Джон Макдональд - Wine of the Dreamers [= Planet of the Dreamers]

He lay back on the bed. The magazine slipped to the floor, landing with the dry sound of a dead winged thing. Madness in the world. Madness tolling in his mind like a huge cracked bell in a forgotten tower, a bell swayed by the unknown winds. He shut his hands hard, squeezed his eyes shut and felt his soul as a fading focal point of certainty in this alien body, in this body of webbed nerves and muscle fiber and convoluted brain. He knew that any idea of plan or order in this mad world was pure delusion, that man was a tiny creature, knotted with the most deadly instincts, that he could look at the stars, but never attain them. In the back of his mind he stood at the edge of a distorted cliff, and he leaned toward the darkness. So easy to fall, to drop downward with a scream so vast and so solid that it would be as a smooth silver column inserted slickly in his throat. He would fall with his head tilted back, his lips drawn wide, with white-rimmed iris, with long tortured spasm that...

The bed moved. He opened his eyes. The little blond nurse from the lounge sat on the end of his bed. The stiff starched uniform had a bold life of its own, as though, inside it, her tender body recoiled from any touch against its harshness. The temple veins were violet tracery against the luminescent skin. Her large eyes were blue-purple glass beads from a costume jewelry counter.

“As bad as that, Bard Lane?” she said.

He frowned. Nurses were not supposed to sit on patients’ beds. Nurses did not speak with such casual informality. Possibly in the psych ward the nurses had special leniency from the rigid rules applying to those who nursed more obvious wounds.

“Maybe I can do a soft-shoe dance to show how gay I am,” he said.

“He didn’t tell me about you. I thought I’d take a look while he’s getting you out of here. Of course, he might not approve.”

“Who are you talking about, Nurse? And what didn’t he tell you, whoever he is?”

“Nurse is so formal. My name is Leesa.”

“Very odd name. And you seem like an odd girl. I don’t follow you very well, Leesa.”

“I don’t imagine that you’ll be able to, Bard Lane. Actually I was talking about Raul, my brother, if that means anything. Raul Kinson.”

Lane sat up, his face flushed with anger. “Nurse, I’m not so far gone that I’m going to stand still for any half-baked experiments. Go on back to Sharan and tell her that it didn’t work. I’m still rational.”

The nurse tilted her blond head to one side and smiled. “I like you when you’re angry, Bard Lane. So fierce! Anyway, Raul is sorry that he got you into this mess by being too anxious to get into communication with you. Now he’s trying to straighten things out for you. Poor Raul! He thinks that you actually exist. All of you people are so obsessed with the idea of your own reality. It gets tiresome.”

Bard stared at her. He said slowly, “Nurse, this is just friendly advice from a patient. Why don’t you go to Dr. Inly and ask to have the standard series? You know, when a person works around... mental cases for a long enough time, it sometimes happens that—”

Her laugh was raw gold, and oddly sane. “Goodness! So solemn and so kindly! In a minute you’ll be patting me on the head and kissing my forehead.”

“If this approach of yours is supposed to help me, Nurse, I...”

She became serious. “Listen to me. You’re just part of an unpleasant and rather dull dream as far as I’m concerned. Raul seems to get a certain amount of amusement out of fooling himself about you. I wanted to see what you looked like. He seems very impressed with you. But I don’t have to be. I...”

A stocky woman in white appeared in the open doorway. She scowled. “Anderson! What is the meaning of this? Number seventeen has been signaling for the last ten minutes. And I’ve been trying to find you. You know better than to sit on a patient’s bed. I’m sorry this happened, Dr. Lane, but—”

The little blond nurse gave the supervisor a solemn wink. She slid up toward the head of the bed, curled a soft arm around Lane’s neck and kissed him firmly and warmly on the lips. The supervisor gasped.

The little blond nurse straightened up. Slowly a look of horror came over her face. She jumped to her feet, holding her hands at her breast, twisting her fingers until her knuckles cracked.

“I demand an explanation, Anderson,” the supervisor said ominously.

“I... I...” Two tears spilled over her lower eyelids and ran down her cheeks. She backed away from the bed.

“I think Leesa is a little upset,” Bard said. His tone was placating.

“Her name is Elinor,” the supervisor said crisply.

The nurse turned and fled. The supervisor sighed. “More trouble. I’m shorthanded, and now I’ll have to send her up for tests.” She plodded out of the room.

Sharan Inly was staring at Major Tommy Leeber. His smooth, jocular voice was just the same, his oval face kindly, his eyes jet-hard. But his words made Sharan feel a distant thunder in her ears, a weakness that was like the lethargy that came before a dead faint.

“If this is some sort of stupid joke, Major—”

“I’ll start from the beginning again, Dr. Inly. I made a mistake. But you made one also. My name is Raul Kinson. For the moment I am using the body of this man named Leeber. That shouldn’t be too difficult to accept as a basic premise. I used Lane’s body and sent him a message. Both you and Lane apparently jumped to the conclusion that he is mentally unsound.”

“I think General Sachson would like to have Lane and myself off the project, Major Leeber. I don’t care for your way of trying to eliminate me.”

“Please, Dr. Inly. There must be some test we can make. If I could repeat the message that I left for Lane to find—”

“Bess Reilly could have told you the message.”

“I don’t know who she is, but please have her come in and ask her.”

They waited. Bess Reilly arrived within a few moments. She was a very tall girl, angular and without beauty, except for her eyes, sea-green, long-lashed, expressive.

“Bess, have you spoken to anyone about that dictation tape on Dr. Lane’s machine?”

Bess lifted her chin a fraction of an inch. “Dr. Inly, you told me not to tell anyone. And I didn’t. I’m not the sort to—”

“Have you talked to Major Leeber today?”

“I saw him once yesterday for the first time. I’ve never spoken to him.”

Sharan gave the girl a long, steady look. “Thank you, Bess. You can go.”

The door closed behind her. She turned to Major Leeber. “Now tell me what the tape said.”

Leeber repeated it. In two places he made minor changes in sentence structure, but the rest of it was completely accurate. There was a calmness and a confidence about him that disturbed her.

She said, “Major, or Raul Kinson, or whoever you are... I... this is something that I can’t bring myself to believe. This idea of taking over other people. This idea of coming from some alien planet. There are cases on record where persons have repeated the contents of sealed envelopes. You’ll have to do better.”

“Bard Lane has to be put back in charge. I am going to have to frighten you, Dr. Inly. But it will be the best proof I can give you. Without attempting to explain how, I am going to vacate this host brain and enter your brain. In the process, Major Leeber will revert to complete consciousness. But he won’t remember very much of what has gone on. I will use your voice to get rid of him.”

Sharan’s smile felt as though it had been painted across her lips with a stiff brush. “Oh, come now!”

She sat with her palms pressed flat and hard against the cool desk top. The idea, in spite of its preposterousness, gave her an odd feeling of shame, as though an alien invasion of her mind would be a violation more basic than any physical relationship could ever be. Her mind had been a temple, a place of refuge, a place of secret thoughts, some of them so abandoned as to cause, in someone without her knowledge of psychiatry, a sense of guilt. To have these secret places laid bare would be... like walking naked through the streets of a city.