Дэймон Найт: Orbit 6

‘All I can do! What good is it?’ She shrugged. She added, ‘I’ve got to leave tomorrow.’ He got up and put his arm around her shoulders. I thought that looked bad because he was actually a couple of inches shorter than she was.

He said, ‘Baby, you don’t have to go.’ She was staring out into the back garden, as if looking miles away, miles out, far away into our vegetable patch or our swing or my mother’s hybrids, into something nobody could see. He said urgently, ‘Honey, look—’ and then, when she continued to stare, pulling her face around so she had to look at him, both his broad, mechanic’s hands under her chin, ‘Baby, you can stay with me.’ He brought his face closer to hers. ‘Marry me,’ he said suddenly. She began to laugh. I had never heard her laugh like that before. Then she began to choke. He put his arms around her and she leaned against him, choking, making funny noises like someone with asthma, finally clapping her hands over her face, then biting her palm, heaving up and down as if she were sick. It took me several seconds to realize that she was crying. He looked very troubled. They stood there: she cried, he, distressed — and I hiding, watching all of it. They began to walk slowly towards the kitchen door. When they had gone out and put out the light, I followed them out into the back garden, to the swing my father had rigged up under the one big tree: cushions and springs to the ground like a piece of furniture, big enough to hold four people. Bushes screened it. There was a kerosene lantern my father had mounted on a post, but it was out. I could just about see them. They sat for a few minutes, saying nothing, looking up through the tree into the darkness. The swing creaked a little as our visitor crossed and uncrossed her long legs. She took out a cigarette and lit it, obscuring their faces with even that little glow: an orange spot that wavered up and down as she smoked, making the darkness more black. Then it disappeared. She had ground it out underfoot in the grass. I could see them again. Bogalusa Joe, the garage mechanic, said:

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow,’ she said. Then they kissed each other. I liked that; it was all right; I had seen it before. She leaned back against the cushions of the swing and seemed to spread her feet in the invisible grass; she let her head and arms fall back on to the cushion. Without saying a word, he lifted her skirt far above her knees and put his hand between her legs. There was a great deal more of the same business and I watched it all, from the first twistings to the stabbings, the noise, the life-and-death battle in the dark. The word Epilepsy kept repeating itself in my head. They got dressed and again began to smoke, talking in tones I could not hear. I crouched in the bushes, my heart beating violently.

I was horribly frightened.

She did not leave the next day, or the next or the next; and she even took a dress to my mother and asked if she could have it altered somewhere in town. My school clothes were out, being aired in the back yard to get the mothball smell out of them. I put covers on all my books. I came down one morning to ask my mother whether I couldn’t have a jumper taken up at the hem because the magazines said it was all right for young girls. I expected a fight over it. I couldn’t find my mother in the hall or the kitchen so I tried the living room, but before I had got half way through the living room arch, someone said, ‘Stop there,’ and I saw both my parents sitting on two chairs near the front door, both with their hands in their laps, both staring straight ahead, motionless as zombies.

I said, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, what’re you —’

‘Stop there,’ said the same voice. My parents did not move. My mother was smiling her social smile. There was no one else in the room. I waited for a little while, my parents continuing to be dead, and then from some corner on my left, near the new Philco, our visitor came gliding out, wrapped in my mother’s spring coat, stepping softly across the rug and looking carefully at all the living room windows. She grinned when she saw me. She tapped the top of the Philco radio and motioned me in. Then she took off the coat and draped it over the radio.

She was in black from head to foot.

I thought black, but black was not the word; the word was blackness, dark beyond dark, dark that drained the eyesight, something I could never have imagined even in my dreams, a black in which there was no detail, no sight, no nothing, only an awful desperate dizziness, for her body — the thing was skintight, like a diver’s costume or an acrobat’s — had actually disappeared, completely blotted out except for its outline. Her head and bare hands floated in the air. She said, ‘Pretty, yes?’ Then she sat crosslegged on our radio. She said, ‘Please pull the curtains,’ and I did, going from one to the other and drawing them shut, circling my frozen parents and then stopping short in the middle of the quaking floor. I said, ‘I’m going to faint.’ She was off the radio and into my mother’s coat in an instant; holding me by the arm, she got me on to the living room couch and put her arm around me, massaging my back. She said, ‘Your parents are asleep.’ Then she said, ‘You have known some of this. You are a wonderful little pickup but you get mixed up, yes? All about the Morlocks? The Trans-Temporal Military Authority?’

I began to say ‘Oh oh oh oh —’ and she massaged my back again.

‘Nothing will hurt you,’ she said. ‘Nothing will hurt your parents. Think how exciting it is! Think! The rebel Morlocks, the revolution in the Trans-Temporal Military Authority.’

‘But I–I —’ I said.

‘We are friends,’ she continued gravely, taking my hands. ‘We are real friends. You helped me. We will not forget that,’ and slinging my mother’s coat off on to the couch, she went and stood in front of the archway. She put her hands on her hips, then began rubbing the back of her neck nervously and clearing her throat. She turned around to give me one last look.

‘Are you calm?’ she said. I nodded. She smiled at me. ‘Be calm,’ she said softly. ‘Sois tranquille. We’re friends,’ and then she put herself to watching the archway. She said once, almost sadly, ‘Friends,’ and then stepped back and smiled again at me.

The archway was turning into a mirror. It got misty, then bright, like a cloud of bright dust, then almost like a curtain; and then it was a mirror, although all I could see in it was our visitor and myself, not my parents, not the furniture, not the living room.

Then the first Morlock stepped through.

And the second.

And the third.

And the others.

Oh, the living room was filled with giants! They were like her, like her in the face, like her in the bodies of the very tall, like her in the black uniforms, men and women of all the races of the earth, everything mixed and huge as my mother’s hybrid flowers but a foot taller than our visitor, a flock of black ravens, black bats, black wolves, the professionals of the future world, perched on our furniture, on the Philco radio, some on the very walls and drapes of the windows as if they could fly, hovering in the air as if they were out in space where the Morlocks meet, half a thousand in a bubble between the stars.

Who rule the worlds.

Two came through the mirror who crawled on the rug, both in diving suits and goldfish-bowl helmets, a man and a woman, fat and shaped like seals. They lay on the rug breathing water (for I saw the specks flowing in it, in and out of strange frills around their necks, the way dust moves in air) and looking up at the rest with tallowy faces. Their suits bulged. One of the Morlocks said something to one of the seals and one of the seals answered, fingering a thing attached to the barrels on its back, gurgling.