“Your patient, if that term is acceptable to you, is Dr. Fisher. He’s an authority on space medicine and the key man in Britain’s space project. That’s why this mission is important. We’ve got a colony on the moon, just as America has, and Russia and China. Our problem now is maintaining it and extending it. I needn’t go into the how and why, but Fisher is the only man we can hope for even the chance of an answer from.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Arnold told him. “But don’t expect anything. The nearer I get to it the more I’m sure that we’re on a wild goose chase.”
They came into Woomera on the far side of the town from the launching grounds. Half a dozen rockets thrust their gleaming towers to the sun. The landscape was dotted with structures and buildings that by their odd shapes seemed to have extensions into a new dimension of the future.
The hospital was as modern and gleaming as everything here. The psychiatrist who received them, a Dr. Pevsner, was polite but no more, Arnold thought, than he had to be. And informative, but there again, no more than he had to be. His attitude was understandable. No expert liked unspecialized outsiders brought in, in any field. He could obviously tell that Arnold was no psychiatrist, and Arnold made no attempt to keep up any pretence in that direction. The psychiatrist might be suffering from a temporarily disjointed nose, but he would have his compensation when the interloper tried and failed and departed.
“Breakdown,” Pevsner said, “was five months ago. Diagnosis is schizophrenia.” He looked inquiringly at Arnold as if Arnold might not even know the meaning of the word.
Arnold nodded.
“The diagnosis is infallible. Treatment has been with drugs of the mescalin group, then with shock therapy—electrical and insulin. Reaction negative.”
Arnold dug down in his memory for a detail that he had encountered in copy for a medical manufacturer’s release. He found it.
“And encephalo-feedback?”
The doctor blinked and Arnold smiled inwardly.
“Of course. But it bas never worked where the older methods fail.”
“No, but side effects are less.”
The doctor reddened. “Just remember, Mr. Ash, that medical treatment of the patient is in our hands.”
“It’s all right,” Arnold reassured him. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
The psychiatrist rose, plainly annoyed. “I’ll have the patient sent in.” He departed.
A few minutes later an orderly came in, leading by the arm a tall gaunt man with grey hair. The man’s eyes were vacant.
“Sit down there,” Arnold said, not knowing how to begin.
The tall man made no response. Arnold gestured to the orderly, who led the patient to the chair.
“Thank you,” Arnold said to the orderly.
The orderly coughed. “I’ve got orders to stay with the patient.” His accent was broad Australian. “Medical security.”
Arnold shrugged. “Very well. Will you please sit over there.” He indicated the farthest chair in the aseptically white room.
Arnold turned to Dr. Fisher. The sick man sat across the desk from him, facing him. Yet not facing him, for it was as if, to him, Arnold—and everything else—simply did not exist.
“Dr. Fisher,” Arnold said softly.
The man turned away, as if disowning any claim to his identity. Well, it was some reaction, even if completely negative. Unless it had been purely coincidental.
“Dr. Fisher,” Arnold repeated.
But the man seemed now only to be preoccupied with the disposition of his hands. He brought them up from his lap and spread them on the desktop. He looked at them as if they belonged to somebody else. He lifted the right one, then let them both slump back to his lap.
Arnold looked at the single skeleton case sheet which was all that Pevsner had left. He wondered whether that had been the psychiatrist’s or Jay’s doing, and found that he didn’t care one bit.
“You are forty-nine?”
“Nine,” Dr. Fisher mumbled.
“You were born in Dunedin, New Zealand?”
“Wha—”
“Dunedin.”
“Dunedin.”
“Is that a big town?”
“Big town.”
“Yes, Dunedin, is it a big town?”
“Town.”
Arnold shook his head hopelessly. For this he had been brought twelve thousand miles across the world! He might as well have been still twelve thousand miles away for all the contact he could make with this man. He could not even begin to communicate with words, let alone by the method which he had been brought all this way to try. For that there had to be consent, as he had tried to convince Jay. For the hundredth time he cursed the bureaucratic mind.
He made a last effort. He brought himself to look deep in the vacant eyes of Dr. Fisher. It took an effort. Nothing, he realized, was so frightening as mindlessness. At least, to him. He remembered a horror film he had seen as a boy. It had been about zombies and had been utterly laughable. Until—there was a shot of zombies trudging catatonically round a capstan, and suddenly the camera swung straight into the eyes of one of them… and it ceased to be laughable. It was like looking down into a bottomless pit. It was done by means of lighting and chemicals, he had told himself—but he hadn’t slept for a week after seeing it.
And now this was not done by means of light or chemicals or anything else; this was real—and horrible. Fighting his fear, he called out silently to the mind that lurked somewhere behind that emptiness.
There was no response. He had not expected any. He called again, “Dr. Fisher, Dr. Fisher,” trying to focus the power to a point that did not exist. There had been the time when, to show Claire that her fear of domination was groundless, he had tried to concentrate it in a manner parallel to this. He had succeeded because he had failed. Now he was failing—and failing.
Then there was a flicker. Something, he could not tell what, stirred.
He called again, feeling the flesh creep on the back of his neck.
