Orbit 13 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “Night,” Delia said at the door, and I looked at her again, nodded, and she started through, then stopped. A high, uncanny, inhuman scream sounded once, from a long way off. It echoed through the empty city. The silence that followed it made me understand that what I had thought to be quiet before had not been stillness. Now the silence was profound; no insect, no rustling, no whir of small wings, nothing. Then the night sounds began to return. The three of us had remained frozen; now Bernard moved. He turned to Delia.

  “I knew it,” he said. “I knew!”

  She was very pale. “What was it?” she cried shrilly.

  “Panther. Either in the city or awfully close.”

  Panther? It might have been. I had no idea what a panther sounded like. The others were coming down again, Evinson in the lead, Corrie and J.P. close behind him. Corrie looked less frightened than Delia, but rattled and pale.

  “For heaven’s sake, Bernard!” J.P. said. “Was that you?”

  “Don’t you know?” Corrie cried. At the same time Delia said, “It was a panther.”

  “No! Don’t be a fool!” Corrie said.

  Evinson interrupted them both. “Everyone, just be quiet. It was some sort of bird. We’ve seen birds for three days now. Some of them make cries like that.”

  “No bird ever made a sound like that,” Corrie said. Her voice was too high and excited.

  “It was a panther,” Bernard repeated. “I heard one before. In Mexico I heard one just like that, twenty years ago. I’ve never forgotten.” He nodded toward the net-covered window. “Out there. Maybe in one of the city parks. Think what it means, Evinson. I was right! Wildlife out there. Naturalized, probably.” He took a breath. His hands were trembling, and he spoke with an intensity that was almost embarrassing. Corrie shook her head stubbornly, but Bernard went on. “I’m going to find it. Tomorrow. I’ll take Sax with me, and our gear, and plan to stay out there for a day or two. We’ll see if we can find a trace of it, get a shot. Proof of some kind.”

  Evinson started to protest. If it wasn’t his plan, he hated it. “We need Sax to find water for us,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what the beast is; it might attack on sight.”

  I was watching Bernard. His face tightened, became older, harsher. He was going. “Drop it, Evinson,” I said. “They know about me. The only water I’ll find is the river, which I already stumbled across, remember. And Bernard is right. If there’s anything, we should go out and try to find it.”

  Evinson grumbled some more, but he couldn’t really forbid it, since this was what the expedition was all about. Besides, he knew damn well there was no way on earth that he could enforce any silly edict. Sulkily he left us to plan our foray.

  * * * *

  It was impossible to tell how the waterways had been laid out in many places. The water had spread, making marshes, and had changed its course, sometimes flowing down streets, again vanishing entirely, leaving dry beds as devoid of life as the Martian canals. Ruined concrete and sand lay there now. And the ruins went on and on. No frame houses remained; they had caved in, or had been blown down, or burned. A trailer court looked as if someone had taken one corner of the area and lifted it, tipping the chrome and gaudy-colored cans to one side. Creepers and shrubs were making a hill of greenery over them. We rowed and carried the boat and our stuff all day, stopped for the storms, then found shelter in a school building when it grew dark. The mosquitoes were worse the farther we went; their whining drowned out all other noises; we were both a mass of swollen bites that itched without letup. We saw nothing bigger than a squirrel. Bernard thought he glimpsed a manatee once, but it disappeared in the water plants and didn’t show again. I didn’t see it. There were many birds.

  We were rowing late in the afternoon of the second day when Bernard motioned me to stop. We drifted and I looked where he pointed. On the bank was a great gray heron, its head stretched upward in a strange but curiously graceful position. Its wings were spread slightly, and it looked like nothing so much as a ballerina, poised, holding out her tutu. With painful slowness it lifted one leg and flexed its toes, then took a dainty, almost mincing step. Bernard pointed again, and I saw the second bird, in the same pose, following a ritual that had been choreographed incalculable ages ago. We watched the dance of the birds in silence, until without warning Bernard shouted in a hoarse, strange voice, “Get out of here! You fucking birds! Get out of here!” He hit the water with his oar, making an explosive noise, and continued to scream at them as they lifted in panicked flight and vanished into the growth behind them, trailing their long legs, ungainly now and no longer beautiful.

  “Bastard,” I muttered, and started to row again. We were out of synch for a long time as he chopped at the water ineffectually.

  We watched the rain later, not talking. We hadn’t talked since seeing the birds’ courtship dance. I had a sunburn that was painful and peeling; I was tired, and hungry for some real food. “Tomorrow morning we start back,” I said. I didn’t look at him. We were in a small house while the rain and wind howled and pounded and turned the world gray. Lightning flashed and thunder rocked us almost simultaneously. The house shook and I tensed, ready to run. Bernard laughed. He waited for the wind to let up before he spoke.

  “Sax, we have until the end of the week, and then back to Washington for you, back to New York for me. When do you think you’ll ever get out of the city again?”

  “If I get back to it, what makes you think I’ll ever want out again?”

