The Berserkers

by Roger Elwood

  Starke rubbed his face, reconstructing the moment in Poletsky’s Fiat. “Roily was driving,” he said, “we had the radio on. There was a Vaughan Williams symphony, I think, then we got some news. They were talking about the war, about bombing the enemy, and then—1” He looked at Marston, startled. “Is that it? Did I see the war? Or—what?”

  Marston shrugged.

  “All right. The third thing. We pulled into the company parking lot. I looked at the guard and he was Frankenstein.”

  Marston laughed again. “I’m sorry. No connection with anything?”

  Starke considered. “It’s really hard to remember.” He picked up his coffee cup. It was empty except for a small, cold residue in the bottom. He drank even the dregs. “Just before we arrived at the gate I was talking to Roily about seeing the bombing. He thought I was silly. He said that—” Starke brought his empty cup down on the saucer hard, sending a spoon clanking and clattering across the table and onto the floor. Two or three customers at Enzo’s bar turned around to stare.

  “Mel,” Starke said, “Roily thought I was just foolish. He accused me of seeing horror movies!”

  “Ahah! And then you did see one!” He rubbed his hands together delightedly. “Now we’re getting somewhere! And was there anything else?”

  Starke put both hands to his face. “One more,” he said. “In the office, I didn’t tell you this. I had just arrived, I was looking at the Sarm-X test and I was going to show it to you. Before I did I thought about you for a second, wondered how a hippy like you could make it in the computer works, and when I looked at you you were a hippy. You were dressed weirdly, you had long hair, and your pipe had turned into a hookah of pot.”

  Marston slapped the table with both hands and roared with amusement. “Old hippy Mel! Not quite, friend. But that’s all right, in fact that’s just fine, that caps it. Don’t you see the pattern?”

  “No. I—what?”

  “Why, you’re up so close to it, you can’t see the forest for the trees! Listen. First you were waiting for Roily, thinking he was about due, then you saw him. Right?”

  “Then you heard about the war on the radio, you were thinking about bombing, and you saw bombing.

  “Then Poletsky said you were seeing horror movies, and you thought about that, and then you saw Frankenstein.

  “Finally, you thought I was a hippy, you looked at me, and you saw—what, beads and feathers, that stuff right?”

  Starke nodded, Yes, yes, yes.

  “Well then, first you think about a thing. Then you see it. It’s that simple!”

  Starke expelled his breath with a hiss, suddenly aware that he had been holding it in while Marston spoke. “So I’m just—thinking about a thing, then I see it. But why? What’s the trigger, and why is it happening to me?”

  With a shrug, Marston said, “Search me. Everybody must have a bunch of images in his head—stray thoughts, fragments of recollections, notions conjured by all sorts of external stimuli, full-fledged fantasies.”

  “Sure, of course. But these are externalized. Look, Mel, you can tell the difference between thinking about, oh, having the chairman of the board pull up a chair and join us for lunch…and actually having him walk in that door, come over to our booth here and sit down. No matter how vivid your thought was, you could still distinguish it from a real occurrence. You see? That’s what’s happening to me.”

  “It isn’t happening now, is it?”

  Starke thought for a few seconds. “No. Everything is normal.” He picked up his empty coffee cup, peered sadly at its dry bottom and put it back down. “What I mean is, everything seems normal. You know, once you start to have your doubts…”

  “No. What?”

  “Mel—how do I know I’m not still sitting upstairs waiting for you to get back from that editorial lecture? For that matter how do I know I’m not still at home and the whole day’s been a dream?”

  Marston stood up and began wrapping a striped scarf around his throat. “Sure, David, that’s the classic dilemma. There’s no logic to counter it any more than there is to knock down the old solipsist paradox. In fact it’s really just solipsism turned around and viewed from an odd angle. All the reality you know is what you can see. Or feel, taste, whatever. You don’t know that I’m really real, I don’t know that you’re really real. We all just have to take one another on faith and keep on truckin’ if you know what I mean. Right?”

  Starke assented dubiously.

  “Come on, Dave. We’d better get back across the street.”

  Outside Enzo’s the snow was still falling. The sky was darker now, the snowflakes heavier, and thicker. A coating was beginning to accumulate on the sidewalks and even on the street. The automobiles in the computer works’ parking lot were crusted over with white.

  But the security man at the gate was still human, Starke noted gratefully, and inside the programming center everything seemed as usual.

  He spent the afternoon conferring with the development programmers assigned to Sarm-X, going over the test data from the previous night’s run. Marston sat in on the meeting, representing the documentation area.

  The sort turn-off problem, it appeared, could be easily corrected in the next version of the program. Once the system was performing all functions according to specs they could turn their attention to improving performance time and trying to cut down on memory utilization.

  It was a good meeting and actually ended before the scheduled quitting time for the day, a rare happening at the computer works.

  On his way to the exit Starke passed the office of his boss, Wally Cheng, and stopped to mention the results of the Sarm-X meeting. Angie Turner wasn’t at her desk outside Cheng’s office. Thinking of Cheng’s oriental coolness and authority and the amusing contrast of Angie’s overweight attempts at glamour, Starke knocked once on Cheng’s door, heard a cool “Come in,” and opened the door.