Now something definitely moved in the eyes opposite his. It was as if there were a ledge beyond them up to which something infinitely wary had hauled itself to peer out.
The eyes blinked violently, and the image fled. But in that instant Arnold felt himself drawn forward. The barrier was gone. The mind of Dr. Fisher, or the ruined castle that contained it, was open to him.
The whole clinicality of the hospital room fell away. Now he stood in a great hall, its walls striated and jagged, that arched into blackness above him and stretched back into gibbering shadows.
“Dr. Fisher,” he cried out, and his silent voice echoed about him. The echoes died away in a sound like laughter.
“Frank,” he called out. Then, because another name came into his mind now, “Kipper.”
He felt something detach itself from the shadows, saw a tiny white face like a moth flutter about him, then rush away back into the shadows. The shadows stirred as if a wind had lifted them.
“Kipper,” he called again.
“Chalky?” came an answering voice, plaintive as a gull’s cry.
“Yes, it’s Chalky.”
“No—no, you’re not Chalky White.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m Arnold. You don’t know me, but I’m a friend. I’ve come to find you.”
“You’re lying again. You said you were Chalky, and you’re not.”
“I was only trying to be friendly. I’ve been sent to bring you home.”
“I don’t want to go home. Never, never. You can’t make me go back.”
“I can’t make you. But come back, please. Your friends miss you. They all want to see you again.”
The voice fled away.
Arnold groped into the shadows, calling out above the shrieks that rose up. It was as if the shadows themselves were threshing and crying aloud. And yet it was all silent, Arnold knew. Somewhere he was sitting opposite a man, and they were gazing at each other, locked in utter silence. Somewhere, bu
t in a distant and unreal country. Here was the only reality.
He advanced further into the tormented shadows. They swirled and parted, revealing a fleeing figure. Then they closed in again. Arnold followed in the direction of the figure, not questioning the unknown geometry that enabled him to do so.
And now it was as if he were climbing a mountain, clutching for handholds on a way that grew steadily steeper. He eased his way through a defile—and a vast winged shape with gleaming fangs came swooping down upon him. He raised his hands desperately to defend himself, and the shape veered away.
Then he was descending, into a pit lit with murky fires. Faceless creatures lumbered forth, hurling forked flame at him. He shouldered them aside. They were chimeras. Yet he felt that were he once to show fear, Identify himself with the fear that had begotten them, they could seize him and drag him down and devour him.
And then he broke through into the light.
It was sunlight, but the brazen sunlight of a day before a storm when everything stands out in such quivering detail as to be unreal.
It was a toy landscape he had entered, the kind of landscape that was painted on a child’s brick. The colours had the same primitive, varnished quality. Before him stood a little white house. He walked around it and—
—There was Doctor Francis Fisher… Frank… Kipper, a child of eight or nine, holding in his arms a black spaniel. Arnold knew, without being told, that the dog was dead. It lay brokenly in the boy’s arms, its coat shining dully in the yellow light.
Kipper looked up. “It wasn’t me. It was Chalky. Chalky killed him.”
The voice was the voice of a child—but the face was the face of a man of fifty.
The shadows closed in, as if the threatening storm had burst. But the shadows were in his own mind now…
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He was lying on his back, looking up at a cool white ceiling. He moved to get up, but hands restrained him gently. Faces moved in the heights above him. One craned down and spoke—in the deep timbre of Jay.
“How are you feeling now?”
“What happened?”
“You passed out.”
“Did I? That’s right, I remember now. How long have I been out?”
“Nearly three hours.”
Arnold pulled himself up. The restraining hand, at a gesture from Jay, released him; its owner, an orderly, moved away from his side. Arnold swung his legs over and sat on the side of the bed. The effort made pains explode in his head. He sank it into his hands.
Somebody held a glass of milky liquid in front of him.
“Drink that,” Jay said. Arnold complied.
Jay pulled a chair over and sat by him.
“Was it rough?”
“Rougher than anything I’ve ever been through. Just what did happen? A faint, pure and simple?”
“Not exactly. From what the orderly says, you went into some kind of trance with Fisher for about ten minutes. Both of you groaned and whimpered. Finally you shuddered and yelled and passed out. So did Fisher, at exactly the same time. Your pulse was racing, then fluttered and went dead slow before it returned to normal You had us really scared.”
“How about Fisher? Is he all right?”
“Yes. Pevsner’s looking after him. But I ought to ask you that question. Is he?”
“I can’t tell you yet. Let me pull myself together first.” He fumbled in pockets that weren’t there. “Do you have a cigarette?”
Jay handed him one. It tasted acrid after the draught he had just swallowed.
“Now,” said Jay. “We only know what happened outside. What really happened?”
Arnold smiled crookedly.
“I don’t think it would mean anything to you if I told you. Come to that, I’d have a job to describe it.”
“But did you get anywhere?”
“Yes.”
“You mean—you made contact with Fisher’s mind?”
Arnold nodded. “He’s suffering from—I’m no psychiatrist, but it’s what I suppose they’d call a guilt complex. And he’s terribly afraid.”
Jay beamed. “That adds up. Did you get down to the cause of it?”
