Дэймон Найт: Orbit 7

“We’re going to move. We’ll go back to the city.”

“All right. If you want to. It won’t matter. This house has nothing to do with it.”

“Christ!” Martie let her go suddenly, and she almost fell. He didn’t notice. He paced back and forth a few minutes, rubbing his hand over his eyes, through his hair, over the stubble of his beard. She wished she could do something for him, but she didn’t move. He turned to her again suddenly. “You can’t stay alone again!”

Julia laughed gently. She took his hand and held it against her cheek. It was very cold. “Martie, look at me. Have I laughed spontaneously during this past year? I know how I’ve been, what I’ve been like. I knew all along, but I couldn’t help myself. I was such a failure as a woman, don’t you see? It didn’t matter if I succeeded as an artist, or as a wife, anything. I couldn’t bear a live child. That’s all I could think about. It would come at the most awkward moments, with company here, during our lovemaking, when I had the mallet poised, or mixing a cake. Whammo, there it would be. And I’d just want to die. Now, after last night, I feel as if I’m alive again, after being awfully dead. It’s all right, Martie. I had an experience that no one else could believe in. I don’t care. It must be like conversion. You can’t explain it to anyone who hasn’t already experienced it, and you don’t have to explain it to him. I shouldn’t even have tried.”

“God, Julia, why didn’t you say what you were going through? I didn’t realize. I thought you were getting over it all.” Martie pulled her to him and held her too tightly.

“You couldn’t do anything for me,” she said. Her voice was muffled. She sighed deeply.

“I know. That’s what makes it such hell.” He pushed her back enough to see her face. “And you think it’s over now? You’re okay now?” She nodded. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t care. If you’re okay, that’s enough. Now let’s put it behind us… .”

“But it isn’t over, Martie. It’s just beginning. I know he’s alive now. I have to find him.”

“Can’t get the tractor in the yard, Miz Sayre. Could of if you hadn’t put them stones out there in the way.” Mr. Stopes mopped his forehead with a red kerchief, although he certainly hadn’t worked up a sweat, not seated on the compact red tractor, running it back and forth through the drive.

Julia refilled his coffee cup and shrugged. “All right. We’ll get to it. The sun’s warming it up so much. Maybe it’ll just melt off.”

“Nope. It’ll melt some, then freeze. Be harder’n ever to get it out then.”

Julia went to the door and called to Martie, “Honey, can you write Mr. Stopes a check for clearing the drive?”

Martie came in from the living room, taking his checkbook from his pocket. “Twenty?”

“Yep. Get yourself snowed in in town last night, Mr. Sayre?”

“Yep.”

Mr. Stopes grinned and finished his coffee. “Some April Fools’ Day, ain’t it? Forsythia blooming in the snow. Don’t know. Just don’t know ‘bout the weather any more. Remember my dad used to plant his ground crops on April Fools’ Day, without fail.” He waved the check back and forth a minute, then stuffed it inside his sheepskin coat. “Well, thanks for the coffee, Miz Sayre. You take care now that you don’t work too hard and come down with something. You don’t want to get taken sick now that Doc Hendricks is gone.”

“I thought that new doctor was working out fine,” Martie said.

“Yep. For some people. You don’t want him to put you in the hospital, though. The treatment’s worse than the sickness any more, it seems.” He stood up and pulled on a flap-eared hat that matched his coat. “Not a gambling man myself, but even if I was, wouldn’t want them odds. Half walks in gets taken out in a box. Not odds that I like at all.”

Julia and Martie avoided looking at one another until he was gone. Then Julia said incredulously, “Half!”

“He must be jacking it way up.”

“I don’t think so. He exaggerates about some things, not things like that. That must be what they’re saying.”

“Have you met the doctor?”

“Yes, here and there. In the drugstore. At Dr. Saltzman’s. He’s young, but he seemed nice enough. Friendly. He asked me if we’d had our … flu shots.” She finished very slowly, frowning slightly.

“And?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking that it was curious of him to ask. They were announcing at the time that there was such a shortage, that only vital people could get them. You know, teachers, doctors, hospital workers, that sort of thing. Why would he have asked if we’d had ours?”

“After the way they worked out, you should be glad that you didn’t take him up on it.”

“I know.” She continued to look thoughtful, and puzzled. “Have you met an old doctor recently? Or even a middle-aged one?”

“Honey!”

“I’m serious. Dr. Saltzman is the only doctor I’ve seen in years who’s over forty. And he doesn’t count. He’s a dentist.”

“Oh, wow! Look, honey, I’m sorry I brought up any of this business with Boyle. I think something is going on, but not in such proportions, believe me. We’re a community of what?—seven hundred in good weather? I don’t think we’ve been infiltrated.”

She wasn’t listening. “Of course, they couldn’t have got rid of all the doctors, probably just the ones who were too honest to go along with it. Well, that probably wasn’t many. Old and crooked. Young and… immortal. Boy!”

“Let’s go shovel snow. You need to have your brain aired out.”

While he cleared the path to the barn, Julia cleaned off the granite sculptures. She studied them. They were rough-quarried blocks, four feet high, almost as wide. The first one seemed untouched, until the light fell on it in a certain way, the rays low, casting long shadows. There were tracings of fossils, broken, fragmented. Nothing else. The second piece had a few things emerging from the surface, clawing their way up and out, none of them freed from it, though. A snail, a trilobite-like crustacean, a winged insect. What could have been a bird’s head was picking its way out. The third one had denned animals, warm-blooded animals, and the suggestion of forests. Next came man and his works. Still rising from stone, too closely identified with the stone to say for certain where he started and the stone ended, if there was a beginning and an end at all. The whole work was to be called The Wheel. These were the ends of the spokes, and at the hub of the wheel there was to be a solid granite seat, a pedestal-like seat. That would be the ideal place to sit and view the work, although she knew that few people would bother. But from the center, with the stones in a rough circle, the shadows should be right, the reliefs complementary to one another, suggesting heights that had been left out, suggesting depths that she hadn’t shown. All suggestion. The wheel that would unlock the knowledge within the viewer, let him see what he usually was blind to. …

“Honey, move!” Martie nudged her arm. He was panting hard.

“Oh, dear. Look at you. You’ve been moving mountains!” Half the path was cleared. “Let’s make a snowman, right to the barn door.”

The snow was wet, and they cleared the rest of the path by rolling snowballs, laughing, throwing snowballs at each other, slipping and falling. Afterward they had soup and sandwiches, both of them too beat to think seriously about cooking.

“Nice day,” Julia said lazily, lying on the living-room floor, her chin propped up by cupped hands, watching Martie work on the fire.

“Yeah. Tired?”

“Um. Martie, after you talked with Hilary, what did you do the rest of the night?”