Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

Maiya weeps bitterly and can’t answer their questions, can’t speak. Dr. Whitman motions them angrily from the room and sits by her side and pats her shoulder awkwardly. “I know, my dear. Hank told me what a wonderful life you had together. You will have to be brave now. It isn’t going to be easy for you.” No!

Maiya jerked when somewhere a clock struck four. It was almost time. She returned to the kitchen and stood with her hand on the plug to the coffeepot. Hank’s papers. What if they wanted his papers? She ran to the bedroom and yanked open the top bureau drawer and snatched notebooks and loose papers up in both hands. Where could she put them? She started for the bed, then stopped. But where? Bedroom, living room, kitchen, bath…She ran to the bathroom and started to tear up the papers into tiny fragments. Limericks, bits of verse, songs, letters. All very, very dirty. She flushed them down the toilet.

A film of perspiration had broken out on her forehead and she blotted it with Kleenex moistened with skin freshener. What would they have thought of her?

Why were they coming?

What did they want from her?

She thought of the concrete road again and walked back to the living room and sat down once more. It was so bright! On her way from the university where they’d had a housekeeping unit, to Mesa, Arizona, where Hank had his new job. Miles and miles of plains, desert, white bright sky, and the car with four men in it that kept edging closer and closer so that she couldn’t relax, couldn’t let down her guard a moment. Everything connected to everything else. A skein of wool with millions of threads, so that it didn’t matter which one you followed, you ended back in the middle. Hank had said that, not Maiya. She shook her head violently. Not-thinking of Hank. The car followed closer going up the mountain roads. She couldn’t help it, she had to slow down. If only she knew exactly what it was she was running from. Maybe they weren’t even threatening her, just happened to be going in the same direction, at about the same speed.

“Honey, all my life I’ve wanted to make things, you know? Model cars when I was a kid, then string wires into bottles and make lamps, put tubes together and come up with a radio or a hi-fi. Like that. I like to take things and put them together and come up with something new and useful, and even pretty.” He got out of the army in California and walked across the country to New York where they met and were married three weeks later. “No kids for awhile, okay with you?”

She had nodded, relieved. No kids now, maybe never. She teased him about it, though: You’re the guy that wants to make things, but not kids.

Nothing that would hurt, he’d said. She knew she had looked blank, and he had pushed her over backward in the bed and was on top of her with a scissors-lock. . Not-thinking of Hank and her in bed together. God, not that…

Hairpin curves, thirty miles an hour, the other car half a city block away. Almost see their expressions now, one in the back seat leaning over the front seat, his chin on his arms, looking ahead, looking at her.

Maiya is so young, so vulnerable. “I tried,” she says desperately. “I wanted him to stay on and go back to school. I wanted him to make something of himself. When he told me what he planned, I was terrified. He was sick. He needed help. You have to understand that.”

Morrison, looming over her, blotting out the light, his voice everywhere in the room, says, “He was a traitor, an agent. And you were his accomplice.”

“NO!” she cries, and her innocence is so apparent that even Morrison is moved into retreating. He mutters to Jeffries, the security man, “She’s okay. Chalk it up as an accident, give her the usual pension. Let’s go.”

He was sick. Feverish, restless, pacing, in bed and up, again and again.

“Hank, what is the matter? What happened?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“How can I?” She pulled her robe on, chilled in the air-conditioned room. “At least tell me what happened.”

Hank, muttering like a drunk, or a sleepwalker, some of the words coming through, not enough: “. . doesn’t matter what you try to do, all ends up in the middle, all connected, wound around each other. .”

She caught his arm and pulled him to a stop. “What happened?”

“Ullster is working on developing a mathematical approach to mental disease, and at the same time, on a mathematical approach to an electronic mind wave that would turn a man into a walking corpse in an instant.” Hank put his hand over hers on his bare arm. His hand was hot and dry. “We’re minting coins out there at the complex,” he said. “And each and every one of them has two heads.” His hand tightened on hers. “And I don’t know which mouth I’m feeding,” he said harshly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve been smoking pot or something.”

He flung her hand away and went to the window. “I know you don’t know. Would it matter if you did? Would it matter?” He almost cried when he said that.

She stood in the doorway staring at his silhouette against the pale light of the full moon on the desert. Then she turned and went back to bed. Much later she heard his soft voice and his guitar, but she didn’t get up.

She looked about suddenly. For a moment she thought she had heard it again, only the elevator down the hall. She remembered the funny words he had made up that night: “Oh, they’ll tell you the story of a little file clerk; They’ll say that one day he went all berserk, That he raided the files and made a high pyre. That he lay down on top to take his rest there…”

They caught up with her halfway down the mountain. When she got out of her car and faced them, she said, “What do you want? I’m out of gas, there wasn’t any place I could stop. Will you take me to the next town, to the complex where my husband works?”

One of them doubled over, laughing. “No place to stop! You drove like hell through town after town, past crossroad after crossroad. Honey, you didn’t want to stop.”

Maiya heard the steps in the hallway and she stood up. They were on time.

Maiya admits them graciously, wordlessly, and as they enter they murmur words of condolence. .

The buzzer rasped at her. She fumbled with the lock, then got the door open.

“Mrs. Brewster, I’m Dr. Whitman. How do you do.” He stepped aside and the two other men entered. “Mr. Fields, our company attorney, and Jack Arcana, of course, you know already.”

She nodded and made a motion to close the door.

Mr. Fields said, “Mrs. Brewster, we’ve come to talk to you about the terrible accident at the complex, to explain what your rights are, and primarily to offer, to urge you to accept our help at this difficult time.”

Jack Arcana cleared his throat. “Maiya,” he said, “if there’s anything we, Susan and I can do, you know. .”

She looked at him and shook her head. She said dully, “Mary. My name is Mary.” Then she sat down and waited for them to tell her what to do.

Lights. Some scattered about the dark ground. Others flaring like cressets on high poles. Others floodlighting a tall cylindrical object, metallically gleaming against the night sky. Shouts. The throaty purr of trucks. Pieces of equipment strewn here and there. Gantries. Snaking cables and hoses. Sounds of quickly moving feet. Shapes silhouetting themselves against lighted windows and doors. But in thie midst of all this confusion, a concerted movement: a crowd making its way across the open ground, one man at its center. He walks slowly, gesturing. Those in front of him walk backward, spattering him with light. Those at his side hold white squares of paper, pencils alert or moving.