  “You will. This trip will haunt you. You’ll begin to think of those parakeets, the terns wheeling and diving for fish. You’ll dream of swimming in clean water. You’ll dream of the trees and the skies and the waves on the beach. And no matter how much you want to get it back, there won’t be any way at all.”

  “There’s a way if you want it bad enough.”

  “No way.” He shook his head. “I tried. For years I tried. No way. Unless you’re willing to walk cross-country, and take the risks. No one ever makes it to anywhere, you know.”

  I knew he was right. In Health and Education you learn about things like public transportation: there isn’t any. You learn about travel: there isn’t any, not that’s safe. The people who know how to salvage and make-do get more and more desperate for parts to use, more and more deadly in the ways they get those parts. Also, travel permits were about as plentiful as unicorns.

  “You wanted to go back to Mexico?” I asked.

  “Yeah. For twenty years I wanted to go back. The women there are different.”

  “You were younger. They were younger.”

  “No, it isn’t just that. They were different. Something in the air. You could feel it, sniff it, almost see it. The smells were...” He stood up suddenly. “Anyway, I tried to get back, and this is as close as I could get. Maybe I’ll go ahead and walk after all.” He faced the west where the sky had cleared and the low sun looked three times as big as it should have.

  “Look, Bernard, I could quote you statistics; that’s my job, you know. But I won’t. Just take my word for it. That’s what I’m good at. What I read, I remember. The birth rate has dropped to two per thousand there. As of six years ago. It might be lower now. They’re having a hell of a time with communications. And they had plague.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “What? The birth rate?”

  “Plague.” He looked at me with a strange smile.

  I didn’t know what he was driving at. I was the one with access to government records, while he was just a photographer. “Right,” I said. “People just died of nothing.”

  “It’s a lie, Sax! A goddamn fucking lie! No plague!” He stopped as suddenly as he had started, and sat down. “Forget it, Sax. Just forget it.”

  “If it wasn’t the plague, what?”

  “I said to let it drop.”

  “What was it, Bernard? You’re crazy, you know that? You’re talking crazy.”

  “Yeah, I’m crazy.” He was looki
ng westward again. During the night I wakened to hear him walking back and forth. I hoped that if he decided to start that night, he’d leave me the canoe. I went back to sleep. He was still there in the morning.

  “Look, Sax, you go back. I’ll come along in a day or two.”

  “Bernard, you can’t live off nothing. There won’t be any food after tomorrow. We’ll both go back, stock up, and come out again. I couldn’t go off and leave you. How would you get back?”

  “When I was a boy,” he said, “my father and mother were rather famous photographers. They taught me. We traveled all over the world. Getting pictures of all the vanishing species, for one last glorious book.” I nodded. They had produced two of the most beautiful books I had ever seen. “Then something happened,” he said, after a slight hesitation. “You know all about that, I guess. Your department. They went away and left me in Mexico. I wasn’t a kid, you see, but I’d always been with them. Then I wasn’t with them anymore. No note. No letter. Nothing. They searched for them, of course. Rich gringos aren’t -- weren’t -- allowed to simply vanish. Nothing. Before that my father had taken me into the hills, for a hunt. This time with guns. We shot -- God, we shot everything that moved! Deer. Rabbits. Birds. A couple of snakes. There was a troop of monkeys. I remember them most of all. Seven monkeys. He took the left side and I took the right and we wiped them out. Just like that. They shrieked and screamed and tried to run away, and tried to shield each other, and we got every last one. Then we went back to my mother and the next day they were gone. I was fifteen. I stayed there for five years. Me and the girls of Mexico. They sent me home just before the border was closed. All North Americans out. I got permission to go back to New York, and for seventeen years I never left again. Until now. I won’t go back, Sax.”

  He leaned over and picked up a rifle. He had had it with his photographic equipment. “I have ammunition. I’ve had it for years. I’m pretty good with it. I’d demonstrate, but I don’t want to waste the shell. Now, you just pick up your gear, and toss it in the boat, and get the hell out of here.”

  I suddenly remembered watching television as a child, when they had programs that went on around the clock -- stories, movies. A man with a rifle stalking a deer. That’s all I could remember of that program, but it was very clear and I didn’t want to go away and let Bernard be that man. I stared at the rifle until it began to rise and I was looking down the barrel of it.

  “I’ll kill you, Sax. I really will,” he said, and I knew he would.

  I turned and tossed my pack into the boat and then climbed in. “How will you get back, if you decide to come back?” I felt only bitterness. I was going back and he was going to be the man with the rifle.

  “I’ll find a way. If I’m not there by Friday, don’t wait. Tell Evinson I said that, Sax.”

  “Bernard...” I let it hang there as I pushed off and started to paddle. There wasn’t a thing that I could say to him.

  I heard a shot about an hour later, then another in the afternoon, after that nothing. I got back to headquarters during the night. No one was up, so I raided the food and beer and went to bed. The next morning Evinson was livid with rage.

