Then blackness.
* * * * *
"Mersey." The voice summoned the visitor, huddling in a corner of the
deranged mind, fearing contamination.
The eyes opened, looked up at the ceiling of a barred cell.
"Dr. Cloyd is here to see you," the voice said.
The visitor felt the mind of his host seeking to close out the words
and the world, to return to sheltering darkness.
There was a rattle of keys and the opening of an iron door.
The eyes opened as a hand shook the psychotic Mersey by the shoulder.
The visitor sought escape, but the eyes avoided those of the other.
"Come with me, son," the doctor's voice said. "Don't be frightened.
No one will hurt you. We'll have a talk."
Mersey shook off the hand on his shoulder.
"Drop dead," he muttered.
"That wouldn't help anything," the doctor said. "Come on, man."
Mersey sat up and, through his eyes, the traveler saw the doctor's
legs. Were they legs or were they iron bars? The traveler cringed away
from the mad thought.
A room with a desk, a chair, a couch, and sunlight through a window.
Crawling sunlit snakes. The visitor shuddered. He sought the part of
the mind that was clear, but he sought in vain. Only the whirling
chaos and the distorted images remained now.
There was a pain in the throat and with Mersey he lifted a hand to it.
Bandaged--gleaming teeth and a snarling animal's mouth--fear, despair
and hatred. With the prisoner, he collapsed on the couch.
"Lie down, if you like," said Dr. Cloyd's voice. "Try to relax. Let me
help you."
"Drop dead," Mersey replied automatically. The visitor felt the
tenseness of the man, the unreasoning fear, and the resentment.
But as the man lay there, the traveler sensed a calming of the
turbulence. There was an urgent rational thought. He concentrated and
tried to help the man phrase it.
"The girl--is she all right? Did I...?"
"She's all right." The doctor's voice was soothing. It pushed back the
shadows a little. "She's perfectly all right."
The visitor sensed a dulled relief in Mersey's mind. The shadows still
whirled, but they were less ominous. He suggested a question, exulted
as Mersey attempted to phrase it: "Doctor, am I real bad off? Can...?"
But still the shadows.
"We'll work together," said the doctor's voice. "You've been ill, but
so have others. With your help, we can make you well."
The traveler made a tremendous effort. He urged Mersey to say: "I'll
help, doctor. I want to find peace."
But then Mersey's voice went on: "I must find a new home. We need a
new home. We can't stay where we are."
* * * * *
The traveler was shocked at the words. He hadn't intended them to come
out that way. Somehow Mersey had voiced the underlying thoughts of his
people. The traveler sought the doctor's reaction, but Mersey wouldn't
look at him. The man's gaze was fixed on the ceiling above the couch.
"Of course," the doctor said. His words were false, the visitor
realized; he was humoring the madman.
"We had so much, but now there is no future," Mersey said. The visitor
tried to stop him. He would not be stopped. "We can't stay much
longer. We'll die. We must find a new world. Maybe you can help us."
Dr. Cloyd spoke and there was no hint of surprise in his voice.
"I'll help you all I can. Would you care to tell me more about your
world?"
Desperately, the visitor fought to control the flow of Mersey's words.
He had opened the gate to the other world--how, he did not know--and
all of his knowledge and memories now were Mersey's. But the traveler
could not communicate with the disordered mind. He could only
communicate through it, and then involuntarily. If he could escape the
mind ... but he could not escape. Mersey's eyes were fixed on the
ceiling. He would not look at the doctor.
"A dying world," Mersey said. "It will live on after us, but we will
die because we have finished. There's nothing more to do. The Change
is upon us, and we must flee it or die. I have been sent here as a
last hope, as an emissary to learn if this world is the answer. I have
traveled among you and I have found good things. Your world is much
like ours, physically, but it has not grown as fast or as far as ours,
and we would be happy here, among you, if we could control."
