Tom O'Bedlam

by Robert Silverberg

  There was a steep, tricky trail from the top of the cliff down to the beach. The beach itself had just about enough sand to spread three blankets on, side by side. In winter at high tide there was hardly any beach at all, and if you went there you had to huddle in an ocean-carved cave with the chilly waves practically lapping at your toes. But this was a warm summer afternoon, no fog, the tide low. She tossed the beach blanket that she was carrying over the edge or the cliff and went scrambling down after it. Robinson came right behind her, taking the trail in big confident bounds.

  When they reached the beach she said, “I’m going to take my clothes off. I usually do here.” She looked him in the eye, a look that said, Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be provocative. It also said, You’re here but I don’t really want you to be, and I’m going to behave as if I were here by myself.

  He seemed to understand. “Sure,” he said. “That’s fine with me.” He tossed his shirt aside; kept his jeans on, squatted down by the tide-pools at the upper end of the beach. “Couple of starfish here,” he said.

  Elszabet nodded vaguely. She undid her halter and dropped her shorts and walked naked to the edge of the water, not looking toward him. Cold wavelets swirled up around her toes.

  “Are you going in?” Robinson asked.

  She laughed. “You think I’m nuts?”

  She never went swimming here. No one ever did, winter or summer. The water was cold as death all year round, as it was along the whole Pacific Coast north of Santa Cruz, and a dark reef just off shore made the surf turbulent and impassable. That was all right with Elszabet. If she felt like swimming, there was a pool at the Center. The beach meant other things to her.

  After a while she glanced back at Robinson and saw him looking at her. He smiled and did not look hurriedly away, as if to look hurriedly away would be an admission of guilt. Instead he kept his gaze on her another moment or two, and then he returned his attention in a deliberate way to his starfish. Maybe this is not such a good idea, Elszabet thought. Nudity was no big deal at the Center, but there were just the two of them here. And she knew Robinson was interested in her, though he had never been overt about it. She was an attractive woman, after all, and he was a healthy outgoing man, and there were professional and intellectual ties. They were a plausible couple; everyone at the Center thought that. She sometimes thought that herself. But she wanted no romantic entanglements, not with Dan Robinson, not with anyone. This was not the time for that sort of thing for her. She wondered if she had actually meant to be provocative. Or teasingly cruel. She hoped not.

  She decided not to worry about it. Cautiously she waded out until the water was ankle-deep on her. The cold drew a hiss from her, but it seemed to purge the throbbing in her temples.

  Robinson said, still poking in the tide-pools, “I’ve been thinking about the dreams. One possible explanation. Which may sound weird to you but it seems less weird to me than trying to argue that a lot of people are having identical bizarre dreams through sheer coincidence.”

  Elszabet didn’t feel much like talking about the problem of the dreams just now, or about anything else. But all the same she said politely enough, “What’s your theory?”

  “That we’re getting some kind of broadcasts from an approaching alien space vessel.”

  “What?”

  “Does that sound crazy to you?”

  “A little farfetched, let’s say.”

  “I’d say so too. But I’ve got a rationale to fit behind it. Do you know what Project Starprobe was?”

  She was beginning to feel awkward, standing there naked, half turned toward him with her feet in the cold water. She walked a little way up the beach, not as far as her blanket, and sat down in the sand with her back against an upjutting rock and her knees drawn up to her chest. The warm sun felt good against her skin. She didn’t put her clothes back on but she felt a bit less exposed, sitting down. It seemed to her that the headache might be returning. Just the merest tickle of it, across her brow. “Project Starprobe?” she said. “Wait a second. That was some kind of unmanned space expedition, wasn’t it?”

  “To Proxima Centauri, yes. The star system closest to Earth. It was sent off a little way before the Dust War—oh, around 2050, 2060. I could look it up. The idea being to get to the vicinity of Proxima Centauri in twenty, thirty, forty years, go into surveillance orbit, search for planets, send back pictures—”

  The headache again, yes. Definitely.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “Try this,” Robinson said. “I haven’t checked it out, but I figure Starprobe must have reached Proxima ten or fifteen years ago. About four light-years away, and I think the ship was supposed to reach a pretty hefty acceleration after a while, peak velocity close to a quarter the speed of light or so, and—anyway…let’s say the probe got there. And Proxima Centauri has intelligent life-forms living on one of its planets. They come out in their little spaceships and they inspect the probe, they determine that it comes from Earth and is full of spy equipment, and they get kind of nervous. So they dismantle the probe, which maybe is why we’ve never received any messages back from it, and then they send out an expedition of their own to see what this place Earth is like, whether it’s dangerous to them and so forth.”

  “And this spy mission announces its arrival by bombarding the Earth with random hallucinations of other worlds?” Elszabet asked. Dan was a sweet man, but she wished he would leave her alone for a little while. “It doesn’t sound very plausible to me.” She closed her eyes and tipped her face toward the sun and prayed that he’d let the discussion drop.

