“There’s just one problem, Dr. Robinson.” A new voice cutting in from the far end of the table, quiet, assured. “May I have the floor a moment? Dr. Robinson? Dr. Lewis?”
Hearing her name, Elszabet looked up, startled, realizing she had been drifting again. They were all looking at her.
“May I address this point, Dr. Lewis?” The voice from the far end again. It belonged to the man from San Diego, Elszabet realized, her counterpart, Leo Kresh, the head of the Nepenthe Center down there. A smallish man, about forty, balding, precise in movement and in speech. She stared at him but she had wandered too far from the discussion to know what to say.
Into her silence Dan Robinson said quickly, “Of course, Dr. Kresh, go ahead, please.”
Kresh nodded. “That these images of other worlds might in some way be connected with Project Starprobe had also occurred to me, Dr. Robinson, and in fact I’ve done considerable investigation of that possibility. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to work out. As you correctly state, the unmanned Starprobe vehicle was launched in 2057, just a few years before the outbreak of the Dust War. However, I’ve been able to determine that even at the quite extraordinary velocities that Starprobe was capable of attaining at its peak of acceleration, it would not have reached the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from Earth, until the year 2099. So you can see that there has not yet been quite enough time even for Starprobe’s own signal, which of course is a narrow-band radio wave traveling at the speed of light, to have returned from Proxima, let alone for any hypothetical inhabitants of that system to have sent us any kind of signal of their own. And of course if the Proximans—if there are any—had shipped a Proximan equivalent of Starprobe in our direction, as you suggest, there’s no likelihood at all that it will be here for decades more. Therefore I think we have to rule out the hypothesis that the space dreams have an extraterrestrial origin, tempting though that notion may seem.”
“Suppose,” Robinson said, “that the Proximans have some way of sending a spaceship here at speeds faster than light?”
Gently Kresh said, “Pardon me, Dr. Robinson, but I’d have to call that an excessive multiplication of hypotheses. Not only are we required to postulate Proximans, but also you ask us to assume faster-than-light transit, which under the laws of physics as we currently understand them is simply not—”
“Hold on,” Bill Waldstein said. “What are we talking about here? Spaceships to and from other stars? Faster-than-light travel? Elszabet, for God’s sake, rule all this stuff out of order. It’s bad enough that the situation we’re coping with is fantastic in itself—can you imagine hundreds of thousands of people having identical bizarre dreams all over the West Coast, and maybe everywhere else too?—without dragging in all this imaginary speculation besides.”
“In addition,” said Naresh Patel, “it has been over two months since the first dreams were reported. Given what Dr. Kresh has told us about the time of Starprobe’s arrival at this other star and the necessary time that must elapse before its radio signal can return to us, I believe it’s clear that there is no connection between the dreams and whatever data the Starprobe satellite will eventually send back.”
“What’s more,” Dante Corelli offered, “we’re getting views of at least seven different solar systems in these dreams, right? Starprobe went to just one system, as I understand it. So even allowing for these problems of transmission time that Dr. Kresh’s been pointing out, how can it be sending back so many different sorts of scenes? I think—”
“Point of order,” Bill Waldstein shouted. “Elszabet, will you please let us move on to something more rational? We’ve got people here from San Francisco and San Diego who want to tell us what’s going on at their centers, and… Elszabet? Elszabet? Is there something the matter with you?”
She struggled to understand what he was telling her. Her mind was full of green fog. Crystalline figures moved gracefully to and fro, introducing themselves to her, inviting her to incomprehensible social events, a cataclysm symphony, a four-valley splendor, a sensory retuning. Everyone will be there, dear Elszabet. Your poet will present his latest, you know. And there is hope of another green aurora, the second one this year, and then no more again for at least fifteen tonal cycles, so they say—
“Elszabet? Elszabet?”
“I think I’d like to go to the four-valley splendor,” she said. “And maybe the cataclysm symphony. But not the sensory returning, I think. Will that be all right, to skip the sensory returning”
“What’s she talking about?”
She smiled. She looked from one to the other, Dan, Bill, Dante, Naresh, Dave Paolucci, Leo Kresh. Green light blazed upward from the center of the huge redwood table. It’s all right, she wanted to say. I’ve gone out of my mind, that’s all. But you don’t need to worry about me. It’s not unusual for people to go out of their minds these days.
“You aren’t well, Elszabet?”
Dan Robinson. Standing beside her, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.
“No,” she said. “I’m really not very well at all. I don’t think I have been all morning. Would you excuse me, everyone? I’m terribly sorry but I think I should lie down. Would you excuse me? Thank you. Thank you. I’m terribly sorry. Please don’t interrupt the meeting. But I think I should lie down.”
5
Ferguson said, “What did I tell you? There’s nothing to it. You just slip away through the forest and keep on going east, and you’ll hit civilization sooner or later.”
“You have any idea where we are?” Alleluia asked.
“On our way to Ukiah.”
“Ukiah. Where’s that?”
“East of Mendo, maybe thirty miles from the coast. You forget? They pick it out of you?”
“I don’t know much about this part of California,” she said. “We’re going to walk thirty miles, Ed?”
He looked at her. “You’re a superwoman, right? What’s the big deal about walking thirty miles? Little less than thirty, maybe. We do it in two days, tops. You can’t handle that?”
“Not me. You. Are you in shape for that kind of hike?”
Ferguson laughed and rubbed his hand against the flawless skin of her upper arm. “Don’t worry about me, baby. I’m in terrific shape for a man my age. I’m in terrific shape, period. Anyway, I get tired, we can always stop a couple hours. Nobody going to be coming after us here.”
“You sure of that?”
“Sure I’m sure,” he said. He grinned. “Imagine,” he said. “No pick tomorrow morning. No more head-scrambling. We’ll go through a whole goddamn day remembering everything that happened to us the day before.”
“And what we dreamed the night before too.”
“What we dreamed, yeah.” The grin, which had slowly been fading, turned into a frown. “You dream last night? A space dream?”
“I think so.”
“You get them just about every night.”
“Do I?” she asked.
“That’s what you’ve been telling me every morning before pick. I’ve got it all down, right here on my little ring. A different planet every night, the nine suns, the green world, the one where the whole sky’s full of stars. Last night it was the big blue star in the sky and the shining bubbles floating in the air.”