Robert Silverberg - Something Wild Is Loose

Room 403 turned out to be a two-sector interrogation office. The rear sector of the room was part of the building’s central quarantine core, and the front sector belonged to the public-access part of the building, with a thick glass wall in between. Six haggard-looking spacemen were slouched on sofas behind the wall, and three members of the starport’s quarantine staff paced about in the front. Mookherji’s irritation ebbed when he saw that one of the quarantine men was an old medical-school friend, Lee Nakadai. The slender Japanese was a year older than Mookherji—29 to 28; they met for lunch occasionally at the starport commissary, and they had double-dated a pair of Filipina twins earlier in the year, but the pressure of work had kept them apart for months. Nakadai got down to business quickly now: “Pete, have you ever heard of an epidemic of nightmares?”

“Eh?”

Indicating the men behind the quarantine wall, Nakadai said, “These fellows came in a couple of hours ago from Norton’s Star. Brought back a cargo of greenfire bark. Physically they check out to five decimal places, and I’d release them except for one funny thing. They’re all in a bad state of nervous exhaustion, which they say is the result of having had practically no sleep during their whole month-long return trip. And the reason for that is that they were having nightmares—every one of them—real mind-wrecking dreams, whenever they tried to sleep. It sounded so peculiar that I thought we’d better run a neuropath checkup, in case they’ve picked up some kind of cerebral infection.”

Mookherji frowned. “For this you get me out of my ward on emergency requisition, Lee?”

“Talk to them,” Nakadai said. “Maybe it’ll scare you a little.”

Mookherji glanced at the spacemen. “All right,” he said. “What about these nightmares?”

A tall, bony-looking officer who introduced himself as Lieutenant Falkirk said, “I was the first victim—right after floatoff. I almost flipped. It was like, well, something touching my mind, filling it with weird thoughts. And everything absolutely real while it was going on—I thought I was choking, I thought my body was changing into something alien, I felt my blood running out my pores—” Falkirk shrugged. “Like any sort of bad dream, I guess, only ten times as vivid. Fifty times. A few hours later Lieutenant Commander Rodriguez had the same kind of dream. Different images, same effect. And then, one by one, as the others took their sleep-shifts, they started to wake up screaming. Two of us ended up spending three weeks on happy-pills. We’re pretty stable men, doctor—we’re trained to take almost anything. But I think a civilian would have cracked up for good with dreams like those. Not so much the images as the intensity, the realness of them.”

“And these dreams recurred, throughout the voyage?” Mookherji asked.

“Every shift. It got so we were afraid to doze off, because we knew the devils would start crawling through our heads when we did. Or we’d put ourselves real down on sleeper-tabs. And even so we’d have the dreams, with our minds doped to a level where you wouldn’t imagine dreams would happen. A plague of nightmares, doctor. An epidemic.”

“When was the last episode?”

‘The final sleep-shift before floatdown.”

“You haven’t gone to sleep, any of you, since leaving ship?”

‘No,” Falkirk said.

One of the other spacemen said, “Maybe he didn’t make it clear to you, doctor. These were killer dreams. They were mind-crackers. We were lucky to get home sane. If we did.”

Mookherji drummed his fingertips together, rummaging through his experience for some parallel case. He couldn’t find any. He knew of mass hallucinations, plenty of them, episodes in which whole mobs had persuaded themselves they had seen gods, demons, miracles, the dead walking, fiery symbols in the sky. But a series of hallucinations coming in sequence, shift after shift, to an entire crew of tough, pragmatic spacemen? It didn’t make sense.

Nakadai said, “Pete, the men had a guess about what might have done it to them. Just a wild idea, but maybe—”

“What is it?”

Falkirk laughed uneasily. “Actually, it’s pretty fantastic, doctor.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, that something from the planet came aboard the ship with us. Something, well, telepathic. Which fiddled around with our minds whenever we went to sleep. What we felt as nightmares was maybe this thing inside our heads.”

“Possibly it rode all the way back to Earth with us,” another spaceman said. “It could still be aboard the ship. Or loose in the city by now.”

“The Invisible Nightmare Menace?” Mookherji said, with a faint smile. “I doubt that I can buy that.”

“There are telepathic creatures,” Falkirk pointed out.

“I know,” Mookherji said sharply. “I happen to be one myself.”

“I’m sorry, doctor, if—”

“But that doesn’t lead me to look for telepaths under every bush. I’m not ruling out your alien menace, mind you. But I think it’s a lot more likely that you picked up some kind of inflammation of the brain out there. A virus disease, a type of encephalitis that shows itself in the form of chronic hallucinations.” The spacemen looked troubled. Obviously they would rather be victims of an unknown monster preying on them from outside than of an unknown virus lodged in their brains. Mookherji went on, “I’m not saying that’s what it is, either. I’m just tossing around hypotheses. We’ll know more after we’ve run some tests.” Checking his watch, he said to Nakadai, “Lee, there’s not much more I can find out right now, and I’ve got to get back to my patients. I want these fellows plugged in for the full series of neuropsychological checkouts. Have the outputs relayed to my office as they come in. Run the tests in staggered series and start letting the men go to sleep, two at a time, after each series—I’ll send over a technician to help you rig the telemetry. I want to be notified immediately if there’s any nightmare experience.”

“Right.”

“And get them to sign telepathy releases. I’ll give them a preliminary mind-probe this evening after I’ve had a chance to study the clinical findings. Maintain absolute quarantine, of course. This thing might just be infectious. Play it very safe.”

Nakadai nodded. Mookherji flashed a professional smile at the six somber spacemen and went out, brooding. A nightmare virus? Or a mind-meddling alien organism that no one can see? He wasn’t sure which notion he liked less. Probably, though, there was some prosaic and unstartling explanation for that month of bad dreams—contaminated food supplies, or something funny in the atmosphere recycler. A simple, mundane explanation.

Probably.

The first time it happened, the Vsiir was not sure what had actually taken place. It had touched a human mind; there had been an immediate vehement reaction; the Vsiir had pulled back, alarmed by the surging fury of the response, and then, a moment later, had been unable to locate the mind at all. Possibly it was some defense mechanism, the Vsiir thought, by which the humans guarded their minds against intruders. But that seemed unlikely since the humans’ minds were quite effectively guarded most of the time anyway. Aboard the ship, whenever the Vsiir had managed to slip past the walls that shielded the minds of the crewmen, it had always encountered a great deal of turbulence—plainly these humans did not enjoy mental contact with a Vsiir—but never this complete shutdown, this total cutoff of signal. Puzzled, the Vsiir tried again, reaching toward an open mind situated not far from where the one that had vanished had been. Kindly attention, a moment of consideration for confused other-worldly individual, victim of unhappy circumstances, who—