“Why does it communicate only with sleeping people?” an intern asked.

  “Perhaps those are the only ones it can reach. Maybe a mind that’s awake isn’t receptive,” Martinson suggested.

  “Seems to me,” a security man said, “that we’re making a whole lot of guesses based on no evidence at all. You’re all sitting around talking about an invisible telepathic thing that breathes nightmares in people’s ears, and it might just as easily be a virus that attacks the brain, or something in yesterday’s food, or—”

  Mookherji said, “The ideas you’re offering now have already been examined and discarded. We’re working on this line of inquiry now because it seems to hold together, fantastic though it sounds, and because it’s all we have. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to start checking the building for telepathic output, now.” He went out, pressing his hands to his throbbing temples.

  ***

  SATINA RANSOM STIRRED, STRETCHED, SUBSIDED. She looked up and saw the dazzling blaze of Saturn’s rings overhead, glowing through the hotel’s domed roof. She had never seen anything more beautiful in her life. This close to them, only about 750,000 miles out, she could clearly make out the different zones of the rings, each revolving about Saturn at its own speed, with the blackness of space visible through the open places. And Saturn itself, gleaming in the heavens, so bright, so huge—

  What was that rumbling sound? Thunder? Not here, not on Titan. Again: louder. And the ground swaying. A crack in the dome! Oh, no, no, no, feel the air rushing out, look at that cold greenish mist pouring in—people falling down all over the place—what’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening? Saturn seems to be falling toward us. That taste in my mouth—oh—oh—oh—

  Satina screamed. And screamed. And went on screaming as she slipped down into darkness, and pulled the soft blanket of unconsciousness over her, and shivered, and gave thanks for finding a safe place to hide.

  ***

  MOOKHERJI HAD PLODDED THROUGH THE whole building accompanied by three security men and a couple of interns. He had seen whole sectors of the hospital that he didn’t know existed. He had toured basements and sub-basements and sub-sub-basements; he had been through laboratories and computer rooms and wards and exercise chambers. He had kept himself in a state of complete telepathic receptivity throughout the trek, but he had detected nothing, not even a fit of mental current anywhere. Somehow that came as no surprise to him. Now, with dawn near, he wanted nothing more than sixteen hours or so of sleep. Even with nightmares. He was tired beyond all comprehension of the meaning of tiredness.

  Yet something wild was loose, still, and the nightmares still were going on. Three incidents, ninety minutes apart, had occurred during the night: two patients on the fifth level and one on the sixth awakened in states of terror. It had been possible to calm them quickly, and apparently no lasting harm had been done, but now the stranger was close to Mookherji’s neuropathology ward, and he didn’t like the thought of exposing a bunch of mentally unstable patients to that kind of stimulus. By this time, the control center had reprogrammed all patient- monitoring systems to watch for the early stages of nightmare—hormone changes, EEG tremors, respiration rate rise, and so forth—in the hope of awakening a victim before the full impact could be felt. Even so, Mookherji wanted to see that thing caught and out of the hospital before it got to any of his own people.

  But how?

  As he trudged back to his sixth-level office, he considered some of the ideas people had tossed around in that midnight briefing session. Wandering around trying to communicate with us, Martinson had said. Its communications reach human minds only in the form of frightful nightmares. Maybe a mind that’s awake isn’t receptive. Even the mind of a human telepath, it seemed, wasn’t receptive while awake. Mookherji wondered if he should go to sleep and hope the alien would reach him, and then try to deal with it, lead it into a trap of some kind—but no. He wasn’t that different from other people. If he slept, and the alien did open contact, he’d simply have a hell of a nightmare and wake up, and nothing gained. That wasn’t the answer. Suppose, though, he managed to make contact with the alien through the mind of a nightmare victim—someone he could use as a kind of telepathic loudspeaker—someone who wasn’t likely to wake up while the dream was going on—

  Satina.

  Perhaps. Perhaps. Of course, he’d have to make sure the girl was shielded from possible harm. She had enough horrors running free in her head as it was. But if he lent her his strength, drained off the poison of the nightmare, took the impact himself via their telepathic link, and was able to stand the strain and still speak to the alien mind—that might just work. Might.

