The Impossible Intelligence

Robert Silverberg

It was a warm and mild August night, with just the merest hint of rain in the distance—the kind of night on which there are few pleasures greater than a fine meal followed by a gramophone concert in the music room. And the meal was indeed fine; Mary Quinlan, our estimable factotum, had quite outdone herself with a magnificent roast capon, and the mouth of my friend and companion Dario di Cesare was literally watering as he deftly drew the cork from a bottle of chilled Chablis.

“Bene,” the little Italian muttered. “The obstinate obstruction gives way at last, and we are free to enjoy our wine!” He filled my glass lavishly. “Drink hearty, friend Star-buck, and proceed to attack your fowl with gusto—for the great talents of la Callas await us in the music room.”

Di Cesare had brought home but that afternoon a new album of operatic discs, and I knew that only the opulence of the meal Miss Quinlan had prepared had kept him from plunging at once toward our music room to surround himself with the wonderful melodies of Donizetti. For the peppery little psychoanalyst had brought with him from his native land—when forced by tyranny to leave twenty years before—the Italian’s fanatical devotion to opera.

“Looks as though there’ll be rain tonight,” I ventured.

“Si. Clouds shroud the stars,” di Cesare remarked between mouthfuls of tender white meat. “There will be no glorious meteoric displays tonight, I fear. But for us there will be a display more dazzling than even the Leonid showers, via the spinning discs.”

For the past two weeks, we had been subjected to nightly meteor showers of great intensity—a normal occurrence in August, though this year they seemed particularly intense—and di Cesare and I had witnessed in wonder the fall of one blazing beauty several weeks before. Tonight, though, the little Italian’s mind was riveted exclusively on his new operatic album, and not even the unheralded appearance of the Star of Bethlehem would budge him from the music room this evening.

“Excuse me, sirs,” Mary Quinlan said, entering the dining room with an air of irritation. “There’s a young man outside who insists on seeing you, Dr. di Cesare. I told him you’re eating, but he won’t go away, and he says he’ll stay outside all night making a racket until I let him in to talk to you, so …”

Di Cesare cut off the voluble flow with a gesture of one hand. “Ahime,” he sighed sadly, “will interruptions never cease? Send him in, Miss Quinlan.”

“But your dinner …”

“Send him in. Perhaps he will be brief, and we can return in peace to this excellent bird.”

The young man who entered was hatless and wild-looking. Moist patches of sweat showed through his thin sports shirt. He glanced at our laden table and said apologetically, “I hate to come barging in like this when you’re in the middle of dinner, Dr. di Cesare.”

“The damage is done,” my friend said, his eyes sparkling with annoyance. “Now that you are here, tell us, per favore, why it is you must disturb us at this hour.”

“It’s my wife,” he said. “She’s disappeared—gone without a trace!”

“A case for the police, not us,” I snapped. “Dr. di Cesare isn’t in the business of crime detection.”

“Wait,” the young man exclaimed. “You see, she—she has been delirious for several days. Muttering about a cave, and insects talking to her, and all kinds of other gibberish. She didn’t have any fever or anything, but her eyes were closed, and she didn’t seem to hear anything we said to her. I had the doctor—maybe you know him, Dr. Starbuck, he’s Dr. Wright from Lorimer Street

—but he couldn’t figure out what the matter was, and suggested that it was a mental breakdown, and that I call in a psychiatrist. And then some time this afternoon she disappeared! I had engaged a nurse for her, you see, and the nurse was going to bathe her, and had gone to draw the water; and when she came back the bed was empty and my wife was gone!”

I said, “This is all very interesting, Mr.—Mr. …”

“Collins. Paul Collins.”

“Mr. Collins. But you’ve made a mistake by coming here. Phillipsburg has a very efficient police force to deal with disappearances. And in any event, my friend Dr. di Cesare is not a psychiatrist. He is a psychoanalyst; that is to say, he practices Freudian therapy to cure neuroses, and …”

“Basta!” di Cesare exclaimed. “If there is any explaining to do, friend Starbuck, let me do it.” He looked sharply up at the young man. “Your wife, Mr. Collins, has vanished after a sudden schizophrenic seizure. Have you notified the police of her disappearance?”

