Orbit 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Her heart pounded and she was afraid to look at him, afraid he would see the excitement on her face. She waited a moment then said, “Is it official?”

  “Not yet. Hadley was surprised when he learned that I’m still on the outside and working in Ullster’s section. He’ll take it up with them next week.”

  His tight voice, gaze fixed on the road ahead of them, hands hard on the wheel, furious with them at the complex, furious with himself, for being told he would have to move, ordered to come inside the complex. She knew. But the complex!

  Luxuriant apartments, some single houses, some duplexes, its own stores, restaurants, bowling lanes, swimming pools, putting greens . . .

  She shopped in Goldwater’s for a dress to mark the occasion, a simple sleeveless linen, pale yellow. Fifty-nine ninety-five. She took it home and hid it.

  Maiya, lovely in her pale lemon-colored dress that was superb with her rich tan and honey-toned hair, self-possessed and cool, stands in the doorway and looks them over appraisingly as they enter the apartment and find seats. One, Morrison, president of the research corporation, doesn’t sit down. He studies her as carefully as she examines them. He nods. He motions to the group of men and two of them leave quietly, three others remaining.

  “What’s your price?” Morrison asks.

  “One percent in the company,” Maiya says easily. She moves to the table and gets a cigarette and waits for him to light it for her. He does and she blows a perfect smoke ring. “Plus fifty thousand cash within ten days.”

  Maiya thought of Morrison whom she had seen at one time from a distance. Corpulent, a giant, with a head as big as a basketball and shining bald. He would fill the living room all by himself; she would be like a single wreath of pale smoke beside such a man. With one sweep of his hand he could disperse her, make her vanish forever, and he wouldn’t even notice that she had been there and was gone.

  “Honey, I think this is what I want to do. I’ll have to start low, but that’s all right. I’ll have my degree in two years, and meanwhile I’ll be part of it. They’re doing research and making plans for the uses of the ocean floor and for the planets when the time comes. Food, fuel, medicines, who knows what they’ll come up with from research like this?”

  Hank, twenty-three, ex-GI, ex-many things, nothing. Starting salary $98.75 per week. Up to $135.45 after a year and a half. The apartment was $160.00 per month. Quitting school with only half a year to go. Stopping the flow of communication that he had maintained with Maiya since they had been married four years ago.

  Maiya on the couch, waiting for the visitors, twenty-four, thinking about fifty thousand dollars. Not-thinking about Hank again and again, resolutely not-thinking about Hank. Fifty thousand dollars. He had lived in the Village on nothing, he said. Air, words, ideas? Handouts? What was fifty thousand dollars to him? Not-thinking of Hank. She could go to New York or Miami, and . . . And what? Having the money was what she thought of, not what she would do with it, where she would go with it. Having it, and not-thinking of Hank.

  Hank, looking out the window during the night. “There’s a crazy moon. Look at it, honey. Big as a house out there.” Moonlight on the desert, blue light that almost let you see, like a half-remembered image from a fairy tale where you didn’t have to think about the reality or unreality of a castle floating on water. Hank, naked at the window, unreal in the same pale light, playing his guitar, singing softly: “. . . and what have you built, when you’ve built a bomb? You’ve built hurt and pain and suffering anon . . .”

  “Hank, stop it! Come on to bed.”

  Sometimes she didn’t know him, couldn’t think why she had married him, where they were going or why.

  Not-thinking of Hank in bed with her. Especially not-thinking of Hank in bed with her.

  Maiya weeps bitterly and can’t answer their questions, can’t speak. Dr. Whitman motions them angrily from the room and sits by her side and pats her shoulder awkwardly. “I know, my dear. Hank told me what a wonderful life you had together. You will have to be brave now. It isn’t going to be easy for you.” No!

  Maiya jerked when somewhere a clock struck four. It was almost time. She returned to the kitchen and stood with her hand on the plug to the coffeepot. Hank’s papers. What if they wanted his papers? She ran to the bedroom and yanked open the top bureau drawer and snatched notebooks and loose papers up in both hands. Where could she put them? She started for the bed, then stopped. But where? Bedroom, living room, kitchen, bath...She ran to the bathroom and started to tear up the papers into tiny fragments. Limericks, bits of verse, songs, letters. All very, very dirty. She flushed them down the toilet.

  A film of perspiration had broken out on her forehead and she blotted it with Kleenex moistened with skin freshener. What would they have thought of her?

  Why were they coming?

  What did they want from her?

  She thought of the concrete road again and walked back to the living room and sat down once more. It was so bright! On her way from the university where they’d had a housekeeping unit, to Mesa, Arizona, where Hank had his new job. Miles and miles of plains, desert, white bright sky, and the car with four men in it that kept edging closer and closer so that she couldn’t relax, couldn’t let down her guard a moment. Everything connected to everything else. A skein of wool with millions of threads, so that it didn’t matter which one you followed, you ended back in the middle. Hank had said that, not Maiya. She shook her head violently. Not-thinking of Hank. The car followed closer going up the mountain roads. She couldn’t help it, she had to slow down. If only she knew exactly what it was she was running from. Maybe they weren’t even threatening her, just happened to be going in the same direction, at about the same speed.

