Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

“We don’t tolerate that kind of thing in these pa’ts,” Jacobs said grimly. “Hell, Will, those kids are a royal pain in the ass, but—” But not in these pa’ts, he told himself, not that. There are decent limits. He was surprised at the depth and ferocity of his reaction. “This a’n’t Alabama,” he said.

“Might as well be, with Riddick. His idea of law enforcement’s to take everybody he doesn’t like down in the basement and beat the crap out of them.” Sussmann sighed. “Anyway, Riddick wouldn’t stop to piss on me if my hat was on fire, that’s for sure. Good thing I got other ways of finding stuff out.”

Jed Everett came in while Jacobs was ordering coffee. He was a thin, cadaverous man with a long nose; his hair was going rapidly to gray; put him next to short, round Sussmann and they would look like Mutt and Jeff. At forty-eight—Everett was a couple of years older than Jacobs, just as Sussmann was a couple of years younger—he was considered to be scandalously young for a small-town doctor, especially a GP. But old Dr. Barlow had died of a stroke three years back, leaving his younger partner in residency, and they were stuck with him.

One of the regulars had moved away from the trough, leaving an empty seat next to Jacobs, and Everett was talking before his buttocks had hit the upholstery. He was a jittery man, with lots of nervous energy, and he loved to fret and rant and gripe, but softly and goodnaturedly, with no real force behind it, as if he had a volume knob that had been turned down.

“What a morning!” Everett said. “Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle—’scuse me, Myna, I’ll take some coffee, please, black—I swear it’s psychosomatic. Honest to God, gentlemen, she’s a case for the medical journals, dreams the whole damn shitbundle up out of her head just for the fun of it, I swear before all my hopes of heaven, swop me blue if she doesn’t. Definitely phychosomatic.”

“He’s learned a new word,” Sussmann said.

“If you’d wasted all the time I have on this nonsense,” Everett said fiercely, “you’d be whistling a different tune out of the other side of your face, I can tell you, oh yes indeed. What kind of meat d’you have today, Myna? How about the chops—they good?—all right, and put some greens on the plate, please. Okay? Oh, and some homefrieds, now I think about it, please. If you have them.”

“What’s got your back up?” Jacobs asked mildly.

“You know old Mrs. Crawford?” Everett demanded. “Hm? Lives over to the Island, widow, has plenty of money? Three times now I’ve diagnosed her as having cancer, serious but still operable, and three times now I’ve sent her down to Augusta for exploratory surgery, and each time they got her down on the table and opened her up and couldn’t find a thing, not a goddamned thing, old bitch’s hale and hearty as a prize hog. Spontaneous remission. All psychosomatic, clear as mud. Three times, though. It’s shooting my reputation all to hell down there. Now she thinks she’s got an ulcer. I hope her kidney falls out, right in the street. Thank you, Myna. Can I have another cup of coffee?” He sipped his coffee, when it arrived, and looked a little more meditative. “Course, I think I’ve seen a good number of cases like that, I think, I said, ha’d to prove it when they’re terminal. Wouldn’t surprise me if a good many of the people who die of cancer—or a lot of other diseases, for that matter—were like that. No real physical cause, they just get tired of living, something dries up inside them, their systems stop trying to defend them, and one thing or another knocks them off. They become easy to touch off, like tinder. Most of them don’t change their minds in the middle, though, like that fat old sow.”

Wilbur Phipps, who had been leaning on the counter listening, ventured the opinion that modern medical science had never produced anything even half as good as the oldfashioned mustard plaster. Everett flared up instantly.

“You ever bejesus try one?” Phipps demanded.

“No, and I don’t bejesus intend to!” Everett said.

Jacobs turned toward Sussmann. “Wheah you been, this early in the day?” he asked. “A’n’t like you to haul yourself out before noon.”

“Up at the Factory. Over to West Mills.”

“What was up? Another hearing?”

“Yup. Didn’t stick—they aren’t going to be injuncted.”

“They never will be,” Jacobs said. “They got too much money, too many friends in Augusta. The Board’ll never touch them.”

“I don’t believe that,” Sussmann said. Jacobs grunted and sipped his coffee.

“As Christ’s my judge,” Everett was saying, in a towering rage, “I’ll never understand you people, not if I live to be two hundred, not if I get to be so old my ass falls off and I have to lug it around in a handcart. I swear to God. Some of you ain’ got a pot to piss in, so goddamned poor you can’t afford to buy a bottle of aspirins, let alone, let alone pay your doctor bills from the past half-million years, and yet you go out to some godforsaken hick town too small to turn a horse around in proper and see an unlicensed practitioner, a goddamn backwoods quack, an unmitigated phony, and pay through the nose so this witchdoctor can assault you with yarb potions and poultices, and stick leeches on your ass, for all I know—” Jacobs lost track of the conversation. He studied a bee that was bumbling along the putty-and-plaster edge of the storefront window, swimming through the thick and dusty sunlight, looking for a way out. He felt numb, distanced from reality. The people around him looked increasingly strange. He found that it took an effort of will to recognize them at all, even Sussmann, even Everett. It scared him. These were people Jacobs saw every day of his life. Some of them he didn’t actually like —not in the way that big-city folk thought of liking someone—but they were all his neighbors. They belonged here, they were a part of his existence, and that carried its own special intimacy. But today he was beginning to see them as an intolerant sophisticate from the city might see them: dull, provincial, sunk in an iron torpor that masqueraded as custom and routine. That was valid, in its way, but it was a grossly one-sided picture, ignoring a thousand virtues, compensations and kindnesses. But that was the way he was seeing them. As aliens. As strangers.

Distractedly, Jacobs noticed that Everett and Sussmann were making ready to leave. “No rest for the weary,” Everett was saying, and Jacobs found himself nodding unconsciously in agreement. Swamped by a sudden rush of loneliness, he invited both men home for dinner that night. They accepted, Everett with the qualification that he’d have to see what his wife had planned. Then they were gone, and Jacobs found himself alone at the counter.

He knew that he should have gone back to work also; he had some more jobs to pick up, and a delivery to make. But he felt very tired, too flaccid and heavy to move, as if some tiny burrowing animal had gnawed away his bones, as if he’d been hamstrung and hadn’t realized it. He told himself that it was because he was hungry; he was running himself down, as Carol had always said he someday would. So he dutifully ordered a bowl of chili.

The chili was murky, amorphous stuff, bland and lukewarm. Listlessly, he spooned it up.

No rest for the weary.

“You know what I was nuts about when I was a kid?” Jacobs suddenly observed to Wilbur Phipps. “Rafts. I was a’ways making rafts out of old planks and sheet tin and whatevah other junk I could scrounge up, begging old rope and nails to lash them together with. Then I’d break my ass dragging them down to the Kennebec. And you know what? They a’ways sunk. Every goddamned time.”