Victor did not tell her that he had arranged for the cat to catch the bird; he watched in silence as his mother tried and tried to pry Dorky out from her hiding place; Dorky was crunching up the bird; he could hear the sound of breaking bones, small bones. He felt a strange feeling, as if he should tell his mother what he had done, and yet if he told her she would punish him. I won’t do that again, he said to himself. His face, he realized, had turned red. What if his mother figured it out? What if she had some secret way of knowing? Dorky couldn’t tell her and the bird was dead. No one would ever know. He was safe.
But he felt bad. That night he could not eat his dinner. Both his parents noticed. They thought he was sick; they took his temperature. He said nothing about what he had done. His mother told his father about Dorky and they decided to get rid of Dorky. Seated at the table, listening, Victor began to cry.
“All right,” his father said gently. “We won’t get rid of her. It’s natural for a cat to catch a bird.”
The next day he sat playing in his sandbox. Some plants grew up through the sand. He broke them off. Later his mother told him that had been a wrong thing to do.
Alone in the backyard, in his sandbox, he sat with a pail of water, forming a small mound of wet sand. The sky, which had been blue and clear, became by degrees overcast. A shadow passed over him and he looked up. He sensed a presence around him, something vast that could think.
You are responsible for the death of the bird, the presence thought; he could understand its thoughts.
“I know,” he said. He wished, then, that he could die. That he could replace the bird and die for it, leaving it as it had been, fluttering against the cobwebbed window of the garage.
The bird wanted to fly and eat and live, the presence thought.
“Yes,” he said miserably.
“You must never do that again,” the presence told him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and wept.
This is a very neurotic person, the ship realized. I am having an awful lot of trouble finding happy memories. There is too much fear in him and too much guilt. He has buried it all, and yet it is still there, worrying him like a dog worrying a rag. Where can I go in his memories to find him solace? I must come up with ten years of memories, or his mind will be lost.
Perhaps, the ship thought, the error that I am making is in the area of choice on my part; I should allow him to select his own memories. However, the ship realized, this will allow an element of fantasy to enter. And that is not usually good. Still—
I will try the segment dealing with his first marriage once again, the ship decided. He really loved Marline. Perhaps this time if I keep the intensity of the memories at a greater level the entropic factor can be abolished. What happened was a subtle vitiation of the remembered world, a decay of structure. I will try to compensate for that. So be it.
“Do you suppose Gilbert Shelton really signed this?” Martine said pensively; she stood before the poster, her arms folded; she rocked back and forth slightly, as if seeking a better perspective on the brightly colored drawing hanging on their living room wall. “I mean, it could have been forged. By a dealer somewhere along the line. During Shelton’s lifetime or after.”
“The letter of authentication,” Victor Kemmings reminded her.
“Oh, that’s right!” She smiled her warm smile. “Ray gave us the letter that goes with it. But suppose the letter is a forgery? What we need is another letter certifying that the first letter is authentic.” Laughing, she walked away from the poster.
“Ultimately,” Kemmings said, “we would have to have Gilbert Shelton here to personally testify that he signed it.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t know. There’s that story about the man bringing the Picasso picture to Picasso and asking him if it was authentic, and Picasso immediately signed it and said, ‘Now it’s authentic.’ ” She put her arm around Kemmings and, standing on tiptoe, kissed him on the cheek. “It’s genuine. Ray wouldn’t have given us a forgery. He’s the leading expert on counterculture art of the twentieth century. Do you know that he owns an actual lid of dope? It’s preserved under—”
“Ray is dead,” Victor said.
“What?” She gazed at him in astonishment. “Do you mean something happened to him since we last—”
“He’s been dead two years,” Kemmings said. “I was responsible. I was driving the buzzcar. I wasn’t cited by the police, but it was my fault.”
“Ray is living on Mars!” She stared at him.
