Orbit 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Eliot watched the laughing figures, rolling, grappling, and he felt only disgust for the girl, and the man, whoever he happened to be. Too quick. Everything about her was too quick. He started to move from the post, but there were others now coming from the dunes, running together so that it was impossible to say if there were two or three, or even four of them. The light from a crescent moon was too feeble, he couldn’t make them out. Now there was a tight knot in his middle, and he felt cold. He looked down at the swells of the sea, black and hard looking here, but alive and moving, always moving. When he looked again at the beach he knew that there were six people, dancing together, run­ning, playing. All naked, all carefree and happy now. They paired off and each couple became one being, and he turned away. With­out looking again at the figures, he left the pier and hurried home. He was shivering from the constant wind on the pier.

  Strange, fragmented dreams troubled his sleep. The night witch came to him and tormented his flesh while he lay unable to move, unable to respond, or refrain from responding when that pleased her. Then he was crawling up a cliff, barren and rocky, windswept and cold. He was lost and the wind carried his voice down into crevices when he tried to call for help. His hands hurt, and he knew his toes were bleeding, leaving strange trails, like the spoor of an unidentified animal. He was on a level plain, with a walking stick in his hand, weary and chattering with cold. The wind was relentless, tearing his clothes from him; the rock-strewn field that he traversed was like dry ice. He kept his eyes cast down, so he wouldn’t lose the nebulous trail that he had to follow, strange reddish wavery lines, like blood from an unknown animal. He tried to use the walking stick, but each time he struck it on the boulder, he felt it attach itself, knew that it rooted and sprouted instantly, and he had to wrench it loose again.

  Eliot sat on his porch drinking black coffee, a newspaper on the table ignored as he stared over the blue-green waters. The sun was hot already, the day calm, the water unruffled. Another perfect day in paradise. He frowned at the sound of light tapping on the screen door. Donna Bensinger opened it, called, “Hello, are you decent? Can I come in?”

  “Sure. Around the corner on the porch.” He didn’t stand up. She had on shorts, too short for her bulging pale legs, and a shirt that didn’t conceal her stomach at all. Her hair was pulled back with a yellow ribbon; there were bright red spots on her cheeks, and her nose flamed, as did the tops of her bare feet and forearms. One morning and she was badly burned already. By the end of the day she’d be charred and by the next day, probably in the hospital, or at least on her way home again. He motioned for her to sit down.

  “Coffee?”

  “Oh, no, thank you. This is all so fantastic, isn’t it? I mean, the island, the houses for all of us, people to bring you groceries and anything you need, boats we can use. I never dreamed of a job like this. It’s right out of a movie, isn’t it?”

  He turned from her to resume his contemplation of the quiet ocean. She continued to talk. He finished his coffee and stood up. “Let’s go. I have a date at twelve. I can show you the offices and explain briefly what you’re to do in half an hour or so.”

  Eliot was six feet tall, his stride was long and quick, and he made no pretense of slowing it for the girl. She trotted at his side. “Oh, I know that people have planted all this stuff, that it didn’t just happen like this, I mean the orchids in the trees, and the jasmines and hibiscus and everything, but doesn’t it look just like one of those dream islands where the heroine wears a grass skirt and sings and the hero dives for pearls, and there’s a volcano that erupts in the end and they all get away in those funny boats with the things sticking out of the sides of them? Who started to build something here?”

  “Spaniards. They brought in the rocks to build a fort, then abandoned it.”

  “Spaniards! Pirates!” She stopped abruptly, then had to run to catch up. “I can see the ships with all those sails, and slaves haul­ing the blocks all roped together, a Spaniard in black with a long whip . . .”

  The pink stucco building that they were approaching was lav­ishly landscaped with tropical and semitropical plants imported from around the world: travelers’ palms, fifteen-foot-high yucca plants, Philippine mahogany trees, a grouping of live oaks hung with gray-green Spanish moss that turned the light silver. A small lake before the building mirrored the trees, swans gliding through the water hardly distorted the images.

  “The office building used to be a guest house,” Eliot said. “It has its own kitchen, a hurricane-proof basement. Come on.” There was another of the wide porches; then they were inside, in the cooled air of the lobby. This had been converted into a lounge, with a coffee maker, tables and chairs, a color television, a fire­place. Eliot showed her through the building quickly. Her office was small but well furnished, and she nodded approval. The old dining room had been equipped with a computer, several desks and chairs, a typewriter desk, drawing table lighted by a pair of fluorescent lamps. Next door was the file room, cabinet after cabinet, with library tables in the center of the room, all covered with folders and loose papers. “Marianne usually kept it up to date, but these last weeks she really wasn’t well enough.”

  She sounded put-upon. “I have to file all that stuff?”

  “Beatrice will come over a couple of hours every day to show you the system, help you get caught up. She’s Pitcock’s private secretary, but she knows this work too.”

  He showed her the rest of the first floor, then they went down­stairs to the recreation room, where he sat down and lighted a cigarette. “Any questions?”

  “But you haven’t told me anything about what I have to do, except the filing. And what you’re doing here, all of you, I mean.”