  He went to her room. He clasped her hand between his.

  —Satina?

  —Morning so soon, doctor?

  —It’s still early, Satina. But things are a little unusual here today. We need your help. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I think you can be of great value to us, and maybe even to yourself. Listen to me very carefully, and think it over before you say yes or no—

  God help me if I’m wrong, Mookherji thought, far below the level of telepathic transmission.

  ***

  CHILLED, ALONE, GROWING GROGGY WITH dismay and hopelessness, the Vsiir had made no attempts at contact for several hours now. What was the use? The results were always the same when it touched a human mind; it was exhausting itself and apparently bothering the humans, to no purpose. Now the sun had risen. The Vsiir contemplated slipping out of the building and exposing itself to the yellow solar radiation while dropping all defenses; it would be a quick death, an end to all this misery and longing. It was folly to dream of seeing the home planet again. And—

  What was that?

  A call. Clear, intelligible, unmistakable. Come to me. An open mind somewhere on this level, speaking neither the human language nor the Vsiir language, but using the wordless, universally comprehensible communion that occurs when mind speaks directly to mind. Come to me. Tell me everything. How can I help you?

  In its excitement the Vsiir slid up and down the spectrum, emitting a blast of infrared, a jagged blurt of ultraviolet, a lively blaze of visible light, before getting control. Quickly it took a fix on the direction of the call. Not far away: down this corridor, under this door, through this passage. Come to me. Yes. Yes. Extending its mind-probes ahead of it, groping for contact with the beckoning mind, the Vsiir hastened forward.

  ***

  MOOKHERJI, HIS MIND LOCKED TO Satina’s, felt the sudden crashing shock of the nightmare moving in, and even at second remove the effect was stunning in its power. He perceived a clicking sensation of mind touching mind. And then, into Satina’s receptive spirit, there poured—

  A wall higher than Everest. Satina trying to climb it, scrambling up a smooth white face, digging fingertips into minute crevices. Slipping back one yard for every two gained. Below, a roiling pit, flames shooting up, foul gases rising, monsters with needle-sharp fangs waiting for her to fall. The wall grows taller. The air is so thin she can barely breathe, her eyes are dimming, a greasy hand is squeezing her heart, she can feel her veins pulling free of her flesh like wires coming out of a broken plaster ceiling, and the gravitational pull is growing constantly—pain, her lungs crumbling, her face sagging hideously—a river of terror surging through her skull—

  —None of it is real, Satina. They’re just illusions. None of it is really happening.

  —Yes, she says, yes, I know, but still she resonates with fright, her muscles jerking at random, her face flushed and sweating, her eyes fluttering beneath the lids. The dream continues. How much more can she stand?

  —Give it to me, he tells her. Give me the dream!

  She does not understand. No matter. Mookherji knows how to do it. He is so tired that fatigue is unimportant; somewhere in the realm beyond collapse he finds unexpected strength, and reaches into her numbed soul, and pulls the hallucinations forth as though they were cobwebs. They engulf him. No longer does he experience them indirectly; now all the phantoms are loose in his skull, and, even as he feels Satina relax, he braces himself against the onslaught of unreality that he has summoned into himself. And he copes. He drains the excess of irrationality out of her and winds it about his consciousness, and adapts, learning to live with the appalling flood of images. He and Satina share what is coming forth. Together they can bear the burden; he carries more of it than she does, but she does her part, and now neither of them is overwhelmed by the parade of bogeys. They can laugh at the dream monsters; they can even admire them for being so richly fantastic. That beast with a hundred heads, that bundle of living copper wires, that pit of dragons, that coiling mass of spiky teeth—who can fear what does not exist?

  Over the clatter of bizarre images Mookherji sends a coherent thought, pushing it through Satina’s mind to the alien.

  —Can you turn off the nightmares?

  —No, something replies. They are in you, not in me. I only provide the liberating stimulus. You generate the images.

  —All right. Who are you, and what do you want here?

  —I am a Vsiir.

  —A what?