“I know I was responsible. I never told you. I never told anyone. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. I saw it flapping against the window, and Dorky was trying to reach it, and I lifted Dorky up, and I don’t know why but Dorky grabbed it—”
“Sit down, Victor.” Martine led him to the overstuffed chair and made him seat himself. “Something’s wrong,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Something terrible is wrong. I’m responsible for the taking of a life, a precious life that can never be replaced. I’m sorry. I wish I could make it okay, but I can’t.”
After a pause, Martine said, “Call Ray.”
“The cat—” he said.
“What cat?”
“There.” He pointed. “In the poster. On Fat Freddy’s lap. That’s Dorky. Dorky killed Ray.”
Silence.
“The presence told me,” Kemmings said. “It was God. I didn’t realize it at the time, but God saw me commit the crime. The murder. And he will never forgive me.”
His wife stared at him numbly.
“God sees everything you do,” Kemmings said. “He sees even the falling sparrow. Only in this case it didn’t fall; it was grabbed. Grabbed out of the air and torn down. God is tearing this house down which is my body, to pay me back for what I’ve done. We should have had a building contractor look this house over before we bought it. It’s just falling goddam to pieces. In a year there won’t be anything left of it. Don’t you believe me?”
Marline faltered, “I—”
“Watch.” Kemmings reached up his arms toward the ceiling; he stood; he reached; he could not touch the ceiling. He walked to the wall and then, after a pause, put his hand through the wall.
Marline screamed.
The ship aborted the memory retrieval instantly. But the harm had been done.
He has integrated his early fears and guilts into one interwoven grid, the ship said to itself. There is no way I can serve up a pleasant memory to him because he instantly contaminates it. However pleasant the original experience in itself was. This is a serious situation, the ship decided. The man is already showing signs of psychosis. And we are hardly into the trip; years lie ahead of him.
After allowing itself time to think the situation through, the ship decided to contact Victor Kemmings once more.
“Mr. Kemmings,” the ship said.
“I’m sorry,” Kemmings said. “I didn’t mean to foul up those retrievals. You did a good job, but I—”
“Just a moment,” the ship said. “I’m not equipped to do psychiatric reconstruction of you; I am a simple mechanism, that’s all. What is it you want? Where do you want to be and what do you want to be doing?”
“I want to arrive at our destinalion,” Kemmings said. “I want this trip to be over.”
Ah, the ship thought. That is the solution.
One by one the cryonic systems shut down. One by one the people returned to life, among them Victor Kemmings. What amazed him was the lack of a sense of the passage of time. He had entered the chamber, lain down, had felt the membrane cover him and the temperature begin to drop—
And now he stood on the ship’s external plaiform, the unloading plalform, gazing down at a verdant planetary landscape. This, he realized, is LR4-6, the colony world to which I have come in order to begin a new life.
“Looks good,” a heavyset woman beside him said.
“Yes,” he said, and felt the newness of the landscape rush up at him, its promise of a beginning. Someth
ing better than he had known the past two hundred years. I am a fresh person in a fresh world, he thought. And he fell glad.
Colors raced at him, like those of a child’s semianimate kit. Saint Elmo’s fire, he realized. That’s right; there is a great deal of ionization in this planet’s atmosphere. A free light show, such as they had back in the twentieth century.
“Mr. Kemmings,” a voice said. An elderly man had come up beside him, to speak to him. “Did you dream?”
“During the suspension?” Kemmings said. “No, not that I can remember.”
“I think I dreamed,” the elderly man said. “Would you take my arm on the descent ramp? I feel unsteady. The air seems thin. Do you find it thin?”
“Don’t be afraid,” Kemmings said to him. He took the elderly man’s arm. “I’ll help you down the ramp. Look; there’s a guide coming this way. He’ll arrange our processing for us; it’s part of the package. We’ll be taken to a resort hotel and given first-class accommodations. Read your brochure.” He smiled at the uneasy older man to reassure him.
