Дэймон Найт - Orbit 10

Eliot sat on his porch drinking black coffee, a newspaper on the table ignored as he stared over the blue-green waters. The sun was hot already, the day calm, the water unruffled. Another perfect day in paradise. He frowned at the sound of light tapping on the screen door. Donna Bensinger opened it, called, “Hello, are you decent? Can I come in?”

“Sure. Around the corner on the porch.” He didn’t stand up. She had on shorts, too short for her bulging pale legs, and a shirt that didn’t conceal her stomach at all. Her hair was pulled back with a yellow ribbon; there were bright red spots on her cheeks, and her nose flamed, as did the tops of her bare feet and forearms. One morning and she was badly burned already. By the end of the day she’d be charred and by the next day, probably in the hospital, or at least on her way home again. He motioned for her to sit down.

“Coffee?”

“Oh, no, thank you. This is all so fantastic, isn’t it? I mean, the island, the houses for all of us, people to bring you groceries and anything you need, boats we can use. I never dreamed of a job like this. It’s right out of a movie, isn’t it?”

He turned from her to resume his contemplation of the quiet ocean. She continued to talk. He finished his coffee and stood up. “Let’s go. I have a date at twelve. I can show you the offices and explain briefly what you’re to do in half an hour or so.”

Eliot was six feet tall, his stride was long and quick, and he made no pretense of slowing it for the girl. She trotted at his side. “Oh, I know that people have planted all this stuff, that it didn’t just happen like this, I mean the orchids in the trees, and the jasmines and hibiscus and everything, but doesn’t it look just like one of those dream islands where the heroine wears a grass skirt and sings and the hero dives for pearls, and there’s a volcano that erupts in the end and they all get away in those funny boats with the things sticking out of the sides of them? Who started to build something here?”

“Spaniards. They brought in the rocks to build a fort, then abandoned it.”

“Spaniards! Pirates!” She stopped abruptly, then had to run to catch up. “I can see the ships with all those sails, and slaves haul­ing the blocks all roped together, a Spaniard in black with a long whip . . .”

The pink stucco building that they were approaching was lav­ishly landscaped with tropical and semitropical plants imported from around the world: travelers’ palms, fifteen-foot-high yucca plants, Philippine mahogany trees, a grouping of live oaks hung with gray-green Spanish moss that turned the light silver. A small lake before the building mirrored the trees, swans gliding through the water hardly distorted the images.

“The office building used to be a guest house,” Eliot said. “It has its own kitchen, a hurricane-proof basement. Come on.” There was another of the wide porches; then they were inside, in the cooled air of the lobby. This had been converted into a lounge, with a coffee maker, tables and chairs, a color television, a fire­place. Eliot showed her through the building quickly. Her office was small but well furnished, and she nodded approval. The old dining room had been equipped with a computer, several desks and chairs, a typewriter desk, drawing table lighted by a pair of fluorescent lamps. Next door was the file room, cabinet after cabinet, with library tables in the center of the room, all covered with folders and loose papers. “Marianne usually kept it up to date, but these last weeks she really wasn’t well enough.”

She sounded put-upon. “I have to file all that stuff?”

“Beatrice will come over a couple of hours every day to show you the system, help you get caught up. She’s Pitcock’s private secretary, but she knows this work too.”

He showed her the rest of the first floor, then they went down­stairs to the recreation room, where he sat down and lighted a cigarette. “Any questions?”

“But you haven’t told me anything about what I have to do, except the filing. And what you’re doing here, all of you, I mean.”

“Okay. I didn’t know how much Pitcock told you. You’ll handle correspondence, type up reports, keep the files up to date. We are studying the effects of cycles. First we establish the fact of cycles, correlate synchronous cycles, check them back as far as you can find records for, and predict their future appearance. We collect data from all over the world, Marty feeds it into his computer and the monster spits out answers. The snowshoe hare and the lynx have the same cycle. There are business cycles of highs and lows that persist in spite of wars, technological discoveries, any­thing that happens. Weather cycles, excitability cycles in man. War and peace cycles. There are cycles of marriages in St. Louis, and cycles of migrations of squirrels in Tennessee.” He stopped and stubbed out his cigarette hard, mashing it to shreds.

After the silence had lengthened long enough for him to light a new cigarette and for her to start fidgeting, she said, “But—why? I mean, who cares, and why?”

Eliot laughed and stubbed out the new cigarette. “That’s the best damn question anyone’s asked around here for over two years.”

At noon he picked up Gina to take her to Charleston. Beatrice was dressed, as if she too would go, if he only asked again. He didn’t look directly at her, nor did he ask. The day was not a success, although usually he enjoyed taking the child to town. He kept wondering what Beatrice was doing, what the others were doing, if they were all together. He returned to the island with Gina at six thirty. Pitcock and Bonner were talking on the dock when he brought the small boat in.

Pitcock reached for Gina’s hand. “Have a good time, honey?”

“Eliot bought me a see-through raft. And a book about sea shells. And we went on rides at a carnival.”

Eliot handed the parcels to Bonner, checked the boat again, then climbed out. The motor launch was gone. Pitcock stood up, still holding Gina’s hand. “Come over to dinner later, Eliot? The others have gone out fishing. I’ll see Gina home.”

“Beatrice?”

“She’s here. She’ll be over later too.”

“Okay. See you around eight?”

Donna was there. Eliot paused in the doorway when he saw her, shrugged, and entered. She smiled at him, dimpling both cheeks. Beatrice nodded, murmured thanks for Gina’s gifts, then turned away. Pitcock handed him a martini, and Eliot sat down with it and studied an Escher drawing over the mantel. It reminded him of his dream, following his own trail that he was making so that he wouldn’t get lost when he came along. He shook his head and tried to pick up the gist of the story Pitcock was telling. Donna was hanging on every word. She was no more burned than she had been that morning, must have spent the day inside somewhere. He wondered with whom, then concentrated on Pitcock.

“Selling you down the river was no idle threat, not just a little piece of slang that got started; what it was was a death sentence. It meant actually selling a slave to work in the bottom lands on the coast—downriver. Swamps, disease, floods, alligators, snakes. Sure death real quick. And the sands kept piling up on the islands, the rocks got buried deeper and deeper. In eighteen forty my great-granddaddy bought three of these islands, ten dollars an island, or some such amount. He was ashamed to put down the real figure he paid for them, just said they were cheap. Along about nineteen twenty-eight, twenty-nine, a hurricane came and stripped a lot of the sand away again, and by the time I got around to coming out to see the damage, hell, I found a pile of rocks and stones, the foundation of a fort, all that stuff. Decided to keep the island. But I sold off the other two. One island’s enough for a man.”