Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

“Sure . . .”

“All right, then, let’s go.”

The kid shouted after them, “Look out for the peripheral crosswinds, suckers!”

Murdock merely muttered, grunted and mumbled in response to the pieces of travelogue the pilot gave him. He gazed out the window at the gray mush of cloud cover that hid the Okefenokee. He nodded abstractedly as he was told that they’d follow the coast up from Brunswick. He didn’t bother to ask which when Dallas told him one of those islands below was St. Simon’s and another Sapelo. He just didn’t give a damn.

But when Dallas said, “That’s Skidaway, and there’s Tybee up ahead,” he squinted to pick them out. Tybee marked the mouth of the Savannah River.

Almost home.

There was the island, and there was the river spilling itself into the sea. Upriver, the long thin strip of Cockspur Island sat stolidly, with Fort Pulaski standing vigil at one end. Then the pine islands and the grassy marshes cut by twisting ribbons of creeks and rivers. And there the high bluff where Oglethorpe had established his colony in 1733—the site that had become the city of Savannah.

There. The bluff.

There.

Murdock stared at the vast grassy space atop the bluff. It stretched out for miles, open and empty, sloping into the marshlands, fading into piney woods. Empty. Nothing.

“Savannah,” Murdock said softly.

“Huh?” Dallas said.

“Savannah. It’s . . . gone?”

The only reply Murdock got was a slight shrug.

“It can’t be gone,” he said. He stared at the ground. “Can you land here?”

“Sure can.”

The plane dipped one wing. Banking, it began to circle. Murdock saw nothing but grassy vastness.

“Maybe we . . . took a wrong turn somewhere?” he suggested.

“Nope,” Dallas said. “Savannah, Georgia. This is it.”

Murdock kept staring at the red river, the bluff, the bottoms, the wide flat of Hutchinson Island and the marshes that decades ago had been rice paddies. There was the point where the Talmadge Bridge should have stood. There was the narrow lip at the foot of the bluff that should have been River Street. There, outlying from the townsite were the swamplands that had been drained and filled for the ever-expanding suburbs. But there weren’t any suburbs. No suburbs, no city. Nothing.

Grass bowing gently in the breeze.

It must be a mirage, he told himself. He wasn’t convinced.

The wheels of the Yamacraw touched the grass, moved away, touched again and began to roll across the bumpy ground.

“It’s gone,” Murdock said dully. “It’s really gone. My home, my wife, my poor children. My home . For God’s sake, Dallas,” he pleaded, “what’s happening here?”

The plane jolted to a stop.

“Perspective causes parallel lines to converge,” the pilot said.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Murdock snarled in sudden fury. He turned to glare at the man. And failed.

The pilot was gone.

Murdock sat for a moment, feeling the anger drain out and numbness seep in.

Then he slowly opened the door of the plane, put a careful foot on the step and lowered himself to the ground.

The grass was thick with weeds and the wind was picking up, blowing across the river. It carried the salty scent of marshes. There was no one in sight. No one to question. No one to blame.

Murdock pinched his nose and turned in a full circle.

Nothing. The plane had disappeared while his back was turned.

There had to be an explanation. There had to be a rational explanation. Had to be.

Nothing. Nothing except Murdock. Nothing except himself.

He turned his back to the bluff, turned to face the wind. He began walking.

Before he’d gone far, he sat down and removed his shoes. The grass was soft. He stood up and started to run. After a short distance, he’d winded himself, but he kept on going.

The sun went down and it got dark and cool. Dew formed. His socks were sopping wet. He stripped them off and stuffed them into his shoes, then threw the shoes over his shoulder and kept on going.

Toward. Not away.

In her youth Maud Constable had talked longingly about the days when she would be a venerable widow with beautiful white hair; she would live like a small gem in an exquisitely furnished setting well away from spilled cereal and greasy fingerprints, and in solitude she would perfect her poetry. She secretly knew she would never really be any better than she was but she used this fiction to prepare herself for the eventual loss of her children to adult life and for the unbearable prospect of outliving her husband.

At seventy-five she was in fact a venerable widow with beautiful white hair, she had an exquisitely furnished apartment in which the walls were white and everything else was rococo and, while she would not admit it, her poetry had in fact grown richer, but the days tasted flat in her mouth and she opened her doors to everybody who came, welcoming dirty feet and fingerprints and fifteen-year-old runaways and assorted deadbeats sleeping curled up in corners, secretly hoping that eventually, one of these mornings, somebody might even spill a bowl of cereal, so that it would be more or less like old times.

When the telegram came, she thought at first that it must be for Anderson, who lived in the dinette, and she went in and cleared her throat to wake him, saying: “Greetings . . But when he extended a hand from under the walnut table and took the wire and read it, he scrambled out in a hurry, saying, “Read it again, honey, it’s for you.”

Her hands were trembling so that she couldn’t make out any of the print but she already had the wire by heart:

GET AFFAIRS IN ORDER.

NEED YOU FOR SPACE PROBE.

And in the next minute the man from NASA was at the door to explain. Errol and Stanley took Maud into the bedroom to dress for the interview, while Anderson cleared Billy and the cats off the couch so the man from NASA would have a place to sit down. In a minute or two Errol and Stanley opened the bedroom door and Maud sailed out in black, she had put on something that could pass for a cassock, and her white hair made an aureole under the Spanish veil. She looked a little tremulous but her chin was firm, and as she sat down with the man from NASA she gave the others such a look that they cleared the room so she and the man from NASA could be alone.

“Of course,” Darrel said at the party Anderson gave to celebrate. “It’s the most logical thing in the world.”

Mary del Val stopped doing her nails. “But NASA.”

“They’ve been talking about it for years,” Darrel said, “but there wasn’t a poet alive who could pass the physical.”

Mary said, “But Maud.”

Darrel overrode him. “The only person who ever said anything decent in space was Yuri what’s-his-name, you know, ‘I am iggle.’ It’s her patriotic duty as a poet.”

“Maud’s a hundred and twelve if she’s a day.”

“I happen to be seventy-five,” Maud said, giving Mary a stuffed grape leaf. “Besides, that’s just the point.”

Mary sniffed. “Sweetie, you’ll disintegrate.”

“Oh, but I’ll keep on sending, right up to the end. ‘Deathsong in the Stars.’ “

“Heroic.”

“Beautiful.”

“I didn’t think it was bad,” Maud said. “Not half bad at all.”

Mary put an arm around her. “Well all right, but we’re going to miss you.”

“Somebody will put up a statue.”

Darrel said, “They might even put you on a stamp.”

Mary sighed grudgingly. “Well, I suppose there are worse ways to go.”

When all the guests had left, Anderson and Billy and Errol and everybody seemed to disappear at the same time; Anderson mumbled something about taking back the deposit bottles and vanished into the night; Billy was already asleep on the couch, and Errol curled tightly in his corner and snored heavily when Maud asked him to take out the garbage, so that she ended, as she always did, by cleaning up after the party all by herself.