“You’d think our muscles would be nothing but flab after ten years in suspension,” the elderly man said.
“It’s just like freezing peas,” Kemmings said. Holding onto the timid older man, he descended the ramp to the ground. “You can store them forever if you get them cold enough.”
“My name’s Shelton,” the elderly man said.
“What?” Kemmings said, halting. A slrange feeling moved through him.
“Don Shelton.” The elderly man extended his hand; reflexively, Kemmings accepted it and they shook. “What’s the mailer, Mr. Kemmings? Are you all right?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m fine. But hungry. I’d like to get something to eat. I’d like to get to our hotel, where I can take a shower and change my clothes.” He wondered where their baggage could be found. Probably it would take the ship an hour to unload it. The ship was not particularly intelligent.
In an intimate, confidential tone, elderly Mr. Shelton said, “You know what I brought with me? A bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. The finest bourbon on Earth. I’ll bring it over to our hotel room and we’ll share it.” He nudged Kemmings.
“I don’t drink,” Kemmings said. “Only wine.” He wondered if there were any good wines here on this distant colony world. Not distant now, he reflected. It is Earth that’s distant. I should have done like Mr. Shelton and brought a few bottles with me.
Shelton. What did the name remind him of? Something in his far past, in his early years. Something precious, along with good wine and a pretty, gentle young woman making crepes in an old-fashioned kitchen. Aching memories; memories that hurt.
Presently he stood by the bed in his hotel room, his suitcase open; he had begun to hang up his clothes. In the corner of the room, a TV hologram showed a newscaster; he ignored it, but, liking the sound of a human voice, he kept it on.
Did I have any dreams? he asked himself. During these past ten years?
His hand hurt. Gazing down, he saw a red welt, as if he had been stung. A bee stung me, he realized. But when? How? While I lay in cryonic suspension? Impossible. Yet he could see the welt and he could feel the pain. I better get something to put on it, he realized. There’s undoubtedly a robot doctor in the hotel; it’s a first-rate hotel.
When the robot doctor had arrived and was treating the bee sting, Kemmings said, “I got this as punishment for killing the bird.”
“Really?” the robot doctor said.
“Everything that ever meant anything to me has been taken away from me,” Kemmings said. “Martine, the poster—my little old house with the wine cellar. We had everything and now it’s gone. Martine left me because of the bird.”
“The bird you killed,” the robot doctor said.
“God punished me. He took away all that was precious to me because of my sin. It wasn’t Dorky’s sin; it was my sin.”
“But you were just a little boy,” the robot doctor said.
“How did you know that?” Kemmings said. He pulled his hand away from the robot doctor’s grasp. “Something’s wrong. You shouldn’t have known that.”
“Your mother told me,” the robot doctor said.
“My mother didn’t know!”
The robot doctor said, “She figured it out. There was no way the cat could have reached the bird without your help.”
“So all the time that I was growing up she knew. But she never said anything.”
“You can forget about it,” the robot doctor said.
Kemmings said, “I don’t think you exist. There is no possible way that you could know these things. I’m still in cryonic suspension and the ship is still feeding me my own buried memories. So I won’t become psychotic from sensory deprivation.”
“You could hardly have a memory of completing the trip.”
“Wish fulfillment, then. It’s the same thing. I’ll prove it to you. Do you have a screwdriver?”
“Why?”
Kemmings said, “I’ll remove the back of the TV set and you’ll see; there’s nothing inside it; no components, no parts, no chassis—nothing.”
“I don’t have a screwdriver.”
“A small knife, then. I can see one in your surgical supply bag.” Bending, Kemmings lifted up a small scalpel. “This will do. If I show you, will you believe me?”
“If there’s nothing inside the TV cabinet—”
Squatting down, Kemmings removed the screws holding the back panel of the TV set in place. The panel came loose and he set it down on the floor.