“Yes, I called them right away. And it was Sergeant Berkowitz who suggested that I tell you about it, too. He said there was something definitely fishy about it, and that you’d be interested in the case.”

Di Cesare scowled fiercely. “Sciagurato! Seeing me leave the record store with a neatly-wrapped album under my arm this afternoon, the brutish Berkowitz must have spent all day devising some means of prying me loose from my phonograph this evening!”

“You’ll help me, then?” Collins said hopefully.

Di Cesare shrugged. “I will finish my meal. Then I will telephone il Berkowitz. and learn why this matter should interest me. And then, forse, I will be at your service, Signor Collins.”

Di cesare rushed through his meal, stuffing the meat into his mouth and gulping the wine as though he were eating nothing more important than hamburger, or drinking no finer beverage than soda pop. While we finished, poor Collins was banished to di Cesare’s waiting-room, there to cool his heels and, if he chose, explore di Cesare’s bound volumes of Imago. At length, the meal was concluded. What had promised to be a relaxed evening for two bachelor operaphiles was rapidly turning into yet another frantic exertion in the interests of law and order.

Taking his coffee in three swallows, di Cesare rose from the table, ignoring the cognac Miss Quinlan had thoughtfully placed out for after-dinner delectation. “I will phone the police, amico mio, and get to the-root of this. You had best go to my waiting-room and comfort the Collins lad.”

I found Collins pacing nervously up and down the room. He turned on me the moment I entered.

“Dr. Starbuck, do you think di Cesare can find my wife? The police seemed to think he was the only one who could.”

“If your wife can be found,” I said, “di Cesare will go to the ends of the Earth to find her. I hope you realize, though, that he’s sacrificing an evening’s pleasure to help you.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am. And if only he can find Ellie for me …”

At that moment, di Cesare strode briskly into the room. His eyes were alight, and he was nervously tugging at his pointed little goatee.

“Well?” I asked.

“I have indeed spoken to Detective Sergeant Berkowitz, and he requests that we come to the station house at once, young Collins and I. You too, friend Starbuck, if you wish.”

“Of course. But—what’s it all about?”

“Mrs. Collins is not the first to disappear,” di Cesare said. “She is the fourth, in the past two days. And the same symptoms in each case—delirium, dreams of caves and insects, ultimately somnambulism. An epidemic of schizophrenia! Per-bacco, but it gives me the fascination!”

“But what about the Donizetti album?” I asked.

“Pleasures postponed are all the sweeter,” di Cesare remarked. “Andiamo, signori! To the police station!”

A light rain was beginning to fall as we crammed ourselves into di Cesare’s diminutive Fiat and headed for the police station. As usual, di Cesare drove as if the traffic regulations were for mere mortals, not himself. Only a few minutes later, we pulled up in front of the building that housed the Phillipsburg police.

The light was on in the second-floor office of Detective Sergeant Berkowitz. He rose to greet us as we entered, his jowly, usually-affable face looking dark and fretful.

“A terrible business, Dr. di Cesare. Four young women in their twenties going off their rockers like this.”

“Have you found my wife yet, Sergeant?”

Berkowitz glared witheringly at Collins. “I’ve got a six-state alarm out for her,” he said. “And every off-duty cop in town is on emergency call, hunting for her. That’s the best I can tell you now.”

“Do you suspect kidnapping?” I asked.

Berkowitz shrugged. “I wish I knew what I suspected. Look—in each case, the girl was out of her head for a couple of days before disappearing. Talked about a mysterious cave, bugs, whatnot. Same sort of gabble with each girl. And all four walked out of their houses in broad daylight while nobody was looking. Elinor Collins left in her birthday suit, according to the nurse. I tell you, it don’t make sense. Four girls having the same nightmare, and all of them going into thin air …” He shrugged in the elaborate manner of his ancestors. “I don’t know. That’s why I sent for Dr. di Cesare. He seems to do just fine with cockeyed cases like this.”

