Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

The wind blew, whipping his coat open, and he shivered. On trial, before his judges. Martin Sayre, do you dare risk your immortal soul for this momentary fling? Confess, go to the flame willingly, with confession on your lips, accept the flame, that too is momentary, and rejoice forever in Paradise.

“Dr. Sayre, you’re a reasonable man. You know that we can’t do anything for your wife. She will be allowed to bear her child here. No other hospital would admit her, none of the city hospitals would dare. We won’t harm her, Dr. Sayre. We won’t do anything that is not for her own good. …”

Torquemada must have argued so.

And, somewhere else. He couldn’t keep them apart, all the same, different faces, but the same. “Of course, the child will have to be taken from her, no matter what happens. The fear of death is a disease as dangerous almost as death itself. It drives man mad. These new children must not be infected with it… .”

And somewhere else. “Ah, yes, Dr. Sayre. Meant to call you back, but got tied up. Appropriations Committee sessions, don’t you know. Well now, Dr. Sayre, this little theory of yours about the serum. I’ve been doing some thinking on that, Dr. Sayre, and don’t you know, I can’t come up with anything to corroborate what you say. Now if you can furnish some hard proof, don’t you know, well now, that would make a difference. Yes, sir, make a big difference.”

And again, “Hello, Martie, I just don’t know. You may be absolutely right. But there’s no way to get to anything to make sure. I can’t risk everything here on a wild-goose chase. I checked your data file, as you suggested, and they have a diagnosis made by a Dr. Fischer of Lester B. Hayes Memorial Hospital, who examined you extensively in four examinations from March through August of this year. He recommended treatment for schizophrenia; you refused. Face it, Martie, I have to ask myself, isn’t this just a schizophrenic construct?”

He should have jumped, he decided. He really should have jumped. He opened the door to the apartment to find Julia surrounded by their luggage, her coat over a chair, and sketch pads strewn about her on the floor.

“Honey, what’s the matter?”

“I want to go home. Now. We have seats for six o’clock. …”

“But, Julia, you know …”

“Martie, with you, or without you, I’m going home.”

“Are you giving up, then? Is that it? You go slinking back licked now, let them take away your baby, do whatever they mean to do to you… .”

“Martie, I can’t explain anything. I never can, you know. But I have to go back. I have work to do before the baby comes. I just have to. It’s like this with every artist I know. Jacques Remy, Jean Vance, Porter, Dee Richardson … I’ve been in touch with different ones here and there, and they’re all driven to work now. Some of my best friends simply didn’t have time to see me. None of them can explain it. There’s a creative explosion taking place and we’re helpless. Oh, if I could drink, I could probably resist it by getting dead drunk and staying that way. …”

“What are you going to do?” He picked up several sheets of her drawing paper, but there were only meaningless scribbles on it.

“I don’t know. I can’t get it on paper. I need my tools, the sandstone. My hands know, will know when they start… .”

“Julia, you’re feverish. Let me get you a sleeping pill. We’ll go home in a day or two, if you still feel like this. Please …”

She grabbed up her coat and swung it about her shoulders, jerking her arms through the sleeves, paying no attention to him. “What time is it?”

“Four. Sit down, honey. You’re as pale as a ghost… .”

“We’ll have to wait at the airport, but if we don’t leave now, traffic will get so bad. Let’s start now, Martie. We can have a sandwich and coffee while we wait.”

At the airport she couldn’t sit still. She walked the length of the corridors, rode the ramps to the upper levels, watched planes arriving and departing, walked to the lowest levels and prowled in and out of shops. Finally they boarded their plane and the strap forced her into a semblance of quietude.

“Martie, how do you, science, explain dreams? The content of dreams? Wait, there’s more. And the flashes of intuition that almost everyone experiences from time to time? The jumps into new fields that scientists make, proposing new theories explaining the universe in a way that no one had ever thought of before? Deja vu feelings? Oh, what else? Flashes of what seems to be telepathy? Clairvoyance? Hilary’s X factor? All those things that scientists don’t usually want to talk about?”

“I don’t. I don’t try. I don’t know the answer. And no one else does either.” The engines roared and they were silent until the mammoth jet was above the clouds. Clouds covered the earth from Chicago to Kennedy Airport.

Julia looked down sometime later and said, “That’s like it is with us. There are clouds hiding something from us, and once in a while a strong light probes through for a minute. The clouds thin out, or the light is strong for a short time, whatever. It doesn’t last. The cloud layer thickens, or the power source can’t keep up the strength of the beam, and there are only the clouds. No one who wasn’t there or didn’t see through them at that moment would believe they could be penetrated. And trying to make a whole out of such glimpses is a futile thing. Now a bit of blue sky, now a star, now pitch-black sky, now the lights of a passing plane …”

“So we invent an infrared light that penetrates the clouds. …”

“What if there were something on the other side of the layer that was trying to get through to us, just as much as we were trying to get through from this side, and with as little success … ?” She hadn’t even heard him. Martie took her hand and held it, letting her talk on. Her hand was warm and relaxed now that they were actually heading for home.

“Suppose that it, whatever it is, gets through only now and then, but when it does it is effective because it knows what it’s looking for, and we never do. Not infrared …” She had heard. “But the other direction. Inward. We send other kinds of probes. Psychoanalysis, EEG, drugs, hypnosis, dream analysis … We are trying to get through, but we don’t know how, or what we’re trying to reach, or how to know when we have reached it.”

“God?” Martie turned to look at her. “You’re talking about reaching God?”

“No. I think that man has always thought of it as God, or some such thing, but only because man has always sensed its presence and didn’t know what it was or how it worked, but he knew that it was more powerful than anything else when it did work. So, he called it God.”

“Honey, we’ve always been afraid of what we didn’t understand. Magic, God, devils …”

“Martie, until you can explain why it is that more comes out of some minds than goes in, you haven’t a leg to stand on, and you know it.”

Like the new geometries, he thought. The sum can be greater than its parts. Or, parallel lines might meet in some remote distance. He was silent, considering it, and Julia dozed. “But, dammit,” he breathed a few minutes later… .

“You’re a Hull, Watson, Skinner man,” Julia finished, not rousing from her light sleep. He stared at her. She hadn’t studied psychology in her life. She didn’t know Hull from Freud from Jung.

The polishing wheel screamed for hours each day as the carborundum paste cut into the quartzite. Martie dragged Julia from it for her meals, when it was time to rest, at bedtime.

“Honey, you’ll hurt yourself. It might be hard on the baby. …”

She laughed. “Have I ever looked better or healthier?”