Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

The nightmare woke me up, and it was minutes before I could move. It was nearly daylight; I didn’t try to sleep any more. I was too afraid of having her dreams again. At seven thirty I called Janet.

“Hey,” she said happily. “I thought we’d never hear from you.”

“I sent some cards.”

“But you’ll be here before they will. How’s it going?”

“Fine. Boring after the first day. I went to a dirty movie last night.”

“I hope you had bad dreams. Serve you right.” Her voice was teasing and cheerful and happy, and I could see her smile and the light in her eyes.

“How’s everything there?” I couldn’t ask about Lenny and Christine. If they had found out anything, they hadn’t told her. I’d know, if they had. We chatted for several minutes, then she had to run, and I kissed her over the wire and we both hung up at the same time, the way we always did. I was being stupid. Naturally they wouldn’t tell her. Hey, did you know that your husband’s been torturing this woman psychologically, that he raped her repeatedly, that he’s contemplating killing her? I jerked from the bed, shaking.

I had a dull pain behind my right eye when I went down to breakfast. A wind was driving sleet through the streets like sheer white curtains, and I stopped at the doorway, shivering, and went back inside to the hotel dining room. I couldn’t think, and I knew that I had to think now.

If Lenny deciphered the notebooks, and if Karl had known that she could be possessed—there, I thought with some satisfaction, I used the word. If he had known and put that in his notebooks, then Lenny was bright enough to know that the recurrence of her schizophrenia was more than likely due to a new invasion. I groaned. He wouldn’t believe that. I couldn’t even believe it. No one in his right mind would, unless he had done it and could prove it to himself… I gripped my cup so hard that coffee splashed out and I had to use both hands to return the cup to the saucer. Had Lenny gone into her too?

The pain behind my eye was a knife blade now. Lenny! Of course. I tried to lift the coffee and couldn’t. I flung down my napkin and got up and hurried back to my room, as fast as I could get out of there. I paced, but no matter how I came to it, I ended up thinking that the only way Lenny could have accepted the thing was through experience. First Rudeman, then me, and now Lenny.

He couldn’t have her. She was mine now. And I would never give her up.

The pain was unbearable and I collapsed, sprawled across the bed, clutching my head. I hadn’t had a migraine in years. It was not knowing. Not knowing how much they had found out, not knowing what they were doing, what they were planning, not knowing if there was a way they could learn about me.

I went to her abruptly, roughly. She dropped a pan of developer and moaned, and caught the sink in a dark room. “No!” she cried. “Please. No!”

I tried to make her remember everything Lenny had said to her, tried to bring back his voice, but there was too much, it came too fast. She was too frightened, and intermixed were the revived thoughts of insanity, of Karl’s voice, Lenny’s words. Too much. She had to relax. I took her to the couch and made her lie down and stop thinking. I felt her fear, and hatred, and abhorrence, like a pulse beating erratically, with each beat the pressure increased, and then ebbed. She tried to break away, and we struggled, and I hurt her. I didn’t know what I had done, how I had managed it, but she groaned and wept and fell down again, and now my pain was also her pain. “Karl,” she whispered soundlessly, “please go. Please leave me alone. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Please.”

I stayed with her for more than an hour, and then I tried to force her to forget. To know nothing about my presence. She struggled again, and this time she screamed piercingly, and for a moment the feeling of a plunge straight down was almost overwhelming, but everything stopped, and I could find nothing there to communicate with, nothing to probe. It was like being swallowed by a sea of feathers that stretched out in all directions, shifting when I touched them, but settling again immediately. She had fainted.

I fell asleep almost immediately and when I awakened it was nearly two, and my headache was gone. I went to the exposition.

That afternoon a man returned who had been at the stall for almost an hour on Saturday. He had a companion this time. “Hi, Mr. Laslow. Hendrickson, remember? Like you to meet Norbert Weill.”

Of course, I knew who Norbert Weill was. If you had a home workshop, you had something of his in it. If you had a small commercial shop, you probably had something of his. If you had a hundred-man operation, you’d have something of his. He was about sixty, small and square, with muscles like a boxer’s. He grunted at the introduction, his handshake was a no-nonsense test of strength. “Hendrickson says it’ll cut through plastic, glass, aluminum, steel. Without changing nothing but the program. That right?”

“Yes. Would you like a demonstration?”

“Not here. In my shop. How much?”

“I can’t discuss that without my partner, Mr. Weill.”

“Get him, then. When can he make it?”

So it went. In the end I agreed to call Lenny, then get in touch with Weill again at his Chicago office. Lenny didn’t sound very enthusiastic. “Let him have the machine in his own shop for a couple of weeks after you close down there. Then let him make an offer.”

“I think he’ll make the offer without all that, if we’re both on hand to discuss it. Outright sale of this machine, an advance against royalties. Could come to quite a bundle.”

“Christ! I just don’t… Eddie, can you get away from that place for a couple of hours? I’ve got to have a talk with you. Not about this goddam machine, something else.”

“Sure. Look, plan to fly up on Friday. It’ll take an hour, no more. A couple of hours for the talk with Weill. A couple more with me, then fly back. Six hours is all. Or less maybe. You can afford to take one lousy day off.”

“Okay. I’ll call your hotel and let you know what time I’ll get in.” He sounded relieved.

“Hey, wait a minute. What the hell is going on? Is it one of the suits? The closed-circuit TV giving trouble? What?”

“Oh. Sorry, Eddie. I thought I said personal. Nothing at the shop. Everything’s fine. It’s… it’s something with Chris. Anyway, see you Friday.”

I didn’t go back to the booth, but instead found a small coffee shop in the exposition building and sat there smoking and thinking about Lenny and Christine, and Janet and me, and Mr. Weill, and God knows what else. This was it, I thought, the break we’d been waiting for. I didn’t doubt that. Money, enough for once to do the things we’d been wanting to do. A bigger shop, more equipment, maybe some help, even a secretary to run herd on books. And neither Lenny nor I cared. Neither of us gave a damn.

Sitting there, with coffee in front of me, a cigarette in my fingers, I probed Christine to see what was happening. She was talking in a low voice. Her eyes were closed. Going into her was like putting on distortion lenses, putting scrambling devices in my ears. Nothing was in clear focus, no thoughts were coherent all the way through. She was on something, I realized. Something that had toned down everything, taken off all the edges, all the sharpness.

“I used to walk on that same path, after… I saw the fields sown, the tractors like spiders, back and forth, back and forth, stringing a web of seeds. And the green shoots—they really do shoot out, like being released, a rubber band that is suddenly let go, but they do it in slow motion. It was a wheatfield. Pale green, then as high as my shoulders so that I was a head floating over the field, only a head. Magician’s best trick. Float a head. Then the harvesters came and the snow fell. And it was the same walk. You see? And I couldn’t tell which was the real one. They were all real. Are real. All of them are. The tranquilizers. He said I shouldn’t take them. Have to learn how to find which one is now and concentrate on it. No tranquilizers.”