Di Cesare grinned. “Indeed, some mysteries are beyond even the efforts of the so-efficient police force. But I beg you, more details!”

Berkowitz handed him a sheaf of papers. “Here’s the statements of the people concerned in the other three disappearances. That’s about all I can give you right now.”

Di Cesare took the papers and skimmed rapidly through them, muttering to himself in a steady stream of unintelligible Italian. When he put the last sheet down, he looked up and said, “Amici miei, there is something weird at work here.”

“What have you discovered, di Cesare?”

“Nothing, as yet, sorrowfully. Except that this is a most strange case. Consider: identical hallucinations on the part of four young women who did not know each other at all. And identical disappearances under mysterious circumstances. It tests disbelief.”

“But doesn’t Freud say,” I asked, “that many hallucinations well up from the common unconscious of mankind? And so it shouldn’t be surprising that four girls would have the same kind of dream, according to his theory.”

“True, mio caro. But the racial unconscious is not so efficient, eh? It does not simultaneously smite four young women of the same town with identical dreams, especially when the four have had no contacts. I fear that what we have to contend with is something that the good Viennese sage never dreamed of, signori.”

“For the love of God, what’s he talking about?” Collins demanded. “Where did my wife go? What’s all this babble about Freud?”

Di Cesare chuckled. “I am merely saying, my friend, that I am in doubt. But perhaps there will be an end to our doubts shortly. Your telephone, Sergeant?”

“Sure.”

“Whom are you calling?” I asked.

“Norman Burke,” di Cesare said. “The president of the local speleological society. I wish him to mobilize his forces on our behalf.”

Ninety minutes later, a motley group of some twenty men and women had assembled at police headquarters. They wore leather jackets and sturdy trousers, despite the warm mugginess of the evening, and they were equipped with ropes, pickaxes, powerful searchlights, “walky-talky” radio communicators, and all manner of other paraphernalia. They were the Phillipsburg Speleological Society, and they had come from their homes at the urgent request of their president, Norman Burke.

Burke himself, a stocky, red-faced man in his middle fifties, was a local veterinarian whose hobby was “spelunking,” or cave-exploring. I knew him vaguely, since, after all, we were both members of the healing profession, albeit of distant branches.

He said now, “I want to thank you all for responding to this emergency call. I’m not in much of a position myself to explain why you’re here, except to say that Dr. di Cesare needs you to help him with an important case. He’ll tell you the rest himself.”

Di Cesare stepped forward, his eyes flashing eagerly. “I apologize for the suddenness with which I had you yanked from your homes this evening,” he said. “But the fates of four young women may depend on your skills.”

“Really,” Berkowitz exclaimed, “just because those women dreamed about caves doesn’t mean they’re actually in a cave, Dr. di Cesare …”

“Let me do this my way, per piacere,” di Cesare told the Sergeant, silencing him with an imperious wave of his hand. “Your men are searching the area in the orthodox way. We shall supplement them. And has not Freud said many times that the most obvious methods should never be discarded merely on the grounds of their obviousness?”

Berkowitz subsided. Di Cesare faced the eager, curious speleologists once again and said, “During the last two days, four young women have vanished mysteriously from their homes—one of them the wife of the unfortunate Mr. Collins, whom you see here. In all four cases the disappearance was preceded by strange hallucinations, dreams of caves and insects. I suspect that perhaps a search of the caves in this vicinity would not be ill-advised. Sergeant Berkowitz, you have a city map?”

Berkowitz produced a map of Phillipsburg and environs from a shelf in his office closet. Di Cesare spread it out on the detective’s desk and said, “Dr. Burke, will you be good enough to mark the location of the major caves in this area?”

“Of course.”

