Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

Nert took the camera from under the blanket and recorded the doctor as he reached behind vials, bottles, and pill boxes and retrieved a small grey carton from which he took large pinches of fine white powder and rubbed it all over his face. The doctor coughed, caught his breath, and rubbed more powder into his face. Slowly he straightened up. He noticed Nert’s camera for the first time. “What are you doing?”

Under the blanket, Nert was turning a delicate blue. He clicked his claws and whirled around the room like a dervish, trying to work off the burst of nervous energy given him by the mittlebran. When he spoke, his voice shook.

“Pictures, doctor. I’m taking pictures. Clear shots of a certain Dr. Billingsley sprinkling mittlebran.”

“Who are you?”

“Nert, the Droshi. Remember? Two nights ago at the Galactica Hotel?”

Dr. Billingsley sat heavily on the side of the desk and stuck his legs out for support “I told you,” he said between heavy breaths, “that doesn’t worry me. I’ve got a lot of friends. You went to a great deal of trouble for nothing.”

“That’s not what I hear.” Nert was nearly hysterical from the mittlebran, and his olfactory nerves felt as if they were burning. It helped to know the symptoms would pass when he got out of the room, but it seemed he’d been with Dr. Billingsley for hours. “You can have the film. For one thousand credits, even.”

“I see.” Dr. Billingsley walked casually around the desk to the examination table behind it “A little blackmail, eh? But then, I suppose, it’s only fair after what I did to you.” He rested his hands on the edge of the table and suddenly was holding a blip-gun.

“Now,” he said, “put that camera on the desk and get out of here.”

Nert screamed and stamped on the floor three more times.

Dr. Billingsley’s face contorted as if it were a carved apple drying in the sun, and he groaned and dropped the gun. “Now,” shouted Nert, “the thousand credits!”

The doctor crawled across the floor to the desk where he opened the bottom drawer and thumbed open a metal box. He counted out a thousand credits and struggled to his knees to put it on the desk top.

Nert took the film magazine out of the camera and exchanged it for the money. Bright points of light sparkled on everything in the room. It was the first sign of mittlebran shock. If he began to hear bells he would need a doctor and he wouldn’t be able to leave the planet for many days.

He said, “Thank you,” and ran out of the room.

With the quick three-legged lope the Droshi use when in a hurry he ran across the waiting room, threw the empty camera to the Fomalhautian, opened the door and ran down the rusting stairway.

The Fomalhautian bounded after him, shouting, “Wait. What am I supposed to do with this?” It yelped in surprise as Dr. Billingsley suddenly grabbed it from behind and pulled it into the waiting room.

Nert went to the hole in the old wooden door and said, “Come on! It’ll only take him a few seconds to find out that the Fomalhautian isn’t me.” He went to the passageway and climbed the stone steps two at a time. Herbie rolled past him like a soft living wheel and beat him to the top.

“Which way?” Nert said.

“There.” They ran across the street and hid in the shadows of the grotesque sculpture of an old portico, while Dr. Billingsley ran toward the city chased by the Fomalhautian, still waving the camera and shouting wildly about tests.

When they were gone, Nert and Herbie walked out of the shadows and looked down the empty street. Herbie said, “Being taken by a new Blue probably hurts him more than losing the thousand credits.” He looked at Nert. “By the way, you did get the money, didn’t you?”

“Sure did.” He flipped through the sheaf of bills.

“In an hour or so every shady character on Spangle will be looking for us. If we’re going to make that ship, we’d better hurry.”

They walked and undulated toward the nearest slideway. The stink of the mittlebran was almost gone and Nert felt better with every step. He said, “Herbie?”

“Um?”

“You don’t ever have to retire to a gerbis farm or any other place, do you?”

After a while, Herbie said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean you can just keep turning into your own children forever. Isn’t that right?”

There were streetlights around them now and the buildings did not look so forbidding. “Almost forever, yes,” Herbie said.

“Then why did you buy a gerbis farm with me for your old age if you never will get old?”

“Oh, I’ll get bored with being a spaceman after a while, and I’ll want to do something else. I might as well do it with a friend”

They were silent as they walked among the gathering crowds near the slideway. Nert finally said, “If we’re friends, next time you’re going to do something like becoming your own child, please don’t try to surprise me.”

Herbie laughed and said, “If you think I’m unusual, you should see how the Terrans produce offspring.”

“How’s that?”

Herbie told him.

“I don’t believe it,” said Nert.

“Frooth’s truth,” said Herbie.

They thought of Dr. Billingsley doing that and laughed about it all the way to the spaceport.

IT STARTS, I think, with Lucia and her Lucite block full of the exploded watch. If I could lie at peace and sleep I’m sure I would dream of cogs and springs and escapements and crystals wheeling about me in eccentric orbits.

But I can’t. I cannot sleep. I hang suspended, manacles chafing the skin of my wrists, chains angling up to darkness, body pulled uncomfortably downward by the weight of plaster at my loins. It could be a scenario for Torquemada, or a Gahan Wilson cartoon.

Eyes of Bogart, Jagger, Fonda (Peter), Morrison, Nimoy, Dylan stare at me passionlessly. The lights are primary colors and they flash randomly, only occasionally assuming patterns during my hallucinations. Most of the pain stopped some time ago. There’s still a dull pressure that throbs almost subliminally.

I suspect the odor of incense is vervain, but my olfactory nerve synesthizes to leaf of oregano and I want to throw up.

Love, vain love. When I was eighteen and a virgin, I went off to college both timidly expectant and fearful that I somehow could never partake of the fantasies I had seen in the X-rated films. Four years later I was jaded. Only a few years more in the matter-of-fact environment of communicative arts, and I was bored. All the one-night understandings, all the meaningful ententes were misunderstood and meaningless. Then dear Lucia love flew in from Rochester and reflinted my Ronson.

I had recalled Lucia from a book about holiday customs around the world. I’d read it, I think, in the third grade. Each year in the spring Saint Lucia would appear in alpine villages and meadow huts. The eldest girl-child of each family, she would dress in a white robe and crown of lighted candles. Tall and golden-haired and quite Nordic, she would haunt the early-morning hours of Saint Lucia’s Day, putting out strudel and cheese and making coffee for her parents. The real Saint Lucia had undoubtedly been martyred centuries before in some messy fashion by the Magyars or Slovaks or whomever. But the book didn’t cover that ground. Rereading the story usually made me hungry, and at recess I would pull the orange or apple from my lunch pail and covertly devour it behind the swings.

My Lucia was tall and blond and her eyes had the requisite hue of unsmogged sky. She ran up behind me that particular day in Chicago as I was walking along North Michigan Avenue on my lunch break.

“Jim! Mr. James W—. I love you. Stop.”