  For only an instant he saw Cheng garbed as a mandarin in silken cap and robe, Angie beside him wearing a high-slit cheongsam, Chinese writing brush poised over a sheet of parchment.

  Starke leaned heavily against the doorjamb and shut his eyes. There was a rushing sound in his ears and he felt weak.

  “Dave?” said Wally Cheng.

  Starke opened his eyes. Cheng was seated at his desk in his usual herringbone suit and white shirt. Angie Turner, wearing the same outfit she’d had on that morning, was holding a stenographer’s pad half covered with shorthand notes and a brown wooden pencil.

  “Uh, just felt odd for a minute,” Starke said. “I was just going to bring you up to date on the Sarm-X thing.”

  Fifteen minutes later he was back in the passenger seat of Roily Poletsky’s green Fiat. On the way back home on 909 they made some small talk, then David turned on the Blaupunkt and found a station carrying the soothing melodies of Schubert’s fourth, the pleasantly ill-named Tragic.

  In front of Starke’s house Poletsky pulled up and stopped the Fiat. “I won’t try the driveway tonight, Dave. The snow looks too slippery for me to get back up. You be able to get your car out in the morning?”

  Starke already had his hand on the door switch. “Nothing to worry about,” he said, “local guy runs a private plowing service, solid as a rock. I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

  He stood and watched die little green car round the comer, then made his way back to his house and Bertha.

  That night, lying in the big double bed, he moaned and dreamed, reaching that half-awake state of knowing he was dreaming, being able to assess his own visions, yet not breaking from them into full wakefulness.

  His strange malady did not disappear with the night’s rest. Instead it spread, like a virulent plague, striking first his wife, his closest friends and co-workers at the programming center. Then it moved onward in waves as successive circles of acquaintances passed the infection to their own companions.

  Everywhere the mental fantasies of the stricken appeared, externalized. Daily the number, the conc
entration, the variety of images grew greater.

  Public places became filled with wild beasts of all eras; wolves and snakes, condors and tyrannosaurs, and imaginary creatures; griffins, unicorns, chimerae, basilisks monstrous sandworms. Marilyn Monroe walked the streets, jostling a troop of Beatles, a brigade of John F. Kennedys, an army of Jesuses.

  Not only did any figure appear when summoned by the fleeting thought of a mind: the same figure could be conjured up in endlessly replicated images by a single thinker or by any number of independently. For not only did each person conjure his own fantasies. Now the fantasies of all coexisted, intermixing in a common conjured reality.

  Before long the thronging figures began to overcrowd all available space. A whole section of the municipal airport was filled with conjured images of the Spirit of St. Louis, of the infamous Air Force One, of the tragically remembered Enola Gay. Sports fans filled a giant stadium with Joe DiMaggios, Jim Thorpes, Jack Dempseys.

  An entire jungle sprang up, populated by endlessly varied versions of Tarzan.

  The sky was filled for an entire afternoon with muscular figures in variously colored costumes as a group of comic-book enthusiasts exchanged recollections of their respective favorites.

  When an old Bela Lugosi film turned up at a revival showing, the theater was miraculously transformed into a huge, shadowy castle, a freeway leading to its creaking gate was filled with hundreds of caped and fanged images crowding to join the audience.

  With a start David awoke.

  He reached out and placed his hand on the figure of Bertha lying beside him in the bed. Somehow the familiar sensation of her skin beneath his hand seemed altered.

  He switched on a bedside lamp and the room was flooded with a startling, pulsing, emerald hue;

  He jumped from the bed, flung open the bathroom door and stared into the mirror.

  He screamed and screamed until they came and took him away.

  Even then the ride to the hospital was delayed for over an hour because of the crowd of Draculas jamming the freeway.

  Night and Morning of the Idiot Child

  Virginia Kidd

  (for Karen B., eternally six months old; in her seventh year)

  Evocative and woven from personal experience this

  poem is an illustration that madness is not confined

  to any one generation but can attack the very young.

  I—NIGHT TREACHERY: Cellophane and Silk ‘

  Hold-and-see is touching; see-through crumples, Chill as clear as red. Is sometimes softer,

  Much as rumple, much as smooth. Bold is

  falling—

  Empty holding is a sound of “Ah…”

  [frustrate, wailing]

  If feeling is no keeping, hold is numb,

  Bad see-through! o-no taking, will-not,

  Shaking strike the deepness under heel;

  Roll seeing past the plaster sky, to sleep.

  II—SPIDER: The Unattainable, Morning

  A thread, a shining fall-to, slides the air,

  Like looking for a see-through turns,

  Like hoping for a soft, and these slow

  Reachers in the bed can almost turn

  And almost share the spinning search.

  But the capricious shining thing that dandles

  self,

  Stranding for home, swings thinly past and

  down.

  Though seeing drown, the reachers still uncurl as

  empty wants.

  And no is “Ah-h-h.” [charmed, hypnotized]

  Sound is sleeping then. To hold

  Is come-times after; hear the warm in waking,

  shine-through silk enfold;

  Here sound the seeking “O” and laughter’s “did

  she cry?”

