Robert Silverberg - Something Wild Is Loose

One of the security men said, a little belligerently, “Doctor, just how are we supposed to find an invisible entity?”

Mookherji struggled to keep impatience out of his voice. “The visible spectrum isn’t the only sort of electromagnetic energy in the universe. If this thing is alive, it’s got to be radiating somewhere along the line. You’ve got a master computer with a million sensory pickups mounted all over the hospital. Can’t you have the sensors scan for a point-source of infrared or ultraviolet moving through a room? Or even X-rays, for God’s sake: we don’t know where the radiation’s likely to be. Maybe it’s a gamma emitter, even. Look, something wild is loose in this building, and we can’t see it, but the computer can. Make it search.”

Dr. Bailey said, “Perhaps the energy we ought to be trying to trace it by is, ah, telepathic energy, doctor.”

Mookherji shrugged. “As far as anybody knows, telepathic impulses propagate somewhere outside the electromagnetic spectrum. But of course you’re right that I might be able to pick up some kind of output, and I intend to make a floor-by-floor search as soon as this briefing session is over.” He turned toward Nakadai. “Lee, what’s the word from your quarantined spacemen?”

“All six went through eight-hour sleep periods today without any sign of a nightmare episode: there was some dreaming, but all of it normal. In the past couple of hours I’ve had them on the phone talking with some of the patients who had the nightmares, and everybody agrees that the kind of dreams people have been having here today are the same in tone, texture, and general level of horror as the ones the men had aboard the ship. Images of bodily destruction and alien landscapes, accompanied by an overwhelming, almost intolerable, feeling of isolation, loneliness, separation from one’s own kind.”

“Which would fit the hypothesis of an alien being as the cause,” said Martinson of the psychology staff. “If it’s wandering around trying to communicate with us, trying to tell us it doesn’t want to be here, say, and its communications reach human minds only in the form of frightful nightmares—”

“Why does it communicate only with sleeping people?” an intern asked.

“Perhaps those are the only ones it can reach. Maybe a mind that’s awake isn’t receptive,” Martinson suggested.

“Seems to me,” a security man said, “that we’re making a whole lot of guesses based on no evidence at all. You’re all sitting around talking about an invisible telepathic thing that breathes nightmares in people’s ears, and it might just as easily be a virus that attacks the brain, or something in yesterday’s food, or—”

Mookherji said, “The ideas you’re offering now have already been examined and discarded. We’re working on this line of inquiry now because it seems to hold together, fantastic though it sounds, and because it’s all we have. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to start checking the building for telepathic output, now.” He went out, pressing his hands to his throbbing temples.

Satina Ransom stirred, stretched, subsided. She looked up and saw the dazzling blaze of Saturn’s rings overhead, glowing through the hotel’s domed roof. She had never seen anything more beautiful in her life. This close to them, only about 750,000 miles out, she could clearly make out the different zones of the rings, each revolving about Saturn at its own speed, with the blackness of space visible through the open places. And Saturn itself, gleaming in the heavens, so bright, so huge—

What was that rumbling sound? Thunder? Not here, not on Titan. Again: louder. And the ground swaying. A crack in the dome! Oh, no, no, no, feel the air rushing out, look at that cold greenish mist pouring in—people falling down all over the place—what’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening? Saturn seems to be falling toward us. That taste in my mouth—oh—oh—oh—

Satina screamed. And screamed. And went on screaming as she slipped down into darkness, and pulled the soft blanket of unconsciousness over her, and shivered, and gave thanks for finding a safe place to hide.

Mookherji had plodded through the whole building accompanied by three security men and a couple of interns. He had seen whole sectors of the hospital that he didn’t know existed. He had toured basements and sub-basements and sub-sub-basements; he had been through laboratories and computer rooms and wards and exercise chambers. He had kept himself in a state of complete telepathic receptivity throughout the trek, but he had detected nothing, not even a fit of mental current anywhere. Somehow that came as no surprise to him. Now, with dawn near, he wanted nothing more than sixteen hours or so of sleep. Even with nightmares. He was tired beyond all comprehension of the meaning of tiredness.

Yet something wild was loose, still, and the nightmares still were going on. Three incidents, ninety minutes apart, had occurred during the night: two patients on the fifth level and one on the sixth awakened in states of terror. It had been possible to calm them quickly, and apparently no lasting harm had been done, but now the stranger was close to Mookherji’s neuropathology ward, and he didn’t like the thought of exposing a bunch of mentally unstable patients to that kind of stimulus. By this time, the control center had reprogrammed all patient-monitoring systems to watch for the early stages of nightmare—hormone changes, EEG tremors, respiration rate rise, and so forth—in the hope of awakening a victim before the full impact could be felt. Even so, Mookherji wanted to see that thing caught and out of the hospital before it got to any of his own people.

But how?

As he trudged back to his sixth-level office, he considered some of the ideas people had tossed around in that midnight briefing session. Wandering around trying to communicate with us, Martinson had said. Its communications reach human minds only in the form of frightful nightmares. Maybe a mind that’s awake isn’t receptive. Even the mind of a human telepath, it seemed, wasn’t receptive while awake. Mookherji wondered if he should go to sleep and hope the alien would reach him, and then try to deal with it, lead it into a trap of some kind—but no. He wasn’t that different from other people. If he slept, and the alien did open contact, he’d simply have a hell of a nightmare and wake up, and nothing gained. That wasn’t the answer. Suppose, though, he managed to make contact with the alien through the mind of a nightmare victim—someone he could use as a kind of telepathic loudspeaker—someone who wasn’t likely to wake up while the dream was going on—

Satina.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Of course, he’d have to make sure the girl was shielded from possible harm. She had enough horrors running free in her head as it was. But if he lent her his strength, drained off the poison of the nightmare, took the impact himself via their telepathic link, and was able to stand the strain and still speak to the alien mind—that might just work. Might.

He went to her room. He clasped her hand between his.

—Satina?

—Morning so soon, doctor?

—It’s still early, Satina. But things are a little unusual here today. We need your help. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I think you can be of great value to us, and maybe even to yourself. Listen to me very carefully, and think it over before you say yes or no—

God help me if I’m wrong, Mookherji thought, far below the level of telepathic transmission.

Chilled, alone, growing groggy with dismay and hopelessness, the Vsiir had made no attempts at contact for several hours now. What was the use? The results were always the same when it touched a human mind; it was exhausting itself and apparently bothering the humans, to no purpose. Now the sun had risen. The Vsiir contemplated slipping out of the building and exposing itself to the yellow solar radiation while dropping all defenses; it would be a quick death, an end to all this misery and longing. It was folly to dream of seeing the home planet again. And—