Robert Silverberg - Something Wild Is Loose

Bailey? The head of the neuropathology department, still hitting the desk this late. What now? But of course there was no ignoring such a summons. Mookherji notified the control center that he had been called off his rounds, and made his way quickly down the corridor to the frosted-glass door marked SAMUEL F. BAILEY, M.D.

He found at least half the neuropath staff there already: four of the other senior residents, most of the interns, even a few of the high-level doctors. Bailey, a puffy-faced, sandy-haired, fiftyish man of formidable professional standing, was thumbing a sheaf of outputs and scowling. He gave Mookherji a faint nod by way of greeting. They were not on the best of terms; Bailey, somewhat old-school in his attitudes, had not made a good adjustment to the advent of telepathy as a tool in the treatment of mental disturbance. “As I was just saying,” Bailey began, “these reports have been accumulating all day, and they’ve all been dumped on me, God knows why. Listen: two cardiac patients under sedation undergo sudden violent shocks, described by one doctor as sensory overloads. One reacts with cardiac arrest, the other with cerebral hemorrhage. Both die. A patient being treated for endocrine restabilization develops a runaway adrenaline flow while asleep, and gets a six-month setback. A patient undergoing brain surgery starts lurching around on the operating table, despite adequate anesthesia, and gets badly carved up by the lasers. Et cetera. Serious problems like this all over the hospital today. Computer check of general EEG patterns shows that fourteen patients, other than those mentioned, have experienced exceptionally severe episodes of nightmare in the last eleven hours, nearly all of them of such impact that the patient has sustained some degree of psychic damage and often actual physiological harm. Control center reports no case histories of previous epidemics of bad dreams. No reason to suspect a widespread dietary imbalance or similar cause for the outbreak. Nevertheless, sleeping patients are continuing to suffer, and those whose condition is particularly critical may be exposed to grave risks. Effective immediately, sedation of critical patients has been interrupted where feasible, and sleep schedules of other patients have been rearranged, but this is obviously not an expedient that is going to do much good if this outbreak continues into tomorrow.”

Bailey paused, glanced around the room, let his gaze rest on Mookherji. “Control center has offered one hypothesis: that a psychopathic individual with strong telepathic powers is at large in the hospital, preying on sleeping patients and transmitting images to them that take the form of horrifying nightmares. Mookherji, what do you make of that idea?”

Mookherji said, “It’s perfectly feasible, I suppose, although I can’t imagine why any telepath would want to go around distributing nightmares. But has control center correlated any of this with the business over at the quarantine building?”

Bailey stared at his output slips. “What business is that?”

“Six spacemen who came in early this morning, reporting that they’d all suffered chronic nightmares on their voyage homeward. Dr. Lee Nakadai’s been testing them; he called me in as a consultant, but I couldn’t discover anything useful. I imagine there are some late reports from Nakadai in my office, but—”

Bailey said, “Control center seems only to be concerned about events in the hospital, not in the starport complex as a whole. And if your six spacemen had their nightmares during their voyage, there’s no chance that their symptoms are going to find their way onto—”

“That’s just it!” Mookherji cut in. “They had their nightmares in space. But they’ve been asleep since morning, and Nakadai says they’re resting peacefully. Meanwhile an outbreak of hallucinations has started over here. Which means that whatever was bothering them during their voyage has somehow got loose in the hospital today—some sort of entity capable of stirring up such ghastly dreams that they bring veteran spacemen to the edge of nervous breakdowns and can seriously injure or even kill someone in poor health.” He realized that Bailey was looking at him strangely, and that Bailey was not the only one. In a more restrained tone, Mookherji said, “I’m sorry if this sounds fantastic to you. I’ve been checking it out all day, so I’ve had some time to get used to the concept. And things began to fit together for me just now. I’m not saying that my idea is necessarily correct. I’m simply saying that it’s a reasonable notion, that it links up with the spacemen’s own idea of what was bothering them, that it corresponds to the shape of the situation—and that it deserves a decent investigation, if we’re going to stop this before we lose some more patients.”

“All right, doctor,” Bailey said. “How do you propose to conduct the investigation?”

Mookherji was shaken by that. He had been on the go all day; he was ready to fold. Here was Bailey abruptly putting him in charge of this snark-hunt, without even asking! But he saw there was no way to refuse. He was the only telepath on the staff. And, if the supposed creature really was at large in the hospital, how could be tracked except by a telepath?

Fighting back his fatigue, Mookherji said rigidly, “Well, I’d want a chart of all the nightmare cases, to begin with, a chart showing the location of each victim and the approximate time of onset hallucination—”

They would be preparing for the Festival of Changing, now, the grand climax of the winter. Thousands of Vsiirs in the metamorphic phase would be on their way toward the Valley of Sand, toward that great natural amphitheater where the holiest rituals were performed. By now the firstcomers would already have taken up their positions, facing the west, waiting for the sunrise. Gradually the rows would fill as Vsiirs came in from every part of the planet, until the golden valley was thick with them, Vsiirs that constantly shifted their energy levels, dimensional extensions, and inner resonances, shuttling gloriously through the final joyous moments of the season of metamorphosis, competing with one another in a gentle way to display the great variety of form, the most dynamic cycle of physical changes—and, when the first red rays of the sun crept past the Needle, the celebrants would grow even more frenzied, dancing and leaping and transforming themselves with total abandon, purging themselves of the winter’s flamboyance as the season of stability swept across the world. And finally, in the full blaze of sunlight, they would turn to one another in renewed kinship, embracing, and—

The Vsiir tried not to think about it. But it was hard to repress that sense of loss, that pang of nostalgia. The pain grew more intense with every moment. No imaginable miracle would get the Vsiir home in time for the Festival of Changing, it knew, and yet it could not really believe that such a calamity had befallen it.

Trying to touch minds with humans was useless. Perhaps if it assumed a form visible to them, and let itself be noticed, and then tried to open verbal communication—

But the Vsiir was so small, and these humans were so large. The dangers were great. The Vsiir, clinging to a wall and carefully keeping its wavelength well beyond the ultraviolet, weighed one risk against another, and, for the moment, did nothing.

“All right,” Mookherji said foggily, a little before midnight. “I think we’ve got the trail clear now.” He sat before a wall-sized screen on which the control center had thrown a three-dimensional schematic plan of the hospital. Bright red dots marked the place of each nightmare incident, yellow dashes the probable path of the unseen alien creature. “It came in the side way, probably, straight off the ship, and went into the cardiac wing first. Mrs. Maldonado’s bed here, Mr. Guinness’ over here, eh? Then it went up to the second level, coming around to the front wing and impinging on the minds of patients here and here and here between ten and eleven in the morning. There were no reported episodes of hallucination in the next hour and ten minutes, but then came that nasty business in the third-level surgical gallery, and after that—” Mookherji’s aching eyes closed a moment; it seemed to him that he could still see the red dots and yellow dashes. He forced himself to go on, tracing the rest of the intruder’s route for his audience of doctors and hospital security personnel. At last he said, “That’s it. I figure that the thing must be somewhere between the fifth and eighth levels by now. It’s moving much more slowly than it did this morning, possibly running out of energy. What we have to do is keep the hospital’s wings tightly sealed to prevent its free movement, if that can be done, and attempt to narrow down the number of places whom it might be found.”