by C. L. Moore
"No," Hooten said drowsily.
Dr. Scott sighed. "Do things begin to look blurry yet?"
"No, but I'm ... I'm beginning to ..."
"To what?"
"To wake up," Hooten said indistinctly, and closed his eyes. "Hello, Dr. Rasp."
"There is no Dr. Rasp," Dr. Scott said in an impatient voice. "Dr. Rasp is imaginary."
"Dr. Rasp says you don't exist," Hooten murmured, his eyes shut. "Yes, Dr. Rasp ..."
-
Hooten opened his faceted eyes and stared through the sky-slit at the Quatt Wunkery. He shook his head dizzily. "What's the matter?" Dr. Rasp asked.
"Dr. Scott just gave me an injection of sodium pentothal," Hooten said.
The psychiatrist made a quick note on his wing-case. Then he crossed his antennae with Hooten's again and turned on the juice.
"Dr. Scott is simply a defense," he pointed out. "There is no Dr. Scott. There is no such thing as sodium pentothal. You are going to estivate now, do you hear me? You will be deeply asleep, so deeply that Dr. Scott cannot wake you up. You will obey me, not Dr. Scott. I tell you to estivate. Do you hear me?"
"Yes ... but I'm afraid it isn't going to work very well. You see, if I estivate I'll just wake up in Dr. Scott's—"
"There is no Dr. Scott. Forget Dr. Scott."
"But—"
"Estivate. Estivate."
"All right. Now I'm ... oh, hello, Dr. Scott."
-
Dr. Scott reached for another hypodermic and used it.
"Just relax," he said gently.
"I'm beginning to hate this," Hooten said pettishly. "I'm caught right in the middle. Something's going to give if we keep on. I don't know what, but—can't we postpone it till tomorrow and let Dr. Rasp have his innings?"
"I am your doctor," Scott pointed out. "Not Dr. Rasp. You refer Dr. Rasp to me if he tries to—"
"Oh, those antennae," Hooten murmured. "I can't—I—"
"Just relax," Dr. Scott said. "There is no Dr. Rasp."
Hooten struggled feebly. "This can't go on," he protested in a drowsy voice. "I tell you, something will have to give. I—oh, for God's sake, Dr. Rasp keeps telling me to estivate."
"Hush," Dr. Scott said, looking thoughtfully toward the hypodermics.
-
"Estivate," said Dr. Rasp.
"Look out!" Hooten said wildly, struggling. "He's going to give me another shot—"
Dr. Rasp curled his antennae tightly around Hooten's and poured on more juice.
"Estivate," he said, and then had a sudden idea. "You too, Dr. Scott. Do you hear me? You're going to estivate, Dr. Scott. Relax. Stop struggling. You're in a warm, comfortable, musty burrow. You're beginning to estivate, Dr. Scott ..."
-
"Now he's trying to make you estivate," Hooten said, squirming on the couch.
Dr. Scott smiled grimly. He bent forward and fixed Hooten with a compelling gaze.
"Relax," he said. "I'm talking to you, Dr. Rasp. Relax and sleep. I'm going to give you another shot of pentothal in a moment, and that will put you to sleep. Do you hear me, Dr. Rasp?"
"Oh, God," Hooten said, blinking his eyes very rapidly indeed. "I feel as though I'm on an alternating current. What's going to happen? I warn you—we'd better stop this before—"
He squealed faintly as Dr. Scott punctured his skin with a hypodermic, filled, however, with nothing but a harmless and ineffective solution designed for psychosomatic purposes only. Hooten was already at the brink of tolerance for sodium pentothal and should have been fathoms deep long ago.
"Go to sleep, Dr. Rasp," Dr. Scott commanded in a firm, confident voice.
-
"Estivate, Dr. Scott," Dr. Rasp ordered.
-
"Sleep."
-
"Estivate."
-
"Sleep!"
-
"Estivate!"
