Chapter 3
Alain did not sleep well in his hotel room that night. In part, he told himself, it was because Earth’s gravity was slightly stronger than he was used to on Leone, which tended to make the mattress feel lumpy and uncomfortable. Far more than that was the mental illness creeping into him. He was swallowing fistfuls of trimethaline at regular intervals, but they didn’t even slow the pain down. Something was going badly wrong inside his head, and despite all his years of training and practice, he could not keep it under control.
All night, as he lay in his bed, dreams assailed him. If they’d been his own dreams, he might have coped with them somehow; but the dreams of people in the rooms all around his were more than he could handle. All their private hells, desires and needs, the
