The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  “Maybe it will come back to me.”

  “Like Ryerson has?” Booey shook his head. “I doubt it. I want you to come back here if things don’t work out, Walter. I know a lot of good men who might do you some good.”

  “If I run into a dead end,” Sherwood promised, taking the paper Booey had folded so neatly for him, “I’ll be back.”

  “I won’t count on it. You may only find Merrittville is a jumping off place for somewhere else. You said you woke up in Los Angeles with somebody else’s identification.”

  “It’s a chance I’ll have to take.”

  “I got a letter or two from you after you got up there, but I threw them away, as I always do, after I answer them, and I’ll confide I always have a backlog, too. It seems you mentioned once going deep-sea fishing in Grand Traverse Bay and catching a twenty-three pound Muskie and at the time I thought it was fine you were finding time to do things, like that.”

  Booey chuckled as if at some secret thought. “Just like when you went fishing through the ice on Crystal Lake in the dead of winter. That surprised me, too. You sent me a picture of the inside of your cabin—they put them on skids and tow them out on the lake, you said—and you and your wife looked—”

  “My…wife?”

  “Of course.” Then Booey was suddenly agitated. “My God, that’s right, you don’t remember, do you?”

  SEVEN

  FOR A LONG TIME Virginia Appleby sat in bed, the covers bunched up under her chin, staring at the little hallway where the man had gone out, and from out of the muddled depths of her mind where a thousand questions fought to impinge themselves on her consciousness emerged the most important one: Who was he? Immediately her orderly mind set about to solve this question for her. The man was not John Trankle. Yet the last time she had been in a man’s room it had been the room of John Trankle and the early morning sun rising over Lake Michigan was sending an exploring finger of yellow through a window, brightening the flowered wallpaper on the opposite wall just over John Trankle’s head. She had stayed the night to help with his lessons, she in the only cushioned chair in the room and he on the floor across the room, his head against the wall.

  “Plantaris,” she had said, and he tried, “Ah…origin, femur at outer bifurcation of linea aspera…ah…posterior ligament of knee…” and it was as if he had said it only a moment ago. But of course it had been only yesterday.

  Then came the pain, she remembered, when she had tried to get out of the chair, and John had helped her to the bathroom because she was so suddenly sick and he was so solicitous because she had stayed up all night to see that he learned all he’d need for the final exam. Then came the hospital.

  “Blood count?” she remembered asking the doctor. “Whites around fifteen thousand.”

  And she said, “Leukocytes working overtime. Should have known better than to associate with a medical student. Where’s the infection, Doctor, appendix?”

  The doctor had told her she was right and they had agreed on the operation for the next morning

  No, this man who had just left the room was not John Trankle. This was not the room where she had helped him cram for his anatomy final, these were not the walls that echoed to plantaris, longus capitis, quadratus femoris and all the rest. This place had monk’s cloth drapes at the windows, wall-to-wall carpeting, original art on the walls, and not art John Trankle would have chosen. She had the feeling they were not pictures a man would select. In fact, the whole place did not have any real maleness about it, least of all any John Trankle bachelor maleness, which helped her decide it was not the apartment of the man she had seen depart from it, whoever he might be.

  Now from the caldron of churning thoughts that was her mind came a single, bright picture complete with feelings: The doctor was going out the door and she could see the starched whiteness of his coat as be turned and smiled as he glanced at his wristwatch and she asked what time it was. “Going somewhere?” he said. “A little after nine.” And a host of little pictures that followed, in quick succession: a nurse and thermometer, nurse and pill, white ceiling and lights out and the yellow effulgence of the corridor baseboard lights. All that had been only last night, yesterday, when she fell ill in John Trankle’s apartment and she had been taken to the hospital and after much probing and talking they had decided it was appendicitis, and the operation had been planned for the following morning. This morning. Today.

  Virginia threw the covers down and stared at the nakedness of her abdomen. The scar was there. The operation had been done. Long ago.

  How long ago?

  She felt the anxiety start in her arms and legs. Before it could move anywhere else she swung her feet out of bed to the floor. Quickly she picked up a robe draped across a chair.

  The bathroom was genuine tile. She glanced in the mirror, was startled to see the mature woman who returned her gaze. She turned on the side and overhead lights for a better look at herself, saw a face no longer as thin as it was yesterday; it had a lot more character now, and it pleased her to see that it was a happy face without a single worry line. She inspected her teeth, observed that she had taken good care of them, examined the rest of herself, was not displeased to find that the thinness that had so often worried her was gone. A thought kept intruding in the forepart of her brain: These things do not happen overnight.

  She returned to the living room-bedroom and sat on the bed. Just how was it possible to take a sedative one night and wake up a long time later in some apartment somewhere? It wasn’t possible, that was all there was to it. Not normally possible. And instantly all the conversations on mental aberrations she had ever given ear to in school flooded her mind. Just what had gone wrong?

  Virginia drew up a knee and clasped her hands over it, wondering why she wasn’t frightened now. She decided it was because of her academic training and a slavish adherence to the scientific method. Where there is an action there will be an equal and opposite reaction, wasn’t that it? There have to be enough plusses to take care of all the minuses. So there has to be an answer of sorts and sometimes insanity is the answer, it is an answer of sorts and something can be done about it. We could start from there and work toward the light.

