The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  Finally, impressed by her insistence, they did sit, a cloud of uncertainty hovering over their faces, while she tried to tell them what had happened to her.

  “I just don’t understand,” her mother said at one point, and Virginia had to go, back and tell it all over again.

  “You mean you don’t remember anything?” her father asked, incredulous.

  She told them again firmly just how it was, how it felt to go to sleep in a hospital in Chicago one day and wake up in a motel in Los Angeles the next day eleven years later, how she felt when she walked out of the motel to find she was in a city she had never seen before.

  “You poor child,” her mother said, and her father shook his head uncomprehendingly.

  “I’ve had enough training to know it’s some form of amnesia,” Virginia said. “But I’m not frightened by it because I know where I am now and who I am, which is important, and I don’t want either of you to lose your heads about this.”

  “You mean it would’ve been different if you’d forgotten everything,” Appleby said. “That’d have been serious.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But isn’t this serious, Virginia?”

  “It may be, Mom, but as long as I remember as much as I do I’m not too worried.”

  “What are you going to do?” Mrs. Appleby asked concernedly, not hearing the whistling teakettle.

  “I don’t know exactly.” Then she said, “One thing you can be thankful for is that you don’t have to tell me I’m married. I know I’m Mrs. Morley Donn Fisher. I know what my husband looks like and where he lives and I’ll go to him when I get used to the idea. I want to see if I feel the same way about him as I must have before. What I’d really like to know is what happened between the hospital and the motel.”

  Her father and mother, who had been exchanging startled glances, now looked away and Virginia knew something was wrong and her anxiety came back strong, a ball in her stomach, her mouth suddenly dry.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What did I say?”

  “Virginia,” her mother then said softly, “you are not Mrs. Morley Donn Fisher.”

  “We—we never, heard of anybody named Fisher,” her father said, shaking his head sadly.

  “Never heard of him?” Virginia asked, her voice rising. She had been so sure she had it all worked out. Now she could only stare at the two of them.

  “You are married, however,” her mother said. “You’re Mrs. Walter Sherwood, Walter Evan Sherwood.”

  “He’s a doctor,” her father said. “Specializes in nerves.”

  “But how—?”

  The three sat in a vacuum of silence avoiding each other’s eyes, and the teakettle’s shriek finally aroused Mrs. Appleby who was glad for an excuse to break the spell and do something.

  “Homer,” she said as she busied herself with the tea, “why don’t you get that picture? The one on the dresser.”

  “Say, I forgot about that,” he said rising. “It’s a picture of you two, you and Walter,” he told Virginia.

  “We think Walter is wonderful,” her mother said warmly, “what little we’ve ever got to see of him. He’s a very busy man.”

  “When did I marry this…this Walter Sherwood?”

  “In nineteen fifty-one. In Chicago.”

  “Here’s the picture,” her father said, coming back with the photograph folder.

  “You and Walter didn’t want to have your picture taken,” Mrs. Appleby said. “Everybody does, you said, and you wanted to be different. But your father and I insisted.”

  Virginia opened the photograph and saw herself and the man she had seen in the motel, side by side, looking very happy.

  “Why”—she swallowed hard—“that’s him. That’s Mr. Fisher.”

  “But it can’t be, dear,” her mother told her. “That’s Dr. Sherwood.”

  Virginia examined his picture more closely, took in the honest bright eyes, the fine cut of face, the intelligent look. There could be no mistake in spite of the fact she had seen him only once and then only briefly.

  “But why would he call himself Fisher? He had a driver’s license and—well, so have I.” She produced it from her bag and showed it to them. “It’s an accurate description of me and his must have been true of him, too.”

  “Why, I just don’t know,” her mother said, puzzled.

  “It just don’t make any sense 4t all,” Appleby said in an irritated voice. “What were you two doing in California with changed names anyway?”

  “You didn’t write that you and Walter were going anywhere. We thought you were still in Michigan.”

  “Michigan?” Virginia shook her head in weary perplexity. “It gets more and more confusing.”

  They had tea now and sat around the kitchen table sipping it and nibbling on cookies Mrs. Appleby placed on the centerpiece.

  “Maybe I’d better go back to where you’ve forgotten,” her mother said. “You were operated on and the surgery came along well. The school let us know and we went to Chicago right away and saw you in the hospital there that night. You were going to school then, remember?”

  “Yes, I remember. I was specializing in bacteriology.”

  “The old separator curiosity still at work,” her father said, chuckling, “only on a more advanced scale.”

  “Your grades were good, so they let you take your final tests in June before summer school opened. Then you came home for the summer.” Mrs. Appleby looked at her husband. “Did Virginia come home the next summer? I don’t seem to remember.”

  “Let’s see.” Appleby frowned. “It was the summer of nineteen forty-eight she stayed in Chicago, so she was here the next summer.”

  “I’m glad I came home to help out, Dad.”

  “You were always a help,” he said gruffly. “You’d get out in the oat field on days so hot I could hardly stand it. Made me feel almost ashamed of myself, you did.”

  “It was after you graduated in nineteen forty-seven that you got the job at Wright Memorial Hospital,” Mrs. Appleby went on. “You were pretty happy there. You were head bacteriologist when you felt there three years later. They were sorry to lose you, they said.”

