Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

Janet stayed with her for a few minutes, but she didn’t wake up, and finally Janet joined me in the kitchen, where I had poured a glass of milk and was sipping it.

“I never saw anything like that,” Janet said. She was pale, and shaking.

“A nightmare, honey. Too much watermelon, or something. More than likely she won’t remember anything about it. Just as well.”

We didn’t discuss it. There wasn’t anything to say. Who knows anything about nightmares? But I had trouble getting back to sleep again, and when I did, I dreamed off and on the rest of the night, waking up time after time with the memory of a dream real enough to distort my thinking so that I couldn’t know if I was sleeping in bed, or floating somewhere else and dreaming of the bed.

Laura didn’t remember any of the dream, but she was fascinated, and wanted to talk about it: what had she been doing when we found her? how had she sounded when she shrieked? and so on. After about five minutes it got to be a bore and I refused to say another word. Mornings were always bad anyway; usually I was the last to leave the house, but that morning I had to drive Janet to work, so we all left at the same time, the kids to catch the schoolbus at the end of the lane, Janet to go to the hospital, and me to go to the lab eventually. At the end of the lane when I stopped to let the kids hop out, we saw our new neighbor. She was walking a Dalmatian, and she smiled and nodded. But Laura surprised us all by calling out to her, greeting her like a real friend. When I drove away I could see them standing there, the dog sniffing the kids interestedly, the woman and Laura talking.

“Well,” was all I could think to say. Laura usually was the shy one, the last to make friends with people, the last to speak to company, the first to break away from a group of strangers.

“She seems all right,” Janet said.

“Let’s introduce ourselves tonight. Maybe she’s someone from around here, someone from school.” And I wondered where else Laura could have met her without our meeting her also.

We didn’t meet her that day.

I got tied up, and it was after eight when I got home, tired and disgusted by a series of mishaps again at the lab. Janet didn’t help by saying that maybe we had too many things going at once for just the two of us to keep track of. Knowing she was right didn’t make the comment any easier to take. Lenny and I were jealous of our shop and lab. We didn’t want to bring in an outsider, and secretly I knew that I didn’t want to be bothered with the kind of bookkeeping that would be involved.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Janet said. Sometimes she didn’t know when to drop it. “Either you remain at the level you were at a couple of years ago, patenting little things every so often, and leave the big jobs to the companies that have the manpower, or else you let your staff grow along with your ideas.”

I ate warmed-over roast beef without tasting it, and drank two gin-and-tonics. The television sound was bad and that annoyed me, even though it was three rooms away with the doors between closed.

“Did you get started on Mike’s ham set yet?” Janet asked, clearing the table.

“Christ!” I had forgotten. I took my coffee and headed for the basement. “I’ll get at it. I’ve got what I need. Don’t wait up. If I don’t do it tonight, I won’t get to it for days.” I had suits being tested at three different hospitals, Mike’s, one at a geriatric clinic where an eighty-year-old man was recovering from a broken hip, and one in a veterans’ hospital where a young man in a coma was guinea pig. I was certain the suit would be more effective than the daily massage that such patients usually received, when there was sufficient help to administer such massage to begin with. The suits were experimental and needed constant checking, the programs needed constant supervision for this first application. And it was my baby. So I worked that night on the slides for Mike Bronson, and it was nearly two when I returned to the kitchen, keyed up and tense from too much coffee and too many cigarettes.

I wandered outside and walked for several minutes back through the woods, ending up at the bridge, staring at the Donlevy house where there was a light on in Pete Donlevy’s study. I wondered again about the little woman who had moved in, wondered if others had joined her, or if they would join her. It didn’t seem practical for one woman to rent such a big house. I was leaning against the same tree that Rusty had perched in watching the unloading of boxes. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, images were flitting through my mind, snaps, scraps of talk, bits and pieces of unfinished projects, disconnected words. I must have closed my eyes. It was dark under the giant oak and there was nothing to see anyway, except the light in Pete’s study, and that was only a small oblong of yellow.

The meandering thoughts kept passing by my mind’s eye, but very clearly there was also Pete’s study. I was there, looking over the bookshelves, wishing I dared remove his books in order to put my own away neatly. Thinking of Laura and her nightmare. Wondering where Caesar was, had I left the basement light on, going to the door to whistle, imagining Janet asleep with her arm up over her head, if I slept like that my hands would go to sleep, whistling again for Caesar. Aware of the dog, although he was across the yard staring intently up a tree bole where a possum clung motionlessly. Everything a jumble, the bookshelves, the basement workshop, Janet, Caesar, driving down from Connecticut, pawing through drawers in the lab shop, looking for the sleeve controls, dots and dashes on slides…

I whistled once more and stepped down the first of the three steps to the yard, and fell…

Falling forever, ice cold, tumbling over and over, with the knowledge that the fall would never end, would never change, stretching out for something, anything to grasp, to stop the tumbling. Nothing. Then a scream, and opening my eyes, or finding my eyes open. The light was no longer on.

Who screamed?

Everything was quiet, the gentle sound of the water on rocks, a rustling of a small creature in the grasses at the edge of the brook, an owl far back on the hill. There was a September chill in the air suddenly and I was shivering as I hurried back to my house.

I knew that I hadn’t fallen asleep. Even if I had dozed momentarily, I couldn’t have been so deeply asleep that I could have had a nightmare. Like Laura’s, I thought, and froze. Is that what she had dreamed? Falling forever? There had been no time. During the fall I knew that I had been doing it for an eternity, that I would continue to fall for all the time to come.

Janet’s body was warm as she snuggled up to me, and I clung to her almost like a child, grateful for this long-limbed, practical woman.

We met our new neighbor on Saturday. Janet made a point of going over to introduce herself and give her an invitation for a drink, or coffee. “She’s so small,” Janet said. “About thirty, or a little under. And handsome in a strange way. In spite of herself almost. You can see that she hasn’t bothered to do anything much about her appearance, I mean she has gorgeous hair, or could have, but she keeps it cut about shoulder length and lets it go at that. I bet she hasn’t set it in years. Same for her clothes. It’s as if she never glanced in a mirror, or a fashion magazine, or store window. Anyway, you’ll see for yourself. She’ll be over at about four.”

There was always work that needed doing immediately in the yard, and on the house or the car, and generally I tried to keep Saturday open to get some of it done. That day I had already torn up the television, looking for the source of the fuzzy sound, and I had replaced a tube and a speaker condenser, but it still wasn’t the greatest. Rusty wanted us to be hooked up to the cable, and I was resisting. From stubbornness, I knew. I resented having to pay seventy-five dollars in order to bring in a picture that only three years ago had been clear and sharp. A new runway at the airport had changed all that. Their radar and the flight paths of rerouted planes distorted our reception. But I kept trying to fix it myself.