Taking a red pencil from Berkowitz’ desk, the speleologist rapidly sketched in X-marks in eight or ten areas, chiefly in the wooded, hilly section that surrounded broad Lake Thomas.

“Bene,” di Cesare muttered. “And now, Sergeant, kindly indicate the locations of the homes from which the four missing women came.”

Consulting his notes, Berkowitz laboriously colored in four marks. I peered over di Cesare’s shoulder and saw that the homes were in four different areas of the city—but they were situated in a rough semicircle that ran along the borders of the lake! All four women, then, had come from houses near the lakefront and near the cave region! Obviously di Cesare had something in mind which he was keeping from the rest of us. But I knew him well enough, after all these years, to refrain from trying to probe his hypothesis. In his own good time, if all went well, he would let us in on his secrets.

He looked up from the map. “A pattern takes place, amici! And now, andiamo, off to the caves!”

The spelunkers began to gather up their equipment and file out. Di Cesare smiled at me. “Perhaps you had best go home and get your rest, mio vecchio. The night is damp, and the dankness of caves will do your old bones no good.”

“Curse you, di Cesare, my bones aren’t a month older than yours!” I yelped.

There was a mischievous twinkle in the little Italian’s eyes. “Very well, then. Let us go—a n d consider yourself warned.”

The rain had ceased, but an oppressive damp still clung tight to the town. Burke and his spelunkers were having a conference in the street, dividing up the various caves of the region among themselves. Finally they reached some understanding, went to their separate cars, and drove off. Di Cesare, Collins, and I re-entered the tiny Fiat; Sergeant Berkowitz, having expressed skepticism about this entire enterprise, was on his way home for his belated evening’s repose.

We drove off  lakeward, with di Cesare keeping the Fiat humming along unnervingly close to Norman Burke’s station-wagon. It was now past nine, and I thought longingly of what the evening might have been—two hours of glorious opera, followed by some delicate liqueur and a good night’s sleep. Instead, we would be dragged by di Cesare’s zeal through dank caves and dreary darkness until who knew what hour of the night.

Mist was rising from the lake. The frogs that inhabited the shore region ceased their songs abruptly as our cars arrived.

Lake Thomas was ringed with low limestone cliffs that were hollowed by years and centuries of erosion. The children of the town were fond of wandering in the caves, but some were extremely deep and were dangerous for any wanderer but an expert speleologist. Burke and two of his companions entered the nearest of the caves, while di Cesare, Collins, and I followed not far behind. Within the cave, all was cold and damp, bone-chilling. Our voices, when we spoke, echoed eerily. Up ahead of us prowled Burke and his associates, while we kept our eyes open for anything unusual.

After fifteen minutes of exploring the twisting labyrinth within the cliff, I was moist and uncomfortable, and my bones did indeed ache from the dank-ness—though I would sooner have cut off my legs than admitted my discomfort to di Cesare.

The little Italian strode ahead buoyantly, wandering into every bypath and crevice he came to, until I greatly feared that at some turn he would slip from sight and be forever lost. He maintained his footing, though, with the agility of a mountain goat.

From time to time the walkie-talkie carried by Burke would burst into chattering sound—reports from his colleagues in different caves. Invariably, they were reports of no consequence. I was wearying rapidly. At my side, Collins murmured, “Does Dr. di Cesare really think that caves have anything to do with this? It was only delirious raving, after all.”

I shrugged. “It’s altogether possible that di Cesare is on a false trail. But it’s best not to question him, I’ve found.” After nearly an hour, we had

penetrated as far into the cave as any of the spelunkers had gone before, and no clue had been found. We seemed hopelessly immured beneath the surface of the cliff. I was exhausted; and even di Cesare, turning to me, muttered, “Ahime, friend Starbuck, I fear perhaps we have chased the wild goose.”

“Tell me, di Cesar, do you think we ought to. ”

“Hold it!” Burke said sharply. “There’s a message coming through. What? You’ve found them? All right, we’ll be there as soon as we can get out of here!”

