Damon Knight - Orbit 16

Vision blurred and eyes burning, she got in line at an oxygen booth. Nearby, a Ransomite rally was underway. Ona Ransome herself was speaking, a tough, intransigent knot of a woman, locked behind a gold-plated gas mask engraved with the sign of the dollar. She harangued the crowd in husky, accented tones: the threat of the neomystics . . . the threat of an unconquered nature . . . the threat, always the threat. Gudrun’s head pounded agonizedly. She felt as if someone were driving an icepick into her brain.

“They do not stop at cleaning up the air and water, they demand a stop to shopping centers, expressways, transportation! In short, these Dionysian brutes are screaming for an end to America, a stop to civilization!”

Her audience was an undulating mass, responsive to her every cue. And why not? Wasn’t she right, after all? Why carry an onerous burden of guilt when Ona Ransome clearly placed the blame?

A commotion was starting at the oxygen booth; a man refused to relinquish his place after the allotted thirty seconds. Gudrun took a handkerchief from her purse and covered her face.

Who are these people? she asked herself. Gaunt faces; brown-yellow skin stretched hot and tight across the bone. Hollow-chested women with cracked lips, the skin showing through their hair in leprous patches, their flesh seared and burnished by the air itself! Bandanas and scraps of cloth pulled across their mouths like gags. A few Ransomites shouted insults; the man in the oxygen booth stubbornly held his ground.

“The Dionysian motivation is clear—a return to nature in all its ugliness, a mode of life best described by three adjectives: harsh, brutal, and short!”

Men from the oxygen line itself—businessmen, public servants —joined the Ransomites in removing the protester; he twitched and shuddered like a weasel being extruded from the womb. He was stomped to the ground. There was blood. His attackers were met by a dozen ascetic-looking men and women brandishing signs and placards as well as their bony fists: air now! pollution is genocide!

Ona Ransome could not be heard. The sirens of riot police sounded monotonously in the distance. Gudrun felt herself crowded in from all sides, so tightly she could barely move, could only sag and sway with the movement of the mob. Screams. Rushes. Beggarly men falling of their own exertion, trampled.

All at once the crowd parted and Gudrun stared directly into the ratlike face of the man in the air chamber. His face was torn, his eyes maddened with blood and pain. Gudrun’s head spun. She was about to faint. She extended one hand toward him in a meaningless gesture.

The man took something from a package at his side and hurled it with all his strength. Like a tough pink fish encrusted with tar, stinking of some foul preservative, it fell at Gudrun’s feet.

A human lung.

She entered the bar quickly amid sounds of natural ambience; fluttering birds, tumbling water. She saw him almost immediately —the barrel chest heaving beneath a mesh shirt of photosynthetic weave. The stale emblem on the sleeve.

She took a place at a corner table and cleared her throat once, self-consciously. The airbrain yawned.

Her pulse quickened. Again the signal, as delicate and tempting as the crumpling of sheets . . .

He set his milk down on the bar and rose to face her, deltoids flexing, his chest a muscle playground. “You have doubts?” he asked. A standard question, to which she nodded sheepishly. The airbrain had no doubts.

“It is important to have faith. . . .”

The oxygen made her dizzy. She inhaled deeply, relaxed. In and out. The world melted away. The airbrain smiled.

She did not breathe as he laid his hands upon her in a lingering benediction.

To paraphrase Thoreau: Beware of any enterprise that requires you to buy new skirts.

The water on the freeway canal didn’t show a ripple. I eased my skimmer down the ramp and watched the flashes from the fish darling for the bottom. The new skirts of the aircar made it ride a good twelve centimeters higher, and it was smooth, really smooth. I sort of had to grin when I shoved the vanes to full forward and cut in the afterfan. When I hit the speed channel, I was already up to an even hundred kilos. Those fish were in for a bad time later—on a day like this, everybody with a cool skimmer that could lift off the water would be pulling revs. But right then it was quiet. I had to laugh when an old clunker with leaky skirts lost power and plunked down right in front of me. I gave him a blast with the afterfan, just to watch him bob, then scurried in to work. I breezed into the parking marina with plenty of time to spare and strolled into the shop. By the time I got to my bench, I didn’t feel so good.

Somehow a transfer day always does that to me. I don’t owe too much. The usual. Rent to the city for my pad at the collective. A meal tab for two intervals. Payments on the skimmer. Except that I had gotten a bit carried away with those new skirts. My credit was down to the edge of my C5 credit limit. It really wasn’t fair. The more you made, the more you could owe. I had heard the C12 limit was a thousand credits. And here I was stuck at a miserable hundred and fifty. So I shot my balance, and then some. And today Trim Skimmers, Inc., was due for another transfer. I hoped Karl would bail me out. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I dropped into my seat at the bench and picked up the first visiphone. The tag read “Broken View Switch.” Well, that computed. No one would believe how many came in like that. The view switch “somehow” jams on. Then when the user answers the call straight from the shower, they are terribly surprised and flustered when somebody sees them. I remember one time . . . Well, anyway, I was fixing the switch when Karl arrived. He worked at the bench next to me.

“Unity, Len.”

“Unity, Karl. Hey, Karl, how about transferring a hundred credits until tomorrow?”

“Sorry, Len. I’m into my limit now. What’s the trouble this time?”

Then I really didn’t feel so good. I gave him the whole story, complete with dulcimers and moogs. He nodded.

“Bad break.”

That didn’t help much. I had a date tonight, too. Free-fall games. Then he got my attention.

“Look, you can take care of the credit problem real easy.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll break into the Center with a magnet and wipe them out.”

“Naw. That doesn’t work, anyway. But I can show you how to get a start on the next interval.”

“Watch your program, fella. You know that new credits are entered for everybody at the start of an interval. No sooner.”

Karl laughed and sat down on my bench. “Yeah, I know. What time is your payment due?”

“No later than nineteen hundred hours.”

“And what time does the credit center shut down for the day?”

“At seventeen hundred.”

“Correct. Are you getting the program?”

“No.” I could see that Karl had something interesting going, so I shoved back my chair.

“Retrieve, man. Retrieve,” he said. “What says you got no credits? A little strip of plastic on your ID card. Just a few little magnetic spots. Now! What is that interesting piece of machinery next to us? A coder for the key strips in the phones. A coder for little magnetic spots.”

I put the visiphone down with a thump.

“Run complete, Karl. Just add enough to keep the smiling dealer smiling. By the time my transfers hit Central tomorrow, my credits for the next interval are already in. That’s the first run of the day. Then I go to an update booth, get my new balance recorded, and everything is square. Could work.”

“Does work. Do it myself sometimes. Here, I’ll show you.”