-
"Wow!" cried Timothy Hooten, springing to his feet with the certain conviction that something had at last, quite resoundingly, given.
-
In the middle of Dr. Scott's office the air was still quivering around a buglike form that staggered on all sixes. Dr. Rasp's antennae vibrated almost to invisibility as he fixed his faceted stare in dazed disbelief upon the window, the Empire State Building, and the absurdly bipedal form of Timothy Hooten.
-
Dr. Scott in a shimmer of disturbed space-time gazed in wild surmise at the figure reclining before him, all six legs curled in comfortable relaxation, faceted eyes staring. "Hallucination, of course," he told himself dizzily. "Of course, of course, of course ..."
He turned his head for the reassuring sight of his own office around him and his eyes fell upon the sky-slit and the view beyond. The first glimmers of awful conviction began to dawn. He had never seen a Quatt Wunkery before.
The End
DE PROFUNDIS
(from Ahead of Time, Ballantine 1953)
(aka "The Visitors" in Science Fiction Quarterly - May 1953
with Henry Kuttner
(as by C.H. Liddell)
`The trouble is with the words. The trouble is—only an insane man could write this because it could only happen to an insane man. And the barrier is hard to get past. I mean the barrier that has built up around the real me. I can think clearly, but I never know when the compulsion comes, and then the wrong words come out on the paper—
I'm like a wheel spinning too fast. I was pretty well educated—before. I know a lot of the catch phrases. The doctors aren't sure yet what's wrong with me. There's only a tentative prognosis. It might be catatonia or schizophrenia—
IT IS A MOST DEADLY HOPELESS TRAP
Stop. I must try to be coherent, anyway. I must try to write this in conventional form. I want to write it upside down and backwards and like a palimpsest, all over the paper. But I must make everything clear. I'm the only one who can distinguish between the hallucination and the real, but of course I can't make anyone else see it. The trouble is, they slip in among my hallucinations and masquerade as delusions themselves—
It's hard even for me, sometimes. I haven't got the anchor of sanity to cling to. I know I'm insane. That is, I know it when I'm halfway rational. When I'm on the skids, there is only this whirling, prisoning hell of darkness ...
Case history: William Rogers, 38, white, unmarried, early neurotic and psychotic history—
Something like that is on my chart. I don't remember very much about the past. I have been in a sanitarium before. I remember there was something wrong even when I was a kid. My memories don't work quite right, especially since time warped itself a little to let The Visitors in.
The Visitors are not hallucinations. They are the realities among all my delusions. They came only lately. That much I know. They explained everything quite clearly to me. No one else can see or hear them. They said if I wish I could tell the doctors; the doctors would listen sympathetically and ask me questions and not believe anything. Auditory and visual hallucinations. God knows I had enough of those to begin with.
I saw the Cloud sometimes. And I saw demons. Somehow they were so conventional I knew they weren't real, even when they told me I had sinned. That was long before The Visitors came. They are quite real. They come from another space-time continuum. They want to visit and observe. You'd think they'd want somebody like Einstein, but that isn't the way it works. They don't want our world to know about them. I can imagine why. You can't observe an electron without throwing it off its normal path. An animal won't act naturally if it knows it's being watched. Or maybe there are other reasons, too—
The Visitors are horrible to look at.
Their language is telepathy, though often I hear it as sound. It's so different in thought-concept from ours that sometimes it seems like Mother Goose and sometimes like higher mathematics.
The words shift and change and I cannot set down what happened in coherent order I think that rat fat hat sat running funning dunning
&nb
sp; NO
I have a compulsion to rhyme. Is that echolalia? I suppose I feel that if I fill my mind with meaningless rhymes it will stop The Visitors from coming through, and the others—
All the others. The unreal voices I've heard ever since I can remember. All my life something has been vaguely wrong. There were things I wanted to do, and I couldn't have told why. Like the time I collected handkerchiefs. Meaningless. And the voices in my room.
