Дэймон Найт - Orbit 11

Eventually I found the bar, the waiter, and Charlotte.

Charlotte, so like Shelley and Shirley that comparisons are pointless.

Charlotte lasted two years. I sometimes wondered why I did not desire more variety, a taste of another flavor of lotus. But I was never bored with Shelley, Shirley, or Charlotte. Any memory of the others which Charlotte evoked was stimulating rather than nostalgically enervating. Change is what’s boring, monotonous. Sameness is a continual challenge, almost impossible to maintain. Repetition, knowing that you’ve done it right before and can do it right again, is satisfying. If I had merely lost Shelley and not pursued my quest, I would have had to adjust, destroy myself with acceptance of change, let tragedy have a final curtain.

Sometimes I speculated on the origins of my lookalike trio, but I didn’t really care who they were or where they’d come from. Why should I? It was truth, after all, that had sent each of them away.

Charlotte departed for reasons unknown. I passed her in the hall of our apartment building, recognized the look in her eyes. The bedroom telephone was off the hook.

I mourned briefly, felt some regret, but only a slight sense of loss.

Because I had heard about Sherry, Charlene, and Elizabeth from three separate barflies who remarked on their amazing resemblance to Charlotte.

Sherry already had a husband, to whom she was intensely loyal. Elizabeth was a false lead who bore little resemblance to the loves of my life. Charlene was the genuine article. I courted her exactly as I had the other three, and established the same relationship.

We’ve been a perfect blend for fourteen months now. I rarely worry about losing her. What must be, must be. Besides, I have compiled a backlog of six new names already.

I have this recurrent dream. I hear that somebody else is onto my secret and is fast using up the supply of available duplicates. I polish my sixgun and send Bob Steele to him, challenging him to a showdown. He comes riding into town, the sun at his back, a sinister silhouette. Light flashes from the oily surfaces of both our guns. He steps out of the shadow. I find that he looks exactly like me. He is my duplicate. But that doesn’t bother me. I shoot him down anyway.

The typewriter had clattered for three and a half days. It must have stopped now and then, but never when Millie was awake. She had fallen asleep perhaps five times during that period, though something always aroused her after fifteen minutes or so of troubled dreams.

Perhaps it was the silence that hooked her and drew her up out of the thick waters. As soon as she became fully conscious, however, she heard the clicking of the typewriter start up.

The upper part of the house was almost always clean and neat. Millie was only eleven, but she was the only female in the household, her mother having died when Millie was nine. Millie never cleaned the basement because her father forbade it.

The big basement room was his province. There he kept all his reference books, and there he wrote at a long desk. This room and the adjoining furnace-utility room constituted her father’s country (he even did the washing), and if it was a mess to others, it was order to him. He could reach into the chaos and pluck out anything he wanted with no hesitation.

Her father was a free-lance writer, a maker of literary soups, a potboiler cook. He wrote short stories and articles for men’s and women’s magazines under male or female names, science fiction novels, trade magazines articles, and an occasional Gothic. Sometimes he got a commission to write a novel based on a screenplay.

“I’m the poor man’s Frederick Faust,” her father had said many times. “I won’t be remembered ten years from now. Not by anyone who counts. I want to be remembered, baby, to be reprinted through the years as a classic, to be written of, talked of, as a great writer. And so. . . .”

And so, on the left side of his desk, in a file basket, was half a manuscript, three hundred pages. Pop had been working on it, on and off, mostly off, for fifteen years. It was to be his masterpiece, the one book that would transcend all his hackwork, the book that would make the public cry “Wow!” the one book by him that would establish him as a Master. (“Capital M, baby!”) It would put his name in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; he would not take up much space in it; a paragraph was all he asked.

He had patted her hand and said, “And so when you tell people your name, they’ll say, ‘You aren’t the daughter of the great Brady X. Donaldson? You are? Fantastic! And what was he really like, your father?’ “

And then, reaching out and stroking her pointed chin, he had said, “I hope you can be proud of having a father who wrote at least one great book, baby. But, of course, you’ll be famous in your own right. You have unique abilities, and don’t you ever forget it. A kid with your talents has to grow up into a famous person. I only wish that I could be around. . . .”

He did not go on. Neither of them cared to talk about his heart “infraction,” as he insisted on calling it.

She had not commented on his remark about her “abilities.” He was not aware of their true breadth and depth, nor did she want him to be aware.

The phone rang. Millie got up out of the chair and walked back and forth in the living room. The typewriter had not even hesitated when the phone rang. Her father was stopping for nothing, and he might not even have heard the phone, so intent was he. This was the only chance he would ever get to finish his Work (“Capital W. baby!”), and he would sit at his desk until it was done. Yet she knew that he could go on like this only so long before falling apart.

She knew who was calling. It was Mrs. Coombs, the secretary of Mr. Appleton, the principal of Dashwood Grade School. Mrs. Coombs had called every day. The first day, Millie had told Mrs. Coombs that she was sick. No, her father could not come to the phone because he had a very deadly schedule to meet. Millie had opened the door to the basement and turned the receiver of the phone so that Mrs. Coombs could hear the heavy and unceasing typing.

Millie spoke through her nose and gave a little cough now and then, but Mrs. Coombs’ voice betrayed disbelief.

“My father knows I have this cold, and so he doesn’t see why he should be bothered telling anybody that I have it. He knows I have it. No, it’s not bad enough to go to the doctor for it. No, my father will not come to the phone now. You wouldn’t like it if he had to come to the phone now. You can be sure of that.

“No, I can’t promise you he’ll call before five, Mrs. Coombs. He doesn’t want to stop while he’s going good, and I doubt very much he’ll be stopping at five. Or for some time after, if I know my father. In fact, Mrs. Coombs, I can’t promise anything except that he won’t stop until he’s ready to stop.”

Mrs. Coombs had made some important-sounding noises, but she finally said she’d call back tomorrow. That is, she would unless Millie was at school in the morning, with a note from her father, or unless her father called in to say that she was still sick.

The second day, Mrs. Coombs had phoned again, and Millie had let the ringing go on until she could stand it no longer.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Coombs, but I feel lots worse. And my father didn’t call in, and won’t, because he is typing. Here, I’ll hold the phone to the door so you can hear him.”

Millie waited until Mrs. Coombs seemed to have run down.

“Yes, I can appreciate your position, Mrs. Coombs, but he won’t come, and I won’t ask him to. He has so little time left, you know, and he has to finish this one book, and he isn’t listening to any such thing as common sense or . . . No, Mrs. Coombs, I’m not trying to play on your sympathies with this talk about his heart trouble.