Then a wash of sanity came over MacAran. He tore himself free of the Captain, struggling to his feet. He said, in a low, urgent voice, “Sir, this is idiotic. If you fight it, you can get out of this. Try to fight it, try to stay sane–”
But Leicester, rolling free, came up to his feet, snarling with rage, his lips flecked with foam and his eyes unfocused and quite mad. Lowering his head, he charged full steam at MacAran; Rafe, quite cool-headed now, stepped back. He said regretfully, “I’m sorry, Captain,” and a well-aimed single blow to the point of the chin connected and knocked the crazed man senseless to the floor.
He stood looking down at him, feeling rage drain out of him like running water. Then he went to Camilla and knelt beside her. She looked up at him and smiled, and suddenly, in the way he could no longer doubt, they were in contact again. He said gently, “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant, Camilla? I would have worried, but it would have made me very happy, too.”
I don’t know. At first, I was afraid, I couldn’t accept it; it would have changed my life too much.
But you don’t mind now?
She said aloud, “Not just at this minute, I don’t mind, but things are so different now. I might change again.”
“Then it isn’t an illusion,” MacAran said, half aloud, “we are reading each other’s minds.”
“Of course,” she said, still with that tranquil smile, “didn’t you know?”
Of course, then, MacAran thought; this is why the winds bring madness.
Primitive man on Earth must have had ESP, the whole gamut of psi powers, as a reserve survival power. Not only would it account for the tenacious belief in them against only the sketchiest proof, but it would account for survival where mere sapience would not. A fragile being, primitive man could not have survived without the ability to know (with his eyesight dimmer than the birds, his hearing less than a tenth of that of any dog or carnivore,) where he could find food, water, shelter; how to avoid natural enemies. But as he evolved civilization and technology, these unused powers were lost. The man who walks little, loses the ability to run and climb; yet the muscles are there and can be developed, as every athlete and circus performer learns. The man who relies on notebooks loses the ability of the old bards, to memorize day-long epics and genealogies. But for all these millennia the old ESP powers lay dormant in his genes and chromosomes, in his brain–and some chemical in the strange wind (pollen? dust? virus?) had restimulated it.
Madness, then. Man, accustomed to using only five of his senses, bombarded by new data from the unused others, and his primitive brain also stimulated to its height, could not face it, and reacted–some by total, terrifying loss of inhibition; some with ecstasy; some with blank, blind refusal to face the truth.
If we are to survive on this world, then, we must learn to listen to it; to face it; to use it, not to fight it.
Camilla took his hand. She said aloud, in a soft voice, “Listen, Rafe. The wind is dying; it will rain, soon, and this will be over. We may change–I may change again with the wind, Rafe. Let us enjoy being together now–while I can.” Her voice sounded so sad that the man, too, could have wept. Instead, he took her hand and they walked quietly out of the dome; at the door Camilla paused, slipped her hand gently free of Rafe’s and went back. She bent over the Captain, slid her rolled-up windbreaker gently under his head; knelt at his side for a moment and kissed his cheek. Then she rose and came back to Rafe, clinging to him, shaking softly with unshed tears, and he led her out of the dome.
High on the slopes, mists gathered and a soft fine foggy rain began to fall. The small red-eyed furred creatures, as if waking from a long dream, stared wildly about themselves and scurried for the safety of their tree-roads and shelters of woven wood and wicker. The cavorting beasts in the valleys bellowed softly in confusion and hunger, abandoned their cavorting and stampeding and began quietly to graze along the streams again. And, as if waking from a hundred long confused nightmares, the alien men from Earth, feeling the rain on their faces, the effects of the wind receding in their minds, woke and found that in many cases, the nightmare, acted out, was dreadfully real.