Orbit 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Lee had been watching him stonily. Now he said, “Hasn’t it oc­curred to you that you’re butting in on something you don’t know a damn thing about? That girl was frightened. Mary acted like a bitch. Period.”

  Eliot sighed. “Oh, Christ.”

  “I’m leaving,” Mary said furiously. “I won’t stand by and see you make a fool of yourself. And when she throws you over, you’ll know where to look for me.”

  “And you,” Eliot said. “Right on cue. That’s the scenario, all right. For God’s sake, you two idiots, open your eyes and see what you’re doing and why!” He jammed his hands into his pockets. They continued to avoid looking at one another. Finally Eliot shrugged. “Okay. If you really can’t see it, then leave, Mary. It’s the only thing to do.I’ll take you over tonight.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lee demanded coldly.

  “I mean that if you two are so caught up in this that you believe it’s real, she has to go away, or one of you will kill the other one. Either snap out of it and convince me that you’re aware of what’s happened, or I’ll take Mary to Charleston. I won’t leave you to­gether.”

  A new intentness came into Lee’s face. Ignoring Mary, he took a step toward Eliot. “All this crazy talk. You’re the one who started all this.” His eyes narrowed and his hands clenched. “That night, down on the beach, I saw her with you. I let her convince me that it was a dream, but I saw you. I know what I saw. And I’m going to kill you, Kalin. I’m going to choke your lies right back down in your throat.”

  Suddenly the screen door was flung open and Ed Delizzio stepped into the room. Mary screamed. Ed had the same knife that he had threatened Marty with. This time he was holding it to throw. His quick look swept the room, stopped at Lee, and in the same instant that his arm rose, Mary moved toward Lee, her hands out. She pushed him hard; the knife flashed; she screamed again, this time in fear and pain. She staggered against Lee and fell. For a second Lee swayed, gray-faced; then he dropped to his knees at her side.

  “It’s nothing,” she said shakily. “It touched my arm, that’s all. Lee . . . Darling, please, don’t. Please, Lee.” He was rocking back and forth, holding her, weeping. When she tried to get up, he gathered her into his arms and lifted her and carried her into the bedroom. Beatrice followed them.

  Eliot picked up the knife, closed it, and put it in his pocket.

  “I guess we should call the police,” Ed said emotionlessly.

  “We’ll call nobody,” Eliot said. He studied Ed, who continued to stand in the doorway. Even his lips seemed bloodless. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Spent. Used up. Everything’s gone. I’m okay now. It’s over.” He looked like a shock victim: ashen-faced, blank, rigid.

  They waited in silence until Beatrice returned. She was pale and avoided Ed’s glance. “They’re in there crying like babies. She’s all right. Hardly even scratched. Mostly scared.”

  “Let’s go,” Eliot said. He motioned for Ed to leave with them. “We could use a drink.”

  Beatrice hesitated. “Can we leave them? You said . . .”

  “Everything changes from moment to moment, honey. Every­thing’s the same and everything keeps changing. They’ll be all right now. Ed’s going to keel over and I’m damned if I want to carry him across the island. Give us a drink, Beatrice. We all de­serve it.”

  Beatrice kept close to him as they walked around the oleanders. “No lights,” she said on her porch, then added quickly, “It makes us so visible.” She left them. There was the sound of the refrigera­tor door, ice in glasses, liquor being poured. Then she was back and handed them both glasses, very strong bourbon and water. She pulled a chair closer to Eliot’s. “How can she do this to us?”

  “She’s a witch,” Ed said.

  “No. She’s not a witch. And she hasn’t done a damn thing to any of us. Whatever we’re doing, we’re doing to ourselves.” Eliot finished his drink and went inside to refill his glass. When he re­turned, Beatrice was alone.

  “You upset him more than anything up to now. Eliot, is he likely to do anything like that again?”

  “I don’t think so. He sinned. Now he’ll repent, in the good traditional way. Prayers, good deeds, confession. Whatever he does to atone.”

  “Is it all over now? Who else is there to go berserk? Are you safe?”

  “Nobody is safe from himself. Nobody that I know, anyway. Maybe Pitcock. I’m gambling on Pitcock, but I don’t know.” He drank deeply. The alcohol was numbing him now and he felt grate­ful.

  The wind blew harder and the palm trees came to life. On the porch the silence deepened. Beatrice took Eliot’s glass from his hand and went inside with it, bringing it back in a few moments without speaking. He put it down this time. There had been a need before, but the urgency was gone.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” Beatrice said quietly, “but whatever it is, it’s changed you.”

  “Nobody understands, least of all me. I’m just groping for the right thing to do from one moment to the next, no plans, no over­all theory to account for anything.”

  “It won’t go on like this, will it? We couldn’t stand this kind of turmoil day after day.”

  “No. It’s building up to something. Can’t you feel that? Each step is farther, each thrust more nearly mortal.” Lassitude was creeping through his bones. Abruptly he stood up. “I have to go or I’ll fall asleep here.”

  “Eliot... Do you have to go?”

