Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

“Jan, don’t talk around it. We’ve never done that with each other. Not this time either. Okay? There’s nothing wrong with my taking a walk in the night. I do it a lot.”

“Yes, but that’s different. People in the city wait until night but this is so… I just wish you wouldn’t do it here.”

He laughed and caught her to him, hugging her hard. She shivered and he realized how cold she was. “Honey, I’m sorry. You’re freezing.” He rubbed her arms and back briskly, then put her to bed, pulling the cover to her chin. He sat on the edge of the bed with his coffee. “Come out with me tomorrow. Let me show you the forest and the clearing I found.”

“I did go for a walk with you, remember? Miles and miles of walking.” She snuggled down lower in the bed and yawned.

“But that was with the group. .” Jan had closed her eyes already, and her face had softened with relaxation. Lorin kissed her forehead, then walked to the tent flap and stood looking out until the moon was hidden by clouds and there was only darkness. He put down the cold coffee and got into bed beside her. She fitted herself to his body without waking and with his arms around her he listened to the silence.

“It’s such a lonely world,” Jan had said the first night, staring at the dense blackness that was the forest. “It is so still that it is nightmare-like. Nothing but wind, sighing like ghosts through the trees. Whispering. Don’t you feel it, Lorin, the whisper, too faint to catch the words?” She had cocked her head with an abstracted look on her pale face, and Lorin had caught her arm roughly.

“Jan, snap out of it! It’s just silence. For the first time in your life you know what silence is like. The stuff we prayed for night after night.”

“Never again,” she had said, with a stiff, set look on her face, a look of fright denied, of anger at the causeless fear.

Lincoln Doyle, the leader of the expedition, worked them all unmercifully, but even with the full schedule there was not enough work to shut out the world that surrounded them. All the others seemed to share Jan’s reaction to the silent world. There were twelve of them, all with sunup-to-dusk tasks to complete, and all with the same listening look when there was a pause in their own noise. Doyle turned on the recorder, blasting music through the valley, and that helped. But at night the silence returned, deeper, more ominous.

At first no one had believed Lorin’s report that there was no animal life, but they had come to accept that, as they had come to accept the mammoth conifers that grew where oak and maple and birch trees had stood. The trees were giants, three hundred feet or higher, with tops that met and tangled in an impenetrable web of needled branches. Their trunks were from ten to thirty feet through. There was scant undergrowth in the pervasive gloom of the forests, but at the river’s edge where the ship stood, and in the clearings, there were bushes and vines and a vivid green, mossy groundcover. Other places had waist-high grasses, and he had seen a grove of deciduous trees in the distance on one of his exploratory trips. But no animal life. No birds. No insects. No fish. And stillness everywhere. As he was falling asleep the silence became an entity, a being with cradling arms and soothing fingers that penetrated him, searching out and healing bruised and torn nerves.

They had breakfast with the others in the group. The music blared so that talk was in shouts. Doyle looked especially grim that morning. He was a small, thin, intense man. Lorin could imagine him on a high stool frowning over a ledger after hours in a musty office.

“Steve tells me we can expect a storm tonight or in the morning,” Doyle said precisely, clipping off each word, as if he had to pay for them in cash. “We have to get as many of our samples in today as possible. When the cold front comes through with the storm, we could get snow, and that would upset our schedule. Barring that, I am confident that we can finish here within a week, as planned.”

Since there was no work for a biologist in this lifeless time, Lorin’s daily tasks varied with the requests for assistance from the others. Today he was to accompany Lucas Tryoll to the coast, follow it south to the tip of Florida, go inland, and return over the area of the Mississippi River taking pictures of the land. He was pleased and excited by the assignment.

They flew due east to the coast where New York City once had been. Manhattan was gone, as was Long Island. There was only a bay that reached far inland, and was twenty miles across. Most of the New Jersey coast had been swallowed by the ocean, and Delaware Bay was indistinguishable from the rest of the sea. A solid green roof of treetops hid the land almost to the edge of the ocean. There were no offshore islands.

“Spooky, isn’t it?” Tryoll said after several hours. “I still say we should have settled for the last time.”

Lorin looked at him quickly, but there was no humor on the man’s brooding face. Lorin remembered the last time they had arrived to find people turned savage, and animals even more savage. They had all been in the last stages of severe malnutrition and radiation sickness. He tried to recall a time that he preferred to this, and failed. Sickness, or overcrowding, or a wasteland of radioactivity, or glaciation… He touched Tryoll on the arm and pointed: there was no Florida, no islands as far as they could see, hundreds of miles out of unbroken deep blue-green water.

Tryoll turned the plane and followed the coast to the delta of the gargantuan river that emptied into the Gulf. From their height they could see the brown water-swirl pattern as the river flowed into and finally became part of the pale blue of the sea. The Mississippi was miles wide here, shallow, and brown with silt. They followed it north, and the scenery below them was the same as everywhere else: forests, no signs of life. There was a great, shallow inland sea over what had been Nebraska, Kansas, or Iowa. Lorin couldn’t tell where they were. Clouds were forming to the north of them when Tryoll turned eastward again, coming to mountains, and then heading north. There were only clouds under them now, gray concrete, rolling plains, but still the cameras worked, taking infrared movies through the dense layer, mapping the land that lay invisible under them. Once Tryoll said that they would have to land, and Lorin felt his heart thump with excitement. But Tryoll flew on grimly and Lorin knew that he’d risk crashing into the mountains or being iced by the storm rather than land and spend the night here in the silent forests.

When they put down at the camp site a hard rain was driving in, cold and stinging against their faces as they raced back to the ship. Lorin showered and changed into warm clothing, then went to dinner with Jan.

“We’re all going to sleep inside tonight,” she said. “Steve predicts an all-night rain, and possibly snow by morning.”

“Inside? But we have heat in the tent.”

“But if it snows… It will be more comfortable inside the ship on a night like this.”

Lorin put down his fork and took her hand between his. “Jan, please come back to the tent with me. Have you ever slept where you could hear rain in the night right over your head? Have you ever seen fresh white snow falling, covering everything with dazzling white?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“When we get back home we’ll be on the sixty-third floor again, with forty-seven floors over us. All we’ll ever see of rain is a dirty suspension of grime running off our windows, or down our clothes. Can you imagine what this rain will be like?”

“It might be ‘hot.’ “

“You know it isn’t.” He resisted the pull of her hand as she tried to free it. “Jan, we’ve been through a lot together. Remember the wild cats?”