Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

“I don’t believe that.”

“What? The birth rate?”

“Plague.” He looked at me with a strange smile.

I didn’t know what he was driving at. I was the one with access to government records, while he was just a photographer. “Right,” I said. “People just died of nothing.”

“It’s a lie, Sax! A goddamn fucking lie! No plague!” He stopped as suddenly as he had started, and sat down. “Forget it, Sax. Just forget it.”

“If it wasn’t the plague, what?”

“I said to let it drop.”

“What was it, Bernard? You’re crazy, you know that? You’re talking crazy.”

“Yeah, I’m crazy.” He was looking westward again. During the night I wakened to hear him walking back and forth. I hoped that if he decided to start that night, he’d leave me the canoe. I went back to sleep. He was still there in the morning.

“Look, Sax, you go back. I’ll come along in a day or two.”

“Bernard, you can’t live off nothing. There won’t be any food after tomorrow. We’ll both go back, stock up, and come out again. I couldn’t go off and leave you. How would you get back?”

“When I was a boy,” he said, “my father and mother were rather famous photographers. They taught me. We traveled all over the world. Getting pictures of all the vanishing species, for one last glorious book.” I nodded. They had produced two of the most beautiful books I had ever seen. “Then something happened,” he said, after a slight hesitation. “You know all about that, I guess. Your department. They went away and left me in Mexico. I wasn’t a kid, you see, but I’d always been with them. Then I wasn’t with them anymore. No note. No letter. Nothing. They searched for them, of course. Rich gringos aren’t―weren’t―allowed to simply vanish. Nothing. Before that my father had taken me into the hills, for a hunt. This time with guns. We shot―God, we shot everything that moved! Deer. Rabbits. Birds. A couple of snakes. There was a troop of monkeys. I remember them most of all. Seven monkeys. He took the left side and I took the right and we wiped them out. Just like that. They shrieked and screamed and tried to run away, and tried to shield each other, and we got every last one. Then we went back to my mother and the next day they were gone. I was fifteen. I stayed there for five years. Me and the girls of Mexico. They sent me home just before the border was closed. All North Americans out. I got permission to go back to New York, and for seventeen years I never left again. Until now. I won’t go back, Sax.”

He leaned over and picked up a rifle. He had had it with his photographic equipment. “I have ammunition. I’ve had it for years. I’m pretty good with it. I’d demonstrate, but I don’t want to waste the shell. Now, you just pick up your gear, and toss it in the boat, and get the hell out of here.”

I suddenly remembered watching television as a child, when they had programs that went on around the clock―stories, movies. A man with a rifle stalking a deer. That’s all I could remember of that program, but it was very clear and I didn’t want to go away and let Bernard be that man. I stared at the rifle until it began to rise and I was looking down the barrel of it.

“I’ll kill you, Sax. I really will,” he said, and I knew he would.

I turned and tossed my pack into the boat and then climbed in. “How will you get back, if you decide to come back?” I felt only bitterness. I was going back and he was going to be the man with the rifle.

“I’ll find a way. If I’m not there by Friday, don’t wait. Tell Evinson I said that, Sax.”

“Bernard...” I let it hang there as I pushed off and started to paddle. There wasn’t a thing that I could say to him.

I heard a shot about an hour later, then another in the afternoon, after that nothing. I got back to headquarters during the night. No one was up, so I raided the food and beer and went to bed. The next morning Evinson was livid with rage.

“He wouldn’t have stayed like that! You left him! You did something to him, didn’t you? You’ll be tried, Sax. I’ll see you in prison for this.” Color flooded back into his face, leaving him looking as unnaturally flushed as he had been pale only a moment before. His hand trembled as he wiped his forehead, which was flaky with peeling skin.

“Sax is telling the truth,” Delia said. She had circles under her eyes and seemed depressed. “Bernard wanted me to go away with him to hunt. I refused. He needed someone to help him get as far away as possible.”

Evinson turned his back on her. “You’ll go back for him,” he said to me, snapping the words. I shook my head. “I’ll report you. I don’t believe a word of what you’ve said. I’ll report you. You did something, didn’t you? All his work for this project! You go get him!”

“Oh, shut up.” I turned to Corrie. “Anything new while I was gone?”

She looked tired too. Evinson must have applied the whip. “Not much. We’ve decided to take back samples of everything. We can’t do much with the equipment we brought. Just not enough time. Not enough of us for the work.”

“If you knew your business you could do it!” Evinson said. “Incompetents! All of you! This is treason! You know that, don’t you? You’re sabotaging this project. You don’t want me to prove my theory. Obstacles every step of the way. That’s all you’ve been good for. And now this! I’m warning you, Sax, if you don’t bring Bernard back today, I’ll press charges against you.” His voice had been high pitched always, but it became shriller and shriller until he sounded like a hysterical woman.

I spun to face him. “What theory, you crazy old man? There is no theory! There are a hundred theories. You think those records weren’t sifted a thousand times before they were abandoned? Everything there was microfilmed and studied again and again and again. You think you can poke about in this muck and filth and come up with something that hasn’t been noted and discarded a dozen times? They don’t give a damn about your theories, you bloody fool! They hope that Delia can come up with a radiation study they can use. That Bernard will find wildlife, plant life that will prove the pollution has abated here. That J.P. will report the marine life has reestablished itself. Who do you think will ever read your theories about what happened here? Who gives a damn? All they want now is to try to save the rest.” I was out of breath and more furious than I had been in years. I wanted to kill the bastard, and it didn’t help at all to realize that it was Bernard that I really wanted to strangle. The man with the gun. Evinson backed away from me, and for the first time I saw that one of his hands had been bandaged.

Corrie caught my glance and shrugged. “Something bit him. He thinks I should be able to analyze his blood and come up with everything from what did it to a foolproof antidote. In fact, we have no idea what bit him.”

“Isn’t Trainor any help with something like that?”

“He might be if he were around. We haven’t seen him since the night we heard the scream.” Evinson flung down his plastic cup. It bounced from the table to the floor. He stamped out.

“It’s bad,” Corrie said. “He’s feverish, and his hand is infected. I’ve done what I can. I just don’t have anything to work with.”

Delia picked up the cup and put it back on the table. “This whole thing is an abysmal failure,” she said dully. “None of us is able to get any real work done. We don’t know enough, or we don’t have the right equipment, or enough manpower, or time. I don’t even know why we’re here.”

“The Turkey Point plant?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about it, except that it isn’t hot. The people who built that plant knew more than we’re being taught today.” She bit her lip hard enough to leave marks on it. Her voice was steady when she went on. “It’s like that in every field. We’re losing everything that we had twenty-five years ago, thirty years ago. I’m one of the best, and I don’t understand that plant.”