Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

“You’ve been going to school for years now, learning engineering. You aren’t going to be a file clerk all your life. It makes a difference where you live, how people think about you. If we invite Mr. and Mrs. Morrison. .”

“We aren’t going to invite Mr. and Mrs. Morrison. They wouldn’t come if we did. Look, doll, don’t push too hard. Okay?”

“But you will go back to school when the term starts, won’t you?”

“I don’t think so, honey. I want time out. I want to think and rest and think some more.”

“You see,” Maiya says softly, looking into Dr. Whitman’s face, “he was very ambitious, and very brilliant.” She looks beyond him to Mr. Morrison and Mr. Jeffries, the security man. “He could understand everything,” she says, and closes her eyes again. But not before she sees the quick glance that the two men exchange.

No! No! NO!

Fool, she whispered fiercely. Stop it. You don’t know anything!

Maiya took her cup back to the kitchen, washed and dried it and hung it on the turntable rack for eight cups and saucers. She stared at the cups and gave the rack a turn, sending them out and around. Black and orange, black and orange.

The other car was gaining very slowly. Why couldn’t she lose it? A foolish thought. Where could she lose it? Straight road, white concrete ribbon with false water slicks and heat swirls rising, plains and desert, everything aglare and painful against her eyes, no turnoffs for twenty-five miles or more. She forgot how far it was to the next town. She wished she could study the road map. Say twenty-five miles, less than half an hour away. The car could pull around then and slow down and they could ogle her if they chose, it wouldn’t matter. But if it was fifty miles, she would have to stop for gas first. There would be a solitary station along the road; a wide-board shack with two pumps outside, ancient cans of oil behind sand-pitted windows, sign to Ladies Room, Gents Room, and the sun burning down on it all. She would stop for gas and they would go by, and presently she would leave the crummy station, not rushing because they were ahead of her now. One-room station, with Ladies and Gents and nothing else, not even a snack bar, nothing. She could tell the man there:

“They’re following me, pulling around and slowing down when they can, and…” And what? They were probably physicists going back to White Sands after a fishing trip. Or a group of doctors homeward bound from an A.M.A. meeting. Even doctors could look sinister through a back car window, smiling at their own jokes about broken legs, or deliveries, or kidney removals.

“Hank, what’s this?” She held out a plastic tube of pink capsules.

“Oh, that. The superintendent sent me over to see Doc Whitman today. He gave me those, help me sleep temporarily.”

“Sleeping pills? You didn’t tell me you were still having trouble.”

“Nothing serious. They’re mild. He kidded me about them, said it’s what they give to children who’re due for tonsillectomies, that mild.”

“Ever since the transfer. Since you started in Dr. Ullster’s department. Don’t you like it there?”

“Honey, knock it off, huh? Come on, let’s go swimming.”

“You used to tell me about the work, what was going on there, what you were doing. You never say any more.”

“I told you, it’s classified. I took the oath.”

“But me?”

“You too, honey. Now let’s go.”

Ullster was a mathematician, a theoretical mathematical physicist, to be precise. The newspaper said so when his move into the company was announced. Hermann Ullster. No more was said. There was a big shakeup; men were transferred to work in his department from other sections. Computer time was rearranged drastically. Ullster had seven programmers under him.

Coming home from the pool, Hank said, “They might insist that we move inside the complex soon.”

Her heart pounded and she was afraid to look at him, afraid he would see the excitement on her face. She waited a moment then said, “Is it official?”

“Not yet. Hadley was surprised when he learned that I’m still on the outside and working in Ullster’s section. He’ll take it up with them next week.”

His tight voice, gaze fixed on the road ahead of them, hands hard on the wheel, furious with them at the complex, furious with himself, for being told he would have to move, ordered to come inside the complex. She knew. But the complex!

Luxuriant apartments, some single houses, some duplexes, its own stores, restaurants, bowling lanes, swimming pools, putting greens. .

She shopped in Goldwater’s for a dress to mark the occasion, a simple sleeveless linen, pale yellow. Fifty-nine ninety-five. She took it home and hid it.

Maiya, lovely in her pale lemon-colored dress that was superb with her rich tan and honey-toned hair, self-possessed and cool, stands in the doorway and looks them over appraisingly as they enter the apartment and find seats. One, Morrison, president of the research corporation, doesn’t sit down. He studies her as carefully as she examines them. He nods. He motions to the group of men and two of them leave quietly, three others remaining.

“What’s your price?” Morrison asks.

“One percent in the company,” Maiya says easily. She moves to the table and gets a cigarette and waits for him to light it for her. He does and she blows a perfect smoke ring. “Plus fifty thousand cash within ten days.”

Maiya thought of Morrison whom she had seen at one time from a distance. Corpulent, a giant, with a head as big as a basketball and shining bald. He would fill the living room all by himself; she would be like a single wreath of pale smoke beside such a man. With one sweep of his hand he could disperse her, make her vanish forever, and he wouldn’t even notice that she had been there and was gone.

“Honey, I think this is what I want to do. I’ll have to start low, but that’s all right. I’ll have my degree in two years, and meanwhile I’ll be part of it. They’re doing research and making plans for the uses of the ocean floor and for the planets when the time comes. Food, fuel, medicines, who knows what they’ll come up with from research like this?”

Hank, twenty-three, ex-GI, ex-many things, nothing. Starting salary $98.75 per week. Up to $135.45 after a year and a half. The apartment was $160.00 per month. Quitting school with only half a year to go. Stopping the flow of communication that he had maintained with Maiya since they had been married four years ago.

Maiya on the couch, waiting for the visitors, twenty-four, thinking about fifty thousand dollars. Not-thinking about Hank again and again, resolutely not-thinking about Hank. Fifty thousand dollars. He had lived in the Village on nothing, he said. Air, words, ideas? Handouts? What was fifty thousand dollars to him? Not-thinking of Hank. She could go to New York or Miami, and. . And what? Having the money was what she thought of, not what she would do with it, where she would go with it. Having it, and not-thinking of Hank.

Hank, looking out the window during the night. “There’s a crazy moon. Look at it, honey. Big as a house out there.” Moonlight on the desert, blue light that almost let you see, like a half-remembered image from a fairy tale where you didn’t have to think about the reality or unreality of a castle floating on water. Hank, naked at the window, unreal in the same pale light, playing his guitar, singing softly: “. . and what have you built, when you’ve built a bomb? You’ve built hurt and pain and suffering anon. .”

“Hank, stop it! Come on to bed.”

Sometimes she didn’t know him, couldn’t think why she had married him, where they were going or why.

Not-thinking of Hank in bed with her. Especially not-thinking of Hank in bed with her.