Tom O'Bedlam

  “Tom’s dirty. Tom’s cold.”

  “Not for long,” she said. She took him by the wrist. As she touched him she felt a curious sensation, as though something were twisting and churning in the depths of her mind; and for an instant she thought the Green World hallucination was going to repossess her right then and there. But that faded as quickly as it had come. Again Tom smiled. His eyes met hers, and some-thing—she had no idea what—passed between them in that moment, some silent transfer of force, of power. I think we may have something special here, Elszabet told herself. But what? What?

  4

  IN the morning Tom woke a little before sunrise, as he usually did. But for a moment he was bewildered at not being able to see the dawn sky, black shading into blue overhead and the last stars still glowing faintly. Above him all he could make out now was darkness, and beneath him he felt the unaccustomed softness of a bed, and he wondered where he was and what had happened to him.

  Then he remembered. This place called the Center. The woman named Elszabet, taking him to the little wooden cabin at the edge of the woods last night and saying, “This will be where you stay, Tom.” Showing him how to work the sink and the shower and the other attachments. He remembered her telling him, “You get yourself cleaned up and I’ll be back in half an hour or so to take you down to the mess hall, okay?” Giving him fresh clothing, even. Pair of jeans, soft flannel shirt, pretty good fit. And coming back for him and taking him over to the big building where they were serving food. Dinner served on dishes, not something cooked on a stake over a fire by the side of the road. He remembered all that now.

  So he hadn’t dreamed it. He was really here. This beautiful quiet place. He got up and walked out on the cabin porch and stared at the thick mists coiling like lazy snakes through the trees.

  It had felt great sleeping in a bed again, an actual honest bed with pillows and clean sheets and a sleep-wire to hold in your hand if you didn’t feel sleepy, and all the rest. Tom couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a bed, not really. When he was with the scratchers he had slept on one of the blow-up mattresses that they kept in the back of the van. Before that, coming down from Idaho, he had slept outdoors, mostly. Here and there, under trees or in little caves or right out in open fields, and sometimes, but not often, in some old burned-out house in one of the dead towns. And before that? He wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. He was here now.

  It was a good place, this Center. He felt different here, more peaceful, more in command of himself, closer to the center of his being. That was interesting, the way he felt so different here.

  In the dimness he could see the indistinct forms of buildings, some cabins like his own close by and then a big open lawn and some more small cabins and then bigger buildings farther away on the hill over there.

  He looked up through the mists into the sky.

  The stars seemed very close to the Earth here. He couldn’t see them, not with sunrise just a short time away. But he could feel them, the shining presence of them, like a series of invisible glittering spheres lined up one after another up there. This must be a very holy place, he thought, to have the stars so close. All the worlds he had visited so often in his visions seemed practically within his grasp: just reach out, just touch!

  Tom tingled with awe. Those wondrous galaxies, those millions upon millions of worlds bustling with life! “Hello,” he called. “Hello, you Poro and you Zygerone. You Thikkumuuru people. And you fabulous Kusereen, hello, hello!” The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament showeth His handiwork. What a privilege it had been to behold all this, the multitude of worlds, the fullness of the universe. For how many billions of years had those great races been masters of the stars, building their civilizations and their empires, linking world to world, soaring across those black incredible spaces, becoming almost as gods themselves? And he had seen it all, image upon image pouring into his astounded brain. At first it had seemed like mere craziness, sure. But then he began to recognize the patterns; yet even so there was too much to comprehend or even to begin to comprehend. It was as if he had picked up an envelope and taken out a letter and the letter contained every word in every book that had ever been published; and all those words had come roaring into his mind at once. That could have driven anyone crazy. But he had lived with these things so long that he had come to make a little sense out of them. He knew which races ruled the star-kingdoms now, and which had ruled in the eons gone by. He knew which were obedient subjects waiting their own time of greatness yet to come. It was all there, in the Book of Suns and the Book of Moons, which he had been allowed to read. He alone was the chosen one through whom the peoples of the universe were permitting themselves to be made known to Earth. Now the news was spreading, though; and soon everyone would know it; and then the moment for which Tom lived would come, when the peoples of Earth went forth into those shining worlds themselves, soaring across the gulfs of space to become citizens of the vast galactic realm.