* * * * *
The words from Mersey's throat had come falteringly at first, but now
they were strong, although the tone was flat and expressionless. The
words went on:
"But we can't control. I've tried and failed. At best we can co-exist,
as observers and vicarious participants, but we must surrender choice.
Is that to be our destiny--to live on, but to be denied all except
contemplation--to live on as guests among you, accepting your ways and
sharing them, but with no power to change them?"
The traveler shouted at Mersey's mind in soundless fury: "Shut up!
Shut up!"
Mersey stopped talking.
"Go on," said the doctor softly. "This is very interesting."
"Shut up!" said the traveler voicelessly, yet with frantic urgency.
The madman was silent. His body was perfectly still, except for his
calm breathing. The visitor gazed through his eyes in the only
possible direction--up at the ceiling. He tried another command. "Look
at the doctor."
With that glance, the visitor told himself, he would flee the crazed
mind and enter the doctor's. There he would learn what the
psychiatrist thought of his patient's strange soliloquy--whether he
believed it, or any part of it.
He prayed that the doctor was evaluating it as the intricate raving of
delusion.
* * * * *
Slowly, Mersey turned his head. Through his eyes, the visitor saw the
faded green carpet, the doctor's dull-black shoes, his socks, the legs
of his trousers. Mersey's glance hovered there, around the doctor's
knees. The visitor forced it higher, past the belt around a tidy
waist, along the buttons of the opened vest to the white collar, and
finally to the kindly eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses.
Again he had commanded this human being and had been obeyed. The
traveler braced himself for the leap from the tortured mind to the
sane one.
But his gaze continued to be that of Mersey.
The gray eyes of the doctor were on his patient. Intelligence and
kindness were in those eyes, but the visitor could read nothing else.
He was caught, a prisoner in a demented mind. He felt panic. This must
be the mind-screen he'd been warned about.
"Look down," the visitor commanded Mersey. "Shut your eyes. Don't let
him see me."
But Mersey continued to be held by the doctor's eyes. The visitor
cowered back into the crazed mental tangle.
Gradually, then, his fear ebbed. There was more likelihood that Cloyd
did not believe Mersey's words than that he did. The doctor treated
hundreds of patients and surely many of them had delusions as fanciful
as this one might seem.
The traveler's alarm simmered down until he was capable of
appreciating the irony of the situation.
But at the same time, he thought with pain, "Is it our fate that of
all the millions of creatures on this world, we can establish
communication only through the insane? And even then to have only
imperfect control of the mind and, worse, to have it become a
transmitter for our most secret thoughts?"
It was heartbreaking.
Dr. Cloyd broke the long silence. Pulling at his ear, he spoke calmly
and matter-of-factly:
"Let me see if I understand your problem, Mersey. You believe yourself
to be from another world, from which you have traveled, although not
physically. Your world is not a material one, as far as its people
are concerned. Your civilization is a mental one, which has been
placed in danger. You must resettle your people, but this cannot be
done here, on Earth, except in the minds of the mentally ill--and that
would not be a satisfactory solution. Have I stated the case
correctly?"
"Yes," Mersey's voice said over the traveler's mental protests.
"Except that it is not a 'case,' as you call it. I am not Mersey. He
is merely a vehicle for my thoughts. I am not here to be treated or
cured, as the human being Mersey is. I'm here with a life-or-death
problem affecting an entire race, and I would not be talking to you
except that, at the moment, I'm trapped and confused."
* * * * *
The madman was doing it again, the traveler thought
helplessly--spilling out his knowledge, betraying him and his kind.
Was there no way to muffle him?
"I must admit that I'm confused myself," Dr. Cloyd said. "Humor me for
a moment while I think out loud. Let me consider this in my own
framework, first, and then in yours, without labeling either one
absolutely true or false.
"You see," the doctor went on, "this is a world of vitality. My
world--Earth. Its people are strong. Their bodies are developed as
well as their minds. There are some who are not so strong, and some
whose minds have been injured. But for the most part, both the mind
and the body are in balance. Each has its function, and they work
together as a coordinated whole. My understanding of your world, on
the other hand, is that it's in a state of imbalance, where the
physical has deteriorated almost to extinction and the mind has been
nurtured in a hothouse atmosphere. Where, you might say, the mind has
fed on the decay of the body."