Arnold grimaced. “The cause I saw was a pet dog that got killed when Fisher was a kid. But I know just about enough about the subject to know that that was probably a substitution, a symbol.”
“I’ll say it was a symbol!” Jay said elatedly. “Look, Ash, you’ll know before you’re through with this, but Fisher’s work these past few years has been concerned with making it possible for ordinary people to go into space. Not just hand-picked, acclimatized specialists, but anybody. Anybody reasonably fit, anyway. You can’t train an army of spacemen—”
He broke off, seeing Arnold’s expression.
“So that’s it! God, you make me sick!” Arnold exploded. “For Fisher’s childhood puppy read—how many?… dozens?… hundreds?—of space-mad kids, is that it? Deliberately unprepared guinea pigs! No wonder Fisher’s mind cracked. That’s probably because he’s fundamentally decent, unlike you bunch of ghouls.”
Jay looked concerned, rather than insulted.
“I shouldn’t have questioned you so soon after. You haven’t recovered from the experience yet. Tomorrow, eh?”
“Today will do,” Arnold flared. “You pressured me into this. Now I’ve got the whole picture, I’m sick and sorry I let myself be pressured. All you’re interested in is getting an army up there.”
Jay shrugged apologetically.
“All right, so I said army. That’s because the space project is under the direction of the military. The public wouldn’t sanction the money needed under any other heading. But we’re not aiming to put fighting men on the moon and planets. We have to get outposts established. We have to stake our claims, along with the other nations. We started late. There’s no time to lose. Would it make it any better if I called them colonists?”
“Call them what you like. I should think victims would be a better word. Getting men into space—there’s nothing wrong with that—but the thought of military like you in charge gives me the creeps. My father lost his legs in the last war to make the world safe for something they called liberty. And for peace and international sanity. So if I hate the guts of the military and its methods, perhaps you’ll understand why.”
Jay sighed and shook his head.
“I wish it were as simple as you make out. On the one side the black-hearted villains like me; on the other the lily-white victims like Fisher and you and the space volunteers. They really are volunteers, you know. Have you ever been dedicated to a cause?”
“A cause?” Arnold’s voice was bitter. “Only the one that in some perverted way has landed me here.”
“Ah, then you know how a cause can seem to get perverted?”
“Do I? What are you trying to prove?”
“I’m trying to prove nothing. I’m only trying to show that we live in a complicated world. A world in which the old fashioned virtues like idealism, faith, courage, get obscured, and in which a man makes strange alliances. There’s not a man in the world who can say, ‘I defend the right’, and mean it a hundred per cent and be a hundred per cent true. It’s a world in which men do the right things—sometimes—for the wrong reasons—nearly all of the time. The Americans build a dam for a backward country, ostensibly as a bighearted gesture, but in fact to keep their engineers employed and their steel mills rolling, but it’s still a good thing. The Russians build a generating station for another country in need. Another big-hearted gesture. In fact it’s to get a toehold for Russian methods and ideology. But again it’s still a good thing.
“Let me confess something, Mr. Ash, and you can believe me or not as you will. But not so very long ago, I found myself thinking in much the same way as you seem to. I come from a military family, where the military virtues are commonly held to be the original Ten Commandments. I served through the war and on several missions after. Enough to keep me busy and to keep me convinced that I was serv
ing the right cause in a manner fitting a military man. But then, quite suddenly, I took a look around and saw the world and the condition it was in—a state of nuclear stasis. Any further research into newer and more frightful weapons was a waste of time; both sides had the ultimate in frightfulness.
“I felt in my heart that in that setup there was no room for soldiers. I knew some of my colleagues had the same doubt, but they argued that soldiers would always be needed for local actions. Naturally I didn’t dispute the point with them, but I didn’t see much military purpose in fighting with conventional weapons just for the right to light the fuse for the big blow-up. Then, just at that time, I was offered this job—security man and general trouble-shooter for the new space programme.
“My first reaction was to draft a letter of refusal. I could have retired comfortably and honourably. My second reaction was to think. It took me a full week to decide.” He broke off. “Do I bore you?”
“No,” said Arnold—truthfully. He had recovered his equilibrium. Besides, it wasn’t every day you had a chance to see how the military mind worked in private.
“Thank you. And it does bear on your problem. Well, I decided. I don’t know whether it was the last stand of my upbringing, or whether I saw the space programme as a way out of the deadlock—my personal one as well as the global. I’ve been three years in the job now and been pretty fully engaged. But not too engaged to accrete a sense of purpose such as I never had in my life.
“Now, maybe in your eyes it’s for the wrong reasons. I may be going forward under a nationalistic banner—for want of a better one—just the same as the Russians and the Americans and the Chinese and all the rest who’re trying to crack the problem. And I’m committed to beating them, just as they’re committed to beating us. But we’re comrades in the fight as well as enemies. There’s an enemy that’s bigger than any of us.
“A big war is only a collection of smaller wars, and sometimes we’re so busy with the small wars that we don’t even know what the big one is really about. And vice versa. My father was a tank pioneer in the First World War. He spent half the war fighting his own generals, trying to get them to deploy tanks properly. The generals were too busy, only they didn’t know it, fighting the last war. My father was fighting the next.
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