Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

There were fair and dark visages, and blue and gray and brown eyes shining with tears. The seven followed the other seven away, speechless forever, shedding their robes and wrappings, knowing that the blight was already upon their already obsolete world-hives, knowing that their minds and talents were dimmed, and then not really knowing anything, ever again.

HIS NAME was Lindsey.

They (mother, stepbrother, older sister) reared him on a farm in upstate New York. Raised from the potent germ plasm of a father lately dead in Cambodia, Lindsey endured a generally happy childhood. The stepbrother, product of an earlier marriage, served as a surrogate father until he was killed pulling a service-station holdup in Rochester. Eleven at the time, Lindsey cried in his mother’s arms, then returned to the woods behind the house to play with his soldiers.

In his infancy: Lindsey’s mother read some arcane predecessor of Dr. Spock and decided not to make the same mistake she had perpetuated through her first two children; she made a point of never holding Lindsey more than a minute, and then never rocking him. When it was too late, she read in the medical section of Time that physical contact is essential for the development of a child’s motor skills. She wondered, then shrugged off the knowledge. Lindsey grew older in a frangible world, wondering why he alone stumbled over obstacles others easily avoided.

In his childhood: Naturally shy, Lindsey found himself increasingly alone and lonely when he started town school. His stepbrother neglected to teach him how to play baseball or fight. His sister never taught him to dance. Lindsey inhabited the periphery of his peers’ world, and he felt the pain.

Every recess Lindsey went to the school bus parking lot. He played alone among the buses, their high, yellow flanks reminding him of animals. He gradually discovered the buses’ names and personalities.

Crosstown busing for integration came to Lindsey’s city. One night someone dynamited one of the buses at his school. When he saw the burned-out wreckage in the morning, Lindsey collapsed. The school nurse took him home and he spent the next week in bed with a high fever. The doctor diagnosed the cause as a virus.

When Lindsey returned to school, the bus parking lot was surrounded by a chain-link fence twice as high as he. All recess he looked through the mesh; the school buses returned his gaze from forlorn headlights.

In his youth: Lindsey won a Regent’s scholarship and went off to college to become a certified public accountant. It was actually his mother’s idea. Lindsey lived with three roommates in a sterile new apartment building across the street from campus. He bought a tenspeed Sohwinn and kept it chained to the outside stairs. After a month, Lindsey realized that someone was spitting on the seat of his bicycle.

His roommates suggested he was paranoid.

Lindsey grew to dread returning from class to discover the iridescent spittle on his bicycle. He carried a handkerchief used only to wipe off the seat. Lindsey stayed home from classes one entire morning, hoping to catch the phantom expectorator. Nothing happened until noon, when Lindsey left the window and went into the bathroom to relieve a painful bladder. When he returned, he checked the bike. Someone had spat on the seat.

A month later someone cut the locking chain with boltcutters and stole the bicycle.

“You see,” said Lindsey to his roommates. “You see!”

Stripes; they zip-zipped past the left side of his car, disappearing somewhere close under the front fender, then reappearing in the rear-view mirror, to recede into a vanishing perspective. Lindsey counted endlessly in his mind, all the way across Nebraska, about five hundred miles. Six feet of white stripe, six of black asphalt, six of white again, past Omaha and Lincoln, Grand Island and Hershey, North Platte. One day earlier it had been Newark and Allentown, McKeesport and Columbus. Stripes and stripes, cut along a hypnotic dotted line from coast to coast.

Out of habit, Lindsey turned on the radio. Interference from the power towers beside the highway dismembered the music, saw blade biting obliquely into wet wood.

It was early morning and enough sun up behind him so he could turn off the headlights. Lindsey inventoried stripes, but over ten the numbers became meaningless. “Zip, zippety zip,” he mumbled, counting the stripes individually as they slipped under and into the rear-view mirror. The great attraction of the stripes was their utter lack of variation. Thousands upon thousands during the night, and only a dozen seemed to have been deformed. He wasn’t sure he had been fully awake all the time.

Signs swept past, but Lindsey couldn’t integrate letters with meanings until he was jarred into alertness by a day-glo cowboy. HOWDY, PODNUH, read the sign. FOOD SIX MILES. Lindsey looked at the fuel gauge.

“Hay and water,” said Lindsey. “Curry him down, isn’t that right?”

“What?” said the filling station boy. “Fill her up?”

“Right, podnuh,” said Lindsey, walking off toward the sign FOOD. He leaned against the steel jamb of the door for a moment and took a deep breath. The clean prairie air scored his mind with a terrible clarity; Lindsey reeled. A Minnesota tourist couple seated at a table by the window thought he was drunk and ignored him.

Lindsey grinned and assumed a sober posture. The Minnesotans studied their plates of steaming buffalo sausage. The chill rigidity of the jamb passed into Lindsey’s fingers and down his backbone; he entered the restaurant.

The skeg: I’m Lindsey, he thought, looking around the dining room for an empty booth. Not Lindsay or Lindsy. Certainly not Veach. Veach was a fag who entered the office mornings with a flourish of violet—scent and shirts. Veach’s face, framed in the doorway of Lindsey’s office, said, “Hey Lindy, come home with me tonight and meet the wife?” Ritual, almost daily joke for two years. Lindsey said automatically into his ledger, “No thanks, not tonight. Mona’s having friends over.” For the first months Veach had frightened him. Veach took note and was amused.

Not Lindsay or Lindsay, old or young. The older Lindsay had founded the firm just after one of the Great Wars. There was never a question to whom he was referring—Lindsay or Lindsey. A Harvard man, unselfconscious aristocrat, his pronunciation always came down hard on the a. He tolerated Veach out of a perverse democratic fascination, and he thought Lindsey was a good solid worker.

The son Lindsay had attended the University of Southern California. He slurred his words, and his meanings all came from contextual clues. He would rather have been someone other than a CPA.

Lindsay, Lindsay, Linsey, and Veach. A firm firm, thought Lindsey, which is losing its grip. Veach always knew the difference between the Lindsays and the Lindsey; but Veach was—

“Guhmorninmistuhwhatcherwant?” like a garbled readout from the office terminal.

“Mona,” Veach learned to say. “Who the hell’s Mona?”

Persistent, the waitress hovered impatiently at Lindsey’s elbow. “Black coffee,” he said.

“Nothin’ else?”

It’s too quiet in this apartment. The stereo is up and the street buffets the windows, but it’s too silent. All sound sinks into the green-flowered wallpaper.

If there were movement, if there were warmth...

If she were in the kitchen, fixing breakfast.

If . . .

There is movement and there is warmth.

She is in the kitchen fixing breakfast.

Sure you don’t mind?

Of course not. I love making your breakfast.

Never mind; come here. I don’t want breakfast. Only you.