  But he didn’t seem to pick up the hint. He said, “Well, maybe they’re not coming to spy, or to invade. Just as ambassadors, let’s say.”

  Please, she thought. Make him stop. Make him stop.

  “And somehow they give off telepathic emanations—they’re alien, remember, we can’t possibly figure how their thought processes would work—telepathic emanations that stir up pictures of distant solar systems in the minds of those most susceptible to receiving them.” There was no stopping him, was there? She opened her eyes and stared at him, still too gracious to tell him to go away. The drumming in her head was building up. Before it had felt like something trying to get out. Now it felt like something trying to get in. “Or maybe sending the images is their way of softening us up for conquest by spreading confusion, fear, panic,” he went on. “Yes? No. You still don’t like it, do you? Well, that’s okay. I’m just speculating a little, is all. To me it sounds goofy too, but not beyond all possibility. Go ahead, tell me what you think.”

  Robinson grinned at her like an abashed sixteen-year-old. Plainly he wanted some sort of reassurance from her, wanted to be told that his notion wasn’t totally wild. But she could not give him that reassurance. Suddenly she did not care at all about his idea, about him, about anything except the spike of incredible pain that had erupted between her eyes.

  “Elszabet?”

  She lurched to her feet, rocked, nearly toppled forward. Everything looked green and fuzzy. She felt as though a thick blindfold of green wool had been tied around her forehead. And the wool was trying to poke its way into her mind—woolly green tendrils like a dense fog, invading her consciousness—

  “Dan? I don’t know what’s happening, Dan!”

  But she did. It’s the Green World, she said to herself. Trying to break through into my mind. A waking dream, a crazy hallucination. Could that be it? The Green World?

  I’m going crazy, she thought.

  Gasping, sobbing, she stumbled down the little narrow beach and out into the water. It rose about her like ice, like flame, to her thighs, to her breasts. She tried to push at the thing that was creeping into her mind. She scrabbled at her scalp with her fingertips as if she could scrape it away. Then she blundered into a submerged rock, slipped, fell to her knees. A wave hit her in the face. She was freezing. She was drowning. She was going crazy.

  And the
n it was over, as quickly as it had begun.

  She was standing in shin-deep water, shivering. Dan Robinson was beside her. He had his arm around her shoulders and he was leading her to shore, guiding her up the strip of sand, wrapping her blanket around her. She was goosebumps all over, and the fierce cold had made her nipples rise and grow so hard that her cheeks flamed when she saw them. She turned away from him. “Hand me my clothes,” she said, groping for her halter.

  “What was it? What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Something hit me all of a sudden. Some kind of freakout. I don’t know. Something weird, just for a second or two, and I guess I blanked out.” She didn’t want to tell him about the woolly green fog. Already the concept that it had been an image out of the Green World trying to break through into her consciousness seemed absurd to her, a silly horror-fantasy. And even if it had happened, she didn’t dare confess it to Dan Robinson. He would be sympathetic, sure. He’d even be envious. She thought of how he had said sorrowfully only half an hour ago that he had never been lucky enough to experience one of the space dreams. But her own outlook on all this was altogether different. For the first time, the dreams frightened her. Let Father Christie have them; let April Cranshaw have them; let Nick Double Rainbow have them. They were emotionally disturbed people: hallucinations were routine stuff to them. Let Dan have them too, if he wants. But not me. Please, God, not me.

  She was dressed, now. But she was still chilled bone-deep by that plunge into the Pacific. Robinson stood five or six meters away, staring at her, working hard at seeming not to be too worried about her. She forced a smile. “Maybe I just need a vacation,” she said. “I’m sorry I upset you.”

  “Are you okay now?”

  “I’m fine. It was just a quick thing. I don’t know. Wow, that water is cold!”

  “Shall we go back to the Center?”

  “Yes. Yes, please.”

  He offered her a hand to help her climb up the cliff. Elszabet shook him off angrily and went up the trail like a mountain goat. At the top she paused only a moment to adjust the beach blanket around her waist, then took off without waiting for him, running at sprint speed down the unpaved road to the Center. “Hey, I’m coming!” he called, but she refused to let up and pushed herself without mercy down the road, going all out. She would not let him catch her. When she arrived at the Center she was dizzy and fighting for breath but she got there a hundred meters ahead of him. People stared at her in amazement as she thundered past.

  She didn’t pause until she had reached her office. When she was inside she slammed the door behind her, dropped to her knees, crouched there trembling until she was sure that she was not going to throw up. Gradually her heart stopped pounding and her breathing returned to normal. Terrible things were happening in her thigh muscles. She glanced up at her data wall. There was a message waiting for her, it said. She called it up. Thanks for info. Our list of dreams exactly the same, detailed analysis to follow. Rumor of similar dream occurrence as far south as San Diego: am checking. More later. What in Cod’s name is going on, anyhow? It was signed Paolucci, San Francisco.

  * * *

  Three

  With a thought I took for maudlin,

  And a cruse of cockle pottage,

  With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all!

