Дэймон Найт: Orbit 13

At the doorway she paused and said, “Why don’t you take him?”

I looked at her then. Bernard made a snorting sound and didn’t answer. I turned back to the window. The silence was coming in along with the nighttime humidity, and I realized that I had chosen my room on the wrong side of the building. The night air blew from the land to the sea. There was a faint breeze at the window. The oil lamp was feeble against the pressure of the darkness beyond the netting.

“Night,” Delia said at the door, and I looked at her again, nodded, and she started through, then stopped. A high, uncanny, inhuman scream sounded once, from a long way off. It echoed through the empty city. The silence that followed it made me understand that what I had thought to be quiet before had not been stillness. Now the silence was profound; no insect, no rustling, no whir of small wings, nothing. Then the night sounds began to return. The three of us had remained frozen; now Bernard moved. He turned to Delia.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew!”

She was very pale. “What was it?” she cried shrilly.

“Panther. Either in the city or awfully close.”

Panther? It might have been. I had no idea what a panther sounded like. The others were coming down again, Evinson in the lead, Corrie and J.P. close behind him. Corrie looked less frightened than Delia, but rattled and pale.

“For heaven’s sake, Bernard!” J.P. said. “Was that you?”

“Don’t you know?” Corrie cried. At the same time Delia said, “It was a panther.”

“No! Don’t be a fool!” Corrie said.

Evinson interrupted them both. “Everyone, just be quiet. It was some sort of bird. We’ve seen birds for three days now. Some of them make cries like that.”

“No bird ever made a sound like that,” Corrie said. Her voice was too high and excited.

“It was a panther,” Bernard repeated. “I heard one before. In Mexico I heard one just like that, twenty years ago. I’ve never forgotten.” He nodded toward the net-covered window. “Out there. Maybe in one of the city parks. Think what it means, Evinson. I was right! Wildlife out there. Naturalized, probably.” He took a breath. His hands were trembling, and he spoke with an intensity that was almost embarrassing. Corrie shook her head stubbornly, but Bernard went on. “I’m going to find it. Tomorrow. I’ll take Sax with me, and our gear, and plan to stay out there for a day or two. We’ll see if we can find a trace of it, get a shot. Proof of some kind.”

Evinson started to protest. If it wasn’t his plan, he hated it. “We need Sax to find water for us,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what the beast is; it might attack on sight.”

I was watching Bernard. His face tightened, became older, harsher. He was going. “Drop it, Evinson,” I said. “They know about me. The only water I’ll find is the river, which I already stumbled across, remember. And Bernard is right. If there’s anything, we should go out and try to find it.”

Evinson grumbled some more, but he couldn’t really forbid it, since this was what the expedition was all about. Besides, he knew damn well there was no way on earth that he could enforce any silly edict. Sulkily he left us to plan our foray.

It was impossible to tell how the waterways had been laid out in many places. The water had spread, making marshes, and had changed its course, sometimes flowing down streets, again vanishing entirely, leaving dry beds as devoid of life as the Martian canals. Ruined concrete and sand lay there now. And the ruins went on and on. No frame houses remained; they had caved in, or had been blown down, or burned. A trailer court looked as if someone had taken one corner of the area and lifted it, tipping the chrome and gaudy-colored cans to one side. Creepers and shrubs were making a hill of greenery over them. We rowed and carried the boat and our stuff all day, stopped for the storms, then found shelter in a school building when it grew dark. The mosquitoes were worse the farther we went; their whining drowned out all other noises; we were both a mass of swollen bites that itched without letup. We saw nothing bigger than a squirrel. Bernard thought he glimpsed a manatee once, but it disappeared in the water plants and didn’t show again. I didn’t see it. There were many birds.

We were rowing late in the afternoon of the second day when Bernard motioned me to stop. We drifted and I looked where he pointed. On the bank was a great gray heron, its head stretched upward in a strange but curiously graceful position. Its wings were spread slightly, and it looked like nothing so much as a ballerina, poised, holding out her tutu. With painful slowness it lifted one leg and flexed its toes, then took a dainty, almost mincing step. Bernard pointed again, and I saw the second bird, in the same pose, following a ritual that had been choreographed incalculable ages ago. We watched the dance of the birds in silence, until without warning Bernard shouted in a hoarse, strange voice, “Get out of here! You fucking birds! Get out of here!” He hit the water with his oar, making an explosive noise, and continued to scream at them as they lifted in panicked flight and vanished into the growth behind them, trailing their long legs, ungainly now and no longer beautiful.

“Bastard,” I muttered, and started to row again. We were out of synch for a long time as he chopped at the water ineffectually.

We watched the rain later, not talking. We hadn’t talked since seeing the birds’ courtship dance. I had a sunburn that was painful and peeling; I was tired, and hungry for some real food. “Tomorrow morning we start back,” I said. I didn’t look at him. We were in a small house while the rain and wind howled and pounded and turned the world gray. Lightning flashed and thunder rocked us almost simultaneously. The house shook and I tensed, ready to run. Bernard laughed. He waited for the wind to let up before he spoke.

“Sax, we have until the end of the week, and then back to Washington for you, back to New York for me. When do you think you’ll ever get out of the city again?”

“If I get back to it, what makes you think I’ll ever want out again?”

“You will. This trip will haunt you. You’ll begin to think of those parakeets, the terns wheeling and diving for fish. You’ll dream of swimming in clean water. You’ll dream of the trees and the skies and the waves on the beach. And no matter how much you want to get it back, there won’t be any way at all.”

“There’s a way if you want it bad enough.”

“No way.” He shook his head. “I tried. For years I tried. No way. Unless you’re willing to walk cross-country, and take the risks. No one ever makes it to anywhere, you know.”

I knew he was right. In Health and Education you learn about things like public transportation: there isn’t any. You learn about travel: there isn’t any, not that’s safe. The people who know how to salvage and make-do get more and more desperate for parts to use, more and more deadly in the ways they get those parts. Also, travel permits were about as plentiful as unicorns.

“You wanted to go back to Mexico?” I asked.

“Yeah. For twenty years I wanted to go back. The women there are different.”

“You were younger. They were younger.”

“No, it isn’t just that. They were different. Something in the air. You could feel it, sniff it, almost see it. The smells were...” He stood up suddenly. “Anyway, I tried to get back, and this is as close as I could get. Maybe I’ll go ahead and walk after all.” He faced the west where the sky had cleared and the low sun looked three times as big as it should have.

“Look, Bernard, I could quote you statistics; that’s my job, you know. But I won’t. Just take my word for it. That’s what I’m good at. What I read, I remember. The birth rate has dropped to two per thousand there. As of six years ago. It might be lower now. They’re having a hell of a time with communications. And they had plague.”