“I didn’t mean it was familiar that way. But there’s a girl, a nurse over at General Mental, who’s been passing the word around to every doctor and psychiatrist in Long Beach to let her know if one of them gets a Luke Devereaux for a patient. He’s her ex-husband, I believe. Her name is Devereaux too—I forget the first name.”
“Oh. Well, then we got someone to notify all right. But how about these checks? Is he solvent or isn’t he?”
“With fourteen hundred dollars?”
“But is it? They aren’t endorsed. And right now he’s in no shape to do any endorsing.”
“Ummm,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “I see what you mean. Well, as I said, I think the catatonia is a temporary phase, in his case. But if he’s pronounced insane, would his endorsement be valid?”
“You got me, Doc. But why worry about it, at least until after you’ve talked to this dame, his ex-wife. She must have something in mind, and maybe it’s to take responsibility—and that would let us off the hook.”
“Good idea. And I think I remember there’s a phone right out in the hall on this floor. Hold the fort, Pete. And keep an eye on him—he could snap out of that at any time.”
The doctor went out into the hall and came back five minutes later. “Well, we’re in the clear all right,” he said. “She’s taking over. A private san—at her expense if there’s any difficulty about those checks. And a private ambulance will come get him. All she asks of us is we wait ten or fifteen minutes till it gets here.”
“Good deal.” The interne yawned. “Wonder what made her suspect he would end up this way. Instable personality?”
“Partly that. But she was especially afraid something would happen if he went back to writing—seems he hasn’t been doing or even trying any writing since the Martians came. And she said that when he really gets into a story and is working hard and fast on it, concentrating, he used to jump ten feet and fly into a violent tizzy at even a slight interruption. When he was writing, she used to have to go around the house on tiptoe and—well, you see what I mean.”
“I guess some guys are like that, when they concentrate hard on something. Wonder what a Martian did to him tonight?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Whatever it was, it happened in the heat of creation just when he was getting started on a novel. I would like to know what happened though.”
“Why don’t you ask me, Gentlemen?”
They whirled around. Luke Devereaux was sitting up, on the edge of the bed. There was a Martian in has lap.
“Huh?” said the doctor, not very brilliantly.
Luke smiled and looked at him through eyes that were, or at least seemed, perfectly calm and sane.
He said, “I’ll tell you what happened, if you’re really curious. Two months ago I went insane—I think from pressure of trying to force myself to write when I was in a slump and couldn’t. I was in a shack on the desert and I started hallucinating about Martians. I’ve been having hallucinations ever since. Until tonight, when I snapped out of it.”
“Are you—are you sure they were hallucinations?” the doctor asked. At the same tune he put his hand quietly on the interne’s shoulder. As a signal, a signal to keep quiet. If the patient, in this frame of mind, should look down too suddenly, the trauma might happen all over again, and worse.
But the interne didn’t get the signal. “Then what,” he asked Luke, “do you call that creature in your lap?” Luke looked down. The Martian looked up and stuck out a long yellow tongue right into Luke’s face. He pulled the tongue back with a loud slurping noise. Then stuck it out again and let its tip vibrate just in front of Luke’s nose.
Luke looked up and stared at the interne curiously. “There’s nothing in my lap. Are you crazy?”
10.
The case of Luke Devereaux, upon which a monograph was later written by Dr. Ellicott H. Snyder (psychiatrist and proprietor of the Snyder Foundation, the asylum for the mentally deranged to which Luke was committed), was probably unique. At least no other case has been authenticated by a reputable alienist in which the patient could both see and hear perfectly but could neither see nor hear Martians.
There were, of course, a great many people who had the combined afflictions of blindness and deafness. Since Martians could not be felt, smelled or tasted, these otherwise unfortunate people could have no objective or sensory proof of their existence and had to take the word, communicated by whatever means, of those about them that there were such things as Martians. And some of them never did fully believe; one cannot blame them.
And, of course, there were millions, many millions sane and insane, scientists, laymen and crackpots—who accepted their existence but refused to believe that they were Martians.
The most numerous of these were the superstitious and the fanatically religious who claimed that the self-styled Martians were really banshees, brownies, daemons, demons, devils, elves, fairies, fays, gnomes, goblins or hob-goblins; imps, jin, kobolds, peris, pixies, powers of darkness or powers of evil; sprites, trolls, unclean spirits or what-have-you.
All over the world, religions, sects and congregations split over this issue. The Presbyterian Church, for example, found itself split into three separate denominations. There was the Demonist Presbyterian Church, which believed they were devils out of Hell sent to punish us for our sins. There was the Scientific Presbyterian Church, which accepted that they were Martians and that the invasion of Earth by them was no more—or no less—an Act of God than are many of the earthquakes, tidal waves, fires and floods by which, from time to time, He keeps in His hand. And the Revisionist Presbyterian Church, which accepted the basic doctrine of the Demonists but took it a further step and accepted them also as Martians by simply revising their concept of the physical location of Hell. (A small splinter group of Revisionists, calling themselves the Rerevisionists, believed that, since Hell is on Mars, Heaven must be located beneath the everlasting clouds of Venus, our sister planet on the opposite side.)
Almost every other denomination found itself divided or dividing along similar—or even more startling—lines. The two outstanding exceptions were the Christian Scientists and the Roman Catholics.
The Church of Christ, Scientist, held most of its membership (and those who did wander away joined other groups rather than form a new group) by proclaiming that the invaders were neither devils nor Martians but the visible and audible product of human error and that if we refused to believe in their existence they would go away. A doctrine, one might note, with considerable parallel to the paranoiac delusion of Luke Devereaux, except that his theory worked, for him.
The Roman Catholic Church likewise maintained its integrity and a good ninety per cent of its membership due to the common sense or the Infallibility, as you prefer, of the Pope. His proclamation was to the effect that a special diet composed of Catholic theologians and Catholic scientists would be called to determine the position of the Church and that until an official announcement was made Catholics might hold opinions either way. The Diet of Cologne convened within a month and was still in session; since a condition of its adjournment was that a unanimous decision be reached, its deliberations promised to continue indefinitely and meanwhile schism was averted. True, in various countries young girls had Divine if conflicting revelations as to the nature of the Martians and their place and purpose in the universe, but none of them was recognized by the Church or gained more than local adherents. Not even the one in Chile who could show stigmata, the prints of small six-fingered hands, green, in the palms of her own hands.