Пол Андерсон - Orbit 1

She did not answer. She got out and walked a few steps.

Her whole posture was changed. She almost danced along. I followed and touched her shoulder.

“Tell me what’s special,” I said.

She faced around and stared right past me. She had a new grace and vitality and she was a very pretty girl.

“It’s where all the dogs are,” she said.

“Dogs?”

I looked around at the scrubby sagebrush and thin soil and ugly black rock and back at Helen. Something was wrong.

“Big, stupid dogs that go in herds and eat grass,” she said. She kept turning and gazing. “Big cats chase the dogs and eat them. The dogs scream and scream. Can’t you hear them?” “That’s crazy!” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”. I might as well have slugged her. She crumpled instantly back into herself and I could hardly hear her answer.

“I’m sorry. My brother and I used to play out fairy tales here. All this was a kind of fairyland to us.” Tears formed in her eyes. “I haven’t been here since.. I forgot myself. I’m sorry.”

I had to swear I needed to dictate “field notes” to force Helen into that desert again. She sat stiffly with pad and pencil in the jeep while I put on my act with the Geiger and rattled off jargon. Her lips were pale and compressed and I could see her fighting against the spell the desert had for her, and I could see her slowly losing.

She finally broke down into that strange mood and I took good care not to break it. It was weird but wonderful, and I got a lot of data. I made her go out for “field notes” every morning and each time it was easier to break her down. Back in the office she always froze again and I marveled at how two such different persons could inhabit the same body. I called her two phases “Office Helen” and “Desert Helen.”

I often talked with old Dave on the veranda after dinner.

One night he cautioned me.

“Folks here think Helen ain’t been right in the head since her brother died,” he said. “They’re worrying about you and her.”

“I feel like a big brother to her,” I said. “I’d never hurt her, Dave. If we find the lode, I’ll stake the best claim for her.”

He shook his head. I wished I could explain to him how it was only a harmless game I was playing and no one would ever find gold out there. Yet, as a game, it fascinated me.

Desert Helen charmed me when, helplessly, she had to uncover her secret life. She was a little girl in a woman’s body. Her voice became strong and breathless with excitement and she touched me with the same wonder that turned her own face vivid and elfin. She ran laughing through the black rocks and scrubby sagebrush and momentarily she made them beautiful. She would pull me along by the hand and some-times we ran as much as a mile away from the jeep. She treated me as if I were a blind or foolish child.

“No, no, Duard, that’s a cliff!” she would say, pulling me back.

She would go first, so I could find the stepping stones across streams. I played up. She pointed out woods and streams and cliffs and castles. There were shaggy horses with claws, golden birds, camels, witches, elephants and many other creatures. I pretended to see them all, and it made her trust me. She talked and acted out the fairy tales she had once played with Owen. Sometimes he was enchanted and some-times she, and the one had to dare the evil magic of a witch or giant to rescue the other. Sometimes I was Duard and other times I almost thought I was Owen.

Helen and I crept into sleeping castles, and we hid with pounding hearts while the giant grumbled in search of us and we fled, hand in hand, before his wrath.

Well, I had her now. I played Helen’s game, but I never lost sight of my own. Every night I sketched in on my map whatever I had learned that day of the fairyland topography. Its geomorphology was remarkably consistent.

When we played, I often hinted about the giant’s treasure. Helen never denied it existed, but she seemed troubled and evasive about it. She would put her finger to her lips and look at me with solemn, round eyes.

“You only take the things nobody cares about,” she would say. “If you take the gold or jewels, it brings you terrible bad luck.”

“I got a charm against bad luck and I’ll let you have it too,” I said once. “It’s the biggest, strongest charm in the whole world.”

“No. It all turns into trash. It turns into goat beans and dead snakes and things,” she said crossly. “Owen told me. It’s a rule, in fairyland.”

Another time we talked about it as we sat in a gloomy ravine near a waterfall. We had to keep our voices low or we would wake up the giant. The waterfall was really the giant snoring and it was also the wind that blew forever across that desert.

“Doesn’t Owen ever take anything?” I asked.

I had learned by then that I must always speak of Owen in the present tense.

“Sometimes he has to,” she said. “Once right here the witch had me enchanted into an ugly toad. Owen put a flower on my head and that made me be Helen again.”

“A really truly flower? That you could take home with you?”

“A red and yellow flower bigger than my two hands,” she said. “I tried to take it home, but all the petals came off.”

“Does Owen ever take anything home?”

“Rocks, sometimes,” she said. “We keep them in a secret nest in the shed. We think they might be magic eggs.”

I stood up. “Come and show me.”

She shook her head vigorously and drew back. “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “Not ever.”

She squirmed and pouted, but I pulled her to her feet.

“Please, Helen, for me,” I said. “Just for one little minute.”

I pulled her back to the jeep and we drove to the old Price place. I had never seen her look at it when we passed it and she did not look now. She was freezing fast back into Office Helen. But she led me around the sagging old house with its broken windows and into a tumbledown shed. She scratched away some straw in one corner, and there were the rocks. I did not realize how excited I was until disappointment hit me like a blow in the stomach.

They were worthless waterworn pebbles of quartz and rosy granite. The only thing special about them was that they could never have originated on that basalt desert.

After a few weeks we dropped the pretense of field notes and simply went into the desert to play. I had Helen’s fairyland almost completely mapped. It seemed to be a recent fault block mountain with a river parallel to its base and a gently sloping plain across the river. The scarp face was wooded and cut by deep ravines and it had castles perched on its truncated spurs. I kept checking Helen on it and never found her inconsistent. Several times when she was in doubt I was able to tell her where she was, and that let me even more deeply into her secret life. One morning I discovered just how deeply.

She was sitting on a log in the forest and plaiting a little basket out of fern fronds. I stood beside her. She looked up at me and smiled.

“What shall we play today, Owen?” she asked.

I had not expected that, and I was proud of how quickly I rose to it. I capered and bounded away and then back to her and crouched at her feet.

“Little sister, little sister. I’m enchanted,” I said. “Only you in all the world can uncharm me.”

“I’ll uncharm you,” she said, in that little girl voice. “What are you, brother?”

“A big, black dog,” I said. “A wicked giant named Lewis Rawbones keeps me chained up behind his castle.while he takes all the other dogs out hunting.”

She smoothed her gray skirt over her knees. Her mouth drooped.

“You’re lonesome and you howl all day and you howl all night,” she said. “Poor doggie.”