Robert Silverberg - Something Wild Is Loose

Gently he placed his dark hand on Satina’s pale wrist. Physical contact was necessary to attain the mental linkage. He concentrated on reaching her. After months of teletherapy, her mind was sensitized to his; he was able to skip the intermediate steps, and, once he was warmed up, could plunge straight into her troubled soul. His eyes were closed. He saw a swirl of pearly-gray fog before him: Satina’s mind. He thrust himself into it, entering easily. Up from the depths of her spirit swam a question mark.

—Who is it? Doctor?

—Me, yes. How are you today, Satina?

—Fine. Just fine.

—Been sleeping well?

—It’s so peaceful here, doctor.

—Yes. Yes, I imagine it is. But you ought to see how it is here. A wonderful summer day. The sun in the blue sky. Everything in bloom. A perfect day for swimming, eh? Wouldn’t you like a swim? He puts all the force of his concentration into images of swimming: a cold mountain stream, a deep pool at the base of a creamy waterfall, the sudden delightful shock of diving in, the crystal flow tingling against her warm skin, the laughter of her friends, the splashing, the swift powerful strokes carrying her to the far shore—

—I’d rather stay where I am, she tells him.

—Maybe you’d like to go floating instead? He summons the sensations of free flight: a floater-node fastened to her belt, lifting her serenely to an altitude of a hundred feet, and off she goes, drifting over fields and valleys, her friends beside her, her body totally relaxed, weightless, soaring on the updrafts, rising until the ground is a checkerboard of brown and green, looking down on the tiny houses and the comical cars, now crossing a shimmering silvery lake, now hovering over a dark, somber forest of thick-packed spruce, now simply lying on her back, legs crossed, hands clasped behind her head, the sunlight on her cheeks, three hundred feet of nothingness underneath her—

But Satina doesn’t take his bait. She prefers to stay where she is. The temptations of floating are not strong enough.

Mookherji does not have enough energy left to try a third attempt at luring her out of her coma. Instead he shifts to a purely medical function and tries to probe for the source of the trauma that has cut her off from the world. The fright, no doubt; and the terrible crack in the dome, spelling the end to all security; and the sight of her parents and brother dying before her eyes; and the swampy reek of Titan’s atmosphere hitting her nostrils—all of those things, no doubt. But people have rebounded from worse calamities. Why does she insist on withdrawing from life? Why not come to terms with the dreadful past, and accept existence again?

She fights him. Her defenses are fierce; she does not want him meddling with her mind. All of their sessions have ended this way: Satina clinging to her retreat, Satina blocking any shot at knocking her free of her self-imposed prison. He has gone on hoping that one day she will lower her guard. But this is not to be the day. Wearily, he pulls back from the core of her mind and talks to her on a shallower level.

—You ought to be getting back to school, Satina.

—Not yet. It’s been such a short vacation!

—Do you know how long?

—About three weeks, isn’t it?

—Fourteen months so far, he tells her.

—That’s impossible. We just went away to Titan a little while ago—the week before Christmas, wasn’t it, and—

—Satina, how old are you?

—I’ll be fifteen in April.

—Wrong, he tells her. That April’s been here and so has the next one. You were sixteen two months ago. Sixteen, Satina.

—That can’t be true, doctor. A girl’s sixteenth birthday is something special, don’t you know that? My parents are going to give me a big party. All my friends invited. And a nine piece robot orchestra with synthesizers. And I know that that hasn’t happened yet, so how can I be sixteen?

His reservoir of strength is almost drained. His mental signal is weak. He cannot find the energy to tell her that she is blocking reality again, that her parents are dead, that time is passing while she lies here, that it is too late for a Sweet Sixteen party.

—We’ll talk about it…another time, Satina. I’ll…see…you…again… tomorrow…Tomorrow…morning…

—Don’t go so soon, doctor! But he can no longer hold the contact, and lets it break.

Releasing her, Mookherji stood up, shaking his head. A shame, he thought. A damned shame. He went out of the room on trembling legs and paused a moment in the hall, propping himself against a closed door and mopping his sweaty forehead. He was getting nowhere with Satina. After the initial encouraging period of contact, he had failed entirely to lessen the intensity of her coma. She had settled quite comfortably into her delusive world of withdrawal, and, telepathy or no, he could find no way to blast her loose.

He took a deep breath. Fighting back a growing mood of bleak discouragement, he went toward the next patient’s room.

The operation was going smoothly. The dozen third-year medical students occupied the observation deck of the surgical gallery on the starport hospital’s third floor, studying Dr. Hammond’s expert technique by direct viewing and by simultaneous microamplified relay to their individual desk-screens. The patient, a brain-tumor victim in his late sixties, was visible only as a head and shoulders protruding from a life-support chamber. His scalp had been shaved; blue lines and dark red dots were painted on it to indicate the inner contours of the skull, as previously determined by short-range sonar bounces; the surgeon had finished the job of positioning the lasers that would excise the tumor. The hard part was over. Nothing remained except to bring the lasers to full power and send their fierce, precise bolts of light slicing into the patient’s brain. Cranial surgery of this kind was entirely bloodless; there was no need to cut through skin and bone to expose the tumor, for the beams of the lasers, calibrated to a millionth of a millimeter, would penetrate through minute openings and, playing on the tumor from different sides, destroy the malignant growth without harming a bit of the surrounding healthy brain tissue. Planning was everything in an operation like this. Once the exact outlines of the tumor were determined, and the surgical lasers were mounted at the correct angles, any intern could finish the job.

For Dr. Hammond it was a routine procedure. He had performed a hundred operations of this kind in the past year alone. He gave the signal; the warning light glowed on the laser rack; the students in the gallery leaned forth expectantly—

And, just as the lasers’ glittering fire leaped toward the operating table, the face of the anesthetized patient contorted weirdly, as though some terrifying dream had come drifting up out of the caverns of the man’s drugged mind. His nostrils flared; his lips drew back; his eyes opened wide; he seemed to be trying to scream; he moved convulsively, twisting his head to one side. The lasers bit deep the patient’s left temple, far from the indicated zone of the tumor. The right side of his face began to sag, all muscles paralyzed. The medical students looked at each other in bewilderment. Dr. Hammond, stunned, retained enough presence of mind to kill the lasers with a quick swipe of his hand. Then, gripping the operating table with both hands in his agitation, he peered at the dials and meters that told him the details of the botched operation. The tumor remained intact; a vast sector of the patient’s brain had been devastated. “Impossible,” Hammond muttered. What could goad a patient under anesthesia into jumping around like that? “Impossible. Impossible.” He strode to the end of the table and checked the readings on the life-support chamber. The question now was not whether the brain tumor would be successfully removed; the immediate question was whether the patient was going to survive.