  “He wouldn’t have stayed like that! You left him! You did something to him, didn’t you? You’ll be tried, Sax. I’ll see you in prison for this.” Color flooded back into his face, leaving him looking as unnaturally flushed as he had been pale only a moment before. His hand trembled as he wiped his forehead, which was flaky with peeling skin.

  “Sax is telling the truth,” Delia said. She had circles under her eyes and seemed depressed. “Bernard wanted me to go away with him to hunt. I refused. He needed someone to help him get as far away as possible.”

  Evinson turned his back on her. “You’ll go back for him,” he said to me, snapping the words. I shook my head. “I’ll report you. I don’t believe a word of what you’ve said. I’ll report you. You did something, didn’t you? All his work for this project! You go get him!”

  “Oh, shut up.” I turned to Corrie. “Anything new while I was gone?”

  She looked tired too. Evinson must have applied the whip. “Not much. We’ve decided to take back samples of everything. We can’t do much with the equipment we brought. Just not enough time. Not enough of us for the work.”

  “If you knew your business you could do it!” Evinson said. “Incompetents! All of you! This is treason! You know that, don’t you? You’re sabotaging this project. You don’t want me to prove my theory. Obstacles every step of the way. That’s all you’ve been good for. And now this! I’m warning you, Sax, if you don’t bring Bernard back today, I’ll press charges against you.” His voice had been high pitched always, but it became shriller and shriller until he sounded like a hysterical woman.

  I spun to face him. “What theory, you crazy old man? There is no theory! There are a hundred theories. You think those records weren’t sifted a thousand times before they were abandoned? Everything there was microfilmed and studied again and again and again. You think you can poke about in this muck and filth and come up with something that hasn’t been noted and discarded a dozen times? They don’t give a damn about your theories, you bloody fool! They hope that Delia can come up with a radiation study they can use. That Bernard will find wildlife, plant life that will prove the pollution has abated here. That J.P. will report the marine life has reestablished itself. Who do you think will ever read your theories about what happened here? Who gives a damn? All they want now is to try to save the rest.” I was out of breath and more furious than I had been in years. I wanted to kill the bastard, and it didn’t help at all to realize that it was Bernard that I really wanted to strangle. The man with the gun. Evinson backed away from me, and for the first time I saw that one of his hands had been bandaged.

  Corrie caught my glance and shrugged. “Something bit him. He thinks I should be able to analyze his blood and come up with everything from what did it to a foolproof antidote. In fact, we have no idea what bit him.”

  “Isn’t Trainor any help with something like that?”

  “He might be if he were around. We haven’t seen him since the night we heard the scream.” Evinson flung down his plastic cup. It bounced from the table to the floor. He stamped out.

  “It’s bad,” Corrie said. “He’s feverish, and his hand is infected. I’ve done what I can. I just don’t have anything to work with.”

  Delia picked up the cup and put it back on the table. “This whole thing is an abysmal failure,” she said dully. “None of us is able to get any real work done. We don’t know enough, or we don’t have the right equipment, or enough manpower, or time. I don’t even know why we’re here.”

  “The Turkey Point plant?”

  “I don’t know a damn thing about it, except that it isn’t hot. The people who built that plant knew more than we’re being taught today.” She bit her lip hard enough to leave marks on it. Her voice was steady when she went on. “It’s like that in every field. We’re losing everything that we had twenty-five years ago, thirty years ago. I’m one of the best, and I don’t understand that plant.”

  I looked at Corrie and she nodded. “I haven’t seen a transplant in my life. No one is doing them now. I read about dialysis, but no one knows how to do it. In my books there are techniques and procedures that are as alien as acupuncture. Evinson is furious with us, and with himself. He can’t come up with anything that he couldn’t have presented as theory without ever leaving the city. It’s a failure, and he’s afraid he’ll be blamed personally.”

  We sat in silence for several minutes until J.P. entered. He looked completely normal. His bald head was very red; the rest of his skin had tanned to a deep brown. He looked like he was wearing a gaudy skullcap.

  “You’re back.” Not a word about Bernard, or to ask what we had done, what we had seen. “Delia, you coming with me again today? I’d like to get started soon.”

  Delia laughed and stood up. “Sure, J.P. All the way.” They left together.
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br />   “is he getting anything done?”

  “Who knows? He works sixteen hours a day doing something. I don’t know what.” Corrie drummed her fingers on the table, watching them. Then she said, “Was that a panther the other night, Davidson? Did you see a panther, or anything else?”

  “Nothing. And I don’t know what it was. I never heard a panther.”

  “I don’t think it was. I think it was a human being.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yes. In childbirth.” I stared at her until she met my gaze. She nodded. “I’ve heard it before. I am a doctor, you know. I specialized in obstetrics until the field became obsolete.”

  I found that I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “You’re as crazy as Bernard.”

  “No. That’s what I came for, Davidson. There has to be life out there in the Everglades. The Indians. They can stick it out, back in the swamps where they always lived. Probably nothing much has changed for them. Except that there’s more game now. That has to be it.”