Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“Call me Martin. Complaints? I like my privacy, that’s all.”

“My name’s Sol,” the lieutenant said, “and this is Eric.” They shook hands all round again, now that the first-name basis had been established, and Sol said: “About the road being mined. Sure it’s private property and nobody respects the principle of that more than I do, but somebody might get hurt. Somebody who couldn’t read, maybe, or who wandered in after dark—not really meaning to trespass, you know.”

“Sure,” Rolfe said. “I can understand that.”

“Besides,” the sergeant—Eric—said, “anybody with war surplus ammunition was supposed to have turned it in years ago. It’s the law.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rolfe said. “I haven’t booby-trapped the road. I wouldn’t hurt a rabbit, much less a human being. Why, I’m so soft-hearted I don’t even fish the stream.”

Sol said: “I get it. You just put up the sign to keep people away—like ‘Beware of the Dog,’ even if you don’t have a dog.”

“And there really aren’t any bouncing Bettys out there then?” Eric said. “I’m relieved. Believe me, we walked mighty easy along the edge.”

Martin Rolfe grinned. “Gentlemen, I think I begin to understand. And it’s all my fault because I’m such a poor speller. What I was trying to do was to call attention to the fact that it isn’t a public road or a hiking trail or a place for young vandals to go if they have a hankering to break windows or set fires in out-of-the-way places. I believe there’ve been a few such incidents around town.”

“Too many,” Sol said. “But I still don’t know what you mean about being a poor speller.”

“What I intended to say on the sign, I guess, was ‘Mind you, this is a private road.’ It’s a kind of New England expression.”

“I’ve heard it,” Eric said. “They have signs like that in London, where my wife’s from—she was a war bride, you know, Lieutenant—that say ‘Mind the step.’ ”

“That’s m-i-n-d, not m-i-n-e-d,” Sol said.

“Is that right?” Rolfe asked with a grin. “I told you I wasn’t much of a speller. I’d better change the sign, then, hadn’t I?”

Instead of replying directly, Sol asked: “Ever have trouble with kids back in here?”

“Kids and grown-ups both,” Rolfe said. “Different kinds of trouble. Kids broke a window one night. I was asleep and got a shower of broken glass all over my face. Another time a big brave man with a gun shot the hell out of a mother partridge and her brood and left them flopping around. He wasn’t even planning to eat them. Did you ever put a living thing out of its misery with your bare hands, Sol? That same day I put up the sign. The partridges and I haven’t been bothered since.”

Sol got up and let himself out into the clearing. “I had to kill a doe once that some mighty hunter put a hole into but didn’t think worth following into the brush.” Eric went out with Martin Rolfe behind him and all three walked along the middle of the track to the county road. Birds chirped at them and a leisurely rabbit hopped away.

At the blacktopped road Martin Rolfe went to his sign. He took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and scratched a vertical line through the E in mined. Then he joined the N and D with a copyreader’s mark.

The sergeant said, “I don’t know that that’s too highly visible. Besides, a couple of rains’ll wash it off.”

“Oh, come on, Eric,” the lieutenant said, getting into the car. “It’s as plain as day.”

“Thanks, lieutenant,” Martin said, going over to the police car to say goodbye. “I never could spell worth a damn.”

“Oh, yeah?” Eric said. “I’ll bet you can outspell both of us any day.” He was looking back at the sign as he got into the car and he tripped, so that he had to grab for the door to steady himself.

“Mind the step,” Martin said.

It was achingly poignant for him to leaf through the pages of a copy he’d saved of The New York Tinies Magazine.

How lovable and childlike seemed the people doing the weird things fashion advertising demanded of them! How earnest were the statements made in the articles and the letter pages. For example, there was the ironic, the heart-breakingly laughable article about the population explosion—about the insupportable hundreds of millions there soon would be in India, or the six billion there’d be on Earth in just a few more years.

Would that there were only as many people as had read that particular Sunday issue of the Times. A million and a half? World enough. Or even if there existed on Earth only the few hundred people it had taken to write, edit and print that particular issue of The New York Times Magazine. Even if there were only one other than Siss and himself. One man to play chess with, or to philosophize with.

He thrust away from him the thought that the third person on Earth might be another woman. It was too dangerous, too explosive a thought. Would he betray Siss for a normal woman? Certainly he would never abandon her, but betrayal was certain—she would be so easy to fool. What form, other than an intellectual one, would it take? Would he take the new woman blatantly as his mate, with a facile explanation to Siss? Would the new one try to banish Siss (he’d never stand for that—would he?), or decree a demeaning role for her in a reorganized household—something he might rationalize himself into accepting? (He could hear the new one saying: “You want our children—Earth’s only children—to be intelligent, don’t you? You don’t want the new world peopled with feeble-minded brats, do you?”)

His thoughts went back to the possible consequences if a third person were male. Suppose the man were not a chess player? Suppose he were a mere brute, with brutish instincts? Would Martin have to share Siss with him, Eskimo style? Even if he could bring himself (or Siss) to accept such an arrangement, how long could it continue without an explosion?

No—as long as he was fantasizing it would be simpler to dream up two other people, a man and a woman who had already arranged their own lives, who had made the adjustment.

Still—how long could two couples—and only two— live side by side without something boiling over? Wifeswapping was too prevalent an institution in the bad old days, when there was all kinds of other entertainment, not to be a daily temptation in an all-but-depopulated world.

No—it would be best to have no third or fourth person —not unless there could be an infinity of others besides . . .

Ah, but he was so lonely!

“I’m going to the city,” he told Siss.

They had done without the city for a long time. They had made do with the things they had, or could make; they’d let their clothing drop away and hadn’t replaced it; they’d grown their own food; made their country house the center of their universe. But now he wanted to go back.

She must have seen something in his eyes. “Let me go for you,” she said. “Just tell me what you want.”

Sometimes she chose such an ironic way of saying things that he fleetingly suspected her of having not only intelligence but wit.

“Just tell you what I want! As if—” He stopped. As if he could tell her. As if he knew.

He knew only that he had to get away for a little while. He wanted to be alone, with his own memories of a populated Earth.

He also wanted a drink.

Long ago he had made it a rule never to have liquor in the house. It would be too great a temptation to have it handy. He could see himself degenerating into a drunken bum. With an unlimited supply close at hand and a devoted woman to do all the work that needed to be done, he could easily slip into an animalistic role—become a creature with a whiskey-sodden, atrophied brain.