Дэймон Найт: Orbit 6

‘Does she go out?’ he said sharply.

‘Well?’ said our visitor idly.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, she goes out. Every day.’

‘By car or on foot?’ I looked at her but she was doing nothing. Her thumb and finger formed a circle on the table.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Does she go on foot?’ he said.

‘No,’ I blurted suddenly, ‘no, by car. Always by car!’ He sat back in his seat.

‘You would do anything,’ he said conversationally. ‘The lot of you.’

‘I?’ she said. ‘I’m not dedicated. I can be reasoned with.’

After a moment of silence he said, ‘We’ll talk.’

She shrugged. ‘Why not?’

‘This girl’s home,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave fifteen minutes after you. Give me your hand.’

‘Why?’ she said. ‘You know where I live. I am not going to hide in the woods like an animal.’

‘Give me your hand,’ he repeated. ‘For old time’s sake.’ She reached across the table. They clasped hands and she winced momentarily. Then they both rose. She smiled dazzlingly. She took me by the wrist and led me down the stairs while the strange man called after us, as if the phrase pleased him, ‘For old time’s sake!’ and then ‘Good health, cousin! Long life!’ while the band struck up a march in ragtime. She stopped to talk to five or six people, including Ruth’s father who taught mathematics in the high school, and the band leader, and Betty, who was drinking punch with a boy from our class. Betty said to me under her breath, ‘Your daisies are coming loose. They’re gonna fall off.’ We walked through the parked cars until we reached one that she seemed to like; they were all open and some owners left the keys in them; she got in behind the wheel and started up.

‘But this isn’t your car!’ I said. ‘You can’t just —’

‘Get in!’ I slid in next to her.

‘It’s after ten o’clock,’ I said. ‘You’ll wake up my father. Who—’

‘Shut up!’

I did. She drove very fast and very badly. Halfway home she began to slow down. Then suddenly she laughed out loud and said very confidentially, not to me but as if to somebody else:

‘I told him I had planted a Nielsen loop around here that would put half of Greene County out of phase. A dead man’s control. I had to go out and stop it every week.’

‘What’s a Nielsen loop?’ I said.

‘Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today,’ she quoted.

‘What,’ said I emphatically, ‘is a—’

‘I’ve told you, baby,’ she said, ‘and you’ll never know more, God willing,’ and pulling into our driveway with a screech that would have wakened the dead, she vaulted out of the car and through the back door into the kitchen, just as if my mother and father had both been asleep or in a cataleptic trance, like those in the works of E. A. Poe. Then she told me to get the iron poker from the garbage burner in the back yard and find out if the end was still hot; when I brought the thing in, she laid the hot end over one of the flames of the gas stove. Then she rummaged around under the sink and came up with a bottle of my mother’s Clear Household Ammonia.

‘That stuff’s awful,’ I said. ‘If you let that get in your eyes —’

‘Pour some in the water glass,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Two-thirds full. Cover it with a saucer. Get another glass and another saucer and put all of them on the kitchen table. Fill your mother’s water pitcher, cover that, and put that on the table.’

‘Are you going to drink that?’ I cried, horrified, halfway to the table with the covered glass. She merely pushed me. I got everything set up, and also pulled three chairs up to the kitchen table; I then went to turn off the gas flame, but she took me by the hand and placed me so that I hid the stove from the window and the door. She said, ‘Baby, what is the specific heat of iron?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘You know it, baby,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

I only stared at her.

‘But you know it, baby,’ she said. ‘You know it better than I. You know that your mother was burning garbage today and the poker would still be hot. And you know better than to touch the iron pots when they come fresh from the oven, even though the flame is off, because iron takes a long time to heat up and a long time to cool off, isn’t that so?’ I nodded.

‘And you don’t know,’ she added, ‘how long it takes for aluminium pots to become cold because nobody uses aluminium for pots yet. And if I told you how scarce the heavy metals are, and what a radionic oven is, and how the heat can go through the glass and the plastic and even the ceramic lattice, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about, would you?’

‘No,’ I said, suddenly frightened, ‘no, no, no.’

‘Then you know more than some,’ she said. ‘You know more than me. Remember how I used to burn myself, fiddling with your mother’s things?’ She looked at her palm and made a face. ‘He’s coming,’ she said. ‘Stand in front of the stove. When he asks you to turn off the gas, turn it off. When I say “Now,” hit him with the poker.’

‘I can’t,’ I whispered. ‘He’s too big.’

‘He can’t hurt you,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t dare; that would be an anachronism. Just do as I say.’

‘What are you going to do ?’ I cried.

‘When I say “Now,”‘ she repeated serenely, ‘hit him with the poker,’ and sitting down by the table, she reached into a jam-jar of odds and ends my mother kept on the windowsill and began to buff her nails with a Lady Marlene emery stick. Two minutes passed by the kitchen clock. Nothing happened. I stood there with my hand on the cold end of the poker, doing nothing until I felt I had to speak, so I said, ‘Why are you making a face? Does something hurt?’

‘The splinter in my palm,’ she said calmly. ‘The bastard.’

‘Why don’t you take it out?’

‘It will blow up the house.’ He stepped in through the open kitchen door. Without a word she put both arms palm upward on the kitchen table and without a word he took off the black cummerbund of his formal dress and flicked it at her. It settled over both her arms and then began to draw tight, moulding itself over her arms and the table like a piece of black adhesive tape, pulling her almost down on to it and whipping one end around the table edge until the wood almost cracked. It seemed to paralyse her arms. He put his finger to his tongue and then to her palm, where there was a small black spot. The spot disappeared. He laughed and told me to turn off the flame, so I did.

‘Take it off,’ she said then.

He said, ‘Too bad you are in hiding or you too could carry weapons,’ and then, as the edge of the table let out a startling sound like a pistol shot, he flicked the black tape off her arms, returning it to himself, where it disappeared into his evening clothes.

‘Now that I have used this, everyone knows where we are,’ he said, and he sat down in a kitchen chair that was much too small for him and lounged back in it, his knees sticking up into the air.

Then she said something I could not understand. She took the saucer off the empty glass and poured water into it again; she said something unintelligible again and held it out to him, but he motioned it away. She shrugged and drank the water herself. ‘Flies,’ she said, and put the saucer back on. They sat in silence for several minutes. I did not know what to do; I knew I was supposed to wait for the word “Now” and then hit him with the poker, but no one seemed to be saying or doing anything. The kitchen clock, which I had forgotten to wind that morning, was running down at ten minutes to eleven. There was a cricket making a noise close outside the window and I was afraid the ammonia smell would get out somehow; then, just as I was getting a cramp in my legs from standing still, our visitor nodded. She sighed, too, regretfully. The strange man got to his feet, moved his chair carefully out of the way and pronounced: