes, but before his total awareness. And it was not the interior of the structure where he lay on a bed of roots, but the whole planet.
It was a landscape of factories. Countless factories, interconnected, intersupplying, integrated. It lacked only that he find his own working place among them.
Now, said this scene. This is the sane universe, the way it really is. Reconcile yourself to it.
The hell I will!
It was the furious, unbending, solitary, individualistic part that was essentially him, speaking again. Not just speaking. Roaring – snarling its defiance, like a tiger on a hillside.
And the scene went – pop.
Jerry opened his eyes. He sat up. The green shoots around and in his wrists and ankles pulled prickingly at him. But they were already dying and not able to hold him. He swung his legs over the edge of the mat of roots and stood down. Communicator and the others, who were standing there, backed fearfully away from him, gabbling.
He understood their gabbling no better than before, but now he could read the emotional overtones in it. And those overtones were now of horror and disgust, overlying a wild, atavistic panic and terror. He walked forward. They scuttled away before him, gabbling, and he walked through the nearest crack in the wall of the structure and out into the sunlight, toward the transceiver and the belt where he had dropped them.
Gordon R. Dickson's SF Best Page 14