The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72

by Robert Silverberg

  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, gr
inning. “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.

  IN ENTROPY’S JAWS

  This is a story that I began in January, 1970 and finished, after taking a little break for a winter holiday in a warmer place than the one in which I lived, early in March of that year. It was written at a time when I was still reasonably comfortable with the conventions of science fiction and had not yet entered into the period of literary and personal chaos that would complicate my life from 1973 or so through the early 1980’s. And so I blithely tackled this long, complex, challenging story, which moves among changing levels of unreality and shifting zones of time, with the sort of confidence that I would later lose and be a long time regaining.

  I don’t recall much about the genesis of “In Entropy’s Jaws,” only that I wrote it for the second issue of Bob Hoskins’ paperback anthology, Infinity. Hoskins, a long-time science-fiction figure whom I had known glancingly for many years, paid me well and gave me a free hand artistically, a combination that—not too surprisingly—I found irresistible, and so I did a story for each of the five issues of his anthology that appeared between 1970 and 1973. Some of my best work, too. (The first of them was included in the previous volume of this series; three of them are in here, and the fifth, done in that troubled time when I was beginning to lose all faith in the value of science fiction, will be in the next one.)

  ——————

  Static crackles from the hazy golden cloud of airborne loudspeakers drifting just below the ceiling of the spaceliner cabin. A hiss: communications filters are opening. An impending announcement from the bridge, no doubt. Then the captain’s bland, mechanical voice: “We are approaching the Panama Canal. All passengers into their bottles until the all-clear after insertion. When we come out the far side, we’ll be traveling at eighty lights toward the Perseus relay booster. Thank you.” In John Skein’s cabin the warning globe begins to flash, dousing him with red, yellow, green light, going up and down the visible spectrum, giving him some infra- and ultra- too. Not everybody who books passage on this liner necessarily has human sensory equipment. The signal will not go out until Skein is safely in his bottle. Go on, it tells him. Get in. Get in. Panama Canal coming up.

  Obediently he rises and moves across the narrow cabin toward the tapering dull-skinned steel container, two and a half meters high, that will protect him against the dimensional stresses of canal insertion. He is a tall, angular man with thin lips, a strong chin, glossy black hair that clings close to his high-vaulted skull. His skin is deeply tanned but his eyes are those of one who has been in winter for some time. This is the fiftieth year of his second go-round. He is traveling alone toward a world of the Abbondanza system, perhaps the last leg on a journey that has occupied him for several years.

  The passenger-bottle swings open on its gaudy rhodium-jacketed hinge when its sensors, picking up Skein’s mass and thermal output, tell it that its protectee is within entry range. He gets in. It closes and seals, wrapping him in a seamless magnetic field. “Please be seated,” the bottle tells him softly. “Place your arms through the stasis loops and your feet in the security platens. When you have done this the pressor fields will automatically be activated and you will be fully insulated against injury during the coming period of turbulence.” Skein, who has had plenty of experience with faster-than-light travel, has anticipated the instructions and is already in stasis. The bottle closes. “Do you wish music?” it asks him. “A book? A vision spool? Conversation?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” Skein says, and waits.

  He understands waiting very well by this time. Once he was an impatient man, but this is a thin season in his life, and it has been teaching him the arts of stoic acceptance. He will sit here with the Buddha’s own complacency until the ship is through the canal. Silent, alone, self-sufficient. If only there will be no fugues this time. Or, at least—he is negotiating the terms of his torment with his demons—at least let them not be flashforwards. If he must break loose again from the matrix of time, he prefers to be cast only into his yesterdays, never into his tomorrows.

  “We are almost into the canal now,” the bottle tells him pleasantly.

  “It’s all right. You don’t need to look after me. Just let me know when it’s safe to come out.”

  He closes his eyes. Trying to envision the ship: a fragile glimmering purple needle squirting through clinging blackness, plunging toward the celestial vortex just ahead, the maelstrom of clashing forces, the soup of contravariant tensors. The Panama Canal, so-called. Through which the liner will shortly rush, acquiring during its passage such a garland of borrowed power that it will rip itself free of the standard fourspace; it will emerge on the far side of the canal into a strange, tranquil pocket of the universe where the speed of light is the downside limiting velocity, and no one knows where the upper limit lies.

  Alarms sound in the corridor, heavy, resonant: clang, clang, clang. The dislocation is beginning. Skein is braced. What does it look like out there? Folds of glowing black velvet, furry swatches of the disrupted continuum, wrapping themselves around the ship? Titanic lightnings hammering on the hull? Laughing centaurs flashing across the twisted heavens? Despondent masks, fixed in tragic grimaces, dangling between the blurred stars? Streaks of orange, green, crimson: sick rainbows, limp, askew? In we go. Clang, clang, clang. The next phase of the voyage now begins. He thinks of his destination, holding an image of it rigidly in mind. The picture is vivid, though this is a world he has visited only in spells of temporal fugue. Too often; he has been there again and again in these moments of disorientation in time. The colors are wrong on that world. Purple sand. Blue-leaved trees. Too much manganese? Too little copper? He will forgive it its colors if it will grant him his answers. And then. Skein feels the familiar ugly throbbing at the base of his neck, as if the tip of his spine is swelling like a balloon. He curses. He tries to resist. As he feared, not even the bottle can wholly protect him against these stresses. Outside the ship the universe is being wrenched apart; some of that slips in here and throws him into a private epilepsy of the time-line. Space-time is breaking up for him. He will go into fugue. He clings, fighting, knowing it is futile. The currents of time buffet him, knocking him a short distance
into the future, then a reciprocal distance into the past, as if he is a bubble of insect-spittle glued loosely to a dry reed. He cannot hold on much longer. Let it not be flashforward, he prays, wondering who it is to whom he prays. Let it not be flashforward. And he loses his grip. And shatters. And is swept in shards across time.

  Of course, if x is before y then it remains eternally before y, and nothing in the passage of time can change this. But the peculiar position of the “now” can be easily expressed simply because our language has tenses. The future will be, the present is, and the past was; the light will be red, it is now yellow, and it was green. But do we, in these terms, really describe the “processional” character of time? We sometimes say that an event is future, then it is present, and finally it is past; and by this means we seem to dispense with tenses, yet we portray the passage of time. But this is really not the case; for all that we have done is to translate our tenses into the words “then” and “finally”, and into the order in which we state our clauses. If we were to omit these words or their equivalents, and mix up the clauses, our sentences would no longer be meaningful. To say that the future, the present, and the past are in some sense is to dodge the problem of time by resorting to the tenseless language of logic and mathematics. In such an atemporal language it would be meaningful to say that Socrates is mortal because all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, even though Socrates has been dead many centuries. But if we cannot describe time either by a language containing tenses or by a tenseless language, how shall we symbolize it?

  He feels the curious doubleness of self, the sense of having been here before, and knows it is flashback. Some comfort in that. He is a passenger in his own skull, looking out through the eyes of John Skein on an event that he has already experienced, and which he now is powerless to alter.