Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

The Mayor has declared war on the roaches, believing common cause will bring us together; restore esprit, order. The contraceptives have been burned in bonfires on Town Hall Square, people queue outside the compulsory strip shows, the city’s water supply is pumped full of aphrodisiacs—and still, it’s not enough. No one cares. No one, frankly, gives a damn. Anomie and entropy. The birthrate still declines, the city collapses into itself. Stronger measures are required, the Mayor declares from the top of the Town Hall steps (the sun on his skull, the smell of burnt rubber, burning plastic), We must act now!

Badges came last night, press-gang firemen, to bear Molly’s roach away to its execution. She locked the door and shoved things against it—bureaus, bookshelves, the stove—and when they finally broke through, attacked them with shishkebob skewers. She blinded three, ruined another’s hand, neatly burst the balloonlike testicles of the last. Holding her, kicking, screaming, against the wall (halls filled with inquisitive Citizens), they took the cage cover off and discovered that she had (predictably, perhaps) killed the roach herself—with a gold stickpin left behind by one of her lovers—to keep them from getting it.

Molly, “The stars and the rivers

and waves call you back.”

And the citizens, when they return to their flats from gaping and gasping in the hall—what is it that they do? There, in that abject privacy. Contained by those colorful walls.

It was a bad day from beginning to end. Late in the afternoon, just when I was ready to light the fuse to blow up the lab, with Lenny in it, Janet called from the hospital.

“Honey, it’s the little Bronson boy. We can’t do anything with him, and he has his mother and father in a panic. He’s sure that we’re trying to electrocute him, and they half believe it. They’re demanding that we take the cast off and remove the suit.”

Lenny sat watching my face. He began to move things out of reach: the glass of pencils, coffee mugs, ashtray…

“Can’t Groppi do anything?” He was the staff psychologist.

“Not this time. He doesn’t really understand the suit either. I think he’s afraid of it. Can you come over here and talk to them?”

“Sure. Sure. We just blew up about five thousand dollars’ worth of equipment with a faulty transformer. Lenny’s quitting again. Some son of a bitch mislaid our order for wafer resisters… I’ll be over in half an hour.”

“What?” Lenny asked. He looked like a dope, thick build, the biggest pair of hands you’d ever see outside a football field, shoulders that didn’t need padding to look padded. Probably he was one of the best electronics men in the world. He was forty-six, and had brought up three sons alone. He never mentioned their mother and I didn’t know if she was dead, or just gone. He was my partner in the firm of Laslow and Leonard Electronics.

“The Bronson kid’s scared to death of the suit we put on him yesterday. First time they turned it on, he panicked. I’ll run over and see. Where’s that sleeve?” I rummaged futilely and Lenny moved stolidly toward a cabinet and pulled out the muslin sleeve and small control box. Once in a while he’d smile, but that was the only emotion that I’d ever seen on his face, a quiet smile, usually when something worked against the odds, or when his sons did something exceptionally nice—like get a full paid scholarship to MIT, or Harvard, as the third one had done that fall.

“Go on home after you see the kid,” Lenny said. “I’ll clean up in here and try to run down the wafers.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow.”

Children’s Hospital was fifteen miles away, traffic was light at that time of day, and I made it under the half hour I’d promised. Janet met me in the downstairs foyer.

“Eddie, did you bring the sleeve? I thought maybe if you let Mr. Bronson feel it…”

I held it up and she grinned. Janet, suntanned, with red, sun-streaked hair, freckles, and lean to the point of thinness, was my idea of a beautiful woman. We had been married for twelve years.

“Where are the parents?”

“In Dr. Reisman’s office. They were just upsetting Mike more than he was already.”

“Okay, first Mike. Come on.”

Mike Bronson was eight. Three months ago, the first day of school vacation, he had been run over and killed by a diesel truck. He had been listed DOA; someone had detected an echo of life, but they said he couldn’t survive the night. They operated, and gave him a week, then a month, and six weeks ago they had done more surgery and said probably he’d make it. Crushed spine, crushed pelvis, multiple fractures in both legs. One of the problems was that the boy was eight, and growing. His hormonal system didn’t seem to get the message that he was critically injured, and that things should stop for a year or so, and that meant that his body cast had to be changed frequently and it meant that while his bones grew together again, and lengthened, his muscles would slowly atrophy, and when he was removed from the cast finally, there’d be a bundle of bones held together by pale skin and not much else.

At Mike’s door I motioned for Janet to stay outside. One more white uniform, I thought, he didn’t need right now. They had him in a private room, temporarily, I assumed, because of his reaction to the suit. He couldn’t move his head, but he heard me come in, and when I got near enough so he could see me, his eyes were wide with fear. He was a good-looking boy with big brown eyes that knew too much of pain and fear.

“You a cub scout?” I asked.

He could talk some, a throaty whisper, when he wanted to. He didn’t seem to want to then. I waited a second or two, then said, “You know what a ham radio set is, I suppose. If you could learn the Morse code, I could fix a wire so that you could use the key.” I was looking around his bed, as if to see if it could be done, talking to myself. “Put a screen with the code up there, where you could see it. Sort of a learning machine. Work the wire with your tongue at first, until they uncover your hands anyway. Course not everybody wants to talk to Australia or Russia or Brazil or ships at sea. All done with wires, some people are afraid of wires and things like that.”

He was watching me intently now, his eyes following my gaze as I studied the space above his head. He was ready to deal in five minutes. “You stop bitching about the suit, and I start on the ham set. Right?” His eyes sparkled at that kind of language and he whispered, “Right.”

“Now the parents,” I told Janet in the hall. “He’s okay.”

Bronson was apelike, with great muscular, hairy forearms. I never did say who I was, or why I was there, anything at all. “Hold out your arm,” I ordered. He looked from me to Dr. Reisman, who was in a sweat by then. The doctor nodded. I put the sleeve on his arm, then put an inflatable splint on it, inflating it slightly more than was necessary, but I was mad. “Move your fingers,” I ordered. He tried. I attached the jack to the sleeve wire and plugged it in, and then I played his arm and hand muscles like a piano. He gaped. “That’s what we’re doing to your son. If we don’t do it, when he comes out of that cast he’ll be like a stick doll. His muscles will waste away to nothing. He’ll weigh twenty-five pounds, maybe.” That was a guess, but it made the point. “Every time they change the cast, we change the program, so that every muscle in his body will be stimulated under computer control, slightly at first, then stronger and stronger as he gets better.” I started to undo the splint. The air came out with a teakettle hiss. “You wouldn’t dream of telling Dr. Thorne how to operate on your boy. Don’t tell me my business, unless you know it better than I do.”