"No," said Mersey, voicing the traveler's conviction. "You paint a
highly distorted picture of our world."
"I theorize, of course," Dr. Cloyd agreed. "But it's a valid theory,
based on intimate knowledge of my own world and what you've told me of
yours."
"You make a basic error, I think," Mersey said, speaking for the
unwilling visitor. "You assume that I have been able to make contact
only with this deranged mind. That is wrong. I have shared the
experiences of many of you--a man, a boy, a woman about to bear a
child. Even a cat. And with each of these, my mind has been perfectly
attuned. I was able to share and enjoy their experiences, their
pleasures, to love with them and to fear, although they had no
knowledge of my presence.
[Illustration]
"Only since I came to this poor mind have I failed to achieve true
empathy. I have been shocked by his madness and I've tried to resist
it, to help him overcome it. But I've failed and it apparently has
imprisoned me. Whereas I was able to leave the minds of the others
almost at will, with poor Mersey I'm trapped. I can't transfer to you,
for instance, as I could normally from another. If there's a way out,
I haven't found it. Have you a theory for this?"
In spite of his distress at these revelations, the traveler was
intrigued, now that they had been voiced for him, and he was eager to
hear Dr. Cloyd's interpretation of them.
The psychiatrist took a pipe out of his pocket, filled it, lighted it
and puffed slowly on it until it was drawing well.
"Continuing to accept your postulate that you're not Mersey, but an
alien inhabiting his mind," the doctor said finally, "I can enlarge on
my theory without changing it in any basic way.
"Your world is not superior to ours, much as it may please you to
believe that it is. Nature consists of a balance, and that balance
must hold true whether in Sioux City, or Mars, or in the fourth
dimension, or in your world, wherever that may be. Your world is out
of balance. Evidently it has been going out of balance for some time.
"Your salvation lies not in further evolution in your world--since
your way of evolving proved wrong, and may prove fatal--but in a
change in course, back along the evolutionary path to a society which
developed naturally, with the mind and the body in balance. That
society is the one you have found here, in our world. You found it
pleasant and attractive, you say, but that doesn't mean you're suited
to it.
"Nature's harsh rules may have operated to let you observe a way of
life here that you enjoy, but to exclude you otherwise--except from a
mind that is not well. In nature's balance, it could be that the
refuge on this world most closely resembling your needs is in the mind
of the psychotic. One conclusion could be that your race is mentally
ill--by our standards, if not by yours--and that the type of person
here most closely approximating your way of life is one with a
disordered mind."
* * * * *
Dr. Cloyd paused. Mersey had no immediate reply.
The traveler made use of the silence to consider this plausible, but
frightening theory. To accept the theory would be to accept a destiny
of madness here on this world, although the doctor had been kind
enough to draw a distinction between madness in one dimension and a
mere lack of natural balance in another.
Mersey again seized upon the traveler's mind and spoke its thoughts.
But as he spoke, he voiced a conclusion which the traveler had not yet
admitted even to himself.
"Then the answer is inescapable," Mersey said, his tone flat and
unemotional. "It is theoretically possible for all of our people to
migrate to this world and find refuge of a sort. But if we established
ourselves in the minds of your normal people, we'd be without will. As
mere observers, we'd become assimilated in time, and thus extinguished
as a separate race. That, of course, we could not permit. And if we
settled in the minds most suitable to receive us, we would be in the
minds of those who by your standards are insane--whose destiny is
controlled by the others. Here again we could permit no such fate.
"That alone would be enough to send me back to my people to report
failure. But there is something more--something I don't think you will
believe, for all your ability to synthesize acceptance of another
viewpoint."
"And what is that?"