  The first light of dawn came into the sky and the mists started to burn away. Tom felt the phalanx of the galaxies recede and disappear. For a moment, standing there on the porch, he felt a terrible pang of separation and loss. Then the feeling eased and he grew calm again. He went back inside, washed, put on his new jeans, his new shirt. Knelt for a long time beside his bed in prayer, giving thanks for blessings received. And decided to go out, finally, and see if he could get himself some breakfast.

  He wasn’t sure which building it was. Everything looked different by daylight. While he was wandering around he ran into the man with the bad leg, the one called Ed, who had tried to escape. Ed appeared to be wandering around too, walking without any real purpose. He didn’t look very good this morning. His face was puffy and his eyes were red and bleary and his mouth was clamped in a tight scowl, and he was moving in a wobbly blithery way, as though he might be drunk. At this hour of the morning.

  They stood facing each other on the path.

  “Hey,” Tom said, “you wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”

  Ed stared at him in silence for a long moment. He didn’t seem drunk close up. Sick, maybe, but not drunk. “Who the hell are you?” he asked finally.

  “I’m Tom. I was in the helicopter with you yesterday when they brought us in from outside. Don’t you remember that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed said. “I don’t know any goddamn thing right now. I’m just coming up from pick. You know what that is, don’t you, fella?”

  “Pick?”

  “You new here?”

  “I came in last night with you on the helicopter.”

  “You got a lot to learn, then.” Ed shifted his weight, favoring his sore leg. He was leaning on a white plastic crutch. “Pick is when they put electrodes on your head,” he said, “and flash a flickering light in your eyes and send some kind of juice down into your brain. Wipes out your short-term memory. You forget most of what happened to you yesterday. You even forget what you dreamed last night. That’s what they do here.”

  Tom blinked. “Why would they do that? It ought to be against the law, doing that to somebody’s brain.”

  “They do it to heal you. To cure you when they think your mind is mixed up. That’s how they cure you, by mixing it up even more. You wait. They’ll pick you too, fella. Tom, whatever your name is. Soon as they measure your brain-waves they’ll go to work on you.”

  “Me? No,” Tom said, a little nervously. This man was making him very uncomfortable. This man, this Ed, there was something wrong with him inside. Tom had seen that right away, when Ed had first come straggling out of the woods back there on that little highway. His soul was injured; his spirit was all closed in on itself, full of pain and hatred. Like Stidge, that was how he was, a mean and bitter man who thought that everybody was out to get him. Tom smiled and said, “Not me. They won’t do that to me.”

  “You wait.”

  “Not me,” Tom said again. He laughed. “Poor Tom, nobody wants to hurt Tom.
Tom doesn’t do any harm.”

  “You really are a nut, aren’t you?”

  “Poor Tom. Tom’s a nut, yes. Poor Tom, silly Tom.”

  “Christ, where’d they find you?” Ed’s scowl deepened. “You say you came in here with me last night, on the helicopter? From where? What was I doing outside the Center in the first place?”

  “You tried to run away,” Tom said. “You and the woman named Allie. They caught you.”

  “Ah,” Ed said, nodding. “So that’s what.”

  “Brought you back in the helicopter. Just last night. You don’t remember?”

  “Not a goddamn thing,” Ed said. “That’s what they do to you here. They take your memory away.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I don’t believe that. This place is a good place. They wouldn’t hurt anybody’s mind here.”

  “You wait, fella. You’ll find out.”

  Tom shrugged. There was no sense arguing with him. He was sick in the head, everything all twisted up in him. You just had to look at him to know it. Tom felt sorry for people like that. Once we make the Crossing, he thought, everyone will be truly healed of pain. In the embrace of the star-folk all sufferers will be given ease at last.

