It was more than a fad. Those who called it a fad fell silent after they themselves experienced the dream. The suicide index arose around the country and the world. The thing was now international. The cacophonous ditty Green Rain was on all the jukes, as wasThe Wart-Hog Song. People began to loathe themselves and each other. Women feared that they would give birth to monsters. There were new perversions committed in the name of the thing, and several orgiastic societies were formed with the stomach rat as a symbol. All entertainment was forgotten, and this was the only topic.
Nervous disorders took a fearful rise as people tried to stay awake to avoid the abomination, and as they slept in spite of themselves and suffered the degradation.
*
It is no joke to experience the same loathsome dream all night every night. It had actually come to that. All the people were dreaming it all night every night. It had passed from being a joke to being a universal menace. Even the sudden new millionaires who rushed their cures to the market were not happy. They also suffered whenever they slept, and they knew that their cures were not cures.
There were large amounts posted for anyone who could cure the populace of the wart-hog-people dreams. There was presidential edict and dictator decree, and military teams attacked the thing as a military problem, but they were not able to subdue it.
Then one night a nervous lady heard a voice in her noisome dream. It was one of the repulsive cracked wart-hog voices. “You are not dreaming,” said the voice. “This is the real world. But when you wake you will be dreaming. That barefaced world is not a world at all. It is only a dream. This is the real world.” The lady awoke howling. And she had not howled before, for she was a demure lady.
Nor was she the only one who awoke howling. There were hundreds, then thousands, then millions. The voice spoke to all and engendered a doubt. Which was the real world? Almost equal time was now spent in each, for the people had come to need more sleep and most of them had arrived at spending a full twelve hours or more in the nightmarish world.
“It could be” was the title of a headlined article on the subject by the same Professor Greathouse mentioned above. It could be, he said, that the world on which the green rain fell incessantly was the real world. It could be that the wart-hogs were real and the people a dream. It could be that rats in the stomach were normal, and other methods of digestion were chimerical.
And then a very great man went on the air in worldwide broadcast with a speech that was a ringing call for collective sanity. It was the hour of decision, he said. The decision would be made. Things were at an exact balance, and the balance would be tipped.
“But we can decide. One way or the other, we will decide. I implore you all in the name of sanity that you decide right. One world or the other will be the world of tomorrow. One of them is real and one of them is a dream. Both are with us now, and the favor can go to either. But listen to me here: whichever one wins, the other will have always been a dream, a momentary madness soon forgotten. I urge you to the sanity which in a measure I have lost myself. Yet in our darkened dilemma I feel that we yet have a choice. Choose!”
And perhaps that was the turning point.
The mad dream disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The world came back to normal with an embarrassed laugh. It was all over. It had lasted from its inception six weeks.
*
Bascomb Swicegood, a morning type, felt excellent this morning. He breakfasted at Cahill’s, and he ordered heavily as always. And he listened with half an ear to the conversation of two girls at the table next to his.
“But I should know you,” he said.
“Of course. I’m Teresa.”
“I’m Agnes,” said Agnes.
“Mr. Swicegood, how could you forget? It was when the dreams first came, and you overheard me telling mine to Agnes. Then you ran after us in the street because you had had the same dream, and I wanted to have you arrested. Weren’t they horrible dreams? And have they ever found out what caused them?”
“They were horrible, and they have not found out. They ascribe it to group mania, which is meaningless. And now there are those who say that the dreams never came at all, and soon they will be nearly forgotten. But the horror of them! The loneliness!”
“Yes, we hadn’t even pediculi to curry our body hair. We almost hadn’t any body hair.”
Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. “Like a sackful of skunk cabbage,” Bascomb murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase.
Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn’t warts and bumps. “Like a latrine mop!” sighed Bascomb with true admiration. The cracked clang of Teresa’s voice was music in the early morning.
All was right with the earth again. Gone the hideous nightmare world when people had stood barefaced and lonely, without bodily friends or dependents. Gone that ghastly world of the sick blue sky and the near-absence of entrancing odor.
Bascomb attacked manfully his plate of prime carrion. And outside the pungent green rain fell incessantly.
The Imitation of Earth
By James Stamers
Once they had been human—now they shared a remarkable destiny on an incredible new planet....
He was in some dark, moving medium which pressed him gently and released him and pressed against him again with irregular rhythm. He could not feel his hands. He could not feel any part of his body, except a sort of itching in his calf.
He thrust downward to relieve this mild irritation and, surprisingly, seemed to rise up. He seemed to be alive. He had no idea where, or even when, or whether these were valid questions, for the ship had been entering hyper-spacetime when they hit the asteroid belt. Warps and elongations took place in hyper-spacetime. Perhaps he was now a hyper-spaceman.
He could recall his name. It was John Shepherd. He could remember objective events such as Doctor Adelitka Wynn creating a scene in the Mars terminal bar. Her sociology was better than her sense, as she accused him of making a pass at her. He would have liked to, perhaps, but ship’s etiquette said: “Crews date, captains wait, space is not the place.” He and she had been the last alive, and the last image he had seen on the screen had been a sun. Whose sun, which sun, and where were just uninformed speculations. But he was alive and conscious of himself. And he was buried deep in something.
He tried to define his feelings.
The alternating pressure of the darkness was felt only in one spot, in the area of his heart and about the size of a small bean. The occasional itching came from below this. He thrust again and again rose upward. Yet he had no heart, or no sense of hearing, for he could hear no sound of pumping. After several years in space he was only too familiar with the sound of his own blood circulating in his veins. The voids of space turned men into especially noisy bodily orchestras. There was none of that now.
He thought of himself as having the shape of a man, but perhaps that was just habit. The only area he could