  I befell into this dotage.

  I slept not since the Conquest,

  Till then I never waked,

  Till the roguish boy of love where I lay

  Me found and stripped me naked.

  And now I do sing, “Any food, any feeding

  Feeding, drink, or clothing?

  Come, dame or maid,

  Be not afraid.

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.”

  —Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song

  THE red-and-yellow ground-effect van was floating westward, floating westward, floating westward, on and on and on. The scratchers hadn’t wanted to stay in the San Joaquin Valley after the killings in the farmhouse by the river fork. So westward they went, on a chariot of air, drifting a little way above the dusty August roadbed. Tom felt like a king, riding like that: like Solomon going forth in majesty.

  They let him sit up front next to the driver. Charley drove some of the time, and Buffalo, and sometimes the one named Nicholas, who had a smooth boyish face and hair that was entirely white, and who almost never said a thing. Occasionally Mujer drove, or Stidge. Tamale never did, nor Tom himself. Mostly the one who drove, though, was Rupe, beefy and broad-shouldered and red-faced. He just sat there, hour after hour after hour, holding the stick. When Rupe drove, the van never seemed to drift more than a whisker’s width from the straight path. But Rupe didn’t like Tom to sing when he drove. Charley did; Charley was always calling for songs during his shifts. “Get out the old finger-piano, man,” Charley would say, and Tom would rummage in his pack. He had picked up the finger-piano down San Diego way three years ago from one of the African refugees they had down there. It was just a little hollow wooden board with metal tabs fastened to it, but Tom had learned to make it sound as good as a guitar, picking out the melodies with his thumbs against the tabs. He knew the words of a lot of songs. He didn’t know tunes for all of them, but by now he had had enough practice so that he could make tunes up that fitted the words. His voice was a high clear tenor. People liked to hear it, everyone but Rupe. But that was only fair, not bothering Rupe while he was driving.

  O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

  O, stay and hear! your true love’s coming,

  That can sing both high and low.

  Trip no further, pretty sweeting,

  Journeys end in lovers meeting,

  Every wise man’s son doth know.

  “Where do you get those songs?” Mujer asked. “I never heard no songs like that.”

  “I found a book once,” Tom said. “I learned a lot of poems out of it. Then I made up the music myself.”

  “No wonder I never heard none of those songs,” said Mujer. “No wonder.”

  “Sing the one about the beach,” Charley said. He was sitting just to the right of Tom. Mujer was driving, and Tom between them in the front seat. “I liked that one. The sad one, the beach at moonlight.” They were getting close to San Francisco now, maybe just another four or five hours, Charley had said. There were a lot of little towns out here, and most of them still were inhabited, though about every third one had been abandoned long ago. The land was still dry and hot, the heavy hand of summer pressing down. The last time they had gotten out of the van to scratch for food, that morning around eleven, Tom had hoped to feel the first cool breeze blowing from the west, and to see wisps of fog drifting their way: San Francisco air, clean and cool. No, Charley had said, you don’t feel San Francisco air until you’re right there, and then it changes all of a sudden, you can be roasting and you come through the tunnel in the hills and it’s cool, it’s like a different kind of air altogether.

  Tom was ready for that. He was getting tired of the heat of the Valley. His visions came sharper and better when the air was cool, somehow.

  He played a riff on the finger-piano and sang:

  The sea is calm tonight

  The tide is full, the moon lies fair

  Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

  Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

  Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

  Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

  “Beautiful,” Charley said.

  “I don’t like this goddamn song neither,” said Mujer.

  “Then don’t listen,” Charley said. “Just shut up.”

  Only, from the long line of spray

  Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

  Listen! you hear the grating roar

  Of pebbles which the waves draw back—

  “It don’t make no sense,” said Mujer. “It ain’t about anything.”

  “What about the end part?” Char
ley said. “That’s where it’s really beautiful. If you got any soul in you. Skip to the end, Tom. Hey, what’s that town? Modesto, you think? Modesto, coming up. Skip to the end of the song, will you, Tom?”

  Skipping to the end was all right with Tom. He could sing the songs in any order at all.

  He sang:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain—

  “Beautiful,” Charley said. “You just listen to that. That’s real poetry. It says it all. Take the bypass, Mujer. We don’t want to get ourselves into Modesto, I don’t think.”

  —And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  “Do the rest of it,” Charley said, as Tom became silent.

  “That’s it,” said Tom. “That’s where it ends. Where ignorant armies clash by night.” He closed his eyes. He saw Eternity come rising up, that ring of blazing light stretching from one end of the universe to the other, and he wondered if a vision was coming on, but no, no, it died away as fast as it had risen. Too bad, he thought. But he knew it would return before long; he could still feel it hovering at the edge of his consciousness, getting ready to break through. Someday, he told himself, a vision of brightness will come and completely take me and carry me off to the heavens, like Elijah who was swept up by the whirlwind, like Enoch, who walked with God and God took him.