"William Rogers is going to the window," they would whisper. "He is going to fall out of the window. No, he isn't, but when he goes downstairs he will stumble and break his neck. He knows too much to live. We will see that he doesn't live."
That was an auditory hallucination.
I MUST ... STOP ...
-
All right. That was a fairly bad time. I knew they weren't real, but they seemed real, all those bright-colored bugs crawling up my pajamas—I had to scream once. The orderly came. I was afraid I'd go into a wet pack again, but I shut my eyes and let them crawl, and in a minute it stopped. The orderly asked me what was wrong. I said it was all right now.
But he had orders to give me a sedative if I needed one. I am still under observation here. The doctors haven't quite decided on the nature of my psychosis. There are complicating factors. I know what they are. In the beginning I had an ordinary psychosis, but then The Visitors came and upset the applecart. The gyroscope of my mind is oscillating wildly.
Some people are born with a dangerous hereditary factor, others are warped by environment. I had both troubles. I can't remember much and I don't like to try. It isn't pleasant. Besides, the important things happened after I was completely insane. The Visitors are clever. They masquerade as hallucinations, and they appear only to a man who has had hallucinations already.
But there was no ... terror ... until The Visitors came.
Until then, I had at least a certain elation to sustain me, alternating with black despair, and the voices ... Sometimes they said they would protect me. At other times they threatened. Often they told me I had sinned and must be punished.
I have sinned. I must have. I don't know why. I must make amends somehow. The voices—
Then there were the tactile hallucinations. It was monstrous to touch glass and feel fur. It was monstrous to know my skin was coated with icy jelly. And after they brought me here, for a while, they put foul things in my food. I would not eat.
There was a blackness far back in my mind. I always knew when it was coming nearer. It was shapeless and strange. It grew from nothing, in a direction I could not understand, and swelled and swelled toward me. But it never touched me. It only watched. I called it the Cloud. I could never feel or taste or smell it, like the other things. Nor could I see it, exactly. It hasn't appeared for a long time now, though the other things never leave me. But the voices are subdued when The Visitors come ...
This is the way it was.
It happened soon after I came to this place. First the doctors had put me through a long period of baths and wet packs and a few times the restraining jacket, which was terrible because it was hard to breathe and the bright bugs crawled over my face. I learned, after a while, to accept these things. The people here watched me with that familiar look of wary, half-friendly alertness. The voices spoke in my mind, and a few times the Cloud loomed up out of the mistiness and grew and sat watchful for a while, and then dwindled and vanished. This went on for a long time.
Then The Visitors came.
I felt Them probing. There was trouble in the sanitarium that night. A homicidal patient broke loose, in the violent ward. The sedative orders were doubled. It seemed like the peak of a cycle. Really, it was The Visitors searching for a contact.
Insanity doesn't necessarily mean dull perceptions. Often I was able to regard this life from a detached, critical viewpoint, because I am not part of it. I could see, in a way, a sort of pattern to the chaos of world events. Humanity striving toward some unknown goal, but not perhaps a wholly unguided striving. I could see that something was to come. Something new and different. Perhaps something better.
I had not thought that it might be something wholly alien.
I was alone in my room that night. The door was closed and locked. I had been watching the glass panel, with its chicken wire let into the glass, waiting for the doctor to make his rounds. Then I felt a funneling something slip into my head, move away, and come back. It swirled and dug and grew larger. For a moment I thought it might be the Cloud, but the Cloud is shapeless, quiet, watchful. It never troubles me. This troubled me. I felt a high, singing tension of excitement.
They came out of the warped distances and hung in the air before me. A clear darkness surrounded them; it wasn't exactly darkness, for I could see the walls of the room through it. There were three of them. They were like men, but deformed, small, with huge heads covered with knotted blue veins that throbbed. They never walked; they couldn't, on those legs.
They floated there in the darkness, shifting around a little, looking at me. Their minds spoke.
"He is suitable. His intelligence is above average. His psychosis is acceptable."
