Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

“The test is over?”

“That’s right.” She finished, and wheeled a portable psych machine away to the corner of the room. She returned and placed coolly professional fingers on his wrist for a moment. “You can sit up now, if you want.”

“How did I do?”

“Dr. Doyle will be in in a moment. He’s talking to your wife now, I think.”

Lorin sat up and the pain in his head made him blink. He touched the back of his scalp gingerly. The nurse laughed. “The electrodes are still there. Just below the skin. We don’t take them out, so if you ever need a good psychoanalysis, you’re all set. Compliments of the house.” She laughed to show that she joked, and after a bad moment he grinned back at her. Although he couldn’t find the thin platinum wires with his fingertips, he would be wired the rest of his life, ready to be plugged into a psych machine and played like a record. He stood up carefully, but there was no dizziness, and the headache was fading. He looked at the clock over the door. He had been there four hours.

Dr. Doyle came in and shook his hand enthusiastically. “You go home and get some rest now, Lorin. We’ll call you in a day or two, after we analyze the results. If you don’t hear by Monday, report back to your regular job and wait. We never know what kind of bugs we’re going to find that will delay us.” He shook Lorin’s hand again and was gone before Lorin had a chance to ask him a single question.

The nurse ushered him from the room to another room where more nurses were busy at desks. He went to a desk with an information sign over it and asked for his wife.

“I really couldn’t say,” the nurse said, without looking up.

“But we both took the tests. She should be through now too…”

“Not my department. You’d better go on home and wait for her.” The nurse opened a ledger and started to run her finger down columns of figures.

Lorin tried to get back inside the test room, but the door was locked now. None of the nurses knew anything about the tests, and finally he went to the door marked “Exit.” It opened only halfway and he squeezed through into an anteroom that was a bedlam of confusion and noise. He tried to open the door again, but it wouldn’t open at all from this side. Someone caught his arm: “My husband, tall, heavy, bald, did you see him? Is he in there? He went in two weeks ago. . ” Lorin shook his head. “Is Dr. Doyle in there?” someone else yelled. Someone else was holding a snapshot before his eyes; he thought it was of a woman. The press of people was so thick that he couldn’t go straight to the street door, but had to squeeze through openings, to be forced backward, to inch forward again painfully. He saw an opening and stepped into it, relieved at the lessening of the pressure of bodies. Then he saw why there was the open space. A psycho in the telltale yellow coverall. Revolted, he turned back to the crowd. The psycho followed him. It was a woman. She screamed at him, “Stop! Tell me what happens in there! What do they do? What did they do to me?”

The crowd gave ground before her and he knew that the look of disgust that was on everyone else’s face was also on his. He managed to get people between himself and the yellow-clad woman. The noise was deafening. Every time the door to the inside offices opened, there was a surge toward it, and the cacophony increased. His headache returned, stronger than before.

He finally got to the outside door, but hesitated again. He took a deep breath; the fetid air in the room was better than the air out in the street would be. He went outside and was caught up immediately in the swell of people on the sidewalk. Three hours later he arrived at his own building, exhausted and panting. The elevators that went to his level were out of order, so he rode to the fiftieth floor and walked up the next thirteen flights of stairs, stumbling over the gray children who played there. Jan was not in the one-room apartment.

He waited for her all afternoon, listening to the neighbors above and below and on both sides of his small room. Children screamed and shrieked in play through the halls and on the stairs. Women shrilled and men cursed. Radios played out of synch, on different stations; airplanes overhead and traffic below competed with rising decibels; sirens, the blare of advertising trucks, the screech of the elevator again in service. He pressed his hands over his ears; his headache was blinding. Why didn’t she come home? The lights came on: neons, street lights, traffic lights; haze descended and haloed the lights. He fell asleep toward dawn.

That day he returned to the test center and waited along with all the others in the anterooms. Jan didn’t come through the doors from the inner rooms. On the third day he returned to work.

He was stopped at the door of the biology lab by his supervisor, who handed him an envelope and hurried away without speaking. Lorin opened it with shaking fingers, his heart thumping wildly. He was certain it was his test confirmation, and orders to report back to the test center. . He stared at the curt message: Report for analysis 9 A.M. Mon. Thurs. Fri., Rm. 1902 Psych Bldg.

He didn’t enter the lab. He knew his bench would be occupied by someone else. He went to the psych center and was issued his yellow coverall, and shown his iron frame cot. The other men in the ward didn’t stir as he entered, no one looked up at him. He felt his cheeks burn with shame and he sat on the edge of his cot and waited for 9 A.M. Thursday to come. He knew why Jan hadn’t returned, would never come back to him. He ground his hands into his eyes and tried to remember the test, what he had done wrong, how he had revealed insanity. When a sonic boom shook the building, he covered his ears and pushed hard against them, trying to think. He wished he could go for a walk, but the thought of walking in the center of a circle that moved with him everywhere he went, of seeing the disgust and loathing on the faces of those he approached… He sat on the edge of the cot and waited, and tried to remember, and when night came he lay down wearily and stared at the ceiling, trying to remember what he had done wrong, and he listened to the clamor of the city that never was still: traffic; voices singing, shouting, cursing, screaming; sirens; jets; foghorns; elevators; sound trucks; televisions; phonographs; buses; elevated trains. . Nearby a jackhammer started, and an alarm went off. Lorin stuffed his fist into his mouth to keep from screaming, and lay staring at the ceiling trying to remember.

Having achieved perfection, we feel a slight unease. From our height we feel impelled to look down. We make our own place and there is nothing below us; but in our imagination there are depths and animals below us. To look down breeds cultishness.

There are the cults of the further lands and the further people. The Irish and Americans and Africans are respectable philosophical and industrial parties, but the cultishness is something beyond. Any addition to the world would mar the perfect world which is the perfect thought of the Maker. Were there an Africa indeed, were there an Ireland, were there an America or an Atlantis, were there Indies, then we would be other than we are. The tripartite unity that is the ecumene would be broken; the habitable world-island, the single eye in the head that is the world-globe would be voided.

There are those who say that our rational and perfect world should steep itself in this great unconscious geography of the under-mind, in the outré fauna and the incredible continents of the tortured imagination and of black legends. They pretend that this would give us depth.

We do not want depth. We want height. Let us seal off the under things of the under-mind, and exalt ourselves! And our unease will pass.