  “Honey, all my life I’ve wanted to make things, you know? Model cars when I was a kid, then string wires into bottles and make lamps, put tubes together and come up with a radio or a hi-fi. Like that. I like to take things and put them together and come up with something new and useful, and even pretty.” He got out of the army in California and walked across the country to New York where they met and were married three weeks later. “No kids for awhile, okay with you?”

  She had nodded, relieved. No kids now, maybe never. She teased him about it, though: You’re the guy that wants to make things, but not kids.

  Nothing that would hurt, he’d said. She knew she had looked blank, and he had pushed her over backward in the bed and was on top of her with a scissors-lock . . . Not-thinking of Hank and her in bed together. God, not that ...

  Hairpin curves, thirty miles an hour, the other car half a city block away. Almost see their expressions now, one in the back seat leaning over the front seat, his chin on his arms, looking ahead, looking at her.

  Maiya is so young, so vulnerable. “I tried,” she says desperately. “I wanted him to stay on and go back to school. I wanted him to make something of himself. When he told me what he planned, I was terrified. He was sick. He needed help. You have to understand that.”

  Morrison, looming over her, blotting out the light, his voice everywhere in the room, says, “He was a traitor, an agent. And you were his accomplice.”

  “NO!” she cries, and her innocence is so apparent that even Morrison is moved into retreating. He mutters to Jeffries, the security man, “She’s okay. Chalk it up as an accident, give her the usual pension. Let’s go.”

  He was sick. Feverish, restless, pacing, in bed and up, again and again.

  “Hank, what is the matter? What happened?”

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  “How can I?” She pulled her robe on, chilled in the air-conditioned room. “At least tell me what happened.”

  Hank, muttering like a drunk, or a sleepwalker, some of the words coming through, not enough: “. . . doesn’t matter what you try to do, all ends up in the middle, all connected, wound around each other . . .”

  She caught his arm and pulled him to a stop. “What happened?”

  “Ull
ster is working on developing a mathematical approach to mental disease, and at the same time, on a mathematical approach to an electronic mind wave that would turn a man into a walking corpse in an instant.” Hank put his hand over hers on his bare arm. His hand was hot and dry. “We’re minting coins out there at the complex,” he said. “And each and every one of them has two heads.” His hand tightened on hers. “And I don’t know which mouth I’m feeding,” he said harshly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve been smoking pot or something.”

  He flung her hand away and went to the window. “I know you don’t know. Would it matter if you did? Would it matter?” He almost cried when he said that.

  She stood in the doorway staring at his silhouette against the pale light of the full moon on the desert. Then she turned and went back to bed. Much later she heard his soft voice and his guitar, but she didn’t get up.

  She looked about suddenly. For a moment she thought she had heard it again, only the elevator down the hall. She remembered the funny words he had made up that night: “Oh, they’ll tell you the story of a little file clerk; They’ll say that one day he went all berserk, That he raided the files and made a high pyre. That he lay down on top to take his rest there ...”

  They caught up with her halfway down the mountain. When she got out of her car and faced them, she said, “What do you want? I’m out of gas, there wasn’t any place I could stop. Will you take me to the next town, to the complex where my husband works?”

  One of them doubled over, laughing. “No place to stop! You drove like hell through town after town, past crossroad after crossroad. Honey, you didn’t want to stop.”

  Maiya heard the steps in the hallway and she stood up. They were on time.

  Maiya admits them graciously, wordlessly, and as they enter they murmur words of condolence. . . .

  The buzzer rasped at her. She fumbled with the lock, then got the door open.

  “Mrs. Brewster, I’m Dr. Whitman. How do you do.” He stepped aside and the two other men entered. “Mr. Fields, our company attorney, and Jack Arcana, of course, you know already.”

  She nodded and made a motion to close the door.

  Mr. Fields said, “Mrs. Brewster, we’ve come to talk to you about the terrible accident at the complex, to explain what your rights are, and primarily to offer, to urge you to accept our help at this difficult time.”

  Jack Arcana cleared his throat. “Maiya,” he said, “if there’s anything we, Susan and I can do, you know . . .”

  She looked at him and shook her head. She said dully, “Mary. My name is Mary.” Then she sat down and waited for them to tell her what to do.

  <>

  * * * *

  Fame

  by Jean Cox

  1

  Lights. Some scattered about the dark ground. Others flaring like cressets on high poles. Others floodlighting a tall cylindrical object, metallically gleaming against the night sky. Shouts. The throaty purr of trucks. Pieces of equipment strewn here and there. Gantries. Snaking cables and hoses. Sounds of quickly moving feet. Shapes silhouetting themselves against lighted windows and doors. But in thie midst of all this confusion, a concerted movement: a crowd making its way across the open ground, one man at its center. He walks slowly, gesturing. Those in front of him walk backward, spattering him with light. Those at his side hold white squares of paper, pencils alert or moving.

