Damon Knight - Orbit 18

Behind the wheel she moved restlessly. “Don’t,” she said. “It doesn’t help.”

But he persisted, riveted, in examining her, as if he could see beneath the sheepskin greatcoat he’d got her for her twenty-seventh birthday (or had it been her twenty-eighth?) the nightgown he knew for a fact was the only other garment she wore, an abridged tricot tunic pale and thin as light from a distant star. For a perilously balanced moment he felt himself cauterized by the deadly notion that he might insert a hand under the sheepskin and lose the world.

But of course the moment passed, and instead he said, “Jenny, you’ve been wonderful. I mean it. It’s been great.” He took up his briefcase from the floor.

She nodded, this time not taking his words as a personal compliment so much as a statement of mutual opinion. “A great three months,” she agreed. Then she added softly, “My name is Nancy.”

“I’m so very sorry that happened. It was beastly clumsy of me.”

“It’s all right. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

But he was really off balance now, and altogether too impulsively he added, “I guess you know that statistically there’re considerably more than thirty-thousand-to-one odds we’ll ever—that is, the company is strictly against reassignments in the same—”

“I know,” she said.

He opened the door all the way, put a single shoe sole into the light dusting of snow over frozen asphalt. And once more hesitated. “I forgot to tell you: all the stuff I’ve been collecting as chairman of the school board is in the green looseleaf notebook in the den—all the figures on the new tax override proposal, annual budgets for five years back, meeting notes, everything.”

“All right.”

“Kiss the children for me.”

“Hurry,” she said. “The train’s coming.”

His name was Ken Vanselous and he was a project coordinator. A Wharton graduate, thirty-four years old, he had worked in Cleveland, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Livermore, Pittsburgh, New York again, Fort Lauderdale, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Pittsburgh again, Palo Alto, Chicago again, New York again, and some other places. So in the ten-year course of his career he had moved steadily, not so much upward (he was already up, trusted by his firm, accepted by his colleagues) as laterally, with a steady driving force, as relentlessly as live water through stratified rock. (If a man’s career can be compared to a phenomenon of physical nature without an element of dehumanization creeping in somehow.)

In his spare time Van had been a scoutmaster, Y swimming instructor, PTA president, an aiderman, Episcopal vestryman, a Little League daddy, baritone in the choir, Heart Fund volunteer, blood donor, and a member of the museum board, Madrigal Society, Citizens Concerned about Ecology, Save the Redwoods League, Movement to Preserve New England’s Indigenous Fauna, the Bitterbush Valley Racquet Club, Dirty Devils Volleyball Squad, Ravenwood Drive Joggers, Sadsack Rockhounds, Royal Bengali Cycling Society (Colonial Branch), and some other things.

Or he was Bryan Mello, thirty-six, senior systems analyst, who had worked in Minneapolis, Rochester, Van Nuys, Port Arthur, Murfreesboro, Washington, D. C., Providence, San Diego, New York, Indianapolis, Toledo, New York again, Washington again, and some other places. And had been a town councilman, cubmaster, flautist in the amateur symphony, blood donor, chairman of the church board (Unitarian), and member of the Concerned Citizens for Democratic Action, National Geographic Society, New Old Red Bam Players, Sierra Club, Peachtree Numismatists, Dartmouth Alumni Association, Stanford Alumni Association, Rotten Gulch Chess Club . . .

Or he had perhaps still another name, other credentials. Ron Graff, statistician; or Merrill Kost, economist; or Mark Esprit, psychologist; or Moe Ibmore, computer programmer; or Wendell Farraday, electronics engineer; or John Slick, technical writer.

The train sped. Utility poles clicked off frames in the every-morning newsreel. Snowed-over meadow. Snowed-in woods, trees tottery with sliding white. Highway heavy-equipment yard, the driveway a hatch of muddy ruts. Then a set-back Victorian monstrosity, Eastlake influence. A ditto, Queen Anne influence. A ditto-ditto in stockbroker’s Tudor. Then a smaller house of no identifiable architectural influence at all. Another. Another. Another. Then a frankly tract house. And another-another-another. Murky breath of the city. Industrial fringe. Congested heart. Lurching stop.

Hebe, his secretary, came into the office bearing a plastic cup.

Her name wasn’t Hebe, of course, but there was obviously no way to avoid thinking of her that way, and after a decade more or less he had given up trying.

She was reed-lithe and dark, bronze-haired and enticingly freckled, ash-blonde with a surprising olive skin and brown eyes, black-tressed with brows like strokes of a new felt pen and well-distributed flesh running slightly to overweight in a way that was curiously provocative.

But not having looked up—he was busy with the eleventh-hour paperwork—he saw only the vaporous container of coffee being slid into position in front of him. “Thanks.”

“Welcome. And happy moving day. It’s been good working for you. If you ever need a recommendation as a real-boss boss, let me know.”

“Easy. Flattery goes straight to my head and I have to keep at least a couple brain cells clear to close out the project here and find my way to the airport. I appreciate the charming encomium. though. Same to you. What time does my plane leave, anyway?”

“Noon. But I can get a later reservation if you like.”

“No, I think I can make it. But maybe I ought to call home and say what time I’ll be there.”

Obediently she disappeared, and in a moment returned to report that the line to his home was busy. Did he want her to keep trying?

“Never mind. I’ll call from the airport. That is, I will if you can give me the phone number. I know it’s somewhere in the new assignment sheets, but it’s awkward to keep opening my briefcase to find out where I’m going.”

She laughed and handed him a memo slip with his home telephone number and an address. He put the paper carefully away in his wallet.

He finished the work on his desk as one by one, or sometimes by twos or threes, the men and women he had worked with on the project dropped into his office on their way out.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Here’s luck. See you. See you. See you in Denver next spring. Tucson in February. Detroit if I can make it. Sometime, somewhere. Take care. Take care.

Despite a nap on the plane, or perhaps because of it, he was yawning-tired when the DC-10 touched down on a sprawling cushion of heat-filled midaftemoon smog. Home again, he thought, but not quite. At the beginning of the flight, he’d been as unsuccessful with the phone call as his secretary had been earlier in the day. He hoped nothing was wrong. None of the children were sick. No one had been in an accident.

For in the end he was strictly a family man: dedicated father, generous provider. He cared about them. Human relationships were what it was all about.

But the failure of the call meant he wouldn’t be met at the airport, a niggling inconvenience. He’d have to try the house again, say he was coming by taxi. That was only fair, to announce himself. A man going home after a day’s work.

He stepped out of the plane into a hot wind blowing across the runway, descended the steps and started toward the terminal, a glass-and-steel enclosure fringed by a narrow landscaped strip growing a few breeze-whipped palmettoes, fuchsia, and cotoneaster. Only the cotoneaster was at its seasonal best, its fat clusters of berries smoldering richly in the muted sunlight.