Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

“Are you ill?” she asked.

“No. No. I’m all right. I got it in my head that you ...” He took her face in his hands and examined her. Suddenly he pulled her to his chest and held her hard. Then he loosened his arms a bit, still without releasing her, and put his cheek on her hair, and they stayed that way for a long time, his cheek on her hair, her face against his chest, both with closed eyes.

He called the hospital about Norma. He told the recording about her shrieking fits after intercourse; about her sexuality that was as demanding as ever, about her neglect of self, of the baby. “Thank you for your cooperation. This is a recording.” He called back and told the recording to go fuck itself. It thanked him.

“You should have reported an adverse reaction immediately,” the nurse said. “Decrease the dosage from twenty drops to ten drops daily.” She read the prescription from a computer printout.

“And If that doesn’t help?”

“There are several procedures, Mr. Tillich. These are doctor’s orders. Report back in two weeks. You will be given a two-week supply of the medication.”

“Can’t someone just look at him?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Tillich.”

The baby wasn’t eating. He moved very little and slept sixteen hours or more a day.

“You’re killing him,” he told the nurse. He got up. She would merely summon an orderly if he didn’t leave. There was nothing she could do.

“Mr. Tillich, report to room twelve-oh-nine before you leave the building.” She was already looking past him at a woman with red eyes.

“My baby, she’s been vomiting ever since she took that new medicine. And her bowels, God, nothing but water!”

Tillich moved away, back to the dispensary for the baby’s medicine. He had been there for three hours already. The line was still as long as before. He took his place at the end.

Ninety minutes later he received the medicine. The dispensary nurse said, “Report to room twelve-oh-nine, Mr. Tillich.”

In 1209 there was a short line of people. It was a fast-moving line. When Tillich entered the room, a nurse asked his name. She checked it against a list, nodded, and told him to get in line. When he came to the head of the line, he was given a shot.

“What is it?” he asked.

The doctor looked at him in surprise. “Flu vaccine.”

He saw the nurse at the door motioning to him. She put her forefinger to her lips and shook her head.

As he went out she whispered, “Louisa slipped your name in. For God’s sake keep your mouth shut.”

A fast-moving freight from Detroit derailed when the locomotive’s wheels locked as it slowed for a curve. Sixty-four cars left the track, tearing up a section a quarter-mile long. It happened during the night, the specks of light were still motionless in that section when Tillich arrived.

“No more direct connection with Detroit,” the superintendent said, “We’re working on alternate routing now.”

“Aren’t they going to fix the tracks?”

“Can’t. No steel’s being allotted to any nonpriority work. Just keep a hold on section seven until the computer gives us new routing. What a goddamn mess.”

Detroit was out. Jacksonville was out. Memphis was out, Cleveland. St. Paul.

Tillich wondered what a high priority was. Syringes, he thought. Scalpels. Bone saws. He wondered if steel was still being produced

“Can you get away at all?” he asked her desperately.

She shook her head. “No more than you can.”

“I’ll leave them. She isn’t helpless. It’s an act. If she got hungry enough, she’d get something.”

She continued to shake her head. “I looked her up. She is very ill, David. She isn’t malingering.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Primary schizophrenia. Acute depressions. Severe anemia, low blood sugar, renal dysfunction. There was more. I forget.”

“Why don’t they treat her? Try to cure her?”

She was silent.

“They know they can’t. Or it would take too long to be worthwhile. Is that it? Is that it?”

“I don’t know. They don’t put reasons on the cards.”

“Is there someplace we can go? Here, in the city?”

“I don’t have any money. Do you?”

He laughed bitterly. “Your apartment?”

“Father, Mother, my brother Jason. He has tuberculosis, one lung collapsed. We have two rooms.”

“I’ll get some money. I’ll get us a room somewhere.”

He heard the baby wailing halfway down the hall. It was making up for the weeks of drugged silence. As he got nearer he could hear the TV also. Norma was watching it, singing, “I had a red canary, it wouldn’t fly.” She didn’t look at him.

If it weren’t for them, he thought clearly, he could take another job. Able-bodied men could work around the clock if they wanted to. All those hours in lines waiting for her medicine, waiting for the baby’s medicine, waiting for her examination, the baby’s examinations. Shopping for them. Cleaning up after them. Cooking for them.

He shut his eyes, his back against the door. For a long time he didn’t move. He felt a soft tug on his shirt and opened his eyes. She was there, holding out the hairbrush.

“Would you like to do my hair?”

He brushed her pale silky hair. “After I’m well, we’ll have a vacation, won’t we. Just the two of us. We’ll go to the seashore and find pretty shells.”

The baby wailed. The TV played. She sat with tears on her cheeks and he brushed her pale silky hair.

NERT WAS a small, three-legged creature with a pair of manipulative claws and Herbie was a creature closely resembling a serving of very old raisin gelatin. They sat together in a small rustic tavern that tried to look ancient and natural by using new synthetic materials. The low-beamed ceiling was plastic and the tables and chairs were made of formulon. The flickering of the torchlight was electrical. The bartender, a glowing aquamarine ball that floated four feet above the floor, asked, “What’ll it be, boys?”

A diaphragm centered on top of Herbie said, “Your best. We’re celebrating tonight.”

“Oh?” The bartender floated down a little nearer.

“This fellow,” Herbie said, pointing to Nert with a pseudopod, “saved my life. Isn’t that right, Nert?”

“Well—” He blushed blue, and Herbie went on. “He’s modest I was trapped in one of those damned Ardonian cul-de-sacs by a gramut-fowl. I tell you, I was whispering my last thoughts to Frooth when I felt something grab me by the merkin”—he touched a spot on his back—”and I was out of there so fast it singed the bird’s feathers.”

The bartender’s light pulsed, and he said, “I am honored you chose my establishment to celebrate in. And I would like to hear the story in greater detail, but my other customers grow impatient.” Nert saw a ton-and-a-half flomox in a booth in the back beginning to steam. “Order and let him go, Herbie.”

Herbie’s wildly gesticulating pseudopodia wilted back into his body. “All right,” he said. “Antarian glovo, third level.”

The bartender said, “A very good choice, sir,” and jetted toward the flomox, leaving a faint smell of helium in the air.

Herbie burbled happily. “That flomox will be after him for at least half an hour taking germ counts and checking health permits.”

“Why?”

“You’d think anything that size, with a hide you couldn’t bust through with a dynamic M desynthesizer, would be able to eat anything. But those fellows have stomachs so delicate, Terrans use them to test their food But I don’t trust ‘em. Too big. Too powerful.”