Дэймон Найт: Orbit 4

“You do have to be careful. Used to have hay fever myself, fall come around I couldn’t breathe. Took an allergy test and they cleared it up.”

“Yeah, we tried that. Tried about everything. You oughta see our income tax for the last few years, reads like a medical directory. Sarah got so many holes poked in her, the asthma should have leaked right out. Wasn’t any of it seemed to help, though.”

“How’s Sarah doing? Haven’t seen her for quite a while. She’s usually running around in here helping you, shooing you back to the kitchen, making you change your apron, talking to customers. Brightens the place up a lot.”

Doug tilted the cup to drain an extra ounce of cold coffee oft the grounds.

“Not much business lately,” he said. “Boy I had working for me just kind of up and left three-four months ago and I never got around to looking for help, no need of it, specially now.”

“She’s well, though? Doing okay.”

Doug put his cup down, rattling it against the saucer.

“Yeah, she’s okay. She—” He stood and made his way around the counter. “She went away awhile. To get some rest.” He dipped under the counter and came up with a huge stainless steel bowl. “Think I’ll make another pot. This one’s getting stale. Better anyhow if you use the stuff regularly, easier on it, works better—like getting a car out on the road to clean her out.”

He started working at the urn, opening valves, sloshing dark coffee down into the bowl. Hoover watched Doug’s reflection in the shady mirror and a dimmer image of himself lying out across the smooth formica.

So Doug’s wife had gone away too; Sarah had gone to get some rest . . . Hoover remembered a song he’d heard at one of the faculty parties: Went to see my Sally Gray, Went to see my Sally Gray, Went to see my Sally Gray, Said my Sally’s gone away—only this time Sally Gray had taken everybody else with her . . .

Doug was chuckling at the urn.

“You know I gotta make twenty cups just to get two for us, I mean that’s the least this monster here’ll handle. Ask him for forty-fifty cups, he’ll give it to you in a minute. But you ask him for two, just two little cups of coffee, and he’ll blow his stack, or a gasket or something.” He went back to clanging at the urn. “Reckon you can handle ten of ’em?” He started fixing the filter, folding it in half twice, tearing off a tiny piece at one corner. “Hell, there ain’t enough people left in town to drink twenty cups of coffee if I was giving it away and they was dying of thirst. Or anywhere around here.”

He bowed the filter into a cone between his hands, climbed a chair to install it, then came down and drew a glass of water, putting it in front of Hoover.

“That’s for while you wait.”

“I need to be going anyway, Doug. Have to get some sleep sooner or later.”

Doug reached and retrieved Hoover’s cup, staring at the sludge settling against the bottom. “One last cup.”

“All right. One more.”

One for the road . . .

Doug bent and rinsed the cup, then got another from the stack and put it on the counter. He stood looking at the clean, empty cup, wiping his hands against the apron. He lit a cigarette, nodding to himself, and the glowing red tip echoed one of the skipping neon signs on the wall behind him. He put the package on the counter and smiled, softly.

“You know, you could’ve sat right here and watched the whole thing happening. I mean, at first there’d be the usual group, but they were . . . nervous. You know: jumpy. They’d sort of scatter themselves out and every now and then the talk would die down and there’d be this quiet, like everybody was listening for something, waiting for something. Then a lot of them stopped coming, and the rest would sit all around the room, talking across to each other, then just sitting there quiet for a long time by themselves. Wasn’t long before the regulars didn’t come anymore—and you knew what was going on, you knew they were draining out of town like someone had pulled the plug.

“That was when the others started showing up. They’d come in with funny looks on their faces, all anxious to talk. And when you tried to talk to ’em, they’d be looking behind you and around the room and every once in a while they’d get up and go look out the window. And then they’d leave and you’d never see them again.”

Hoover sat with his legs locked back, toes on the floor, regarding the glass of water (the bubbles had nearly vanished). He nodded: he knew, he understood.

“For a while I got some of the ones that were coming through. I’d be in the back and I’d hear the door and come out, and there’d be this guy standing there, shuffling his feet, looking at the floor. He’d pay and take his coffee over in the corner, then the next time I looked around, he’d be gone—lot of them would just take it with them, to go. Then even that stopped.”

(The people: they drip, trickle, run, pour, flood from the cities. They don’t look back. And the ones who stay, try to fight it—they feel it growing in them worse than before. Turning in them, touching them, and they care they love they can’t let go. But the harder they fight, the worse it is, like going down in quicksand, and the wall’s a wedge: shove it between two people and they come apart, like all the rest, like all the rest of the world . . .)

Doug found something on the counter to watch.

“One time during the War, the ship I was on went down on the other side and a sub picked us up. I still remember how it felt, being in that sub, all the people packed in like sardines, stuffed into spaces between controls and motors. You’d think it.would be full of noise, movement. But there was something about being under all that water, being closed in, something about the light —anyway, something that made you feel alone, made you want to whisper. I’d just sit in it and listen. Feel. And pretty soon I’d start wanting them all to really go away, to leave me alone . .

Doug stood looking for a moment out one of the small round windows past Hoover’s shoulder.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the way it is all right.” Then his eyes switched back to Hoover’s cup. “I better go get that coffee, just take it a minute to perk.”

He picked up his cup and walked down the counter toward the kitchen, running his hand along the formica. The door swung back in, wobbled, stopped (light had reached, retreated).

Hoover felt suddenly hollow; empty; squeezed. He looked around. The room was a cave again.

Out in the kitchen, Doug moved among his stainless steel and aluminum. Hoover heard him banging pots on pans, opening doors, sliding things on shelves out of his way. Then the texture of sound changed, sank to quiet, became a silence that stretched and stretched. And seconds later broke: the back door creaked open and shut with a hiss of air along its spring, clicking shut.

(So now the quicksand’s got Doug too, for all his fighting. Now he’s gone with the rest, gone with Sally Gray . . .)

Outside in the alley angling along and behind the cafe, Doug’s Harley-Davidson pumped and caught, coughed a couple of times and whined away, one cylinder banging.

Hoover sat looking at the abandoned cup as silence came in to fill his ears. Then he heard the buzzing of electric wires.

The last grasping and their fingers had slipped.

The wedge was driven in, and they'd come apart . . .

He stood, digging for a dime and finding he’d forgotten to fill his pockets, then walked to the register and punched a key. “No Sale” came up under the glass. There were two nickels and some pennies.

He fed the coins in (ping! ping!), dialed, and waited. The phone rang twice and something came on, breathing into the wires.