Дэймон Найт: Orbit 7

Afterward she didn’t know what she had said to him. He arrived an hour later to find her sitting at the kitchen table, ashen-faced, terrified.

“I’m having a breakdown,” she said quietly. “I knew it happened to some women when they lost a child, but I thought I was past the worst part by now. I’ve heard it before, months ago.” She stared straight ahead. “They probably will want me in a hospital for observation for a while. I should have packed, but … Martie, you will try to keep me out of an institution, won’t you? What does it want, Martie?”

“Honey, shut up. Okay?” Martie was listening intently. His face was very pale. Slowly he opened the door and went into the hall, his face turned up toward the stairs.

“Do you hear it?”

“Yes. Stay there.” He went upstairs, and when he came back down, he was still pale, but satisfied now. “Honey, I hear it, so that means there’s something making the noise. You’re not imagining it. It is a real noise, and by God it sounds like a baby crying.”

Julia built up the fire and put a stack of records on the stereo and turned it too loud. She switched on lights through the house, and set the alarm clock for six twenty to be certain she didn’t let the hour pass without remembering Hilary Boyle’s news show. Not that she ever forgot it, but there might be a first time, especially on this sort of night, when she wouldn’t be expecting Martie until very late, if at all. She wished he’d call. It was four-thirty. If he could get home, he should leave the office in an hour, be on the train at twenty-three minutes before six and at home by six forty-five. She made coffee and lifted the phone to see if it was working. It seemed to be all right. The stereo music filled the house, shook the floor and rattled the windows, but over it now and then she could hear the baby.

She tried to see outside, the wind-driven snow was impenetrable. She flicked on outside lights, the drive entrance, the light over the garage, the door to the barn, the back porch, front porch, the spotlight on the four pieces of granite that she had completed and placed in the yard, waiting for the rest of the series. The granite blocks stood out briefly during a lull. They looked like squat sentinels.

She took her coffee back to the living room, where the stereo was loudest, and sat on the floor by the big cherry table that they had cut down to fourteen inches. Her sketch pad lay here. She glanced at the top page without seeing it, then opened the pad to the middle and began to doodle aimlessly. The record changed; the wind howled through the yard; the baby wailed. When she looked at what she had been doing on the pad, she felt a chill begin deep inside. She had written over and over, MURDERERS. You killed my babies. MURDERERS.

Martie Sayre called the operator for the third time within the hour. “Are the lines still out?”

“I’ll check again, Mr. Sayre.” Phone static, silence, she was back. “Sorry, sir. Still out.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Martie chewed his pencil and spoke silently to the picture on his desk: Julia, blond, thin, intense eyes and a square chin. She was beautiful. Her thin body and face seemed to accentuate lovely delicate bones. He, thin also, was simply craggy and gaunt. “Honey, don’t listen to it. Turn on music loud. You know I’d be there if I could.” The phone rang and he answered.

“I have the material on blizzards for you, Mr. Sayre. Also, Mr. Boyle’s interview with Dr. Hewlitt, A.M.S., and the one with Dr. Wycliffe, the NASA satellite weather expert. Anything else?”

“Not right now, Sandy. Keep close. Okay?”

“Sure thing.”

He turned to the monitor on his desk and pushed the ON button. For the next half hour he made notes and edited the interviews and shaped a fifteen-minute segment for a special to be aired at ten that night. Boyle called for him to bring what he had ready at seven.

There was a four-man consultation. Martie, in charge of the science-news department; Dennis Kolchak, political-news expert; David Wedekind, the art director. Hilary Boyle paced as they discussed the hour special on the extraordinary weather conditions that had racked the entire earth during the winter. Boyle was a large man, over six feet, with a massive frame that let him carry almost three hundred pounds without appearing fat. He was a chain smoker, and prone to nervous collapses. He timed the collapses admirably: he never missed a show. His daily half hour, “Personalized News,” was the most popular network show that year, as it had been for the past three years. The balloon would burst eventually, and the name Hilary Boyle wouldn’t sound like God, but now it did, and no one could explain the X factor that had catapulted the talentless man into the firmament of stars.

The continuity writers had blocked in the six segments of the show already, two from other points—Washington and Los Angeles—plus the commercial time, plus the copter pictures that would be live, if possible.

“Looking good,” Hilary Boyle said. “Half an hour Eddie will have the first film ready… .”

Martie wasn’t listening. He watched Boyle and wondered if Boyle would stumble over any of the words Martie had used in his segment. He hoped not. Boyle always blamed him personally if he, Boyle, didn’t know the words he had to parrot. “Look, Martie, I’m a reasonably intelligent man, and if I don’t know it, you gotta figure that most of the viewers won’t know it either. Get me? Keep it simple, but without sacrificing any of the facts. That’s your job, kid. Now give me this in language I can understand.” Martie’s gaze wandered to the window wall. The room was on the sixty-third floor; there were few other lights to be seen on this level, and only those that were very close. The storm had visibility down to two hundred yards. What lights he could see appeared ghostly, haloed, diffused, toned down to beautiful pearly luminescences. He thought of Boyle trying to say that, and then had to bite his cheek to keep from grinning. Boyle couldn’t stand it when someone grinned in his presence, unless he had made a funny.

Martie’s part of the special was ready for taping by eight, and he went to the coffee shop on the fourteenth floor for a sandwich. He wished he could get through to Julia, but telephone service from Ohio to Washington to Maine was a disaster area that night. He closed his eyes and saw her, huddled before the fire in the living room glowing with soft warm light. Her pale hair hiding her paler face, hands over her ears, tight. She got up and went to the steps, looking up them, then ran back to the fire. The house shaking with music and the wind. The image was so strong that he opened his eyes wide and shook his head too hard, starting a mild headache at the back of his skull. He drank his coffee fast, and got a second cup, and when he sat down again, he was almost smiling. Sometimes he was convinced that she was right when she said that they had something so special between them, they never were actually far apart. Sometimes he knew she was right.

He finished his sandwich and coffee and wandered back to his office. Everything was still firm, ready to tape in twenty minutes. His part was holding fine.

He checked over various items that had come through in the last several hours, and put three of them aside for elaboration. One of them was about a renewal of the influenza epidemic that had raked England earlier in the year. It was making a comeback, more virulent than ever. New travel restrictions had been imposed.

Julia: “I don’t care what they say, I don’t believe it. Who ever heard of quarantine in the middle of the summer? I don’t know why travel’s being restricted all over the world, but I don’t believe it’s because of the flu.” Accusingly, “You’ve got all that information at your fingertips. Why don’t you look it up and see? They banned travel to France before the epidemic got so bad.”