I knew at once that they weren't hallucinations. I got up to call the orderly. They made me lie down on the bed again. I opened my mouth to scream, but they froze my throat.
"We will not harm you."
I said, in my mind, "But you're real. You're real. You're real."
"We are real. We will not harm you. We want to use you to—"
Then all the voices gathered in my mind and shouted.
YOU HAVE SINNED YOU HAVE SINNED YOU HAVE SINNED—
-
I screamed and screamed.
The Visitors came back later on. But it took time before I could talk to them coherently. Once the doctor came in while they were there, but they only held still, hanging in their clear darkness, and he didn't notice. After he had gone—
"Are you invisible?"
"We aren't entirely in your space-time plane."
"What do you want with me?"
"To market, to market, to buy a fat pig—"
"What?"
But they couldn't make it clear. It sounded like nonsense. I asked them where they came from.
"Over the hills and far away. Time. The future. We are studying your world."
"But I hardly ever leave this room."
"You needn't. That doesn't matter." The blue veins pulsed on their heads. "Your mind gives us the ..." A word that had no meaning. "... to enable us to reach out anywhere in your time-sector. You are the catalyst."
Fingers touched me. A Thing, red and terrible, was climbing up out of the floor. It hated me. The voices all laughed. I closed my eyes and shrieked. I went spinning, whirling, spinning ...
-
The bad time passed. Later, The Visitors came back.
"Why me? Why choose me?"
"We needed a contact. You were unusually suitable. We had searched a long while before we found you."
"But why—"
"Your era stands at a crossroads. Great powers have been uncovered. The planes of probability are shifting. This is a period of immense importance. There are many levels of reality. We must search the past to find what is the true reality and if necessary change this past."
I couldn't understand.
"You will not be harmed. Your world will not be harmed. Any changes we make will seem perfectly natural."
"I can't stand it. Take someone else."
"No."
"But you're horrible—"
-
It was because they were so alien. So utterly different from us, even more than their monstrous appearance suggested. Their thoughts went in different channels. Their bodies were different, through and through. Their neural structure was different. I could feel the energy pouring out of them. The tension was unbearable. Always, after they had stayed for a while, I began screaming.
The doctors were puzzled. They often questioned me. I told them about The Visitors, bu
t they just looked at each other.
"You've never seen these Visitors until lately?"
"No. No, I haven't."
"Are they like that Cloud you mentioned?"
"No. The Cloud has been with me for years off and on. It never bothers me."
"Are they like the voices? Do they sound like the same voices?"
"No. The voices are disembodied. The Visitors talk without words, really. They told me you wouldn't believe in them."
"Oh, I don't know about that. Suppose you tell me a little bit more about—"
YOU DAMNED LIAR YOU DON'T BELIEVE A WORD I'M SAYING FOR GOD'S SAKE
-
But they had tried to help. They were discouraged. Until The Visitors came they had been optimistic. They had planned shock treatment, I think, and they were hopeful about its success. But The Visitors brought in a new factor, and threw the psychosis into a new and undiagnosed pattern.
Then for a while The Visitors stopped coming. I think they tried to explain why, but I couldn't understand. After they had gone there were only the voices and a few other nasty things. And the doctors did start the shock treatment. It was violent, but it helped.
My mind began to clear. I don't remember how long it lasted. The doctors were less restrained when they talked to me, and I could feel new hope in the air.
They moved me to an open ward. It was much pleasanter there. I had three good days. And then The Visitors came back ...
"Further investigations."
"No. Go away. Please. I can't stand it."
"We won't harm you."
"But you are. I can feel the ... tension ... pouring out of you. It tightens me up inside. It makes my mind hurt. It—"
"Curious. He is ordinary homo sapiens, of course, but unusually receptive. Probably due to the psychosis. The pineal and the thalamus ... absorbing our—up the hill to get a pail of water Jack fell down—"
The words. I couldn't understand the words. The only means of communication, and they are a deadly barrier.