  “I think so. Are you afraid?”

  “No. It isn’t that. Yes, go now. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “No work tomorrow. I’m going by the office and post a sign, a declared holiday.” He held her hand for a minute. Soon, he thought, soon. Then he left her and walked through the darkness of the shadows cast by the oak trees and the pines, around the ruins that rose abruptly, smelling the night-blooming cereus, and the sea, and the constant odor of decay that was present wherever there were tropical plants. The scents mingled, the drive toward life stronger than death, blossoms in decay, greenery erupting from the black. He didn’t turn on a light when he got to the building, but walked through the dark lobby that echoed hollowly.

  He sat at his desk for several minutes before he flicked the light switch. Then he typed the notice quickly and found scotch tape to attach it to the door. His head was starting to throb and his weariness returned, making his legs ache and his back hurt. Outside the building, he hesitated at the lake. It was spring-fed, cool, clean water, without a ripple on its surface. The moon rode there as sedately as if painted. A whippoorwill cried poignantly.

  Very slowly Eliot began to take off his clothes. He walked out into the water, and when it was up to his thighs, he dove straight out into it, down, down. The moon shattered and fled, the resting swans screamed alarm, and half a dozen ducks took flight. Eliot let out his air slowly, measuring it, and when it was gone he began to rise again, but suddenly he doubled in pain. He sank, struggling to loosen the knot in his stomach. The water was luminous now, pale green and silver, and where the bottom had been there was nothing. He sank lower, drifting downward like a snowflake. The broken moon was falling with him, flecks of silver, a streak of a heavier piece flashing by; the minuscule particles of it that touched him adhered, turning him into a radiant being, floating downward in the bottomless pool. From somewhere a thought came to him, unwanted and obtrusive: The lake is only eight feet deep in the very center. He tried to push the thought away, but his body had heard, and the struggle began again, and now he tumbled and one leg stretched out until his toes felt the sandy bottom and pushed hard. He exploded in pain, as the moon had exploded. The water rushed in to fill his emptiness and he gasped and choked and coughed and the fire in his lungs was all there was.

  He lay on the sand, raw and sore from retching, and he knew he couldn’t move. His legs wouldn’t hold him yet. Another spasm shook him and he heaved again.

  He had little memory of getting to his house and into bed. He drea
med that the Spaniards dragged themselves up from the shadows where they lived and toiled to complete the fort through­out the night. They were crude shadow figures themselves, silent, carrying impossibly heavy burdens on their backs, climbing the crude steps to lay the blocks, and the fort took shape and rose higher and higher. He woke to find it nearly noon.

  There was a note on his table to see Pitcock as soon as conven­ient. He showered and made coffee, and after he had eaten he walked over to the main house. Pitcock was in his office.

  “Ed came by to say he was leaving,” Pitcock said. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened. Will you?”

  “Sure.” His account was very brief, and when he got to his ad­venture in the lake, he summed it up in one sentence. “I went for a swim in the lake and nearly drowned.”

  “Part of the same thing?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Yes. Well, we agreed that it would get dangerous.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you seen Donna this morning?” Pitcock toyed with a pencil and when it fell, he jerked. He looked at his hands with curiosity. Before Eliot could answer his question, he said, “Maybe we should disband the project now. God knows we have to start over with a new staff.”

  “I haven’t seen Donna. Do you really want to quit?”

  “I feel like a man swimming the channel. I’m three-quarters of the way there, but I want to turn around and go back. I feel like either way I’ll lose something. I don’t think I can make it all the way, Eliot.”

  “That’s because we don’t know exactly what’s in the water for the last quarter of the trip. We keep finding out there are things that we weren’t ready for. Ed’s knife. I put it in my pocket, but it’s not there now. Swimming in a lake that suddenly became bottomless. You can walk across that lake in the dry season. What’s ahead? That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? I keep wondering, and if we found out that the earth is an illusion dreamed by a god, what harm have we done? Why are we being stopped? Who’s meddling?”

  Eliot stared at him, then shook his head. “I think you should go away for the weekend. Get away from here for a few days, see how you feel about it Monday. If you want to break it all up then, well, we can talk about it.”

  “You can’t leave now, can you? You’ll see it through, no mat­ter what happens?”

  “I can’t leave now.”

  Pitcock looked shriveled and old, and for several minutes his bright blue eyes seemed clouded. Surprisingly, he laughed then. “You asked once why I picked you. Because I could see myself in you. The self that I could have been forty years ago. But instead I took the other path, extended an empire. Pitcock Enterprises. I thought there was time for it all, and I was wrong. I thought it was a kind of knowledge, that if I bypassed it, I could have it just the same if I forced someone else to seek it and let me see the results. Nontransferable. Not knowledge, then. Not in the ac­cepted sense. I pushed you and prodded you and goaded you into going somewhere and I can’t follow you. Leave me alone, Eliot. I have some work to do now.”

  Eliot stood up and started to leave, but stopped at the door. “Pit, I don’t know anything. If I did, I would make you see it. But there’s nothing.”