“What is it?” I cried.

“Dan and Corinne Haley have found the missing women. They’re in Cave Seven, all the way around on the other side of the lake.”

“The side near my house!” Collins exclaimed. “Did they find my wife?”

“They found all four,” Burke said.

“Meraviglioso!” di Cesare exclaimed. “Wonderful! Let us make haste!”

Making haste was not all that easy, however. We were no longer fresh-winded, and we had come a considerable distance. Even at top speed, without pausing for any side explorations, it took us nearly half an hour to retrace our steps and reach the open air once again.

We hastened around the lake to the cliffs on the eastward bank, and saw as we did so that the other cave-explorers were similarly congregating. Young Collins was tremendously excited. “See, there’s my house right back through there—we’re only a couple of blocks from this side of the lake. It wouldn’t have been hard for Ellie to walk this distance.”

We plunged into the cave, but we did not have far to go. No more than a hundred yards back from the face of the cliff, we came across a widened chamber hewn by erosion into the side of the cave proper. Two of the spelunkers, a middle-aged couple named Haley, stood by the entrance to the little natural chapel. As we approached, they flashed their beam in.

I gasped. The four young women were standing asif petrified against the bare rock. They were shrouded with fine cobwebs, and small dark insects scuttled frantically for shelter as the light struck them.

“They’re all breathing,” Dan Haley said. “We haven’t touched them at all, though. We called to them, but they wouldn’t wake up.”

“’Ellie!” Collins cried. He started to lunge into the chamber, but di Cesare shot out a thin, wiry arm and restrained the young man with ease.

“Be not impulsive, signore,” the little Italian warned. “Your embrace might prove fatal to your wife.”

He bowed to Burke and the other speleologists. “Mille grazie,” he said courteously. “A thousand thanks for your assistance tonight. I have but two favors more to ask.”

“Of course,” Burke said.

“The first is that you and your friends depart at once. What remains to be done can best be done with only a few onlookers. My second request is that you notify the good Sergeant Berkowitz that the missing women have indeed been found, but that Dario di Cesare requests a short time alone with them before they are removed from the cave.”

Burke nodded, and his group of spelunkers began to disperse. “I’ll leave you these flashlights,” he said. “You won’t have any trouble finding your way back out of here.”

They departed, discussing the strange case in whispers that echoed back to us. We stood together at the entrance to the little chapel—di Cesare, Collins, and I.

“My wife’s in there,” Collins cried. “And spider webs all over her! Let me go to her!”

“Va via!” di Cesare cried. “Away from here! Your wife will recover, if you obey me.”

“V-very well.”

“Take this searchbeam and step back. Hold the light so it illuminates us. Ah. Bene! Come, now, friend Starbuck. Let us examine these women.”

With Collins providing light, di Cesare and I stepped into the chamber. The four women did not awaken. They were all in their twenties, and only one of them was clad in anything substantial. Two wore nightgowns, and one—it was Collins’ wife—had been drawn from her house totally nude.

Kneeling, di Cesare placed his hand gently on the girl’s slim, pale bosom. “She breathes. She is in very deep sleep. Fetch your bag from the car, friend Starbuck. Adrenalin will bring these girls to wakefulness.”

I made my way out of the cave, found my black bag, and returned. Collins still held a head. “He’s talking to the spiders, Dr. Starbuck! I think he’s out of his head.”

I peered in. Di Cesare indeed presented a strange sight. He had scooped up one of the many insects that crawled over the floor of the chamber, and his lips were moving in a subliminal murmur as the insect clung to his cheek!

“Di Cesare!” I cried out. “That insect may be dangerous!”

He blinked, opening his eyes like one awakened from deep sleep. “You called, Starbuck?”

“I said that insect might be dangerous. Brush it off your face!”

He laughed. “The insect means no harm. And do you not notice anything strange about this insect, amico mio?”

“Strange? It’s just a nasty little brute of a spider, that’s all.”