  “You know where I can find some breakfast?” Tom asked.

  “Up there. Gray building on the hill, you go around to the right side.”

  “Much obliged. You going that way?”

  Ed made a sour face. “They filled me full of dope last night. The idea of food makes me sick to my stomach.”

  “I’ll see you, then,” Tom said. He headed up the hill at a good clip. The morning air was fresh and bracing, though he suspected the day was going to get hot later on. As he neared the complex of buildings midway up the hill the woman, Elszabet, stepped out of one of them and waved to him.

  “Tom?”

  “Morning, ma’am.”

  She walked toward him. A nice-looking woman, he thought. Not sensationally beautiful, the way that Allie woman was, but of course Allie was artificial, they could make them as beautiful as they wanted. And Elszabet was pretty. Tall and slender with very long legs and wonderful warm rich gray eyes. And a very good person, too, kind and gentle. That was obvious right away, how tender and loving she was, and full of life. He hadn’t known many people like that, with the kindness and goodness right out front where you could feel it. Although there was something tight inside her, like a clenched fist. Tom wanted to reach into her and pry that fist open. She’d look even prettier then.

  “Going up for breakfast?” she asked.

  Tom nodded. “It’s in there, right?”

  “That’s right. I’ll walk over with you. Sleep well?”

  “Best I’ve had in months. Years. Real sound sleep.”

  “I bet it was so sound you didn’t even dream.”

  “Oh, I dreamed, all right,” Tom told her. “I always dream.”

  She gave him that pleasant smile of hers. “I’ll bet you have interesting dreams, don’t you?”

  Tom walked along beside her, not saying anything. She had said something about dreams last night too, he remembered. When she had taken him to his cabin after dinner, just some offhand remark, something about how she was going to go to sleep herself right away because she was tired, she had had a strange dream the night before and it had upset her. He thought then that she was hoping he would ask her about that dream of hers, but he hadn’t felt like it. Now she was talking about dreams again. And both times she had seemed sort of tense when the subject came up, her nostrils quivering a little, color coming into her cheeks. Why were they so interested in dreams here? He recalled that man Ed saying, telling him about the pick thing. You even forget what you dreamed last night. Tom began to feel a little uneasy.

  She said after a moment, “When you get a chance, Tom, would you like to come over to my office for a talk? It’s in that building just down here—you ask anyone inside, they’ll tell you where to find me. I’d like to know a bit more about what was happening yesterday with Ed and Alleluia out beyond the forest, okay? And a few other things I’d like to talk about with you.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll stop by.” Why not? These people were feeding him and sheltering him. She was entitled to ask him a few things.

  They paused outside the big gray building. She stood close beside him, looking straight into his eyes. She was almost as tall as he was, and she was very close to him. He found himself hoping she would take him in her arms and hold him tight; but all she did was rest her hand on his forearm for an instant, giving him a little squeeze. And he saw her nostrils quiver again, and the two little red dots appear in her cheeks. As though she was a little afraid of him. As though she knew somehow that he could reach in and open that tight fist within her soul. And she was afraid of that, afraid of him.

  Well, that makes two of us, he thought. Because I’m a little afraid of you, Miz Elszabet.

  She let go of him and walked away, turning to wave. He waved back and entered the mess hall. There were just a few people in it, most of them sitting far apart from one another. Tom took a seat by himself, off to one side. A machine on the table lit up and asked him what he wanted. Coffee and rolls, he decided. It told him which buttons to push. He had learned how to do that last night at dinner. He had expected that a machine would come down the aisle bringing him his dinner, too, but that wasn’t how it worked: a boy came by with a cart. This morning it was a girl. The rolls were so good that he ordered a second breakfast, more of the same and a grapefruit, too. It seemed you could have whatever you wanted here, and as much as you wanted, and not pay. Poor Charley, he thought—getting scared and running away like that. If he hadn’t run away, he might be eating free grapefruit and coffee and rolls this morning too. Tom wondered what had become of them, Charley and Buffalo and Stidge and the rest. Probably in Ukiah by now, or maybe on their way to Oregon, wandering on and on and on in their aimless way. He hoped they stayed out of trouble, wherever they went. Just took it easy, Tom hoped, and not get themselves killed this close to the Time of the Crossing, because all their worries would be over when they went out to the stars. If they lived long enough to get to go.