  She tried to go back, to shatter the veil over her mind, but she could not. All she could see was the face of the doctor when she told him she wanted to have the operation, the serene face of the nurse who brought in her pill, her sedative. No placebo, that pill. It blotted out the interim. Maybe I’ve been unconscious ever since and people have had to feed me intravenously. But no, my muscles, the dear old plantaris and the thousands of others, would have atrophied by this time. All that remained would be nerves. She smiled, imagining herself nothing but a heap of bones with nerves running every which way in a spiderweb of threads.

  Such imaginings were a part of Virginia Appleby. She had inherited it, together with a lively curiosity (from your grandfather, dear, her mother had told her, not from either of us). Her first curiosity had been the milk separator which she had seen her father use with regularity on the farm, the silver-painted monstrosity on the back porch. Something magical happened to the milk in among the humming, spinning things inside the machine, and though her father did his best to explain it, he was not. able to answer satisfactorily just why one liquid could weigh more than another. This was finally settled one day when he presented her with a University of Illinois farm bulletin on milk separation he had sent for. She read it fascinatedly.

  “Now that you know all about it,” her father said when she finished, “you can go turn the handle.”

  For some reason it never seemed quite as magical after that.

  Then there was the veterinarian who came around, a little embarrassed by her curiosity in his every move, and he cast many an uneasy glance at her father during some of his more basic, surgical functions. But her father invariably shrugged it off.

  Virginia did not get the answers to these things—not the detailed, scientific answers she wanted—until her
curiosity had taken her from the farm to college in Chicago. She was happy in her objectivity, in her detached view of things, the attitude of the scientists, as she studied microbiology, cytochemistry and pathogenic bacteriology, and helped others along the way—John Trankle, for example.

  As she rose now, knowing that she could not sit on the bed all day (though it was a relief from class), she spied the telephone in the corner. That was an answer. She could call Sylvia Lipscomb, one of the few girls in immunology and one of her best friends, if Sylvia was home at this hour. She had momentarily forgotten her schedule. Or she might even give John Trankle a ring. Or the school itself. But what would she say? I just woke up in an apartment I don’t know where and saw a man I don’t know just go out the door?

  She approached the phone, wanting to call someone. But this one had no dial, and she frowned at it. All telephones in Chicago were supposed to have dials, weren’t they?

  She picked up the receiver to listen.

  No dial tone. But, of course, no dial.

  “Yes?” A man’s voice. She nearly dropped the phone in surprise. Now why—

  “Yes?” the voice demanded.

  “Uh—” She cleared her throat. “Can you tell me what time it is, please?” she asked, not knowing what else to say.

  “A quarter after ten. Did your clock stop?”

  “Oh, I forgot.” Now she saw the built-in electric clock on the wall. “Thank you.” Who was she talking to? When there was no sound of a break in connection, she further took advantage of the voice by asking boldly, “What day is this?”

  “Day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wednesday.”

  It had been Wednesday night when she had gone to sleep to wake up on Thursday after the operation.

  “I mean the date,” she said.

  “Oh. The fifteenth. July fifteenth.”

  “July?” she asked, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

  “Yes. July.” The voice sounded a little annoyed.

  “Nineteen forty-six?”

  The voice chuckled. “Fifty-seven, you mean.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  She dropped the phone softly into the cradle and stared at it, feeling a vague anxiety again. Eleven years was an awfully long time not to remember anything. She hadn’t thought she was missing that much. Why, she’d be through school then, John Trankle would be a doctor now and Sylvia would be married and have all those kids she wanted.

  But what about Virginia Appleby? Don’t forget her.

  I’m not forgetting her. As a matter of fact, I’m very concerned about her. And that man. Why, that man who left here…he could be…my husband. She said “my husband” and the words had a strange ring to them and she felt the beginnings of a blush. She pulled the robe more tightly round her and moved to the bureau because she saw a woman’s white knit bag there. She undid the drawstring.

  Inside were a billfold, a keycase with two keys she had never seen before, lipstick, handkerchief, two sticks of gum, half a package of mints, gold pen and pencil, compact. The billfold contained a few dollars, her driver’s license—no, wait. The license was for someone else. A Mrs. Morley Donn Fisher. She read it through, found the description tallied with hers, accepted at once the fact that she must be Mrs. Fisher, who lived, the license said, in Webster, Illinois.

  She took up the man’s billfold, took out the driver’s license. The man was obviously her husband. Morley Donn Fisher.

  Virginia put her hands on the cold top of the bureau to steady herself. There could be no denying she was his wife, not with this evidence. But she didn’t want to be his wife. How could you love somebody you didn’t even know, much less…

  She must not be there when he came back. Must not be! He hadn’t taken his billfold or anything else because he didn’t intend to be gone long, so he’d be back soon, so there was need to hurry. She had to think about this had to get away from here and think and work it out. She had his address, she’d contact him if she decided to, later on. Right now the main thing was to get out of there and get out fast.

