Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

On Wednesday Janet suggested that I should let Lenny go to Chicago and I snapped at her and called her a fool. On Thursday Lenny made the same suggestion, and I stalked from the lab and drove off in a white fury. When Janet came home I accused them of getting together and talking about me.

“Eddie, you know better than that. But look at you. You aren’t sleeping well, and you’ve been as nervous as a cat. What’s the matter with you?”

“Just leave me alone, okay? Tired, that’s all. Just plain tired. And tired of cross-examinations and dark hints and suspicions.”

They were getting together, the three of them, all the time. I knew that Lenny was spending his evenings with Christine, and that Janet was with them much of the time when I was busy down in the basement workshop or out at the hospital. They said, Janet and Lenny, that they were trying to decipher the code that Karl Rudeman had used in making his notes. I didn’t believe them.

They were talking about me, speculating on whether or not I was the one driving her crazy. I imagined the same conversation over and over, with Lenny insisting that I could have done that to her, and Janet, white-faced and frantic with indecision, denying it. Not while I had been with her, she would think. Not at a time like that.

Then I would snap awake, and either curse myself for being a fool, or become frightened by the paranoid drift of my thoughts. And I would know that none of it was true. Of course Janet wouldn’t discuss what went on over there; I had practically forbidden her to do so. And Lenny wouldn’t talk about it under the happiest circumstances, much less now.

Friday, driving to Chicago I began to relax, and after three hours on the road I was whistling and could almost forget the mess, could almost convince myself that I’d been having delusions, which was easier to take than the truth.

I slept deeply Friday night, and Saturday I was busy, getting our exhibit set up and getting acquainted with others who were also showing tools and machinery. From four until the doors closed at eleven, the hall got fuller and fuller, the noise level became excruciating, the smoke-laden air unbreathable. Our cutting tool drew a good, interested response, and I was busy. And too tired for the late dinner I had agreed to with two other exhibitors. We settled for hamburgers and beer in the hotel dining room, and soon afterward I tumbled into bed and again slept like a child. The crowds were just as thick on Sunday, but by Monday the idle curiosity-seekers were back at their jobs, and the ones who came through were businesslike and fewer in number. I had hired a business student to spell me, and I left him in charge from four until seven, the slack hours, so I could have an early dinner and get some rest. But I found myself wandering the streets instead, and finally I stopped in front of a library.

Karl Rudeman, I thought. How did he die? And I went in and looked up the clippings about him, and read the last three with absorption. When I went to dinner afterward, I was still trying to puzzle it out. He had had dinner with his family: his wife, parents, daughter, and son-in-law. After dinner they had played bridge for an hour or two. Sometime after that, after everyone else had gone to bed, he had left the house to roam through the fields that stretched out for a quarter of a mile, down to the river. He had collapsed and died of a heart attack at the edge of a field. Christine, awakening later and finding him gone, had first searched the house, then, when she realized that Karl was in his pajamas and barefooted, she had awakened her stepson-in-law and started a search of the grounds. Karl wasn’t found until daylight, and then the tenant farmer had been the one to spot the figure in orange-and-black striped pajamas. There was no sign of violence, and it was assumed that he had been walking in his sleep when the fatal attack occurred.

Back to the exhibit, and the flow of evening viewers. Invitations, given and accepted, for drinks later, and a beaver flick. Lunch with a couple of other men the following day. A long talk with a manufacturer who was interested in procuring the order for the cutting tool, should there be enough interest to warrant it.

The obscene movie had been a mistake, I knew as soon as the girl jerked off her slip and opened her legs. Suddenly I was seeing her , open-legged on the edge of the bed before a mirror.

I pushed my way through a cluster of men at the back of the theater to get out into the cold November air again. I walked back to the hotel. A freezing mist was hanging head high, not falling, but just hanging there, and I gulped it in, thankful for the pain of the cold air in my throat. A prowl car slowed down as it passed me, it picked up speed again and moved on down the street. I had bought a stack of magazines and some paperbacks to read, but nothing in the room looked interesting when I took off my damp clothes and tried to persuade myself that I could fall asleep now.

I had room service send up a bottle of bourbon and ice, and tried to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. My attention kept wandering, and finally I lay back on the bed, balancing my drink on my stomach, and thought about her .

It was so easy, and gentle even. She didn’t suspect this time, not at all. She was saying, “… because they’re abstractions, you see. Emotions like fear, love, anger. First the physiological change in the brain, the electrochemical changes that take place stimulating those abstractions, and then the experience of the emotion.”

“You mean to say he really believed that the feeling of anger comes after the chemical changes that take place?”

“Of course. That’s how it is with a physiological psychologist. And you can see it operate; tranquilizers permit you to know intellectually but they don’t let you react, so you don’t experience the anger or fear, or whatever.”

Lenny was sitting back in the green chair in the study, and she was behind the desk that was spread with snapshots and proofs.

“Okay. What triggers those changes in the first place?”

“Well, his specialty was sight, or vision, as he preferred to call it. Light entering the eye brings about a change in the chromophore in the first thousandth of a second, and after that the rest of the changes are automatic, a causal chain that results in the experiencing of a vision of some sort.”

“I know,” Lenny said gently. “But what about the vision that doesn’t have an object in real space? The imaginary image? No light there to start the chain of events.”

“A change brought about by electrochemical energy? The leakage of energy from cellular functioning? The first step is on a molecular level, not much energy is involved, after all. Lenny, it’s happening…”

I got a jolt of fear then, along with the words spoken softly. Her hands clenched and a proof under her right hand buckled up and cracked. Before Lenny could respond, I pulled out and away.

I didn’t know how she had found out, what I had done to give my presence away. But her knowledge had been as certain as mine, and the fear was named now, not the fear of insanity. It was a directed fear and hatred that I had felt, directed at me, not the aimless, directionless, more-powerful fear that my presence had stimulated before. She knew that something from outside had entered her. I sat up and finished my drink, then turned off the light. And I wondered what they had been finding in those notes… Half a bottle and hours later I fell asleep.

I dreamed that I was being chased, that I kept calling back over my shoulder, “Stop, it’s me! Look at me! It’s me!” But it didn’t stop, and steadily it gained ground, until I knew that I was going to be caught, and the thought paralyzed me. All I could do then was wait in rigid, motionless, soundless terror for it to reach out and get me.