Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

Leaves fell, dipping and kiting. Puffs of cloud drew their shadows over the blue hills. A flight of crows clamored noisily from tree to tree. One wondered what all the conversation was for. Why didn’t they just leave? It was as though they were saying, Where’s that report from the Florida labs? Dammit, Pete, I told you to take care of that. Their costs are running too high! Who’s that? Representative from Rupert Chemical. Get him out of here, damn spy!

He spent an hour watching a downy woodpecker go up and down the pitchpine just outside his window, picking and picking, softly and imperturbably, while the jays swooped, perched, bowed and brashly quoted prices. That woodpecker was like Paul. Research. The jays, salesmen, in and out all the time, bright-eyed and predatory. The starlings, speculators, always traveling in flocks.

And at last, breakfast came in on a wheeled tray pushed by Erna, the mountain girl, who looked at him white-eyed and served him at arm’s length.

Three days later there was a pimple on his leg. He got out of the boat long enough to touch it gingerly with an exploratory forefinger.

“What’s that?”

“That is how it begins,” said Paul.

Andrew turned to the window irritably. November was forecast by gray gusts of rain. “I wish it were spring.”

A month later, when the first snow lay feathered like a herring-cloud among the brown weeds of the meadow, the pimple had become a huge lump, the size of a grapefruit, and the pain had begun in earnest. It was a queer kind of pain, as though everything in him were being sucked through a pinhole.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” Paul would say, each time he asked the fretful question.

But his suspicions grew. Then the practical self would take command again. You had to stick to the conviction that everything was fine! Maybe it wasn’t, but if not, it still was not practical to dwell on it. Stick with the paying premise.

“I’ve got to have something to do!”

“If you don’t mind Ema, I’ll send her in to play cards with you or something.”

“Anything!”

So Erna, the freckled, long-legged girl, sidled in with a pack of cards, and they played endless, wordless games of Russian bank, in between endless, tasteless meals. And, during the hour each morning, afternoon and evening, when Erna was up at the barn helping Paul with the experimental animals, Andrew played obsessive solitaire.

By February tire lump was the size of a bushel basket and had separated itself from him except for a gristly shining skin-covered tube, that pulsed with his heart like an obscene umbilicus.

“That’s what it is,” said Paul.

“Cover it up!” Andrew ordered. “I don’t want to see it!”

Paul and Erna rigged a curtain between Andrew’s side and the lump’s side of the bed.

Yet, when the March winds started roaring over the quonset, he could no longer bear being in ignorance. He swept aside the curtain to see, and Paul came running at his sudden cry.

“My God, is that it? What’s gone wrong?”

It lay like a huge grub beside him, the head all frontal lobes, so large they wrinkled forward between the blind tumescent bulbs that should have been eyes. Its small caterpillarlike arms were curved in over the wrinkled chest.

“Nothing is wrong. It’s just shaped like a fetus at this stage.”

“It’s hideous!”

Paul jerked the curtain across the bed again and laid a barbiturate on the table. “Take that and stop thinking.”

Andrew gulped it down and replaced the water glass with a trembling hand. “That isn’t me,” he said hoarsely. “That could never be me.”

“Try to stop thinking.”

“What have you done to me?”

“What you insisted I do.”

“I want to stop. Cut it off. Kill it. Get rid of it!”

“If I did, you would die.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You would die. Your body processes are altered now.” He went out and returned with a mirror which he handed Andrew in silence. Glaring at him, Andrew took it, then he glanced in it, handed it back. He didn’t want to see. He had shriveled like a burnt leaf. His skin was leathery and stretched tight over the high bones of his cheeks and forehead and chin, sucked in in prunelike wrinkles around his mouth and eyes. He was aware suddenly of how very weak he had become. He closed his eyes tightly, withdrawing to the tiny boat, clinging to it, rocking and rocking in the now loathsome sea, hearing the suck and surge of his old body’s fluids, the receding tide of his blood.

He had made a mistake. He should not have left his business behind. That was the function of his mind, to keep him from being overwhelmed by this decaying carcass.

He demanded a Times, and Erna made a special trip in the pickup to get it. Thereafter, every day she went in to the distant county seat and brought one back to him. He began to write to his secretary, and large envelopes arrived in the mail once a day. It preoccupied him, and he congratulated himself on getting back to his proper activities again. But by June he was too weak to continue.

That day, when he admitted he could not write any longer, or even leaf stiffly through the contents of the latest brown envelope, Paul pushed back the curtain again. At first, Andrew refused to look.

“It has changed,” Paul assured him. “Take a look.”

At last Andrew turned his head on the pillow.

Beside him, head in the opposite direction, lay a young man.

“That isn’t me.”

“It’s you, all right.”

“It doesn’t look like me. I never looked like that.” He struggled to sit up, but was too feeble. Paul came around and helped him.

“The differences are only wear and tear,” said Paul. “This is a fully mature body, but it’s unmarked by experience. The feet, for example. No calluses, no deformities. They’ve never worn shoes. And the face. Even the face of a four-year-old child is altered to a certain extent by thought.”

Andrew gazed at it, rapt It was eerie, lovely, locked in prenatal composure. “All the orifices are still shut,” he whispered.

“They’ll open shortly now,” said Paul.

Andrew hunched forward as far as he could. “Let me see the hands.”

Paul lifted one hand and held it up for Andrew to see the palm, smooth, flexible, traced like a baby’s with innumerable tiny lines. Andrew studied it avidly.

“I wonder how it will be to touch things again and be able to feel them,” he said, letting Paul help him lie down again.

They kept the curtain back.after that so that Andrew, propped up on pillows, could watch the last changes taking place, the slow unsealing of the eyelids, the lips.

“Why doesn’t he wake up?” Andrew asked.

“This is not your son,” said Paul. “This is you, remember?”

“How do I get in there?”

“Wait and see.”

Andrew was becoming too weak to worry. He avoided looking at his hands, which were so dessicated that the details of the bone structure could be seen through the darkening skin. Erna had to feed him, spoonful by spoonful, a long tedious process that seemed to do him no good at all anymore. Between meals he would sink into a torpor from which he roused sluggishly to be aware that for half-conscious hours he had been carrying on a long dialogue with himself, feebly insisting, heavily denying.

Live! Live!

Oh, it's too weary, it’s too far away, Tm too tired.

That's the trap of the flesh, the weakness of the mind. Don't believe it. Don't listen to it. Live!

And he would pick up the enormous load of his identity and struggle back to seeing once more.

And drift away again, down and down, deeper and deeper . . .

It was warm again and he could smell the meadow, a fragrance compounded of warm grasses and a hint of wild strawberry, immensely sweet. He lay breathing it in, feeling for the first time in months a sense of ease, the quitting of innumerable pains and aches. I’m dead, he thought. And the faraway voice of Paul saying over and over again, “Andrew!” seemed the last echo out of time. So it does go on, he thought. This little I in the dinghy. Well, I’m glad to be out of it. How good to have no sensation but this pleasant scent . . .