  —Native life form of the planet where you collect the greenfire branches. Through my own carelessness I was transported to your planet. Accompanying the message is an overriding impulse of sadness, a mixture of pathos, self-pity, discomfort, exhaustion. Above this the nightmares still flow, but they are insignificant now. The Vsiir says, I wish only to be sent home. I did not want to come here.

  And this is our alien monster? Mookherji thinks. This is our fearsome nightmare-spreading beast from the stars?

  —Why do you spread hallucinations?

  —This was not my intention. I was merely trying to make mental contact. Some defect in the human receptive system, perhaps—I do not know. I do not know. I am so tired, though. Can you help me?

  —We’ll send you home, yes, Mookherji promises. Where are you? Can you show yourself to me? Let me know how to find you, and I’ll notify the starport authorities, and they’ll arrange for your passage home on the first ship out.

  Hesitation. Silence. Contact wavers and perhaps breaks.

  Well? Mookherji says, after a moment. What’s happening? Where are you?

  From the Vsiir an uneasy response:

  —How can I trust you? Perhaps you merely wish to destroy me. If I reveal myself—

  Mookherji bites his lip in sudden fury. His reserve of strength is almost gone; he can barely sustain the contact at all. And if he now has to find some way of persuading a suspicious alien to surrender itself, he may run out of steam before he can settle things. The situation calls for desperate measures.

  —Listen, Vsiir. I’m not strong enough to talk much longer, and neither is this girl I’m using. I invite you into my head. I’ll drop all defenses if you can look at who I am, look hard, and decide for yourself whether you can trust me. After that it’s up to you. I can help you get home, but only if you produce yourself right away.

  He opens his mind wide. He stands mentally naked.

  The Vsiir rushes into Mookherji’s brain.

  ***

  A HAND TOUCHED MOOKHERJI’S SHOULDER. He snapped awake instantly, blinking, trying to get his bearings. Lee Nakadai stood above him. They were in—where?—Satina Ransom’s room. The pale light of early morning was coming through the window; he must have dozed only a minute or so. His head was splitting.

  “We’ve been looking all over for you, Pete,” Nakadai said.

  “It’s all right now,” Mookherji murmured. “It’s all right.” He shook his head to clear it. He remembered things. Yes. On the floor, next to Satina’s bed, squatted something about the size of a frog, but very different in shape, color, and texture from any frog Mookherji had ever seen. He showed it to Nakadai. “That’s the Vsiir,” Mookherji said. “The alien terror. Satina and I made friends with it. We talked it into showing itself. Listen, it isn’t happy here, so will you get hold of a starport official fast, and explain that we’ve got an organism here that has to be shipped back to Norton’s Star at once, and—”

  Satina said, “Are you Dr. Mookherji?”

  “That’s right. I suppose I should have introduced myself when—you’re awake?”

  “It’s morning, isn’t it?” The girl sat up, grinning. “You’re younger than I thought you were. And so serious-looking. And I love that color of skin. I—”

  “You’re awake?”

  “I had a bad dream,” she said. “Or maybe a bad dream within a bad dream—I don’t know. Whatever it was, it was pretty awful but I felt so much better when it went away—I just felt that if I slept any longer I was going to miss a lot of good things, that I had to get up and see what was happening in the world—do you understand any of this, doctor?”

  Mookherji realized his knees were shaking. “Shock therapy,” he muttered. “We blasted her loose from the coma—without even knowing what we were doing.” He moved toward the bed. “Listen, Satina. I’ve been up for about a million years, and I’m ready to burn out from overload. And I’ve got a thousand things to talk about with you, only not now. Is that okay? Not now. I’ll send Dr. Bailey in—he’s my boss—and after I’ve had some sleep I’ll come back and we’ll go over everything together, okay? Say, five, six this evening. All right?”

  “Well, of course, all right,” Satina said, with a twinkling smile. “If you feel you really have to run off, just when I’ve—sure. Go. Go. You look awfully tired, doctor.”