“Ah, this is no arachnid, caro. Nor is it any insect spawned on this Earth, I’ll wager. Come: let us awaken these girls and attempt to talk with them, before the arrival of the ambulances.”

I prepared the injection of the stimulant, and di Cesare, who, of course, had a medical degree, administered it. In a few minutes, color returned to the faces of the four women. They stirred; they moaned; they opened their eyes and sat up. Suddenly conscious of her nudity, Elinor Collins shrieked.

“Have no fear,” di Cesare murmured. “Old Starbuck and I are beyond the years of lustfulness, and we are medical men besides. Your husband waits just without.”

Within a few seconds, we had four conscious and near-hysterical women on our hands. Di Cesare spoke to them each in turn, soothing them, using his unique powers of comfort and solace, until they were calm. He threw his cloak over

Elinor Collins, and we helped the four women to their feet and out of the dank cave.

Not one of the four could explain the strange compulsion that had caused her to go to the cave. They spoke of delirium, nightmares, a beckoning. Each remembered having seen one of the strange insects just before the onset of her mysterious hallucinations.

Ambulances were waiting outside the cave. The good Berkowitz had arrived as well, as had relatives of the other three missing women. There was a tearful scene of reunion, and then the four were bundled off for a night of rest in Phillipsburg General Hospital.

Berkowitz shook his head puzzledly. “All right, Dr. di Cesare. What’s the explanation this time? What possesses four girls to go creeping off into a cave?”

“I am not yet certain,” di Cesare replied. “Be good enough to leave us, Signor Berkowitz. Quite possibly I will have an explanation for you in the morning—although I think it quite probable, it is an explanation you will not care for.”

Still shrugging, Berkowitz returned to his car and drove away. Now only di Cesare and I remained at the entrance to the cave. It was past midnight now, but I felt not the slightest trace of sleep.

“Vieni, Starbuck mio. There is work yet for me, and you must help.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I have a patient, my friend, badly in need of my aid. A stranger patient than ever my practice has brought me before. I would not care to face him unwatched.”

Di Cesare refused to carry his explanation any further. Turning, he led me back through the passageway to the room where the missing girls had been.

To my amazement, he lowered himself to the clammy floor and sprawled out on his back. Almost instantly, half a dozen of the spider-like insects scuttled toward him and began to envelop him in webbing.

“Di Cesare! Those obnoxious insects …”

“I know,” he smiled. “Pace, good friend. Remain here and watch. I will enter a deep sleep, as did those girls. Watch over me, but do not attempt to wake me.” He took his brandy flask from his pocket. “When I stir, pour a few drops of this precious fluid between my lips. If necessary, administer a stronger stimulant. I will be expending perhaps nearly the last molecule of my strength, and I will need you when I awaken.”

I was utterly mystified. But I was conditioned to obey di Cesare in all things, no matter how preposterous they might seem on the surface. Stepping back, I forced myself to look idly on as di Cesare composed himself as if for sleep, while the energetic insects spun their web about his face and body. His eyes closed. Within moments, his breath was rising and falling with the even, regular rhythm characteristic of the hypnoid state.

His lips began to move after a moment. I was astonished, upon detecting a few stray words, to learn that he was speaking as if addressing a new patient in the early stages of analysis! Had he gone mad? Surely it was madness to lie on clammy stone deep within a cave, mouthing the phrases of Freudian analysis while strange spiders spun webs over him!

Time ticked slowly past. Di Cesare spoke less and less, as though we were now listening to a patient’s flow of consciousness. I found my eyes nodding; an hour went by, two hours. It was getting into the small hours of the morning. I fought with myself to stay awake. Di Cesare looked pale and somehow shrunken now; his lean face was beaded with sweat, his usually neat beard looked straggly and unkempt. I could almost sense strength being drained rapidly from him. What insanity was this?

