Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

For a little while, listening to the guard walk the hallways, I confronted this misery, wondering if it was a fake, if all the technical information I’d absorbed was some kind of a joke. The Sunday supplements had suggested that it augmented history in some indescribable way; the commercial programs variously described it as Time Machine, History Machine, Truth Factor, Truth Detector, Headless Marvel, and, in one case, the Whizz Bang, to which the physicists objected, saying it cheapened the concept of time travel.

I had studied every paper on the concepts and the hardware; I had set the dials correctly; I had experienced no discomfort in traveling. What happened when I got there, then? Everything seemed to be all right at this end. I’d give it one more try, before I settled down into sniveling about my aches and pains, and declined into imbecility over a sake on the rocks.

The guard was neither dancing nor singing, he sounded like yet another person, with a light but rather brittle step, as if he were an elderly man doing the rounds. Perhaps they had different shifts. I’d have to be more careful, for without having any such amusements as singing, dancing, and whistling, this guard might be far more alert.

I’d take a week to check everything out, to double-check it. To rest my head and soak my body or perhaps the other way around, anything that might help. Anything, damn it. I would have one night of delight with him before it was too late, and that wasn’t much to ask. A night, a week, six months, a good relationship for a year, was that asking too much? It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been considerate the first time around, knowing he was preoccupied with professional matters, that he had serious attachments, and I wasn’t then any too sure of myself, any more than I was now sure of what color his eyes had been.

It is too dark to see what color his eyes are and anyhow they are closed, he is snoring, and has put his pajamas back on. I lie there in a bitter and resentful daze for a few minutes, then snap on the lamp. A forty-watt bulb, it doesn’t do much for the cracked walls and peeled paint of our hideout.

“Huh?” he says, putting one skinny forearm across his eyes to shield them, and he snores again, deeply. He sleeps with his mouth open. After a moment I raise my own forearm and regard the large pores and liver spots with the dismay of recognition.

Good God, how long have I been here?

I turn my head on the moldy pillow and look at his sparse white hair, the white stubble beginning to appear on his chin, the skeletal fingers of his hand limp against his own shoulder.

Good God, what if I don’t get back?

Back to my studies, to my one-mile jog very morning, well, it’s just half a mile these days; to the quiet simplicities I really enjoy. What if I live here now? It seems to me the time has passed alarmingly and this isn’t at all what I had started out to do or be, nor him, either, when his eyes were blue or hazel and he was becoming famous and for how long, I’d like to know, is he going to lie there and snore?

The vault door snores and rasps as the guard comes in. The room lights up as the blinking console lights flicker and go out. I’m lying on the tightly closed steel slats, clasping my aching head with both hands.

He comes over and takes me by the arm, pulling me to my feet. “What are you doing in here?” he asks, more surprised than angry. “It’s impossible for unauthorized personnel to get in here.”

“No it isn’t,” I say. “Not if you really put your mind to it.” I turn around, out of his grasp, and kick the console, but not hard enough to injure myself. As you get older, you have to be more crafty about these expressions of emotion.

“Now, now,” he says, “don’t do that. You’re not even allowed in here.”

“Yes, but—” I say, turning around to him.

And there he stands. His hair is white and his eyes are still blue.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, stunned by his presence. Did he pop up between the slats right behind me? I wonder.

“I’ve worked here for years,” he says, regarding me kindly but firmly. “Why do you ask that?”

“What about all those papers? The ones I offered to type for you? The lectures? The dinners with all your peerless friends?”

He smiles, and guides me toward the door with one skinny hand on the fat of my back. “Oh, that,” he says, smiling. “Yes, those days. I was promising, I certainly had ambitions, but it turned out I wasn’t good enough, after all. I do remember you, vaguely. Do you want some coffee? I have a thermos.”

“Well, thanks,” I say, sort of lingering to glance back at the vault room where I’d failed so badly. “Aren’t you going to arrest me?”

“Of course. I’ve already sent in the word. I still don’t understand how you got in there like that.”

Sipping his coffee, I say, “They used to call me Lightfoot.”

“Did they? Nicknames are funny things. They used to call my wife Fickle, but it was because she had freckles. She says it started with her school friends calling her Freckles, but gradually—” and he launches into an interminable account of his wife’s past, and goes on and on until they come to take me away, a whole squadron of slim men in squeaky shoes whose eyes are any color I don’t remember. Everything considered, they handle me gently.

Their sergeant says: “You’re charged with breaking and entering. Understand your rights?”

Rights, yes. But breaking and entering what? I wonder. Reentering somewhere? Breaking in or breaking out?

They put me away in a cell where I dozed for the rest of the night. In the morning they released me, my lawyer insisting I had not broken any law. If he only knew how right he was, though if I’d been able to follow my intentions, some laws would have lain in shards. They rarely sentence you for your intentions, though; perhaps they figure you can do that for yourself.

So there I was, free to go home to my filmscreen and warmed sake, and I found that’s what I wanted. Though I wouldn’t have said so, years ago when I knew whether his eyes were brown or grey.

PERHAPS the sound had only been a trick of the wind, but the girl on the beach turned slowly, searching for the gull she might have heard cry. There was no hope in her face, and though her eyes squinted against the glare, she saw nothing but colors bleached and colors charred. And the only thing that moved with her was the wind, in early spring.

She wore slacks and a heavy green sweater hastily snatched from a fallen mannikin; there was a darkly stained kerchief and her shoes she held in one hand. Attractive once, now she was thin and there were coarse lines that deadened her face. She was tired, and as she walked slowly south, she tripped over nothings in the sand.

There was a pier, charred and splintered, where the ocean’s roar was magnified and hurled itself back at her with the odor of salt and dead fish and the rotting slime that covered the pilings. She hesitated as if bracing to run, then bit at her lips and forced herself to walk—out of the white sun into the gray where the cool wind became cold. With one hand at her throat and breathing deeply, she looked straight ahead toward the sand on the other side. Then she stumbled. As she put out a hand to steady herself, the wind shifted a piece of blackened cardboard. There was a man underneath and she screamed when she saw the crabs.

“Oh God!” was not a prayer, but a cry for release as she ran into the open, seeing nothing and hearing only the sea until the pier was lost behind her, and ahead, the wheel.

She slowed until relief forced her to her knees while she stared at the boardwalk lined by rusting metal benches, and beyond them, facing blindly toward the water, the empty stands dwarfed by the once-domed building in their midst.