Дэймон Найт: Orbit 7

“The music bugs the piss right out of me, but the girls, now that’s different,” Boyle said. A waitress moved into range. She wore a G-string, an apron whose straps miraculously covered both nipples and stayed in place somehow, and very high heels. “Double Scotch for me, honeypot, and what for you, Martie?”

“Bourbon and water.”

“Double bourbon and water for Dr. Sayre.” He squinted, studying the gyrating girls. “That one on the left. Bet she’s a blonde. Watch the way she moves, you can almost see blondness in that wrist motion. …” Boyle glanced at the twitching hips of their waitress and said, in the same breath, same tone of voice, “I’m being watched. You will be too after tonight. You might look out for them.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Not government, I think. Private outfit maybe. Like FBI, same general type, same cool, but I’m almost positive not government.”

“Okay, why?”

“Because I’m a newsman. I really am, you know, always was, always will be. I’m on to something big.”

He stopped and the waitress appeared with their drinks. Boyle’s gaze followed the twisting girls in the spotlight and he chuckled. He looked up at the waitress then. “Menus, please.”

Martie watched him alternately with the floor show. They ordered, and when they were alone again Boyle said, “I think that immortality theory that popped up eight or ten years ago isn’t dead at all. I think it works, just like what’s-his-name said it would, and I think that some people are getting the treatments they need, and the others are being killed off, or allowed to die without interference.”

Martie stared at him, then at his drink. He felt numb. As if to prove to himself that he could move, he made a whirlpool in the glass and it climbed higher and higher and finally spilled. Then he put it down. “That’s crazy. They couldn’t keep something like that quiet.”

Boyle was continuing to watch the dancing girls. “I’m an intuitive man,” Boyle said. “I don’t know why I know that next week people will be interested in volcanoes, but if I get a hunch that it will make for a good show, we do it, and the response is tremendous. You know how that goes. I hit right smack on the button again and again. I get the ideas, you fellows do the work, and I get the credit. That’s like it should be. You’re all diggers, I’m the locator. I’m an ignorant man, but not stupid. Know what I mean? I learned to listen to my hunches. I learned to trust them. I learned to trust myself in front of the camera and on the mike. I don’t know exactly what I’ll say, or how I’ll look. I don’t practice anything. Something I’m in tune with … something. They know it, and I know it. You fellows call it the X factor. Let it go at that. We know what we mean when we talk about it even if we don’t know what it is or how it works. Right. Couple of months ago, I woke up thinking that we should do a follow-up on the immortality thing. Don’t look at me. Watch the show. I realized that I hadn’t seen word one about it for three or four years. Nothing at all. What’s his name, the guy that found the synthetic RNA?”

“Smithers. Aaron Smithers.”

“Yeah. He’s dead. They worked him over so thoroughly, blasted him and his results so convincingly, that he never got over it. Finis. Nothing else said about it. I woke up wondering why not. How could he have been that wrong? Got the Nobel for the same kind of discovery, RNA as a cure for some kind of arthritis. Why was he so far off this time?” Boyle had filled the ashtray by then. He didn’t look at Martie as he spoke, but continued to watch the girls, and now and then grinned, or even chuckled.

The waitress returned, brought them a clean ashtray, new drinks, took their orders, and left again. Boyle turned then to look at Martie. “What, no comments yet? I thought by now you’d be telling me to see a head-shrinker.”

Martie shook his head. “I don’t believe it. There’d be a leak. They proved it wouldn’t work years ago.”

“Maybe.” Boyle drank more slowly now. “Anyway, I couldn’t get rid of this notion, so I began to try to find out if anyone was doing anything with the synthetic RNA, and that’s when the doors began to close on me. Nobody knows nothing. And someone went through my office, both here at the studio and at home. I got Kolchak to go through some of his sources to look for appropriations for RNA research. Security’s clamped down on all appropriations for research. Lobbied for by the AMA, of all people.”

“That’s something else. People were too loose with classified data,” Martie said. “This isn’t in the universities any more. They don’t know any more than you do.”

Boyle’s eyes gleamed. “Yeah? So you had a bee, too?”

“No. But I know people. I left Harvard to take this job. I keep in touch. I know the people in the biochemical labs there. I’d know if they were going on with this. They’re not. Are you going to try to develop this?” he asked, after a moment.

“Good Christ! What do you think!”

Julia woke up with a start. She was stiff from her position in the large chair, with her legs tucked under her, her head at an angle. She had fallen asleep over her sketch pad, and it lay undisturbed on her lap, so she couldn’t have slept very long. The fire was still hot and bright. It was almost eleven thirty. Across the room the television flickered. The sound was turned off, music continued to play too loud in the house. She cocked her head, then nodded. It was still crying.

She looked at the faces she had drawn on her pad: nurses, interns, Dr. Wymann. All young. No one over thirty-five. She tried to recall others in the OB ward, but she was sure that she had them all. Night nurses, delivery nurses, nursery nurses, admittance nurse … She stared at the drawing of Dr. Wymann. They were the same age. He had teased her about it once. “I pulled out a grey hair this morning, and here you are as pretty and young as ever. How are you doing?”

But it had been a lie. He was the unchanged one. She had been going to him for six or seven years, and he hadn’t changed at all in that time. They were both thirty-four now.

Sitting at the side of her bed, holding her hand, speaking earnestly. “Julia, there’s nothing wrong with you. You can still have babies, several of them if you want. We can send men to the moon, to the bottom of the ocean, but we can’t fight off staph when it hits in epidemic proportions in a nursery. I know you feel bitter now, that it’s hopeless, but believe me, there wasn’t anything that could be done either time. I can almost guarantee you that the next time everything will go perfectly.”

“It was perfect this time. And the last time.”

“You’ll go home tomorrow. I’ll want to see you in six weeks. We’ll talk about it again a bit later. All right?”

Sure. Talk about it. And talk and talk. And it didn’t change the fact that she’d had two babies and had lost two babies that had been alive and kicking right up till the time of birth.

Why had she gone so blank afterward? For almost a year she hadn’t thought of it, except in the middle of the night, when it hadn’t been thought but emotion that had ridden her. Now it seemed that the emotional response had been used up and for the first time she could think about the births, about the staff, about her own reactions. She put her sketch pad down and stood up, listening.

Two boys. They’d both been boys. Eight pounds two ounces, eight pounds four ounces. Big, beautifully formed, bald. The crying was louder, more insistent. At the foot of the stairs she stopped again, her face lifted.

It was a small hospital, a small private hospital. One that Dr. Wymann recommended highly. Because the city hospitals had been having such rotten luck trying to get rid of staph. Infant mortality had doubled, tripled? She had heard a fantastic figure given out, but hadn’t been able to remember it. It had brought too sharp pains, and she had rejected knowing. She started up the stairs.