Now it was three o’clock in the morning, half past … I nodded … I slipped into a light doze …

I heard di Cesare’s hoarse cry. “Starbuck! The brandy, Starbuck!”

Waking with a start, I saw di Cesare looking beady-eyed and white-faced. He was clawing away the spiders’ webs and was trying to sit up. I rushed to him, unscrewed the cap of the flask, put the flange to his lips. He took a deep pull of brandy, gasped, smiled.

“Sant’angeli, I know now how a man of ninety years feels. Help me to my feet, Star-buck. We must go outside, and we shall behold a sight never seen before by mortal man!”

He lurched to his feet and nearly toppled floorward again. I caught him. Together we tottered to the passageway and thence to the open air. To my surprise, I saw a steady stream of insects preceding us outward—rushing scurryingly past us and heading for the water!

Di Cesare was absolutely drained of strength. Normally he was a powerful man, for all his lack of bulk, but now he could barely swing one leg after the other. We reached the outside and he sank limply down on a boulder at the mouth of the cave.

“Look,” he cried. “Your spiders, friend Starbuck—rushing toward the lake.”

I watched in bewilderment as the creatures swept into the dark water and were gone.

“Di Cesare, what is this all about?”

He smiled wanly. “I have just performed an analysis—a year’s work in three hours. Per carita, it was a strain! But it is done now. The lake, Starbuck—osservate, the lake!”

The lake was beginning to roil and bubble, as though something monstrous were rising from its depths. Before my startled eyes, the surface broke, and a metal shape emerged, rose higher. A submarine? No—something else, something stranger, with a tail of fire. It rose higher and higher, until I could feel the fiery blast overhead, and suddenly it was gone, with an enormous roar, dwindling into the gray sky of early dawn.

“Great Scott, di Cesare, what on Earth was that?”

He laughed. “It is no longer on Earth, friend Starbuck. Nor did it belong here. We have had a rare privilege, seeing the departure of a strange visitor.”

“From some other world?”

“Si. A traveller in distress. Several weeks ago, when we saw the particularly bright meteor flash across the sky—it was a spacegoing vessel, coming to rest at the bottom of our lake. A small vessel, admittedly, no larger than my Fiat. But containing a creature of formidable mind—formidable, but sick.

“Picture the situation, Starbuck. A solitary space traveler, his only companions the insect-creatures that serve as his sensory extensions, struck by crippling psychosis in mid-travel. An irrational fear, magnified, exalted into total terror. A forced landing. The sending out of the insects, which are mere transmitters for the thought-waves of the sick creature from the stars. The random capture of four young housewives—bringing them together to the cave, in hopes that they could heal the sick mind. Alas, they are incapable! On the stranger’s world, things are different. Bene. We come. We find the women. I pick up an insect; I receive the impulses. I learn the truth of the situation. I lie down here, place myself en rapport with the creature, take upon myself the burdens of the alien ego.”

“Impossible!” I ejaculated. “Why you didn’t even know its language and thought-patterns …”

“So? And likewise the ‘insects’ are the impossible extensions of this impossible intelligence.” He shrugged. “Had you asked me yesterday were it possible, I think I would have said no. But—I have to try; and this I find—that the flow of thoughts makes possible in a few hours what would take years were mere words employed. Perhaps this being’s case was a relatively simple one, you think?—I do not know … But, as you did see, freed of the psychosis, the creature is able to continue his journey.”

“Madness, di Cesare!”

“Perhaps. Come, old friend. Let us salvage what we can of the night’s sleep. I have the weakness of a kitten. And tomorrow you must help me construct a tale to tell the skeptics.”

He shuddered. “This is one case history I can submit to my colleagues never, I fear. Ah, but how the good Freud would have relished an account of Oedipal fixation in a beast from the distant stars! Another sip of the brandy, friend Starbuck. And perhaps it is best that you operate the car. Di-Cesare has given aid to a mind far more powerful than his own, caro, and it will be many hours before he is himself again!”

Content

The Impossible Intelligence
Robert Silverberg