  “That’s when I got married?”

  Mrs. Appleby nodded. “We had a hard time getting your husband-to-be to take a minute off for it. I never saw such a busy man. He just wanted a short, civil ceremony.”

  “Funny man, Walter,” her father said. “You talk to him and he seems like he’s listening, but his mind’s a million miles away. He’s always thinking about something else.”

  “Oh, he isn’t offensive about it,” Mrs. Appleby hurried to explain. “He just has so much on his mind. He used to talk to us and tell us what he was doing, but we could never understand it. You could, though. You worshipped him, Virginia.”

  “I did?” Virginia asked, not conversant with this side of her nature.

  “He was your kind of man,” her father said. “Found a man who could answer all your questions for you.”

  “And I didn’t know who he was,” Virginia said morosely. “I woke up and there he was, all dressed up and ready to go somewhere and I didn’t even know who he was. And to think I walked out on him.”

  Appleby took the last cookie. “I wouldn’t feel too bad about it,” he said gently. “You’ll be hearing from him.”

  “Sure you will,” her mother said comfortingly.

  “I wonder.” It had been from Wednesday to Monday, time for him to have called her parents. Why hadn’t he done it? Surely a man missing a wife would have tried to get in touch with her parents by that time, wouldn’t he? Or was that going to be another part of the mystery, the apparently never-to-be-solved puzzle that confronted her. “You say we went to Michigan?”

  “It came suddenly,” Mrs. Appleby said. “Near the end of fifty-one, wasn’t it, Homer?”

  Appleby nodded. “We were planning on a Chicago trip for Christmas, since you’d been out here the year before. But you wrote saying you both were go
ing to Michigan.”

  “He found some kind of research work there he wanted. He never talked much about it.”

  “It was for the government,” Appleby followed the last of the cookie with the remaining tea in his cup. “We were up there in fifty-three, weren’t we, Mother? Nice little town, Merrittville. As clean a town as you’d find anywhere, right smack dab in the middle of the cherry country. Raise turkeys there, too.”

  “It’s mostly resort country, Virginia. Sand and woods and lakes. Your Father and Walter went fishing several times.”

  “Merrittville, Michigan. It’s as if I never heard of it.”

  “You loved it. You had some sort of job that used your training, working for the same people as Walter. Only I don’t think you worked all the time.”

  “No, that was the trouble.” Appleby became uncomfortably conscious of his wife’s glare.

  “Trouble?” Virginia asked.

  “No trouble,” her mother reassured her. “Walter was just so. tied up in his work we didn’t get to see much of him, even when we were there. You were a little unhappy, you know how a person gets—moods? I’ve been guilty of it myself when I get so tired of having your father out there in the fields all day and doing the same thing over and over year in and year out. You just thought you weren’t seeing enough of him, that’s all. But a man has his work and no life is ideal. Even if it were, a person would find something to complain about.”

  “There were—we had no children?”

  “No, Virginia. No children.”

  “He didn’t have time, that Walter,” Appleby said, chuckling.

  “Homer!”

  “Well,” he grumbled, “I think he took everything too serious. Buried himself in his work. Why, if I worked on the farm the way he did with his work you’d never see me days on end.”

  “It’s sometimes that way in science,” Virginia said, seeking to rationalize the behavior of a husband she didn’t even know. “I’ve known a lot of devoted people.”

  “There are some people who think science is going to replace religion.”

  “We’re not going into that, Homer. You and Charlie Frank can argue about that. You always do.” Charlie Frank was a neighbor much given to argument, mostly about the current farm program and price supports, but he could be lured into other avenues of disagreement.

  “Where’s Billy?” Virginia asked. “I half expected to find him working the farm when I arrived.”

  She saw her mother turn away, glanced at her father and saw his grim look, and before either said anything Virginia knew what had happened.

  “He’s—gone,” Mrs. Appleby said.

  “Been gone nearly seven years.”

  “Little Billy?”

  “He grew up fast, Virginia.”

  “He was a man in no time.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “The war,” her mother said simply, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “It took a lot of them, a lot more than we’d like to think and remember.”

  “But the war was over!” Virginia said. “It was over a whole year before I had the operation, wasn’t it?”

  “Not the Korean War.”

  “Korean War?”

  Her father explained that Billy Appleby had died in action just before Christmas in 1950. “Died like the man he was,” he said somberly, “when the Chinese crossed the Yalu River.”

  “I didn’t even know there had been another war,” Virginia said softly. “Poor Billy.”

  And as her father told her about the war, its causes and its results, she fondled her remembrances of her brother and the times they had had together on the farm, and her anxiety was for the moment fully supplanted by the sorrow the fact of his death brought to her.

  Later, when her father had gone out to do his chores she sat in the kitchen watching her mother at work, eased by the familiar sight of her bustling around the room and by the sounds she heard: the running of water in the sink, the squeak of the floor when her mother walked over it (his grandfather hadn’t put in enough nails when he built it, her father often complained), and the hum of the refrigerator. It was home and she couldn’t get used to the idea that eleven years had passed since she’d been in it, at least in her memory of it.