"First I must ask a question. In speaking to me now, do you still
believe yourself to be addressing Mersey, your fellow human being, and
humoring him in a delusion? Or do you think you are speaking through
him to me, the inhabitant of another world who has borrowed his mind?"
* * * * *
The doctor smiled and took time to relight his pipe.
"Let me answer you in this way," he said. "If I were convinced that
Mersey was merely harboring a delusion that he was inhabited by an
alien being, I would accept that situation clinically. I would humor
him, as you put it, in the hope that he'd be encouraged to talk freely
and perhaps give me a clue to his delusion so I could help him lose
it. I would speak to him--or to you, if that were his concept of
himself--just as I am speaking now.
"On the other hand, if I were convinced by the many unusual nuances of
our conversation that the mind I was addressing actually was that of
an alien being--I would still talk to you as I am talking now."
The doctor smiled again. "I trust I have made my answer sufficiently
unsatisfactory."
The visitor's reaction was spoken by Mersey. "On the contrary, you
have unwittingly told me what I want to know. You'd want your answer
to be satisfactory if you were speaking to Mersey, the lunatic. But
because you'd take delight in disconcerting me by scoring a
point--something you wouldn't do with a patient--you reveal acceptance
of the fact that I am not Mersey. Your rules would not permit you to
give him an unsatisfactory answer."
"Not quite," contradicted Dr. Cloyd, still smiling. "To Mersey, my
patient, troubled by his delusion and using all his craft to persuade
both of us of its reality, the unsatisfactory answer would be the
satisfactory one."
* * * * *
Mersey's voice laughed. "Dr. Cloyd, I salute you. I will leave your
world with a tremendous respect for you--and completely unsure of
whether you believe in my existence."
"Thank you."
"I am leaving, you know," Mersey's voice replied.
The traveler by now was resigned to letting the patient be his medium
and speak his thoughts. Thus far, he had spoken them all truly, if
somewhat excessively. The traveler thought he knew why, now, and
expected Mersey to voice the reason for him very shortly. He did.
"I'm leaving because I must report failure and advise my people to
look elsewhere for a new home. Part of the reason for that failure I
haven't yet mentioned:
"Although it might appear that I, the visitor, am manipulating Mersey
to speak the thoughts I wished to communicate, the facts are almost
the opposite. My control over either Mersey's body or mind is
practically nil.
"What you have been hearing and what you hear even now are the
thoughts I am thinking--not necessarily the ones I want you to know.
What has happened is this, if I may borrow your theory:
"My mind has invaded Mersey's, but his human vitality is too strong to
permit him to be controlled by it. In fact, the reverse is true. His
vitality is making use of my mind for its own good, and for the good
of your human race. His own mind is damaged badly, but his healthy
body has taken over and made use of my mind. It is using my mind to
make it speak against its will--to speak the thoughts of an alien
without subterfuge, as they actually exist in truth. Thus I am
helplessly telling you all about myself and the intentions of my
people.
"What is in operation in Mersey is the human body's instinct of
self-preservation. It is utilizing my mind to warn you against that
very mind. Do you see? That would be the case, too, if a million of us
invaded a million minds like Mersey's. None of us could plot
successfully against you, if that were our desire--which, of course,
it is--because the babbling tongues we inherited along with the bodies
would give us away."
The doctor no longer smiled. His expression was grave now.
"I don't know," he said. "Now I am not sure any longer. I'm not
certain that I follow you--or whether I want to follow you. I think
I'm a bit frightened."
"You needn't be. I'm going. I'll say good-by, in your custom, and
thank you for the hospitality and pleasures your world has given me.
And I suppose I must thank Mersey for the warning of doom he's
unknowingly given my people, poor man. I hope you can help him."
"I'll try," said Dr. Cloyd, "though I must say you've complicated the
diagnosis considerably."
"Good-by. I won't be back, I promise you."
"I believe you," said the doctor. "Good-by."
Mersey slumped back on the couch. He looked up at the ceiling,
vacantly.
* * * * *
For a long time there was no sound in the room.