Nightmare Tower

Nightmare Tower by Sam Merwin (1954)

Nightmare Tower is a science fiction story set in a future Earth where human teams work alongside cybernetic machines to solve complex administrative problems for the Earth Government. Lynne Fenlay, a twenty-four-year-old woman, is a synthesizer on one such group-machine team, living under the care of a team-matron called Mother Weedon alongside her teammates Ray Cornell and Janet Downes. Lynne begins suffering from a persistent psychosomatic headache and becomes aware that she is involuntarily reading the thoughts of those around her, discovering Janet's schemes to discredit her and steal Ray, and Ray's own confused emotional state. During two consecutive work sessions at the brain-station, Lynne achieves the previously unheard-of result of zero variance with the cybernetic machine, prompting the Integration Chief to remove her from the team on the grounds that a synthesizer who agrees perfectly with the machine is useless to a system designed to catch the machine's errors. Shortly afterward, a Martian named Rolf Marcein takes up residence at Mother Weedon's. Lynne recognizes him as the twin of the Integration Chief who dismissed her, and deduces that he is a Martian by his deep tan and athletic bearing. She discovers that Rolf is himself a telepath and can read her thoughts as she reads his. Over the following days he speaks to her of Mars, its wild boar hunts, its ruined crystal cities, and its desperate need for telepaths, and she finds herself increasingly drawn to him despite his arrogance and the manipulative methods he uses to unsettle her emotions. After Lynne's headaches are diagnosed as environmentally caused and she is told she needs a change of surroundings, Rolf arranges matters so that she agrees to leave for Mars that same night. The journey takes just over one Earth-day. Aboard the ship, in a state of growing suspicion, Lynne works out that her headaches were induced as part of a deliberate plan to erode her Earth-conditioning and make her willing to emigrate, and that Rolf was summoned from Mars precisely when her telepathic powers became apparent. On Mars she learns the true reason for her recruitment. The planet's thin atmosphere prevents lateral electronic communication, making telepaths essential for transmitting messages between settlements. A scant million people occupy all of Mars and fewer than a hundred telepaths maintain the communications network. Worse, some unknown influence has been driving telepaths mad, and the network is on the verge of collapse. Lynne's twin brother Revere, who was sent to Mars as a child while she remained on Earth, is one of those affected. She is to replace him at the communications post in Barkutburg while he receives treatment in New Samarkand. At Barkutburg, situated amid the ruins of an ancient Martian crystal city, Lynne meets Revere briefly before he is taken away for medical care, and she takes over his tower post. The settlement leader, Lao Mei-O'Connell, shows her murals in one of the ruined buildings, some of which are visible only in the infrared spectrum and depict two distinct types of beings: a near-human dominant species and smaller, twin-bodied, monkey-like creatures with multi-faceted eyes engaged in bizarre and suggestive activities. Lao believes these creatures, long thought extinct, may be the source of the attacks on the telepaths. During a painful episode in which Revere undergoes a dangerous experimental procedure involving a device called the necro-recorder, designed to extract images from the minds of dying or severely ill subjects, Lynne telepathically witnesses Rolf attempting to get Revere to project a visual image of the alien invaders onto a grid. The resulting images are blurred and overlapping. Lynne realizes, in a way the Martian-conditioned researchers have not, that the invaders are not the dominant near-human species as everyone assumed but the pet-like twin-bodied creatures, who survived the death of their planet by discarding their physical forms entirely and subsisting as beings of pure electrical force. That night in her tower post, the invisible aliens attack Lynne directly, crowding into her open telepathic mind with seductive and then painful mental assaults intended to force possession of her body. She resists the first two waves by concentrating her thoughts on homely and absurd images, discovering that the creatures cannot endure ridicule. On the third attack, however, they come in overwhelming force, apparently aware that she has guessed their true nature and determined to silence her before she can pass the information on. Badly weakened, she makes a desperate long-range telepathic effort and reaches Rolf, transmitting her discovery that the survivors are the twin-bodied creatures and not the dominant species. Rolf arrives at the tower by pinnace and drives the creatures off with an anion gun hastily adapted from a device used to discharge the positive electricity that accumulates on spacecraft hulls. Since the disembodied aliens exist as concentrations of positive electrical charge, a dose of negative ions neutralizes them. The communications network across Mars is restored. Rolf then explains to the gathered settlers that the alien creatures had been surviving on a starvation diet of residual electricity for thousands of years and had been gradually strengthened by the electrical activity the arriving Earthmen brought with them, eventually growing powerful enough to invade and possess open telepathic minds. With their true nature now identified and the anion weapon available, the immediate threat is broken, though the creatures will retain some capacity to draw on human electrical sources. Revere is reported to be recovering and wishes to remain on Mars with Lao Mei-O'Connell. Rolf tells Lynne that telepathy will not become less important now that the alien threat is contained but more so, serving as the foundation of Martian culture in education, therapy, and human understanding, and eventually proving essential as humanity reaches out toward Venus and the moons of the outer planets. Standing together in the Martian night, Rolf makes clear his intentions toward Lynne and she, aware that his feelings are as readable to her as hers are to him, answers him in kind.

By Sam Merwin · First published 1954 · Genre: Science Fiction, Psychological Thriller, Romance · 8 chapters · 25,907 words

First lines

Lynne disliked the man from Mars on sight. Yet drawn by forces beyond her control she let him carry her off to the Red Planet.

Lynne Fenlay had had a few headaches in the course of her twenty-four years. But she had never had a headache like this.

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science fiction · horror · dystopian · tower · survival · psychological thriller · suspense · dark · ominous · building · danger · mystery

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Nightmare Tower is listed on Textopian as a novella by Sam Merwin, dated 1954 CE.

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