Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

At breakfast the next morning I realized that I hadn’t eaten anything for a couple of days, and still didn’t want to then. I had coffee and toast, and left most of the soggy bread on the dish. Lenny met me at the hotel.

“God, Eddie, you’d better get home and go to bed. We can close up the display. You look like hell.”

“A bug. I’ll be all right. Maybe you could stay if I do decide to take off?”

“Let’s close the whole thing. It’s just three more days.”

“I’ll stay,” I said. What an ideal set-up that would have been. Him here, me back home, Janet working.

I let Lenny do the talking at Weill’s office, and we got a good offer, not as much as we had hoped, but probably more than Weill had planned to make. We ended up saying that our lawyer would go over the contract and be in touch.

“Let’s go to your room where we can talk without interruption,” Lenny said then, and neither of us mentioned Weill again. A few months ago, B.C., Before Christine, we’d have been arrested for disturbing the peace if we’d had this offer from someone like Weill, and now, we didn’t even mention it again.

I lay down on my bed and let Lenny have the only chair in the room. My head was ringing and aching mildly, and my back and legs were stiff and sore. I didn’t give a damn about Lenny’s problems then.

Lenny paced. “God, I don’t even know where or how to begin this,” he said finally. “Back at the beginning of Christine and Karl. She was such a good subject for his experiments that he based much of his research on her alone, using the other two for controls mostly. Then he found out that she was too good, that what she could do was so abnormal that he couldn’t base any conclusions on his findings on her. For instance, he trained her to see objects so small that they were too small to fall on the cones and rods in the retina. And he trained her to spot a deviation in a straight line so minute that it needs special equipment to measure. Same with a circle. She can tell the exact place that a circle deviates from sphericity, and again it needs sophisticated instruments to measure it. Stereo acuity. We lose it if the peripheral vision is flattened out, if we don’t have the cues. She doesn’t lose it. She can see things where there isn’t enough light to see them. She can see things that are too far away to see. Same with her color perception. You need a spectrometer and a spectrophotometer to make the same differentiation she can do with a glance.”

He stopped and threw himself down in the chair and lighted a cigarette before he continued. “I’m getting pretty well into the notebooks. It’s tough going, very technical, in a field I know nothing about. And he knew nothing about physics, and used layman’s language, and a sort of shade-tree mechanic’s approach with some of the equipment he had to learn to use. Anyway, after a few years, he switched to a second code. He was paranoid about his secrets. A developing psychosis is written down there plain enough even for me to see. He was afraid of her.” Lenny put out the cigarette and looked at me. I was watching him, and now I shook my head.

“What do you mean afraid? Her schizophrenia? Was she showing signs of it again?”

“Will you forget that! She’s not a schizo! Pretend you look at this room and you see it as it’s been all through its history, with everyone who was ever here still here. Suppose you can’t stop yourself from straying in time, just the way you stray in space. If you were lost in a hotel like this one and had to knock on doors, or ask people the way to your room, that’s being lost in space. Lost in time is worse because no one answers until you find your own time. But those who are in your time see the search, hear your end of it, and wham, you’re in a hospital.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up, but the room was unsteady. I had to support my head on my hands, propped up on my knees. “So why isn’t she locked up?”

“Because she learned how to control it most of the time. Maybe a lot of people are born able to see through time and learn as infants to control it, how to tell this present from all the other images that they see. Maybe only a few do it, and most of them never learn control. God knows something drives some children into autism that they never leave. She learned. But in periods of high stress she backslid. If she became overtired, or sick, or under a strain, she couldn’t hold the present in sharp enough focus. So they had her in and out of hospitals. And Rudeman became fascinated by her, and began to do his own line of research, using her, and he realized that she was seeing layers of time. Can’t you just see it? Him the famous physiological psychologist denying mind from the start, being forced finally to concede that there’s something there besides the brain. He struggled. It’s all there. He couldn’t accept, then he looked for a reasonable cause for her aberrations, finally he knew that she was somehow existing partly in another dimension that opened time just as space is opened to the rest of us.” Lenny’s sudden laugh was bitter and harsh. “He preferred to think he was going mad, that she was mad. But the scientist in him wouldn’t let it rest there. He devised one experiment after another to disprove her abilities, and only got in deeper and deeper. First understanding, then control. He taught her how to look at now . He forced her into photography as part of her therapy, a continuing practice in seeing what is now.”

He couldn’t see my face. If he had found out that much, he must have learned the rest, I kept thinking. I couldn’t tell if he suspected me or not, but if he knew that someone was driving her back into that condition, he would go down the list of names, and sooner or later he would get to me. I knew he would stop there. Too many signs. Too much evidence of my guilt. He’d know. Janet would know. I remembered the toast that she had made that night in her house: to the good men. I wanted to laugh, or cry.

“Christ, Eddie, I’m sorry. Here you are as sick as a dog, and I’m going on like a hysterical grandmother.”

“I’m not that sick,” I said and raised my head to prove it. “It just seemed like as good a way as any to listen. It’s a pretty incredible story, you have to admit.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t heard nothing yet. Chris thinks that Rudeman is haunting her. And why not? If you know you can see the past, where do you draw the line at what is or isn’t possible? She’s certain that he found a way to come back and enter her mind, and she’s having a harder and harder time holding on to the present. She thinks he’s having revenge. He always threatened her with a relapse if she didn’t cooperate wholly with him in his research.”

Lenny’s big face registered despair and hopelessness. He spread his hands and said, “After you swallow half a dozen unbelievable details, why stop at one more? But, damn it, I can’t take that, and I know something has driven her back to the wall.”

I stood up then and looked through the drawer where I had put the bourbon. Then I remembered that it was in the bathroom. When I came back with it, Lenny took the bottle and said, “When did you eat last?”

“I don’t remember. Yesterday maybe.”

“Yeah, I thought so. I’ll have something sent up, then a drink, or you’ll pass out.”

While we waited I said, “Look at it this way. She sees things that no one else sees. Most people would call that hallucinating. A psychiatrist would call it hallucinating. She thinks her dead husband is haunting her somehow. What in hell are you proposing to do, old buddy?”

Lenny nodded. “I know all that. Did you know that Eric is color blind?” I shook my head. Eric was his middle son. “I didn’t know it either until he was tested for it at school. A very sophisticated test that’s been devised in the past twenty-five years. Without that test no one would have suspected it ever. You see? I always assumed that he saw things pretty much the way I did. I assume that you see what I see. And there’s no way on this earth to demonstrate one way or the other that you do or don’t. The mental image you construct and call sight might duplicate mine, or it might not, and it doesn’t matter as long as we agree that that thing you’re sitting on is a bed. But do you see that as the same bed that I see? I don’t know. Let me show you a couple of the easy tests that Karl Rudeman used.” He held up a card and flashed it at me. “What color was it?”