  Money. She’d need money. If he were her husband, then there would be no crime in using some of his money, if he had any. But she had seen the green in his billfold and now she withdrew a wad of bills from it, counting one hundred and eighty-three dollars. She couldn’t take all he had; that wouldn’t be right. Then she saw the book of Traveler’s Checks. There were eight one-hundred dollar checks in there, so he needn’t worry about money. So she took the one hundred and eighty-three dollars from his billfold and added it to those in her own.

  Next she scurried about the place, made the bed (I just can’t leave it like this, I don’t care if I am using precious time) and she folded his pajamas neatly on the chair. In the storage compartment she found dresses and a suitcase along with all Mr. Fisher’s things. She packed her clothes, hardly noticing what they were (though she could see they weren’t cheap things), she was in such a hurry. She would have liked to have taken a leisurely bath—or even a quick bath—but the thought of Mr. Fisher walking in on her was just too much.

  She had a few agonized moments when she stood still in the middle of the room toying with the idea of writing him a note, explaining what had happened to her, but she thought if he was really her husband he’d be more worried with a note than without one. He might even go to the police and she’d be stopped and then they’d be reunited before she had a chance to get used to the idea of being married. If she didn’t leave a note he’d think she had become angry or something; at least he’d not get the police involved. Not at first, anyway.

  When everything was ready she gave a final inspection to the rooms, picked up her suitcase and, after one final glance around, went through the door and slammed it after her, stepping out into the warm, brilliant sun.

  EIGHT

  All of the Appleby farm, one of the prettiest in northern Illinois, could be seen from a rise in the blacktop road to the south of it the gray ribbon of road dipping down and running cleanly by it without even a faint whisper of a curve and disappearing in distant greenery. Homer Appleby, who had inherited the land from his father even as his father had inherited it before him, had dedicated his life to keeping it neat and spotless, even to planting everything, which he did in rows laid out with a mathematician’s precision.

  The house and outbuildings, nestling in a forest of green elms, were painted a bright white to match the white crushed rock driveway that ran to the yard. The farm’s picture book effect was further enhanced by white wood fencing which Appleby painted every other year. Wood fencing was a little unusual in that area, but Appleby had once seen a Kentucky farm with such fencing and could not rest until he had put it up everywhere on his farm.

  When Virginia saw it from the rise that July she saw at once the elms had grown so huge they almost blotted out the view of the house itself from this point, and she at once recalled that her grandfather had planted those very trees and only wished now that he were alive to see what he had wrought.

  The taxi, of course, did not stop for the view but hurried on down the blacktop, the meter clicking away, Virginia in a wretched state of expectation and anxiety. She had not wanted to telephone, to communicate in any way because to recite what had happened would sound ridiculous and impossible and would only arouse anxiety. Now she was not so sure she had been right. What if her parents were dead? It would have been better to know a thing like that before coming here. What if they had moved? Retired to town? After all, she knew her father would not be able to work the farm forever, even if he had been in perfect health the last time she remembered seeing him.

  The car swung into the white lane and down it to the yard and Virginia got out, the driver getting her suitcases, and she wondered what they would think, seeing her come in like this, if they were still there, and when the taxi man had been paid and still hesitated before he got into the car, she had an impulse to ask
him to wait until she tried the door or saw someone. But she waved him on and stood in the yard looking at the house, seeing no face at the windows, only little changes here and there, the memory of other days washing over her.

  There was no one home, she discovered. The car was gone, and she remembered suddenly it was Monday and of course they wouldn’t be home. They always took their eggs to market on Monday and did their shopping and other business in De Kalb. She wondered what had happened to her brother, Billy. He’d be twenty-seven now and everybody probably called him Bill and she didn’t want to try to picture what he’d look like. The last time she had seen him he was a gangling, bashful kid of sixteen. Maybe he was married now and had a home of his own.

  She sat on the back steps in the early afternoon sun and patted the head of a dog which had come barking up a few minutes after the taxi had hurried away, having been out in the fields somewhere or down at the barn. It was a fine collie but nothing like the setter they used to have.

  Virginia sat there for what seemed hours, thinking they were never coming back, reviewing what she was going to say when they did, wondering if they could have gone for the day but knowing one cannot just get up and leave a farm with all the chores there are to do, when at last a new car turned in at the driveway. Her first thought was to hide and view these people from a distance before she showed herself, just to make sure they were her parents and avoid embarrassment if they were not, but she forced herself to sit there and watch the shiny car slide to a stop in the yard. She was relieved when she saw the familiar figures step from the car and she was surprised to see how little they bad aged in the last eleven years, her father still a large, ungainly man with a face that looked as if it would break out into a smile (it always did), her mother a small woman with hair that had been white for as long as Virginia could remember, both with a few more wrinkles, perhaps, but still very much alive.

  When the happy reunion was over and they had gone into the house, her mother, flushed and excited, talking happily, and her father beaming (bless them both), she made them come out to the kitchen and sit while she told them something, overriding the protests of her father that he had a few little things he just ought to do before he sat down, and unable to stop her mother from starting tea.