There was nothing inside the TV cabinet. And yet the color hologram continued to fill a quarter of the hotel room, and the voice of the newscaster issued forth from his three-dimensional image.
“Admit you’re the ship,” Kemmings said to the robot doctor.
“Oh dear,” the robot doctor said.
Oh dear, the ship said to itself. And I’ve got almost ten years of this lying ahead of me. He is hopelessly contaminating his experiences with childhood guilt; he imagines that his wife left him because, when he was four years old, he helped a cat catch a bird. The only solution would be for Martine to return to him, but how am I going to arrange that? She may not still be alive. On the other hand, the ship reflected, maybe she is alive. Maybe she could be induced to do something to save her former husband’s sanity. People by and large have very positive traits. And ten years from now it will take a lot to save—or rather restore—his sanity; it will take something drastic, something I myself cannot do alone.
Meanwhile, there was nothing to be done but recycle the wish fulfillment arrival of the ship at its destination. I will run him through the arrival, the ship decided, then wipe his conscious memory clean and run him through it again. The only positive aspect of this, it reflected, is that it will give me something to do, which may help preserve my sanity.
Lying in cryonic suspension—faulty cryonic suspension—Victor Kemmings imagined, once again, that the ship was touching down and he was being brought back to consciousness.
“Did you dream?” a heavyset woman asked him as the group of passengers gathered on the outer platform. “I have the impression that I dreamed. Early scenes from my life… over a century ago.”
“None that I can remember,” Kemmings said. He was eager to reach his hotel; a shower and a change of clothes would do wonders for his morale. He felt slightly depressed and wondered why.
“There’s our guide,” an elderly lady said. “They’re going to escort us to our accommodations.”
“It’s in the package,” Kemmings said. His depression remained. The others seemed so spirited, so full of life, but over him only a weariness lay, a weighing-down sensation, as if the gravity of this colony planet were too much for him. Maybe that’s it, he said to himself. But, according to the brochure, the gravity here matched Earth’s; that was one of the attractions.
Puzzled, he made his way slowly down the ramp, step by step, holding onto the rail. I don’t really deserve a new cha
nce at life anyhow, he realized. I’m just going through the motions… I am not like these other people. There is something wrong with me; I cannot remember what it is, but nonetheless it is there. In me. A bitter sense of pain. Of lack of worth.
An insect landed on the back of Kemmings’ right hand, an old insect, weary with flight. He halted, watched it crawl across his knuckles. I could crush it, he thought. It’s so obviously infirm; it won’t live much longer anyhow.
He crushed it—and felt great inner horror. What have I done? he asked himself. My first moment here and I have wiped out a little life. Is this my new beginning?
Turning, he gazed back up at the ship. Maybe I ought to go back, he thought. Have them freeze me forever. I am a man of guilt, a man who destroys. Tears filled his eyes.
And, within its sentient works, the interstellar ship moaned.
During the ten long years remaining in the trip to the LR4 System, the ship had plenty of time to track down Marline Kemmings. It explained the situation to her. She had emigrated to a vast orbiting dome in the Sirius System, found her situation unsatisfactory, and was en route back to Earth. Roused from her own cryonic suspension, she listened intently and then agree to be at the colony world LR4-6 when her ex-husband arrived—if it was at all possible.
Fortunately, it was possible.
“I don’t think he’ll recognize me,” Martine said to the ship. “I’ve allowed myself to age. I don’t really approve of entirely halting the aging process.”
He’ll be lucky if he recognizes anything, the ship thought.
At the intersystem spaceport on the colony world of LR4-6, Martine stood waiting for the people aboard the ship to appear on the outer platform. She wondered if she would recognize her former husband. She was a little afraid, but she was glad that she had gotten to LR4-6 in time. It had been close. Another week and his ship would have arrived before hers. Luck is on my side, she said to herself, and scrutinized the newly landed interstellar ship.
People appeared on the platform. She saw him. Victor had changed very little.
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