Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

A fitting father and mother to the world such a pair would be!

And so he had made his rule: drink all you want when you have to—in the city—but never bring it home.

And so he had told Siss: “I don’t know what I want, exactly. I just want to go to the city.”

And she had said: “All right, Mr. Ralph, if you have to.”

There was her perception again, if that’s what it was. “If you have to,” she’d said, though he’d talked of want, not need.

“I do,” he said. “But I’ll come back. Is there anything I can bring you?” She looked around the kitchen and began to say something, then stopped and said instead: “Nothing we really need. You just go, Mr. Ralph, and take as long as you have to. It’ll give me a chance to go do that berry-picking I been wanting to.”

She was so sweet that he almost decided not to go. But then he kissed her—very thankful, just then, that she was his Siss and not some too-bright shrew of a problem wife —and went. He drove in, naked in a Cadillac.

He had rolled the swivel chair out of the store onto the sidewalk and was sitting in it in the afternoon sunshine. Beside him on the pavement were half a dozen bottles, each uncapped. He was talking to himself.

“As the afternoon sun, blood-red through the haze* of the remnants of a once overpopulated world, imperceptibly glides to its bed, one of the two known survivors becomes quietly plastered.” He had a drink on that, then went on:

“What thoughts pass through the mind of this pitiful creature, this naked relic of a man left to eke out the rest of his days on a ruined planet?

“Does he ever recall the glory that once was his and that of his fellows? Or is he so sunk in misery—in the mere scratching of a bare existence from an arid soil— that he has forgotten the heights to which his kind once had risen? Subject pauses in thought and reaches for bottle. Drinks deeply from bottle, but not so deeply as to induce drunken sickenness. Aim of subject is quiet plasterization, happy drunkdom, a nonceness of Nirvana, with harm to none and bitterness never. Sicken drunkenness?

“A respite of reverie, perhaps, as subject casts mind back to happy past. Mr. Martin Rolfe in Happier Days.”

He picked up his New York Times Magazine and leafed through it. It was almost as good as having another drink. There they were—they couldn’t have been more than 17 —leaping in their panty girdles to show the freedom of action and the elasticity of the crotch. He remembered once having heard a newsman, waiting in the rain for the arrival of a President, say: “Being a reporter is essentially an undignified occupation.” So had been being a model, obviously.

Things of the past ... He thought: “A title for my memoirs— Things of the Past.” He took up the Times again and turned to an ad of a debonair young man in a revolving door holding a copy of the Wall Street Journal. “I dreamt I was trapped in a revolving door in my Arcticweave tropical worsted,” Rolfe said, summing up the situation. He looked like the 28-year-old Larchmont type; five years out of college, with a Master’s, two kids, wife beginning to drink a little bit too much. “If he’s trapped there long enough he may read the paper right through to the shipping pages and ship out to the islands.”

Rolfe looked pityingly at the trapped Larchmont type, armed against his predicament only with his Arctieweave suit, his Wall Street Journal and, presumably, a wallet full of wife-and-baby pictures, credit cards and a commutation ticket issued by a railroad company petitioning to suspend passenger service.

“You poor bastard,” Rolfe said.

Of course he was saying it to himself, too. He said it all the way home: “You poor bastard. You poor bastard.”

Siss was waiting for him in the cool garden. Gently she led him indoors. She said, with only the slightest hint of reproach (he could stand that much—he deserved more): “You been drinking too much again, Mr. Ralph. You know it’s bad for you.”

“You’re right, Siss. Absolutely right.”

“You got to take care of yourself. I try to, but you got to try, too.”

Tenderly she put him to bed. He knew then, among other times, how much he needed her, and he struggled to say something nice to her before he dropped off to sleep. Finally he said: “You know, Siss, you’re nicer than all those crazy leaping girls in the York Times.” That’s what she called it, the York Times. “You got a lot more sense, too, than they look as if they had.”

From his notebooks:

Got drunk saft. Downtown. Dangerous. Not fair to Siss. Liable get et up by dogs while stinko. Bad show.

Can’t bring bottle home, tho. Too great a temptation to get sozzled daily and twice on Sunday.

Why is Sunday worse than other days? I tried to rename it but Siss insisted we keep it. She also demanded it come every seven days, just like in good old days. Had to give in. So much for calendar reform.

He sought other ways of escaping. He hiked and climbed and explored.

Once he found a spot on the brow of a hill from which one (that is, he) could see for miles but from which no work of man was visible except the top of a silo at the top of a similar hill across a wide valley.

Having found the spot, he cleared wild strawberry plants from beneath a young maple tree, leaving the fems and the cushiony moss, and lay down to rest. It had been a strenuous climb, and hot, and now the insects were upon him. But though the flies buzzed they did not often land and the mosquitoes were torpid and easily slapped. After a while—it was almost noon (as if the hour mattered)—he had a couple of swallows from the flask he carried in his rucksack and ate some cheese. He thought of the flask as his iron rations.

As he rummaged in the rucksack he found a roll of plastic tape he’d brought along to help him blaze a trail. He hadn’t needed it; instead he’d marked his way by cutting branches with a long-handled pruning tool.

But as he lay in the solitude he had sought out and found (how odd to seek solitude in an empty world!), under one of a myriad of trees, where the only sounds were of buzzing insects, chirping birds, the soughing of trees in a soft wind—he knew what to do with the plastic tape. He printed something on a little square of paper, small but legible, and, with the tape, attached it to the lowest bough of his young maple. Now he lay under it, savoring what he had done.

The little sign said: THIS TREE RESERVED.

One June night it rained in great, warm, wind-driven sheets. He had not experienced such a storm since a visit a decade earlier to the tropics.

The pleasure he took in the soaking, bath-temperature rain was enhanced by the danger from the lightning. It stabbed down from the sky as if seeking him out, destroying and burning only yards away, as if it would be a great cosmic joke to strike that one spot on the surface of the Earth and kill the last man.

He defied it, prancing wildly, then halting deliberately as if transfixed when it flashed, posing with outthrust or upthrust arms, yelling, defying the thing or Being that had sent the storm, loosing his pent-up frustrations, his disappointments and hates in the elemental power of the storm.

He had trapped the beast in a pit, unfairly. It had nearly exhausted itself in attempts to leap the sheer walls. At least he hadn’t lined the bottom with spikes.

Rolfe could have killed it from above, poisoned it, let it starve. Instead he jumped into the pit, armed with two knives, to risk mauling and death.

He realized his folly instantly. The creature was far from helpless. Its claws were sharp, though its movements were clumsy in the cramped pit-bottom, and its fetid breath was as much a weapon as its fangs.