Gift From The Stars (5 page)

Adrian nodded. “We believe it. But what part—”

“Everything. The aliens are here. You may be aliens for all I know.” Cavendish’s body tensed again.

“We’re just people,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Like you.”

“That’s what they’d say, wouldn’t they?”

“I’m interested in the spaceship designs,” Adrian said. “I’m an aerospace engineer, and I think I could build a spaceship from those designs.”

“Yes,” Cavendish said. “I got them out of there, you know.”

“From the NASA project?” Adrian guessed.

Cavendish looked puzzled. “From SETI, of course. Cosmic rays. Energetic stuff. Too energetic to be natural, the physicists told me. Figure it out, it makes a picture. Right? You’ve got to decipher the code. But they make it easy. They want you to figure it out.”

“Anti-cryptography,” Adrian said.

“But then you don’t know,” Cavendish said. He looked bewildered.
“Do they want you to come? Why don’t they come here instead? Why don’t the others want the information to get out? What will happen to the world if everyone knows?” He was getting agitated. “Why did they tell us? Why do they want us to come? Do they want to torture us? Dissect us? Make us slaves? Eat us?” Tears began trickling down his face.

“It’s all right, Mr. Cavendish,” Adrian said. He felt like backing away from the man standing in front of him, looking almost normal but acting strangely.

Mrs. Farmstead had better instincts. She moved forward and put her arm around Cavendish’s shoulder and led him to the sofa. She sat down beside him and held his hand.

“Are there any other drawings?” Adrian asked.

“They destroyed them,” Cavendish said more quietly. “The other aliens. The ones who are here. The ones who don’t want us to go.” He glanced around slyly. “But I hid the real ones.” He looked apprehensive again. “Maybe they’re right, though. Maybe it was all a mistake.”

A change in the light and a puff of breeze alerted them more than the muffled sound of the door opening behind them. “I think you’ve talked long enough, Peter,” a calm voice said.

Cavendish jumped up nervously as Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead turned toward the door. A tall, sandy-haired man in a tweed jacket and imitation horn-rimmed glasses stood framed in the doorway. He looked a bit like Cary Grant but sounded more like Clint Eastwood.

“Fred,” he said, and they turned to see the orderly in the entrance to the hall, “I think Peter has had enough company for one day. Take him back to his room and give him a Xanax.”

“Yes, Dr. Freeman,” the orderly said. He took Cavendish’s arm and they disappeared down the hallway. Cavendish gave a single anguished look back at them before he returned to his unnatural calm.

“So,” Adrian said, turning to the psychiatrist, “you’re Cavendish’s physician?”

Freeman nodded. “And who are you?”

“My name is Adrian Mast. And this is Mrs. Farmstead.”

“Frances Farmstead,” she said.

“We were hoping to get some information from Cavendish about a book he published half a dozen years ago,” Adrian said.

“The famous book,” Freeman said.

“What’s famous about it?” Adrian asked. “As far as I know there’s only copy, and we’ve got it.”

“Peter talks about it a lot,” Freeman said. “Maybe we’d better sit. We may have more than a little to talk about.” He walked into the room and sat down in one of the easy chairs, and motioned Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead to the facing sofa. “You’re not casual visitors as you suggested to the receptionist.”

Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead looked at each other. Adrian said, “Not casual—in the sense that we weren’t just passing through. We sought Cavendish out. But casual in the sense that we represent nobody but ourselves and our curiosity.”

“Curiosity about
Gift from the Stars
?”

Adrian nodded. “Do you believe in the book, Dr. Freeman?”

“I’ve never seen a copy.”

Adrian looked at Mrs. Farmstead. She unzipped her large purse, rummaged around in the central pocket, pulled out the book, and handed it to Adrian who passed it on to Freeman. The psychiatrist turned it over in his hands and then opened the cover to the title page and to page one. “Now I believe in it,” he said and held up a hand, “though not in the sense you mean. But, more to the point, you believe in it.”

Adrian cleared his throat nervously. “At this point I have the urge to convince you that we’re not crazy. We’re not UFO believers. We don’t think aliens are zooming around, abducting people, maybe even passing for humans. But could some of the book be derived from reality rather than imagination?”

“Anything is possible, Mr. Mast,” Freeman said carefully. “You can find truth in some unlikely places and, as the French say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. But this is the sort of book I’d expect a paranoid schizophrenic to write, if one wrote a book. Not many of them do; they don’t have the attention span. But Peter wrote this book before he came to us.”

“And how did he come to you?” Mrs. Farmstead asked. “Was he more disturbed then? Did he have any explanation for his condition?”

“Those are not the kind of questions I feel free to answer. Speaking as his physician.” Freeman put his hands together. “You’re the ones who need to justify your presence here.”

“Turn to the appendices,” Adrian said. He waited while Freeman leafed to the back of the book. “Those are spaceship designs. I’m an aerospace engineer, and I would stake my reputation on the fact that those designs are genuine. I could build a spaceship from these if I could find something more detailed. And if I could develop the technology they imply.”

Freeman nodded slowly. “I’ll take your word for it. Not that I believe it. I have no proof, you see.”

“Any more than you have proof of Cavendish’s—condition,” Adrian said. He almost said “insanity” before he realized that psychiatrists probably found that word offensive.

“Could it have been induced?” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Is Cavendish on drugs? Was he placed here?”

