Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

I don’t know what I said to Sister Leona or how I got out of the convent. I only remember walking very fast through the almost empty Sunday-morning streets until the sign in front of the newspaper office caught my eye. The sun was reflected from the gilded lettering and the plate glass window in a blinding glare, but I could see dimly the figures of two men moving about inside. I kicked the door until one of them opened it and let me into the ink-scented room. I didn’t recognize either of them, yet the expectancy of the silent, oiled presses in back was as familiar as anything in Cassonsville, unchanged since I had come in with my father to buy the ad to sell our place.

I was too tired to fence with them. Something had been taken out of me in the convent and I could feel my empty belly with a little sour coffee in it. I said, “Listen to me please, sir. There was a boy named Pete Palmer; he was born in this town. He stayed behind when the prisoners were exchanged at Panmunjom and went to Red China and worked in a textile mill there. They sent him to prison when he came back. He’d changed his name after he left here, but that wouldn’t make any difference; there’ll be a lot about him because he was a local boy. Can I look in your files under August and September of 1959? Please?”

They looked at each other and then at me. One was an old man with badly fitting false teeth and a green eyeshade like a movie newspaperman; the other was fat and tough looking with dull, stupid eyes. Finally the old man said, “There wasn’t no Cassonsville boy stayed with the Communists. I’da remembered a thing like that.”

I said, “Can I look, please?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s fifty cents an hour to use them files, and you can’t tear out nothing or take nothing out with you, understand?”

I gave him two quarters and he led me back to the morgue. There was nothing, nothing at all. There was nothing for 1953 when the exchange had taken place either. I tried to look up my birth announcement then, but there were no files before 1945; the old man out front said they’d been “burnt up when the old shop burned.”

I went outside then and stood in the sun awhile. Then I went back to the motel and got my bag and went out to the island. There were no kids this time; it was very lonely and very peaceful. I poked around a bit and found this cave on the south side, then lay down on the grass and smoked my last two cigarettes and listened to the river and looked up at the sky. Before I knew it, it had started to get dark and I knew I’d better begin the trip home. When it was too dark to see the bank across the river I went into this cave to sleep.

I think I had really known from the first that I was never going to leave the island again. The next morning I untied the skiff and let it drift away on the current, though I knew the boys would find it hung up on some snag and bring it back.

How do I live? People bring me things, and I do a good deal of fishing-r-even through the ice in winter. Then there are blackberries and walnuts here on the island. I think a lot, and if you do that right it’s better than the things people who come to see me sometimes tell me they couldn’t do without.

You’d be surprised at how many do come to talk to me. One or two almost every week. They bring me fishhooks and sometimes a blanket or a sack of potatoes and some of them tell me they wish to God they were me.

The boys still come, of course. I wasn’t counting them when I said one or two people. Papa was wrong. Peter still has the same last name as always and I guess now he always will, but the boys don’t call him by it much.

In 1966 I was privileged to be one of the judges of a computer story contest sponsored by Data Processing magazine. The stories were all interesting, although most of them were unprofessionally written; some were very good, and as a group they presented a remarkably unanimous picture of the near future. (A computerized bureaucracy is going to run our lives, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.)

Doris Buck, is a prime exhibit in my gallery of writers who have never grown up. Although she is a grandmother, well into the age of discretion, she is one of the least bored people I know; she is alert, interested, full of enthusiasm. (And her husband, Richard S. Buck, who is in his seventies and has a white beard to prove it, is just the same.)

The author did not enter this story in the computer contest, although I urged her to (she said she would rather sell it to Orbit, bless her heart); but in my opinion it is better than any of the winners, as well as much funnier.

“Hubert was glad he lived in an age when they still had jet transport. The big tunnels got you across the continent faster, but the two-hour jet trip gave you a chance to enjoy the landscape. And Lila loved to hear his description of the Rockies that looked for the whole of their length like a shelf canted over toward the west. Hubert and Lila planned to vacation there sometime. He saved up his credits conscientiously. But Lila’s health had been unpredictable ever since Hubert had volunteered for the late East Asian War.

“Even when Hubert topped his Congressional Medal of Honor and won the Legion of Purity’s Silver Halo for being the only private in the entire Third Expeditionary Force never to have entered a hot spot in Singapore, Saigon, Shanghai or Tokyo, Lila still showed vague, distressing symptoms. When more decorations were showered on him, she’d take days off from the family record-keeping that had once been Hubert’s chore. She’d spend this free time writing ecstatic letters. The itches, the spots, the hive-like bumps, the vein distensions with their sub-aches let up temporarily. But once she was back at the usual secretarial-computation routine that had succeeded housework as the Number One domestic bane, she was as physically wretched as ever, even in her pride.

“Hubert, who worshiped her as Arthurian knights adored their ladies, put a great deal of thought on her problem. If she met him on his return from business trips, an opaque veil over her once pert nose and swollen coralline mouth, Hubert saddened. He had imagination. He realized what having to hide her face meant to Lila. He kissed her on the temple. Even with this Victorian salutation, Hubert would feel Lila catch her breath. It drew a little of the veil right into her mouth. They tried to laugh that off as something comic. But their eyes moistened with the tragedy of it.

“When Hubert reached his house after this business trip, Lila could not get out of bed. Her ankles were dropsical with edema. Far worse, her eyes were swollen shut. But this time her mouth was visible. Her rosy lips under her temporarily sightless eyes murmured, ‘Darling, do you know what day it is?’

“Hubert searched his prodigious memory for a forgotten anniversary. He knew perfectly well the day was April 7. But they’d been married in June. They were engaged on Valentine’s Day. They had both been born on September 9. It wasn’t Mother’s Day. It wasn’t Father’s Day. It wasn’t Remember-the-Grandparents Day. Nor Armistice Day. Nor Unknown Soldier’s Day. Nor Adopt-a-Veteran Day. Nor Corsage Day. Nor Let’s-Eat-Out Day. Nor National Safety Day. It was only April 7, which had the distinction of being no particular day.

“Hubert was at a loss. He fell back on a true and tried tactic. He said, ‘What have I done?’

“ ‘Nothing. I’ve failed you. Ever since you enlisted,’ she said, scratching, ‘I’ve made out our income tax. I work on it a little every week in the year.’ She scratched again. ‘But I’m still only on the seventy-third page. I’m lying here blind. And the returns are due on April 15.’