Дэймон Найт: Orbit 13

Jacobs stood with his arm around Carol; he didn’t remember putting it there—it was seeking company on its own. He felt her shiver, and clutched her more tightly in response, directed by some small, distanced, horrified part of himself that was still rational—he knew it would do no good. There was a thing in the air tonight that was impossible to warm yourself against. It hated warmth, it swallowed it and buried it in ice. It was a wedge, driving them apart, isolating them all. He curled his hand around the back of Carol’s neck. Something was pulsing through him in waves, building higher and stronger. He could feel Carol’s pulse beating under her skin, under his fingers, so very close to the surface.

Across the street, a group of old people had gathered around the ambulance. They shuffled in the cold, hawking and spitting, clutching overcoats and nightgowns more tightly around them. The corpsmen reappeared, edging carefully down the stairs with the stretcher. The sheet was pulled up all the way, but it looked curiously flat and caved-in—if there was a body under there, it must have collapsed, crumbled like dust or ash. The crowd of old people parted to let the stretcher crew pass, then re-formed again, flowing like a heavy, sluggish liquid. Their faces were like leather or horn: hard, dead, dry, worn smooth. And tired. Intolerably, burdensomely tired. Their eyes glittered in their shriveled faces as they watched the stretcher go by. They looked uneasy and afraid, and yet there was an anticipation in their faces, an impatience, almost an envy, as they looked on death. Silence blossomed from a tiny seed in each of them, a total, primordial silence, from the time before there were words. It grew, consumed them, and merged to form a greater silence that spread out through the night in widening ripples.

The ambulance left.

In the hush that followed, they could hear sirens begin to wail all over town.

ARCS & SECANTS

KATE WILHELM (“The Scream,” p. 7) has appeared in every volume of Orbit. Harlan Ellison said about her, in Again, Dangerous Visions, “She is certainly the very best writer we have working in the field of speculative fiction.”

Grania Davis (“Young Love,”, p. 32), the descendant of Russian Jews who came over in steerage and eventually settled in Los Angeles, is the former wife of Avram Davidson. Now married to a Bay Area doctor, she is a well-to-do suburban matron with a house, two cars, 2.2 children, a basset hound, two Siamese cats, etc. She recently finished her first novel.

R. A. Lafferty’s self-education began when his father gave him the eighteen-volume Grolier History of the World for his tenth birthday. Lafferty read straight through it in a year, still remembers most of it. “And Name My Name” (p. 51) is his eleventh story for Orbit. His latest book is Okla Hannali (Doubleday, 1972).

Edward Bryant (“Going West,” p. 64) was born in White Plains, New York, but has lived mostly in Wyoming since he was six months old. In college he spent a year as an aerospace engineering major before slipping back into “arts and sciences —general.” Regarding “Dune’s Edge,” which appeared in Orbit 11, he wrote, “Aaaagh. The only time I’ve spent more time discussing emendations with an editor was three years ago when David Gerrold wanted me to drop the one lone appearance of the word ‘fuck’ in a story. I won, but it took months of citing literary critics, social pundits, and the like . . . There was another time, later, when I clashed with Bob Hoskins over his desire to change my ‘watercress sherbet’ to ‘watermelon sherbet.’ (Unbelievably yeccch,” said Hoskins.) I lost that one.”

James Sallis (“My Friend Zarathustra,” p. 78) is a southerner educated at Tulane, a poet, a beer-drinker, ex-editor of New Worlds, restless traveler. He was the director of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Tulane in 1971. Macmillan published a collection of his stories, A Few Last Words, in 1970.

Gary K. Wolf (“Therapy,” p. 81) is married to an airline stewardess, with whom he has visited the Orient, South Pacific, Caribbean, Nether Antilles, Europe, etc., etc. Because of allergies, he avoids contact with all four-legged animals. He would like to have a pet, and his wife has made one suggestion, but so far, he says, he has not been able to generate much enthusiasm for a duck.

W. Macfarlane (“Gardening Notes from All Over,” p. 87) was drafted after college when he was working for Lockheed, and the Army made him a professional artilleryman; he ended up a major. He has been an orchardman (still is), a winter vegetable wholesaler, and an estimator for a highway contractor. Some of these experiences turn up in his fiction.

Doris Piserchia (“Idio,” p. 97) and “Naked and Afraid I Go,” p. 159) still lives in a madhouse—see the note about her circumstances in Orbit 12. Her husband successfully underwent heart surgery in April, 1972, but his condition is deteriorating. Writing is Mrs. Piserchia’s lifeline.

Albert Teichner (“Fantasy’s Profession,” p. 109) was once a member of a three-student writing class at Rutgers; one of the other members was James Blish. After the war, which he spent mostly in New Guinea and the Philippines, he took an MA at Columbia with a thesis entitled “Some Uses of Logical Paradox in the Poetry of John Donne.” Weather permitting, he swims a mile a day.

Charles Arnold, a physics dropout from Carleton College, was working on the Illiac IV project at the University of Illinois when the United States invaded Cambodia. (“Illiac IV will be the biggest and fastest computer in the world if it works when they plug it in; it was designed at U.I. and is being built by military money.”) During the complications that followed, he quit in protest and turned to writing science fiction. “Spring Came to Blue Ridge Early This Year” (p. 120) is his first published story.

C. L. Grant (“Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried,” p. 150) spent the summer of 1972 in London studying drama at Royal Holloway College (University of Bath). He was pleased to find that the British countryside was just as he had pictured it in “The Summer of the Irish Sea” (Orbit 11). He also met a sympathetic young lady to whom he expects to be married by the summer of 1973; he adds that he can’t say he is sorry, because being a bachelor ain’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Dennis Etchison (“Black Sun,” p. 183) spent several months doing a feature-length adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s story “The Fox and the Forest,” but the producers did not like it. (They also did not like two previous versions and one later one by other writers, and refused to look at a sample script donated by Bradbury.) More recently he has been collaborating with George Clayton Johnson on an original screenplay called The Cops.

William F. Orr (“The Mouth Is for Eating,” p. 192) teaches mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and is working on a thesis in algebra and finite geometry. He has translated the poems of Lewis Carroll and most of the songs from Hair into Esperanto. This is his first published story.

Gardner R. Dozois, who retreated to Philadelphia more than a year ago, has hardly left it since and is beginning to feel hidebound and barnacle-covered. “Flash Point” (p. 199) is his sixth Orbit story.