  “Okay. I didn’t know how much Pitcock told you. You’ll handle correspondence, type up reports, keep the files up to date. We are studying the effects of cycles. First we establish the fact of cycles, correlate synchronous cycles, check them back as far as you can find records for, and predict their future appearance. We collect data from all over the world, Marty feeds it into his computer and the monster spits out answers. The snowshoe hare and the lynx have the same cycle. There are business cycles of highs and lows that persist in spite of wars, technological discoveries, any­thing that happens. Weather cycles, excitability cycles in man. War and peace cycles. There are cycles of marriages in St. Louis, and cycles of migrations of squirrels in Tennessee.” He stopped and stubbed out his cigarette hard, mashing it to shreds.

  After the silence had lengthened long enough for him to light a new cigarette and for her to start fidgeting, she said, “But—why? I mean, who cares, and why?”

  Eliot laughed and stubbed out the new cigarette. “That’s the best damn question anyone’s asked around here for over two years.”

  At noon he picked up Gina to take her to Charleston. Beatrice was dressed, as if she too would go, if he only asked again. He didn’t look directly at her, nor did he ask. The day was not a success, although usually he enjoyed taking the child to town. He kept wondering what Beatrice was doing, what the others were doing, if they were all together. He returned to the island with Gina at six thirty. Pitcock and Bonner were talking on the dock when he brought the small boat in.

  Pitcock reached for Gina’s hand. “Have a good time, honey?”

  “Eliot bought me a see-through raft. And a book about sea shells. And we went on rides at a carnival.”

  Eliot handed the parcels to Bonner, checked the boat again, then climbed out. The motor launch was gone. Pitcock stood up, still holding Gina’s hand. “Come over to dinner later, Eliot? The others have gone out fishing. I’ll see Gina home.”

  “Beatrice?”

  “She’s here. She’ll be over later too.”

  “Okay. See you around eight?”

  * * * *

  Donna was there. Eliot paused in the doorway when he saw her, shrugged, and entered. She smiled at him, dimpling both cheeks. Beatrice nodded, murmured thanks for Gina’s gifts, then t
urned away. Pitcock handed him a martini, and Eliot sat down with it and studied an Escher drawing over the mantel. It reminded him of his dream, following his own trail that he was making so that he wouldn’t get lost when he came along. He shook his head and tried to pick up the gist of the story Pitcock was telling. Donna was hanging on every word. She was no more burned than she had been that morning, must have spent the day inside somewhere. He wondered with whom, then concentrated on Pitcock.

  “Selling you down the river was no idle threat, not just a little piece of slang that got started; what it was was a death sentence. It meant actually selling a slave to work in the bottom lands on the coast—downriver. Swamps, disease, floods, alligators, snakes. Sure death real quick. And the sands kept piling up on the islands, the rocks got buried deeper and deeper. In eighteen forty my great-granddaddy bought three of these islands, ten dollars an island, or some such amount. He was ashamed to put down the real figure he paid for them, just said they were cheap. Along about nineteen twenty-eight, twenty-nine, a hurricane came and stripped a lot of the sand away again, and by the time I got around to coming out to see the damage, hell, I found a pile of rocks and stones, the foundation of a fort, all that stuff. Decided to keep the island. But I sold off the other two. One island’s enough for a man.”

  “Fifteen fifty,” Donna said, her eyes wide. “Wow! I wonder what happened to them, the Spaniards.”

  Pitcock shrugged and glanced at the glasses the others were holding. He poured more martini into Eliot’s, was waved away by Beatrice. Donna hadn’t touched hers. “Malaria. Possibly a hur­ricane. They went ahead with St. Augustine, but they never came back up here.”

  “Well, I think they were crazy. It’s the grooviest place I’ve ever seen. Last night the wind in the palm trees and the sound of the ocean, and the way the air smells here. I mean, I slept like a baby. I’ve never slept like that before in my life. And awake at dawn! I couldn’t stand not going out right away! I just had to go out and jump into the water and swim.”

  Eliot laughed harshly and choked. “Nothing,” he said when he finally could speak again. “Nothing. Just thinking how we all felt at first, then how the days began to melt into each other, and the weekends tended to blur and run together, and how you’re always tearing off another page of the calendar, another month gone to hell.”

  Beatrice swept him with a sharp look, and he returned her gaze coldly. She was always so cool, so self-possessed, she didn’t like scenes or emotional outbursts, and his voice had been thick with emotion. “Just don’t go childish on me, okay? If you have something to say, say it, but don’t pout or sulk or scream obsceni­ties.” And he said, “You can sweat and moan and cry, just like any other woman.” “But not with you, not again. I don’t like performing, even for an audience of only one.”

  “Dinner’s ready.” The goddam intercom.

  “But the work’s coming along,” Pitcock said to Donna. Pitcock was laughing at him, Eliot knew, not on his face where it would show, or in his voice where it could be heard, but somewhere inside him there was laughter.