  Mookherji blew her a kiss. Then, taking Nakadai by the elbow, he headed for the door. When he was outside he said, “Get the Vsiir over to your quarantine place pronto and try to put it in an atmosphere it finds comfortable. And arrange for its trip home. And I guess you can let your six spacemen out. I’ll go talk to Bailey—and then I’m going to drop.”

  Nakadai nodded. “You get some rest, Pete. I’ll handle things.”

  Mookherji shuffled slowly down the hall toward Dr. Bailey’s office, thinking of the smile on Satina’s face, thinking of the sad little Vsiir, thinking of nightmares—

  “Pleasant dreams, Pete,” Nakadai called.

  SCHWARTZ BETWEEN THE GALAXIES

  In the two years following the completion of the novel Dying Inside in the fall of 1971, I wrote nothing but short stories and the novella “Born with the Dead.” Despite the struggle that those stories, and “Born with the Dead” in particular had been, I allowed myself to take on commitments to write two more novels, which would eventually become The Stochastic Man and Shadrach in the Furnace. I also let two friends talk me into writing short stories for publications they were editing. But, even as I locked myself into these four projects, I felt an increasing certainty that I was going to give up writing science fiction once those jobs were done. My own personal fatigue was only one factor in that decision. Another was my sense of having been on the losing side in a literary revolution.

  Among the many revolutions that went on in the era known as the Sixties (which actually ran from about 1967 to 1972) there was one in science fiction. A host of gifted new writers, both in England and the United States, brought all manner of advanced literary techniques to bear on the traditional matter of s-f, producing stories that were more deeply indebted to Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Mann, and even e.e. cummings than they were to Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke. This period of stylistic and structural innovation, which reached its highest pitch of activity between 1966 and 1969, was a heady, exciting time for science-fiction writers, especially newer ones such as Thomas Disch, Samuel R. Delany, R.A. Lafferty, and Barry Malzberg, although some relatively well-established people like John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, and, yes, Robert Silverberg, joined in the fun. My stories grew more and more experimental in mode—and most of them were published, now, in anthologies of original stories rather than in the conventional s-f magazines.

  What was fun for the writers, though, turned out to be not so much fun for the majority of the readers, who quite reasonably complained that if they wanted to read Joyce and Kafka, they’d go and read Joyce and Kafka. They didn’t want their s-f to be Joycified and Kafkaized. So they stayed away from the new fiction in droves, and by 1972 the revolution was pretty much over. We were heading into the era of Star Wars, the trilogy craze, and the return of literarily conservative action-based science fiction to the center of the stage.

  One of the most powerful figures in the commercialization of science fiction at that time was the diminutive Judy-Lynn del Rey, a charming and ferociously determined woman whose private reading tastes inclined toward Ulysses but who knew, perhaps better than anyone else ever had, what the majority of s-f readers wanted to buy. As a kind of side enterprise during her dynamic remaking of the field, she started a paperback anthology series called Stellar, and—despite my recent identification with the experimental side of science fiction—asked me, in May 1973, to do a story for it.

  Her stated policy was to bring back the good old kind of s-f storytelling, as exemplified in the magazines of the 1950s, a golden age for readers like me. “I don’t want mood pieces without plots,” she warned. “I don’t want vignettes; I don’t want character sketches; and I don’t want obvious extrapolations of current fads and newspaper stories. These yarns should have beginnings, middles, and ends. I want the writers to solve the problems they postulate . . .”

  Since most of what I had been writing recently embodied most of the characteristics she thus decried, there was a certain incompatibility between Judy-Lynn’s strongly voiced requirements and her equally strong insistence on having a Silverberg story for her first issue. And yet I had no real problem with her stated policy. My own tastes in s-f had been formed largely in the early 1950s, when such writers as C.M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, James Blish, Theodore Sturgeon, and Fritz Leiber had been at the top of their form. I had always felt more comfortable with their kind of fiction than with the wilder stuff of fifteen years later; I thought myself rather a reactionary writer alongside people like Disch, Lafferty, Malzberg, or J.G. Ballard. And I thought “Schwartz Between the Galaxies,” which I wrote in October 1973, was a reasonably conservative story, too—definitely a story of the 1970s but not particularly experimental in form or tone.