  And see—die blue-shines hover. “O” makes

  “Ah” [mother’s, doting]

  and “Ah.” [child’s contented drone]

  III—VIRGILS: Whisper

  No one is by…some one is me…

  High is so heavy…I cannot see…

  Soft is warm is dry is “Ah” [tentative] …

  When reachers have no bright to reach?…

  “Ah-h-h-h.” [a little querulous,

  questioning, pianissimo; mad]

  Skinflowers

  David Gerrold

  What would you do if one morning you awoke and

  found that your arm was sprouting strange, alien

  flowers?

  On Wednesday, there were bristly patches on the back on his hands. They looked like a field of tiny white goosebumps and gave his skin a sandpaper feeling. He was in the habit of rubbing the back of a hand against his cheek when perplexed or thoughtful. The roughness on his hand matched the roughness of his face. He hadn’t shaved this morning.

  On Thursday, the bumps were stiller. They seemed to be growing into tiny little spines. Although they were firm, they weren’t rigid. They stood away from the skin, but they could be pressed back into it without any feeling. They weren’t painful.

  Friday, the first of the flowers appeared.

  The spines were noticeably longer now. Most had tiny swellings at their ends. One or two of the swellings had begun to open up into little cuplike shapes, but it wasn’t until Saturday that there were recognizable clusters on each hand.

  The blossoms were carefully shaped cusps, one at the end of each pale stem; a fleshy convex lens. They were as white as bloodless skin.

  Saturday was when he first began to be aware of them—really aware. It’s hard to ignore a field of flowers on the back of each hand and wrist. Turning on the high’* intensity light over his desk, he examined them carefully.

  The stems were less than a quarter-inch in length. They were flexible and seemed to be extensions of the skin itself. The blossoms were shaped like dichondra, each a single white cup of flesh. He felt no sensation from them at all.

  He tried cutting them off, first with a razor, then with a scissors. The smaller ones came off easily, but the larger flowers tugged and resisted as if their stems had become slightly cartilaginous. The scissors worked better, but it left uneven and bristly stubs. They felt as scraggly as a three-day beard and they looked even worse. Besides, cutting the flowers gave him an uneasy feeling—as if he were amputating part of himself. So he stopped with his left hand. He didn’t cut the flowers from his right one.

  He didn’t go out on Saturday—except once to the grocery store. The gloves he wore were uncomfortable. They pressed the flowers into his skin and they seemed to irritate the rough patches of spines; he was glad to get them off when he got home again.

  He rubbed at the flowers on his right hand as if to restore their circulation and make them stand up again. It wasn’t necessary. They moved easily at this touch. But there was no sensation at all from them.

  The skin beneath still had sensation though, and the feel of the flowers between his fingers and his skin was most peculiar—like moist warm leaves. Like soft noodles. He almost enjoyed the way they felt as he ran his fingers through them. The sensation was as interesting as the hole left behind by a tooth freshly fallen out.

  On Sunday, there were more of the flowers. On his right arm, they extended across his wrist, and fresh buds were appearing on the back of his forearm. On his left, where he had cut them, they were already beginning to grow back. Many of the spines had already opened their buds.

  The newer buds on his arms were still very tiny, but the oldest ones were almost as big across as the nail of his little finger. The close, edge-to-edge pattern they formed was fascinating to look at; they were a clustered field of pink-white cups. They were beginning to take on color.

  As he sat in his chair and stroked the back of his hand across his cheek he became aware of their odor; it wasn’t an unpleasant odor—it was kind of sweet-sour and fleshy, almost like the familiar smell of old age, but not quite. It was the smell of skin, the fragrance of flesh. What gave it its hint of pungency, though, was its almost total
lack of musk. The odor was more flowery than human.

  Idly, he wondered what they were, these little skin-flowers. Abnormal growths of some kind? Or a natural development of his body, one that should have been expected? If they were natural, what should he do about them? Were they like hair—to be groomed and admired —or were they blemishes, like unsightly warts?

  And if they were unnatural, what then? Maybe they were parasites—tiny plants or animals that had imbedded themselves in his skin and were actively reproducing like real flowers in fertile soil. No. He doubted that. These flowers were too much like flesh, they were too much a part of him.

  Maybe they were some kind of disease—like a tumor. But he doubted that too. They weren’t painful, and he’d never heard of any disease where the skin broke out in flowers.

  No, they must be some kind of natural development. As he examined them curiously, he noticed that the flowers seemed to be replacing the hair on his hands and arms. The skin beneath the stems were pink and fresh, completely hairless. Parasites wouldn’t do that, would they? Neither would a disease. These skin-flowers were probably a different kind of hair, perhaps their stems were just a different kind of hair follicle.

  Except that he had heard somewhere that hair wasn’t alive; it was protein produced by the follicle and the actual shaft was dead material. These skin-flowers were obviously alive. The ones he had cut on Saturday were quickly replacing themselves.

  Well, perhaps his hair follicles had changed somehow. It wasn’t inconceivable. He stroked his arms fretfully, and the sensation comforted him. The feel of the tiny cups of flesh as they pulled and rolled across his skin was…interesting.