  Her mother talked about people she knew and people she didn’t know, people who had children and people who had not, neighbors who had died and neighbors who were ill, and a few words of censure for this person or that—words of praise for others who had shown unusual fortitude in living their plagued lives. But Virginia listened only half-heartedly, knowing that her mother was trying to draw her out of her situational preoccupation but not wanting to leave it.

  Then, when it must have become obvious to her mother that what she was saying was not having its effect, Mrs. Appleby stopped at her side and said, “What are your plans, Virginia?”

  “Plans?” Virginia shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought everything would be settled once I arrived here, but I see nothing is settled at all. This is as far as I was able to see.”

  “Perhaps I could talk Homer into driving up to Merrittville. He likes it up there. We could get someone to watch the farm and do the chores.”

  “No. If I go to Merrittville I will go by myself.”

  “Do you think you should?”

  “I got this far by myself. There’s nothing really wrong with me. It’s just as if I were twenty-two again. If I could travel when I was twenty-two I can travel now even though I can’t remember what happened in between.”

  “But what about Dr. Sherwood?”

  Virginia found nothing to reply to this. She knew what her mother meant: Suppose you find him a stranger? She had thought of that enough herself. There just was no answer.

  “He’s a neurophysiologist. Maybe he could do something about your condition.”

  “I don’t understand why he hasn’t got in touch with you,” Virginia said heavily. “Maybe he thinks I’m angry or something. Maybe he thinks I’ve left him. Maybe we had an argument or something the night before. Things like that cause amnesia, you know.”

  “You would know more about things like that than I.”

  After the evening meal Virginia took the car into town and stopped at the library. There was something she had to know. She went to the reference room and took down the most recent volume of Who’s Who in America. She found no notation of Morley Donn Fisher. But she had no trouble at all in locating Walter Evan Sherwood. It read:

  SHERWOOD, Walter Evan, neurophysiologist; b. Los Angeles, July 14, 1920; s. Evan Phillip and Gladys (Wray) S.; 3 yrs. Ill. Midwest Col., 1948; M.D., Ryerson Med. Sch. 1951; m. Virginia Appleby, 1951. Research fellow MacReynolds Found. 1951, consultant in neurophys. U.S. Dept. of Defense since 1952. Mem. Am. Physiol. Soc., Am. Neurol. Soc., Am. Electroencephalog. Soc. Home: 347 Walnut St., Merrittville, Mich.

  When she finished the entry she closed the book, feeling a little more certain about things. The record was irrefutable. Dr. Sherwood lived in Merrittville. Michigan; she was his wife and she ought to be there at 347 Walnut Street, whether he was or not.

  It was as simple as that.

  NINE

  It was July and the five hundred inhabitants of Merrittville were forced to share its two-block long business section with strangers, the thousands who lived brief lives in resorts and cottages on the innumerable lakes in the area, and the never-to-be-acquainted-with faces of overnight visitors for whom Merrittville was a mere stopping place, a point between points.

  It was not only this increase in population that proved it was mid-summer. There was the Starlight Drive-In theater, for example, a lonely, desolate waste of snow and speaker poles that stood like silent, starved sentinels in winter, now clean-swept and raked, its box office and its poles newly painted, its marquee alive with the next attraction. And then there were the three motels that each year closed their doors for winter after Labor Day but now closed them every day around three in the afternoon because that’s when the “No Vacanc
y” signs went up.

  Merrittville business was brisk, the fish were said to be biting everywhere (a rumor the resort men did not try to discourage), there was much to see and lots to do in this vacationland (map, anyone?) and tomorrow would be just as busy (where do they all come from?).

  That is why, when Walter Sherwood drove into Merrittville, he was surprised to find it so bustling, having imagined it would be one of those sleepy little places one finds between larger towns, something like Webster, Illinois, and he realized now he need not have worried about it. It was so busy, in fact, that he found no parking space on Main Street, where he was going to stop and inquire for Walnut Street, so he kept on until he came to the drive-in, eying intersecting streets but seeing no signs. There was nothing beyond the drive-in, so he turned back and stopped at a service station at the edge of the business section where he asked after Walnut Street.

  “Walnut Street?” the old, uniformed attendant repeated. “Why, that’s just one street west of here. Can’t miss it.” And then, when he put up the hose and glanced at Sherwood, he squinted, ducked his head to spit a blob of tobacco on the concrete, and said, “Say, ain’t you one of them guys from out at the clinic?”

  “Clinic?”

  “Yeah. You know, that place they built three miles west of town.” And when Sherwood’s face registered nothing, he added, “That Schlessenger place.”

  “You’ve got a good memory,” Sherwood said noncommittally.

  “Thought I spotted you. Never forget a face once it stops here. Yes, sir.”

  Sherwood drove the indicated block west and turned down the unmarked street, found 347 where he expected it to be, three and one-half blocks from Main, an old house little different from those around it, with white clapboard exterior that looked new, a two story house with gingerbread running along the roof line, a brick sidewalk extending from the street to the wide, open porch complete with swing. The ancient front door was wooden with a thick, beveled glass inset marked with curlicues.