  When he was finished eating Tom sat by himself for a while, just savoring the pleasure of sitting still and not having to jump back in the van and ride off somewhere with the scratchers. He wondered how long they would let him stay here. A week, maybe? That would be nice, staying here a week. And then maybe he’d be able to catch a ride down to San Francisco. He had liked that city. So clean, so pretty. Too bad they’d only stayed there a couple of hours. But he would go back. It was getting to be October, now. Winter coming on in those parts of the country that had real winter. If he had to spend another winter on the Earth, he thought, at least let it be a California winter. He didn’t know when the Crossing would begin—maybe next week, maybe by Christmas, maybe not until spring. You could freeze to death wandering around east of the mountains, but out here on the coast you were pretty safe from the weather.

  “Hey, you, Tom!”

  He looked up. The man named Ed was standing by the door of the mess hall. He had another man with him, a short pudgy curly-haired one wearing a Catholic priest’s outfit. They seemed to be looking for company. Tom beckoned them over.

  “I thought the idea of food made you sick right now,” Tom said.

  “Well, I got to feeling a little better after a time. The fresh air. Tom, this is Father Christie. Father, Tom.”

  “You the chaplain here?” Tom asked.

  The priest smiled. He seemed like a sad little man. “Chaplain? Oh, no, no, I’m just a patient, same as you.”

  Tom shook his head. “I’m not a patient.”

  “You aren’t? But you can’t be staff, surely.”

  “Just a visitor,” Tom said. “Just passing through. But very pleased to make your acquaintance, Father. I’ve done some preaching myself, up Idaho way, Washington State. Different sort of thing from yours, of course. But I was pretty good. The
congregation, they didn’t much mind how crazy I got. They thought the crazier the better, the crazier the holier.”

  “We aren’t supposed to use the word crazy here,” said Father Christie.

  “Perfectly good word,” Tom said. “What’s wrong with saying crazy? What’s wrong with being crazy?”

  “You telling us you’re crazy?” Ed asked.

  “You know it. I see visions. Isn’t that crazy? Other worlds swimming before my eyes. Always have, since I was a kid, visions pouring in like—like crazy.”

  Ed and Father Christie exchanged glances. Ed said, “Other worlds? Like space dreams?”

  “Space dreams, yes. But not just when I’m asleep.”

  “Father Christie here has space dreams too. Everyone in this whole fucking place has them. Excuse me, Father. Everyone has them but me, that is. I don’t get them. But I know all the dreams. The green world, the nine suns, the red star and the blue one—”

  “Wait a second,” said Father Christie mildly. “You say there are several kinds of space dreams?”

  “Seven of them,” Ed said. “You don’t know that, because you get picked every morning, you don’t remember anything about your dreams. But there are seven. I have ways of keeping little records. You had one this morning, Father, the green world again. But they picked it. The bastards. Excuse me again, Father.”

  Tom listened in wonder.

  The priest shook his head and said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Say, what about breakfast?”

  “Got a better idea,” Ed said. He reached into his breast pocket and drew forth some little squeeze-flasks. “Too early in the day, maybe? A quick drink? I got Canadian here, bourbon, Scotch. Here, here’s one special for you, Father: a flask of Irish. Tom? You a drinking man?”

  Father Christie said morosely, “I can’t use this, Ed. You know that.”

  “You can’t?”

  “I guess you forgot, on account of being picked. But I’m an alcoholic. I’ve got a conscience chip in my gullet. Any booze hits my throat, the chip’s going to make me throw up. You don’t remember that, huh? Here, maybe your friend Tom wants it.”