Alienist

by Laurence M. Janifer

  Dube?

  It might be, I told myself.

  And it might be another entrant entirely—or fifty other entrants. It really didn’t seem to make much difference; the basic difficulty was the one we’d been stuck with from the start.

  There was no way to get to any one of the alien beings. We had to wait for them to come to us.

  This was not fatal, I told myself. Folla (and by extension the aliens in general) wanted something from us, and kept coming back to get it.

  That bothered me. Folla or Dube had asked me, Hester MacEvoy and Hilda for help. Maybe others had been asked—no way to tell.

  Were the aliens limited to City Two? To Ravenal? To humanity?

  They might be popping up in Giell dreams, or Beri dreams— or anywhere, on any world.

  Maybe there was something about Josephson junctions that limited the people they could work on.

  Maybe there was something about dreams.

  Euglane was really in no shape to be bothered, I thought, but I went and bothered him anyhow. I put the back of my head to work on the damn locked room—there had to be an answer somewhere, didn’t there?—and phoned him.

  He said he was seeing two patients—patients he felt he couldn’t put off at all—but the earliest would be coming in around thirteen. “One U. S,” he added helpfully.

  It was still morning, so I went right on over.

  He relaxed at once, in his living-room, and he had that paper ready for me. The first time I’d met him, he’d wanted to show it to me, and we’d got off on another track. This time he was urgent about it.

  “If these beings can affect human dreaming,” he said, “then perhaps some of the reports I’ve been getting have a real basis.”

  “Your patients dream about—”

  “Some of them do,” he said. “And I’ve seen the dreams as referring to their own lives. They do so refer, of course—but there may be more in them than such reference. Your cigarettes—”

  “Inoson Smoking Pleasure Tubes,” I said. “Perfectly safe— no Earth tobaccos.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They may be phallic symbols. They may be symbols of other things. But they are still cigarettes; they can still be lit and smoked.”

  I had never thought of a cigarette as a phallic symbol. Lighting one up and burning it to ash seemed the Hell of a strange thing to do with it if it was one. “And the dreams, whatever symbols the patient puts into them, may also have some real elements.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  I sat there and looked at the paper. Bundle of papers this time, in fact—very small print, and crowded. I wondered if all Euglane’s patients reported contact with alien beings. I wondered if all psychiatrists’ patients did. Probably not, in either case, but he’d built up a sizable case-list.

  We went through it together, with some care. Most of the alien beings were fairly standard stuff, right off the 3V. Amorphous blobs, great spiky beings with teeth, villainous Things that looked like humans dyed bright green, and so on. A few of the dreamers had been more imaginative—there was a child’s doll that lisped horrors, for instance—but the basics seemed fairly standard, as dreams and nightmares go.

  “I looked especially for any alien making a request of the dreamer,” he said.

  He’d looked, but he hadn’t found anything promising. There were some requests in the pile, but they were dream-requests: an alien in a dream had asked the dreamer to do or say something or other, in the dream. There were no requests that carried over into waking life.

  “I had hoped you might see something in the cases that I’d missed,” Euglane said sadly.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything,” I said. “I’ll give the whole thing another good look, if I can take a copy—”

  “I have one for you,” he said, and provided it. I tucked it away in an inside pocket, where it made quite a bulge, and went back to my own dream.

  “He didn’t appear to you,” Euglane said.

  “He was only a voice,” I said. “What he’d been at first, in my ship. If he was also the small dog I dreamed about, he changed his voice for that—but I don’t see any reason why he couldn’t. If you can turn yourself into a small dog, changing your voice ought to be easy.” I thought of something. “He told me I was going to wake up. Maybe he was trying to duck any more questions.”

  “He may have seen that you were going to awaken,” Euglane said. “That’s physiological—the body controls it. You can wake before your body insists—you can wake yourself up, sometimes—but you can’t keep from waking when it does insist: when the body wakes, you have no choice. There might not be much he can do about it—when your body decides to wake up, you’re awake.”

  I asked my two questions: Could something in a dream persuade you that you could do things, physically, when you were awake, that had previously been impossible for you?, and: Was there any way of figuring out whether Folla and company had been popping up in dreams all over the place, or even on other worlds, to other people as well as humans?

  On the first question, things seemed to be pretty vague. “The mind controls the body more than is realized, even today,” he said. “The mind can create and heal open wounds, without physical agency from outside. It can block, or heighten, all our senses; hyperacuity, for instance, can be produced in a subject by any good hypnotist. Whether it can bypass physical damage, as in the midbrain disease Hester MacEvoy would have—whatever its exact nature, if Dr. Rasczak was dealing with it—I simply do not know. It might be worth finding out just what sort of disease she does have; and, as for physical aid from the mind— well, it is possible.”

  “Doing something normally impossible for you?”

  “There is,” he said, “a phenomenon called ‘hysterical strength’. Under various sorts of impetus, a human can perform acts which would normally be impossible, of many kinds. A hypnotist—I have seen this done, though in my own practice I have had no occasion to call it forth—may cause a human to use this power. Can it be done by means of sleep-suggestion?”

  He paused, and I said: “Is there an answer to that?”

