Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

“Miss Matthews, do you mean to say that everyone you’ve talked to about this has really tried to discourage it? These people are your father’s friends. Why would they do that?”

My face feels stiff and I am thinking that this is too much, but I say, “They all seem to think he’s better off in the nursing home.”

“And isn’t he?”

“In certain respects, yes. But I am qualified to handle him, you know. No one here seems to realize just how well qualified I really am. They think of me as the girl they used to know playing jump-rope in the back yard.”

Dorothea brings icy cucumber soup and we are silent until she leaves again. The grandfather clock chimes ten, and I am amazed at how swiftly the day has gone. By now most of the townspeople are either in bed, or getting ready. Sunday is a hard day, with the trip to church, visits, activities that they don’t have often enough to become accustomed to. They will sleep well tonight, I think. I look at Sid and think that he should sleep well too tonight. His eyes are sunken-looking, and I suppose he has lost weight; he looks older, more mature than he did the first time I met him.

“Are you going to set up your equipment tonight?” I ask. “Any of the other boys volunteer?”

“No,” Roger says shortly. He looks at Sid and says, “As a matter of fact, we decided today not to put any of them in it again here.”

“You’re leaving, then?”

“Sending all the kids back, but Sid and I’ll be staying for awhile. And Dr. Staunton.”

I put down my spoon and lean back, waiting for something that is implicit in the way Roger stops and Sid looks murderously at him. I watch Sid now.

“We think you should leave, too,” he says.

I look to Roger, who nods, and then at Staunton. He is so petulant-looking, even pursing his lips. He fidgets and says, “Miss Matthews, may I suggest something? You won’t take it amiss?” I simply wait. He goes on, “I think you should return to the city and make an appointment with the psychiatrist at Columbia.”

“And the others you are sending out? Should they also see doctors?”

“As a matter of fact, I do think so.”

Sid is examining his bowl of soup with great care, and Roger is having trouble with his cigarette lighter. “But not them?” I ask Staunton, pointing at Roger and Sid.

“Them too,” he says reluctantly. Sid looks amused now and Roger manages to light his cigarette.

“Is this your opinion too?” I ask Sid. “That I should see Dr. Calridge?”

“No. Just go away from here, and stay away.”

Dorothea is bringing in a cart now and I wonder how much she has heard. I see her lined face and the pain in her eyes and I know that she has heard a lot of it, if not all. She catches my gaze and nods firmly. Then she serves us: sizzling ham steaks, french fried fruits, pineapple, apple rings, bananas, sweet potato soufflé.

It is after eleven when we are finished with dinner, and by now Sid is almost asleep. He says, “I’ve got to go. Will you set things up, Rog?”

“Sure. Damn shame that Doug pooped out on us. We need all the data we can get now.”

“I can do the recording,” I say.

At almost the same instant Staunton says, “I thought I was going to record both of you tonight.”

Roger and Sid look embarrassed, and Sid says after a pause, “Doctor Staunton, if it’s all the same with you, we’ll let Janet do it.”

“You really think I’m that biased? That I can’t get objective data?”

Sid stands up and steadies himself with one hand on the table. “I’m too tired to be polite,” he says, “and too tired to argue. So, yes I think you’re too biased to record the dreams. Roger, will you show Janet what we’re doing?”

Roger stays with me until the eye-movement trace shows that Sid is having his first dream, and he watches as I call Sid on the phone and turn on the recorder, and then switch it off again. Then Roger goes to bed in the second room and I see that his electrodes are all working, and I am alone watching the two sets of moving lines. The mountains and valleys of life, I think, watching them peak and level out, and peak again.

There is no mistaking the start of REM sleep; the rapid eye-movements cause a sharp change in the pattern of the peaks and valleys that is more nearly like a waking EEG than that of a sleeping person. I call Sid again, and listen to him describe climbing a mountain, only to slip back down again and again. Roger is on a raft that keeps getting caught up on a tide and brought back to a shore that he is desperately trying to escape.

The same dream, different only in details. Like the dreams I heard earlier on the tape recorder. Like my own.

At three in the morning Staunton joins me. I can tell that he hasn’t been asleep, but I wish he had kept his insomnia to himself. He says, “You might need help. I won’t bother you. I’ll just sit over here and read.” He looks haggard, and like Sid, he seems to have aged since coming to Somerset. I turn my attention to the EEGs again. Roger is dreaming.

“Peaceful now, watching a ball game from a great distance, very silent everywhere.” I bite my lips as I listen to this strange voice that seems to’ have a different accent, a different intonation; flatter and slower, of course, but apart from that, it is a changed voice. It is the dream of contentment, wanting nothing, needing nothing. This is the dream that my six people keep reporting to me, modified from person to person, but the same. Suddenly Roger’s voice sharpens as he recalls the rest of the dream, and now there is a sense of urgency in his reporting. “And I had to get out of it, but couldn’t move. I was frozen there, watching the game, afraid of something I couldn’t see, but knew was right behind me. Couldn’t move.”

I glance at Staunton and he is staring at the moving pens. Roger has become silent once more, so I turn off the tape recorder and look also at the continuing record. Typical nightmare pattern.

Staunton yawns and I turn to him and say, “Why don’t you try to get some sleep? Really, I’m fine. I slept almost all day, remember?”

He yawns again, then says, “If ... if I seem to be dreaming, will you waken me?” I nod and he stretches out on the couch and is asleep almost instantly.

There is a coffee maker with strong coffee hot in it, and I pour myself a cup, and try to read the book that Roger provided, a spy thriller. I can’t keep my mind on it. The hotel is no more noisy at night than my own house, but the noises are not the same, and I find myself listening to them, rustlings in the halls, distant doors opening and closing, the occasional squeak of the porch swing. I sit up straighter. A woman’s laugh? Not at three-fifteen in the morning, surely. I have more coffee and wander to the window. A light on in the Sayer house? I blink and when I look again, I know that it was my imagination. I remember how their baby used to keep night hours, and smile. The baby would be fifteen or sixteen now, at least. I used to babysit for them now and then, and the child never slept.

I return to my chair by the electroencephalograph and see that Sid has started a new dream. I reach for the phone, waiting for the peak to level off again, and slowly withdraw my hand. He is dreaming a long one this time. After five minutes I begin to feel uneasy, but still I wait. Roger has said to rouse the sleeper after ten minutes of dreaming, if he hasn’t shown any sign of being through by then. I wait, and suddenly jerk awake and stab my finger at the phone button. He doesn’t answer.

I forget to turn on the recorder, but rush into the next room to bring him out of this dream turned into nightmare, and when I touch his shoulder, I am in it too.

Somerset is gay and alive with playing children, and sun umbrellas everywhere. There are tables on the lawn of Sagamore House, and ladies in long white skirts moving among them, laughing happily. The Governor is due and Dorothea and Annie are bustling about, ordering the girls in black aprons this way and that, and everywhere there is laughter. A small boy approaches the punch bowl with a wriggling frog held tightly in one hand, and he is caught and his knickers are pulled down summarily and the sounds of hand on bottom are plainly heard, followed by wails. I am so busy, and someone keeps trying to pull me away and talk to me. I shake him off and run to the table where Father and Mother are sitting, and see to it that they have punch, and then swirl back to the kitchen where Dorothea is waiting for me to help her with the ice sculpture that is the centerpiece. It is a tall boy with curly hair rising up from a block of ice, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I want to weep for him because in a few hours he will be gone. I slip on a piece of ice and fall, fall... fall .. .