Freeman shook his head. “He is on drugs, of course. He needs to be calmed occasionally, as you saw just now, and we’re trying to restore his sense of reality by restoring his chemical balances. But paranoid schizophrenia is a genetic predisposition sometimes triggered by an emotional crisis.”

“Not by drugs?” Adrian said.

Freeman chose his words carefully. “He came here talking about aliens and conspiracies, referred to us from a hospital in California. This is a place less conducive to theories of persecution. It was thought he had a better chance of recovery.”

“And what if we told you that there may be evidence of a conspiracy to suppress the distribution of this book?” Adrian said. “Maybe Cavendish isn’t crazy.” There, he had used a word even more likely to offend.

Freeman didn’t seem offended. “He suffers from schizophrenia. You can take my word for that. And for the fact that I’m not a member of any conspiracy. I am trying to cure his condition, not cause it.” Freeman stood up. “I think you’re reading far more into this than is there. Peter Cavendish was a member of a team searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. He had the background and ability to draw these designs, even make them plausible, perhaps even workable. But, like you, he surrendered to his desire that what he wanted to be true was really true. To oversimplify, the conflict created in him by this self-deception, and the necessary supporting details of a conspiracy to keep him from going public, triggered a psychotic reaction that brought him here. When he is able to recognize that, he will be on the road to recovery.”

“You mean,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “when he’s willing to accept your version of reality.”

“The world’s version,” Freeman said.

Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead stood up. Adrian shook his head as if trying to avoid the inevitable. “I hope,” he said, “you won’t find it necessary to report this incident.”

“There is nobody to report it to,” Freeman said, “except the team that supervises Peter’s case. I have to note your visit, but if I can I won’t elaborate on your beliefs. In return I’ll need something from you: by your support for Peter’s delusions, you have given his treatment a setback, and I would like your promise that you won’t disturb him again.”

Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead nodded.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Farmstead,” Freeman said. “Mr. Mast. Give up this notion. You’re only wasting your time.”

“Goodbye, Dr. Freeman,” Adrian said, “and thanks for your consideration.” He reached out his hand. Freeman looked at it for a moment and then, with a start, returned the copy of
Gift from the Stars
.

Adrian sat disconsolately at the counter in the coffee shop, a cup of black coffee cooling unnoticed in front of him. “So Cavendish is crazy, and so are we for chasing after something as weird as this.”

“You’re taking Dr. Freeman’s word for it?” Mrs. Farmstead asked.

“Aren’t you?”

“Well, maybe. Freeman could be working for the people who stopped Cavendish’s publication, who wanted him hospitalized. But he seems genuine.” A wicked smile creased her face. “But just because a person is crazy doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a few sane thoughts. Like Dr. Freeman said about the stopped clock.”

Hope flickered in Adrian’s eyes. “That’s right.”

Mrs. Farmstead took a sip of her hot tea. “Dr. Freeman suggested that maybe the stress of writing the book, of inventing what he wanted to be true, set him off. But what if it wasn’t that—what if it were the predicament of knowing he had stumbled onto some fantastic truth and then it was suppressed?”

“And of not knowing the right thing to do,” Adrian picked up excitedly. “Maybe, he thought, the people who wanted to destroy the information were right. Why were the aliens sending the plans? What did they want from us? Why did they want us to have a spaceship that could reach the stars? Why didn’t they simply hop in their spaceships and come to visit us?”

“Exactly,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Those aren’t easy questions. They might make anyone flip out. That’s what Cavendish kept trying to say.”

“I’ll admit,” Adrian said, “questions about the aliens and their motives have run through my mind, too, while I’m trying to go to sleep and sometimes when I wake up during the night.”

“And like the bumper sticker when I was young,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “‘just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t after you.’”

“But if that were the case,” Adrian said, depression edging back, “you’d think that somebody would be tapping us on the shoulder about now.”

“Mr. Mast, Mrs. Farmstead,” a voice said behind them. “That sounds like a cue.”

They turned. Behind them was the orderly named Fred. He had been wearing white pants and a white jacket at the Clinic, but now he had changed into a rumpled brown jacket over his white pants, and he looked like a bookish graduate student.

“You?” Adrian said.

Fred nodded. “You know how much orderlies make? They paid me pretty good just to keep my eyes open and let them know if anybody came around asking about Mr. Cavendish. Look, there’s somebody who wants to talk to you.”

“Suppose we don’t want to talk to him?” Mrs. Farmstead said.

Fred shrugged. “Up to you. But sooner or later you’re going to talk to him, and the sooner it is the sooner you can stop looking over your shoulder.”

“Are you threatening us?” Adrian asked.

Fred spread his hands. “You see any threats? You know, working around a mental institution you get some insights into behavior. I’ve learned this much: it’s better to face the unknown than to run from it.”

“And where do we do this?” Adrian asked.

“Is this where some goons throw us in a black limousine and whisk us off to Washington?” Mrs. Farmstead said.

“You been watching too many thrillers,” Fred said. “You can go wherever you want, or you can follow me to Forbes Field, where a man has just arrived in an Air Force jet. He’s waiting for you.”

Adrian looked at Mrs. Farmstead, and Mrs. Farmstead looked at Adrian. Adrian shrugged. “Let’s get it over with,” he said.

By the time they reached Forbes Field, the sun was setting. It had been a long day that had started far from this spot, and there had been little sleep and less food. They were tired and hungry.