  “Not much of an answer,” he said. “Little is known about hypnotism, even today; I myself use it sparingly and with great care. The link between sleep and hypnotism exists; but just how close the states are we do not know with certainty.”

  On the second question…

  “It might be that he appears in non-human dreams,” Euglane said, “though so far all we have is human testimony. If a Giell began to dream of some being making requests of him, requests regarding his waking life, he would know something very odd had happened—our shared dream-world does not abut so closely on our waking one. I will ask a few people who deal with troubled members of other races, and see if anything is visible.”

  “And how about Folla’s appearing somewhere else—anywhere else? Or Dube?” I said.

  His arms twined over his head. “How can I say?” he asked. “So far, all the reports we have cluster around two centers: you or Harris France.”

  “And Cornelia Rasczak,” I said. “MacEvoy was her patient—she had nothing to do with France.”

  “But he might have followed a chain from France to Rasczak to MacEvoy,” Euglane said. “It’s clear that he isn’t just picking people at random: we can define centers.”

  “We don’t have a lot of targets, so far,” I said. “You haven’t had any odd dreams, for instance.”

  “I have not,” he said.

  “Nor the Master,” I said, “whatever his dreams are like. I wonder if Cornelia Rasczak had some.”

  Euglane waved his long arms slightly. Another shrug? “I doubt it,” he said. “She became a danger to Folla—and Dube— when Hester MacEvoy told her of the dreams. If she’d had any of her own, she would either have been a helper to them, or a danger, long ago.”

  “True,” I said. “Which means—well, if Hilda is in danger we can trust the Master to look out for her.”

  “I should think so,
” he said.

  “But Hester MacEvoy—”

  “Perhaps it should be looked into,” he said.

  So I did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I stopped off for lunch first—at Old-Fashioned Food, where I found herring in cream sauce, pan-fried potatoes and a dark beer that was, unfortunately, no better than most of the drink on Ravenal, where they don’t understand such things. Their coffee, though, wasn’t at all bad, and seemed to be a local blend I’d never run into before. I made a mental note to ask about it some day—Mirella would know—and used my pocket piece, which I had remembered (for once) to hook into the system, to phone Hester MacEvoy.

  She answered on the first blip, and seemed pleased to hear from me. Pleased, and a little annoyed. “You said you’d find people to come and visit me,” she said, the words dragging a little. “I haven’t seen them, Mr. Knave.”

  “Knave,” I said, “and I can come over and visit you myself, if you’d like.”

  Her tone didn’t change—it fit the basic expression of her face, as I remembered it—but her voice got louder. “Oh, that would be wonderful, Mr. Knave,” she said, and I sighed and told her I’d be right over.

  When I got there nothing had changed in the place—it was as if I’d left it twenty seconds before. She met me at the door, sitting in a depressed sort of way in her chair, and wheeled out of the way as before, to let me pass into the same dark little living-room. Books everywhere, coat-rack, woman’s dark-grey cloak—everything was exactly the same. The cloak was hung on a different high peg on the rack, that was all.

  Something bothered me, dimly, about that fact. But she’d shut the door and come into the room. “Would you like some tea, Mr. Knave?” she said slowly. “It would really be very little trouble.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “I’ll pass.”

  “I like being hospitable,” she said. So we had some tea. And some long, flat and slightly stale cookies covered with more sugar than you’d see in an average month.

  “It’s nice having someone to do for,” she said. “Since Mr. MacEvoy passed over, you know, I’ve been very alone. They don’t like you if you come from somewhere else.”

  “So you said,” I put in. “You’re from Kingsley, aren’t you?”

  She gave me that painful, miserable smile. “How nice of you to remember,” she said. “Yes. I had the loveliest years of my life there. Until I married, you see. Not that marriage wasn’t a delight, Mr. Knave, because it was. A delight.” Smile. “But then Mr. MacEvoy had to go and pass over,” she said. “Of course, there is the pension, and that’s something. Though it’s not very much.”

  “Eight years ago,” I said.

  “My,” she said. “You do have a good memory, don’t you? It must be wonderful to have a good memory. I never did, you know. Not that there was any need for it, of course, we always had a nice couple in as help. But since Mr. MacEvoy passed over, I’ve been quite alone. Quite alone.”

  What two servants had to do with memory I couldn’t really imagine, but there was no sense in trying to find out. The servants weren’t around any more, anyhow—not since Mr. MacEvoy had passed over. “The other day,” I said, keeping it as casual as I could, “you mentioned a dream you’d had.”

  She looked at me with very wide eyes. “I did?” she said. “I did? My goodness, I must have been a terrible bore. People who tell their dreams often are, you know.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I was very interested. You said someone called Dube appeared to you in a dream, and asked you to build something for him.”

  The eyes widened a little more. She was really a remarkably ugly woman. I wondered briefly about Mr. MacEvoy, but there’s no accounting for tastes, and he may have been madly in love. Perhaps even with Hester. “Dube?” she said. “I don’t remember anybody named Dube. People here do have funny names sometimes, it’s not like Kingsley, you know, but I don’t think—”

  “Not a real person,” I said. “In fact, not a person at all. Some kind of alien. In a dream.”

