Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

Spool of thread, spool of thread . . .

He remembered, dreamed, of losing his first tooth, and the thread his mother had tied around it, her gentle insistence, that he pull it himself, and her promise, after a look of surprise and amusement that, yes, they would send it to his father. He drifted out of the dream-reverie and was wide awake thinking about his father who had been a good man, kind and wise, a colonel in the army. He got out of bed and paced his tiny room smoking furiously, but the image of his father naked and bruised, shaved clean, dragging one foot, being pulled hobbling down a street crowded with Oriental faces that were grimaces of hate, the image remained, just as he had watched it on television. A good man, he repeated soberly. But he might have done the things they accused him of doing. He might have.

He swallowed a pill and returned to bed and found himself repeating: spool of thread, spool of thread. He wanted to get up again, but the pill was quick and he felt lethargy stealing over him. He would be achy in the morning, always was achy when he resorted to sleeping pills. Spool of thread . . .

He dreamed discordant, meaningless dreams, fantasies without basis in reality. And slept deeper, and was less restless on the single bed.

We walk through the museum arm in arm and it is Paula who is leading us, although she is in the middle. Her steps are light and quick, and she talks incessantly. She pauses before the paintings of the new artist, Stern, and she squints and cocks her head this way and that, then she pulls us on to the next one. She is changed now, her hair still long and straight, but shining clean, and she has done something to her face, something so subtle that I can’t decide what it is. I find myself staring at her again and again, and she smiles at me, and for an instant I find the wild girl who lived for the ocean only five years ago. Then it is gone and she is saying, “It’s such a joke! He’s wonderful! Don’t you see it?” There are fifty paintings, arranged in aisles that meet and interconnect so that it is hard not to repeat an aisle. There is no arrow pointing this way, no numbers on the paintings, but Paula has led us through them to the end, and she is laughing with delight. The artist is there, regarding Paula with deep and penetrating interest. She runs to him and kisses him on his bearded cheek and says, “Thank you. I won’t tell.” And she doesn’t tell. Gregory goes back to the beginning and works his way slowly to us once more, and when he comes back, his eyes share her mirth, but he won’t tell either. I know that he can explain it although she can’t, but he needed her to tell him there was something to explain. I return later and study the paintings alone for a long time, and I don’t know what they found. I am lost there. The paintings are grotesque, hideous and meaningless, and the arrangement is meant to befuddle, not to enlighten.

Paula loves the city as she loved the beaches. She runs and dances through the streets joyously, tasting what no one else tastes, smelling what no one else smells, seeing what is not there for my eyes to see. She sings in the city like a fresh breeze from the ocean.

Paula plans to leave school in the spring. She wants. . . she doesn’t know what she wants, but it is not in school. She will travel, perhaps marry. I feel tightness in my throat and I ask if she will marry me and she stops, frozen, and finally after a long time she says no. I am angry with her and stalk away. Gregory says that she is like a bird now, she must fly here and there before she stops and love would stop her. I hate them both, their closeness, their awareness of each other. I want to kill them both. Especially Paula. My hands are fists when she comes near me and the smothering waves of love-hate immobilize me at a place where the pain is unendurable.

She knows. Paula is like a spring wind then, gentle and soothing, and I am filled with her presence. For two weeks we are together and she is in every cell of me, deep in me where she can never escape now. Then she is gone. Gregory knows where, I think, but he doesn’t tell me. He plods with his books, getting every detail of every subject letter-perfect, but he never originates anything, never oilers anything and he is like a shadow without the wind. I know his loss is greater than my own, but I don’t care about that. I return to California where I am still in school, and the jet is my scream of anguish that I cannot utter for myself. I want her out of my life. I want never to see her again. I want her dead so that no one else can have her.

Dan Thornton strode across his mammoth office and began pushing buttons on a four-by-eight-foot console on one side of his desk. Three doors flew open from other rooms, and shaking men entered; he waved them to seats and waited for the Secretary.

“I have your answer,” he said to the Secretary on his arrival. “It is simply this . . He was dying, his throat tightening and choking him, his heart pounding harder and harder. . . .

He sat up shivering. He reached for the notebook and the light, and wrote quickly and lay down again. He thought he had been wakeful off and on most of the night, and now the sky was lightening, a pale grey touched with peach tones. He squeezed his eyes tighter, desperately wanting sleep to return, deep, untroubled sleep, and he knew that it would not.

Feldman said slowly, “You are aware of what the Phalanx is, yet you consistently deny any real knowledge of it to yourself. Why is that?”

Thornton shrugged. He thought of his wife and three children and talked of them for a few minutes until Feldman stopped him.

“I know about them. You told me early about them, and it is on your file. Tell me about the spool of thread.”

He free-associated for a while; he had learned to do it quite well, but privately he thought it was nonsense. He paid little attention to his own voice when he free-associated. It wasn’t as if he were being analyzed for a medical purpose, he had told himself early in the business. Feldman was paid to keep tabs, that was all. He had nothing to hide, nothing of interest to learn about himself, so he cooperated, but didn’t pay much attention.

Feldman said, “Maze,” and he answered, “Art Museum.” He sat straight up on the couch. He was shivering/Feldman nodded to him when he swung around to look. “So that is that,” Feldman said. “What it is actually I don’t know, but you do now, don’t you?”

Thornton shook his head violently, shivering hard. He remembered the feeling of being lost at an art exhibit years ago. “It was so meaningless,” he said. “This exhibit was arranged like a maze and the artist came over to me while I was standing there feeling stupid, and he told me that it meant nothing. I had worked hard trying to puzzle it out, and he said it had no meaning. It was arranged like a maze.”

Feldman looked disappointed. His silence invited Thornton to keep talking, but there was nothing more to say about it. Thornton said, “The Phalanx is the final solution to the problem of modem warfare. It is an armored computer bank designed to control at least twenty-five subunits at this time, and it will have the capacity to control n subunits when it is completed. The subunits to this point have been built to scout jungle trails, and go through undergrowth where there are no trails searching out the enemy. They come equipped with flame throwers, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, communications units, infrared sensors, mass sensors, mine laying, or mine detection devices, chemical analysis labs, still and movie cameras, audio sensors and transmitters . .

He became aware of Feldman’s bright, unblinking gaze and he paused and grinned at the analyst. Softly he added, “But the main problem with the Phalanx is that it doesn’t know what a smile is on a friendly face. It can’t distinguish between friend and enemy. It can’t tell if the metal it senses is a gun or a hoe. It has no way of knowing if the mass-burdened heat source is a man with a howitzer or an ass with a load of firewood. And no matter how many changes the psycho-cybernetics lab sends to me, I can’t program those things into it.”