  Pitcock told Donna about the hotel suite he maintained in the Windward Hotel, and the car there available at all times. “Bonner will run you over to the mainland, or the other islands any time you want to go, pick you up again later, or you can just check in and spend the night. Nice shops, a movie or two. Don’t want you getting lonesome, you know.”

  Donna’s eyes grew larger and she ate without glancing at her food.

  And later: “Supposing that you were an intelligent flea on a dog. Life’s been pretty good, plenty to eat, no real drastic changes in your life, or that of your parents or grandparents. You can look forward to generations of the same existence for your children and theirs. But supposing that, because you are intelligent, you want to know more about this thing that is home to you, and when you start digging you find that it isn’t the universe after all. What you thought was the whole world turns out to be a tiny bit of it, with masters ordering it, forces working on it that you never dreamed of. Things you thought were causes turn out to be effects, things that you thought were making you act in one way or another turn out not to be causing any such thing, they just happen to correspond to your actions. Take weather, for instance. Sunspots affect weather. Weather affects people, the way they feel, moody or elated. Right? Maybe. What if weather, sunspots and moods are all the effects of something else that we haven’t even begun to suspect yet? You see, they are synchronous, but not causal. What else has that same periodicity of eleven point three years? Some business cycles.” Pitcock was warming up now. Eliot had forgotten how long it had been since there had been someone new to explain things to. He scowled at his wine glass and wished the old fool would finish. “A businessman was shown a chart of the ups and downs of his business, and he nodded and said, yep, and he could explain each and every one of them. A strike, a lost shipment of parts, an unexpected government contract. Another man might compare the ups and downs to the excitability curve and claim that that explained it. Someone else might point to a weather chart and say that was the cause. Or the sunspot charts. Or God knows what else. But what if all those things are unrelated to each other, just happen to occur at the same time, all of them caused by something apart from any of them, something that happens that has all those effects? That’s what we’re after. Keep taking another step backward so you can get far enough away to see the whole pattern.”

  Or until you step off the end of the gangplank, Eliot added silently.

  Donna was staring at Pitcock. “That’s . . . that’s kind of spooky, isn’t it? Are you serious?”

  “Let me tell you about one more cycle,” Pitcock said, smiling benignly. “Ed will give you a chart tomorrow, your own personal information chart. Every day at the same time you will be required to X in a square that will roughly indicate your mental state for the day. Feeling very optimistic, happy. Moody, apprehensive. Actively worried. At the end of the month Ed will go over it with you and draw you a curve that will show you your high point and your low. It’ll take about fifty days to finish it, probably. Most people seem to have a cycle of fifty to fifty-five days from one high to the next. Now, I’ll warn you, nothing you do or don’t do will change that chart. You’re like a clock ticking away, when it’s time to chime, there it is.”

  Donna made dimples, shaking her head. “I don’t believe it. I mean, if I flunk a test, I feel low. Or if a boyfriend shows up with someone else. You know. And I feel good when I look nice, and someone pays attention to me.”

  “Furthermore,” Pitcock said, ignoring her, “statistics show that although the low points occupy only ten percent of the sub­ject’s life, during these periods more than forty percent of his accidents occur. This is the time that suicides jump, or take an overdose. It’s the time that wives leave husbands, and vice versa. During the high points, roughly twelve percent of the time, twenty percent of the accidents take place, suggesting that there might be overoptimism. The other forty percent of all the acci­dents are spaced out in the rest of the time, sixty-eight percent of your life. It’s the high and the low periods that you have to watch for.”

  “But why?” Donna said, looking from him to Beatrice to Eliot.

  “That’s one of the things we want to find out with this research,” Pitcock said. He glanced at his watch. “May I suggest coffee on the terrace? It’s always pleasant out there this time of the evening.”

  “Do you mind if I beg off?” Beatrice asked, rising. “I still have some packing to do. I want to get an early start with Gina in the morning.” She added to Donna, “She’s going to spend a couple of weeks with her grandparents in the mountains.”

  Donna nodded. “Could I come with you, help you pack or something?”

  There was a quick exchange of glances between Beatrice and Pitcock; then she smiled and said of course. Eliot stood up also, but Pitcock said, “You won’t rush off, too, will you? Something I wanted to bring up, if you aren’t in a hurry.”


  Progress report? A dressing down? A boost in morale? Eliot shrugged and they watched the girls vanish among the magnolia trees. “Drambuie and coffee on the terrace. Right?” Pitcock moved ahead of him and sat down facing the sea. The breeze was warm and gentle, clouds drifted by the moon; a shift, and the moon was gliding among castles.

  “What would you do if you left here tomorrow?” Pitcock asked after several minutes.

  “I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about it. Not much, at least not very soon.”

  “Nothing so fascinating to you that you’d dash right off instantly to do it?”

  “ ‘Fraid not.”

  “Listen.” Pitcock leaned forward slightly. A loon cried out three times, then stopped abruptly, and once more there was only the sound of the waves and the wind in the palm trees.

  Pitcock’s voice was lower. “I have a suggestion then, Eliot. Not an order, merely a suggestion. How about starting a book on the data we’ve collected here?”