  They all pause before a long low building. He glances upward at the metallically gleaming object. His glance is confident and familiar, but it holds a little longer than the glances of those around him, who have looked up also in imitation—and his throat moves, as if he had swallowed to remove some constriction there. Then, decisively pushing open the door, he enters the building. Here too the buzz of incessant activity: telephones, typewriters, teletypewriters —chattering, clattering. There is an abrupt rise in the pitch of these sounds as he comes in, the equivalent of an exclamation, “Here he is, folks!” In fact, a sensitive ear might have caught that very phrase spoken into a dozen microphones. Might have caught also a name, “Cargill,” repeated more than once, “Major Ralph Cargill,” and scattered phrases, “most incredible voyage ever . . . time difference ... to another star and back,” which it might have pieced together into whole sentences: “One hundred years . . . plodding by on Earth on heavy feet . . . will flash by for him in the twinkling of ten years’ time. Our grandchildren . . . their children . . . will greet his triumphant return.” But it could not have caught what was being said directly and in a lower tone into Major Cargill’s left ear by a man in a dark business suit. Cargill nods, but looks around the room with a questing eye. He spots a face, out of the way in a far corner, and beckons. The owner of the face comes over and he and Cargill and the man who had spoken to Cargill go out of a door at the side of the room, followed by a hundred curious eyes. But not by the possessors of those eyes.

  It is quieter in this room, which has only one man in it. The man who had dropped the hint says, “This is Eastman, the make-up man. I need hardly remind you ...”

  “I will be ready. Mr. Eastman will see to that, I’m sure.” The hint-dropper consults his watch, and hurries out. “Now, Shel,” says Cargill, “if you will just stand over here where I can see you ...”

  The man he has brought into the room with him does as he is bid. This man is thin, bespectacled, with sandy ill-combed hair. He is pleasant without being good-looking. He can’t be very observant, his eye is so dull, and he is certainly not very lively. He is not well-dressed, either; and it seems that he is old-fashioned enough to wear a hat, because he carries one in his hand. The name in the hatband is plainly visible. Limbert.

  Cargill seats himself in a chair beside the cluttered table and permits the makeup man to dab at his face uninterruptedly for some minutes before he speaks.

  “Has Harper’s sent back your novel yet?”

  A slight flush (which the makeup man might have tried in vain to imitate) touches the cheek of Limbert. “No. Not yet.”

  “Well, of course,” says Cargill, watching and catching himself up short, “they might not. They might decide to take it.” Then, laughing, though somewhat seriously too, as if this were a moment for honesty: “They might want to be different from all those others.”

  Limbert smiles; and Cargill, still watching him and still amused and friendly, continues: “We’ve known each other for a long time, haven’t we?”

  “Since we were five.”

  “Right!” As if it had been a weighted examination question and Limbert had come out rather well on it. “Then you’re the obvious person to write about me, isn’t that so? In fact, with what you already know about me—and who knows me better than you do, Shel?—you might whip up something really fascinating.”

  His friend betrays a certain hesitancy. “Yes, I do want to write about you. In my way. But my way, you know, is so very uncongenial to the large public kind of thing you seem to have in mind, which is so out of keeping with what I do and with what seems natural for me to do, that—well, in short, it would look as if I were desperately trying to realize some cash on my friendship with you. It would look quite a bit like, a—”

  “Exploitation? Oh, hell, lots of people are doing that, anyway, and who has a better right than you? Listen, now,” getting up from the chair and seeming to brush aside the makeup man, who is imperfectly satisfied, “I’ve already made arrangements with Ed Woods atLife for you to do that long article we spoke about. Here,” extracting a manila envelope from his breast pocket and handing it: “These are a few pages I’ve written about myself. As told to, et cetera. It’ll help you over the rough spots, if you can’t think of anything to say. No—I don’t want any excuses, because I know you can handle it. And,” smartly tapping the envelope in Limbert’s hand with his forefinger, “don’t let the big boys take it away from you, okay?”

  An observant person could not fail to see, perhaps merely from the postures of the two men as t
hey stand facing each other, that they like each other; but that is about all he would find in common. Cargill, handsome and well-knit in his Air Force uniform, is very unlike Limbert: he has the build of an athlete, the face of a matinee idol, the presence and address of a popular politician. But there is a momentary touch of resemblance between them in that there is something like pity in the face of each as he looks at the other. This is to be their last meeting and parting. It is as if each were dying. Limbert will survive Cargill in a sense, but when the other returns to Earth a century from now, he might, if he wishes, walk out and visit Limbert’s grave, if such an obscure grave is still identifiable. But it is Cargill’s face which displays the greater sadness. It may be that, in addition to the feeling natural to the moment, he has in reserve a further store of pity for his threadbare friend, an unpublished would-be writer, a failure at twenty-seven, a fellow who could never have made it on his own. But now he won’t have to; he is seeing to that.

  “Believe me, Shel, really,” placing a hand on the nondescript shoulder, “it’ll be the making of you.”