  She shook her head, very slowly. Her clawlike like hands gripped the arms of the wheelchair. “Oh my, Mr. Knave,” she said. “You must have me confused with some other person. Even a good memory can make little mistakes sometimes. Or so I’ve heard.”

  I shut my eyes for a second. When I opened them again nothing had changed. “You didn’t have a dream about an alien named Dube, who asked you to help him get in to us?”

  The smile again. “I think—” she said— “mind you, one never does know, and of course I have a midbrain disease—but I think—I’d remember having a dream like that. It sounds very strange.”

  “You didn’t have one?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t,” she said. “Are you very interested in dreams, Mr. Knave?”

  “Only in some of them,” I said. “By the way, and if it isn’t too personal a question, what kind of midbrain disease is it you have?”

  “Oh, it’s not a disease, really,” she said.

  All right. Any minute now, she was going to tell me she wasn’t really Hester MacEvoy. The real Hester MacEvoy, she would explain, had passed over. Possibly to Kingsley. “It isn’t?”

  “I had a tumor,” she said. “An astrocytoma, that’s what they called it. It’s a nasty sort of thing, you know, very nasty, Mr. Knave—but they cut it out, the doctors. Only it had done some damage to me, you see, and then there was some more damage, because a little bit of it had to be killed with chemicals. Midbrain damage. They tell me I’m a very lucky woman, Mr. Knave, because an astrocytoma can actually go and kill a person. But mine didn’t.” Her hands tightened on the wheelchair’s arms. “Not quite, it didn’t,” she said. It wasn’t a smile she gave me, but a sudden, startling expression of absolute grimness.

  Then the smile.

  “But that was a long time ago,” she said. “And it’s such a depressing subject, not at all fit for tea-time. Are you enjoying your tea, Mr. Knave?”

  “It’s lovely,” I said. “And thank you. Ms MacEvoy, would you do me a very important favor?”

  Smile. “Oh, it’s no trouble,” she said. “I’ll get more cookies in just an instant.” She put her hands on the wheels, ready to zip out to the kitchen.

  “No,” I said. “Not the cookies—the cookies are fine, but this is a different favor.”

  “Yes, Mr. Knave?” She was attentive and watchful. Maybe, I thought, she expected me to ask her to show me her operation.

  “If you ever do have a dream about an alien—”

  “Named Dube,” she said. “That was his name, wasn’t it, Mr. Knave?”

  “Any alien at all,” I said. “If you ever have a dream that has an alien in it—no matter what his name is, no matter anything at all—would you call me and tell me about it, as quickly as you can?”

  “My goodness,” she said. “Why would I do that? It would just be a dream. Not something to be excited about.”

  “Would you do it for me?” I said. “As a favor?”

  She considered it. After a minute or so she said: “I will, Mr. Knave. I don’t expect to dream about alien beings, you know— it’s not my sort of dreaming at all. But if I do, I’ll call you right up about it.” Smile. “You will leave me your number, won’t you?”

  I gave her a card. “I’ve written my number in City Two right there,” I said.

  She studied the card for a while. In the dim little room I was surprised she could see it clearly, but there was nothing, apparently, wrong with her eyes. “My,” she said. “A Survivor. That must be very exciting work.”

  “It has its moments,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I was sitting in a taxi, on my way back to my hotel, when it hit me. I actually said it: “Aha.”

  I wish I could tell you how I reached the answer, but I can only tell you how I reached part of it—from what (as you’ll see) somebody else couldn’t reach. That told me who had killed Harris France.

  How Harris France had been killed—ho
w the somebody had been able to get in and out of a locked (and chained, and bolted, and sealed) house I also knew. My mind displayed for me a picture of the front door, with the small scuffed-or-trampled patch of dirt right in front of it, and the greenflower stretching all around.

  When I’d realized who our killer was, I’d said: “Aha.” When I’d realized how the job had been managed, I said: “Damn.”

  I should have seen it before. I should have seen it long before—within about a minute of getting inside the damn house. My only consolation was that nobody else had seen it, either, and that wasn’t much consolation. I knew exactly what the Master was going to say when I told him: “Gerald, you see, but you do not observe.”

  Damn.

  I wish I could tell you why my mind picked that moment to toss the picture at me. I wish I could tell you—or myself—why my mind does most of the things it does. But there are Mysterious Entities Unknown to Science, even today, and the inside of my head is where a good many of them seem to live.

  Maybe knowing who somehow kicked my mind into telling me how. It’s as good an explanation as any.

  The taxi stopped in front of my hotel and I got out and paid the mech and found my way through the lobby and on up to my room, and I did not visibly curse or fume until I had reached it, gone inside, and shut the door.

  The damned thing was obvious, of course. It has come to me that the answers always are, once you have them. They stand there and say: “Here I am, smiling and waving and dressed in bright stoplight red, easily, even offensively, visible—what took you so long?”

  Of course. Getting in wasn’t the problem, and never had been; Cornelia Rasczak would have let somebody she knew in, easily. But getting out, and chaining the door shut after you were outside…