  Pitcock didn’t look at him. He had picked up the pencil again and held it poised over a notebook as if impatient to resume an interrupted task. Eliot went out.

  “Eliot, are you all right?” Beatrice was waiting for him. She held out his watch. “I found it by the lake.”

  Eliot took her in his arms and held her quietly for a long time. “I’m all right.”

  “The lake shore is a mess, as if you were fighting there. I went to your house and saw that you’d had breakfast. I knew it was all right, but still. . .”

  They walked in the shade, toward the far end of the island. The trees, the dunes to the seaward side, all masked the sound of the ocean, and there were only bird songs and an occasional rustling in the undergrowth. There was a cool, mossy glen, where the air was tinted blue by a profusion of wild morning glories that never closed in the shadows. Very deliberately and gently Eliot made love to Beatrice in the glen.

  She lay on her back with her eyes closed, a small smile on her face. “I feel like a woods nymph, doing what I have to do, without a thought in the world. My brain’s on vacation.”

  He ran his finger over her cheek. She was humming. With a chill Eliot realized that she was humming “Ten Little Indians.”

  * * * *

  That afternoon Eliot made some preliminary notes:

  Any eschatological system, whether religious, mathemati­cal, physical, or simply theoretical for purposes of analogies is counter to the world as it exists. Experimental bias, ob­server effect, by whatever name science would call it, the addition of life in a universe reverses the entropic nature of matter. Eschatology can validly be applied only to inert mat­ter; the final dispersion of the atoms in a uniform, energyless universe is a reformulation of what others have called the death wish. Since man rose from the same inert matter, this pull or drive or simple tendency exerts its purpose in every cell of his being. But with the random chemical reaction that brought life to the lifeless, another, stronger drive was created. The double helix is the perfect symbol for this new, not to be denied drive that manifests in rebirth, renewal, in an ever widening spiral of growth and change . . .

  “Eliot!” Lee’s voice jolted him awake. “Pitcock’s missing. We can’t find him anywhere.”

  “Where have you looked?” Eliot hurried out to join Lee. “Where’s Bonner?”

  “He went to check out the office building. We went through the house, then the ruins. He likes to prowl among them. I looked in on Beatrice. I thought he might be with you.”

  “Okay. Check out the other houses. I’ll take the beach, work back through the stones toward his house.”

  Two hours until it would be dark, two hours, plenty of time to find him. Not in the woods, but among the dead rocks. A quarter of a mile of jumbled rocks, fan-shaped, narrowed at the ruins, spreading out at the water’s edge, piled higher there with deeper cracks between them. Eliot zigzagged from the edge of the water to the ruins, back to the water. He called, and the whispering sea mocked him. From a distance he could hear Lee’s voice calling. A catbird practiced Lee’s shout, then gave it up and trilled sweetly. Eliot stopped abruptly. He strained to hear, then began working his way more slowly toward a high place where six of the massive stones had been piled up. “I’m coming, Pit.” He couldn’t be cer­tain now if he had heard the old man or not. He searched franti­cally but carefully among the bases. Here the water lapped at the rocks with every third or fourth wave. The tide was turning.

  “Eliot.”

  This time he knew he had heard. He found the old man lying in an unnatural position, his shoulders and his hips not in line. Pitcock was very pale, but conscious. His voice was a faint whisper.

  “Can’t move, Eliot. Back’s hurt.”

  “Okay. Take it easy, Pit. We’ll get you out of here.” Eliot clambered back up the rocks and yelled for Lee. An answer came back faintly, and he waited until Lee was closer. “Bring a stretcher, a door, something to carry him on.” Lee appeared at the head of the rocks and waved. “Tell Bonner to get the launch ready. Mrs. Bonner to call the hospital.” Lee waved again and ran toward Pitcock’s house. Eliot returned to the old man.

  There was nothing he could do now. He found his handkerchief and wiped Pitcock’s face gently. He was perspiring hard.

  “Heard someone crying. Couldn’t find her. Slipped . . .”

  “Don’t talk now, Pit. Save it. Your pulse is good. It’s not seri­ous, I’m sure. Rest.”

  “Eliot, don’t send me over tonight. Isn’t fair, not now. Get me back to the house. Help me up.” His face was gray, cold and moist. His eyes were glazed.

  Damn Lee! Where was Bonner? “Take it easy, Pit. Soon now. Just take it easy.” He yanked his shirt off and covered the old man with it. He mopped his face again.
/>   “I didn’t do it, Eliot. I didn’t want to fall.” He looked past Eliot and groaned. His eyes closed. Beads of sweat came together and a trickle ran across one eye, another down his temple. Eliot wiped his face again and the man shuddered. “She’s up there,” he mumbled. “Watching us.”

  Eliot looked over his shoulder, across the tumbled rocks. She was standing on the wall of the fort, not moving, a dark shape against the paling sky. “Don’t worry about her, Pit,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.” He caught a motion and turned to see Lee and Bonner picking their way among the blocks with a door. Beatrice darted before them, burdened with blankets and a beach mat.