Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (19 page)

The weather had turned quite cold following the storm, and snow was expected that night. He made coffee and drank it, waiting for the snow to begin. When it came he stood watching it for an hour, then pulled on his outer clothing and went outside. The silence of the world was deepened by the snow; it was a black and white silent scene, like a pastoral charcoal drawing come to life. The snow fell straight down, it changed the landscape, made the forests more alien, hid the tent from view almost instantly, and softened the outlines of the ship, making it appear dreamlike and hazy.

He walked along the edge of the woods, lifting his face from time to time to catch the falling snow on his cheeks, feel it stinging his eyes. From time to time he looked back at the ship, growing dimmer and dimmer, until finally it was gone. He took a deep breath, but there was an ache deep within him at the thought of Jan sleeping apart from him. He walked for an hour before he turned back, going into the woods for the return trip. There was little snow under the trees; it had been captured by the roof of green that was fifty, one hundred feet thick in spots. There was only an occasional plop of a falling nut now; that phase was over. The quiet of the forest was deeper than he had known before, a sleeping forest under a snow featherbed. When he listened for the river he could hear the rushing water splashing over rocks off to his left. He guided himself by the sound of the river, drifting out of range now and then, only to veer to his left until it was there again.

The pure, cold river, the meat of the nuts, oil for burning, for candles, mushrooms, roots, the strange waist-high grasses with cornlike ears on them. It was a bountiful time on Earth, more so than he had known.

When he finally got back to his tent, he felt his exhaustion as a weight pulling him down on the bed still fully clothed. He fell asleep instantly, and his sleep was deep and restful.

Before breakfast he called Jan to the tent and showed her the nuts he had found, and when he finished telling her of his day’s work, he knew that Doyle must have had time to make his announcement about departure.

“Honey, get some sample bags together, will you?” he said to Jan. “I’ll go check the day’s assignments for us.”

She nodded and started to check the contents of his bag. Lorin met Doyle at the ship door.

“Where’s Jan? I want her to hear this, too,” Doyle said.

“I’ll fill her in. She’s busy right now checking our stuff for today. I found a swamp yesterday that is exuding heat and fumes. I think she should get samples from it. If you don’t have other plans for us.”

“That’s okay,” Doyle said uninterestedly. “But get back before dark. We’re going back immediately after dinner.” He turned away without waiting for an answer. Lorin took a tray with coffee and biscuits for Jan and went back to the tent. She looked surprised at the service, and he said quickly, “Big day for us, honey. Doyle wants samples from a swamp I stumbled over yesterday. We’re to eat and start right away. It’s a long walk.”

She stiffened and he added, “I had to argue with him to let me go with you, and he isn’t happy about it. He might still change his mind and send me out with Tryoll again, so we’d better hurry.”

Jan reached for the biscuits and coffee. They finished quickly and he led her straight into the woods, not giving her a chance to stop and talk with any of the others, and not until they were a mile from camp did he start to relax. He whistled then and presently she joined him, whistling harmony.

There was no trace of the snow remaining, and the ground under the trees was dry and springy. A pungent odor filled the air. Lorin detoured from his planned route and pointed out the reason for the smell. Where the snows had fallen through the treetops and melted, thousands of mushrooms had sprung up overnight. Looking at them spread like a carpet Lorin was reminded of a painting he had seen once of a courtyard of white cobblestones. The shiny white caps touched one another, were packed into an area twenty-five feet by forty. They skirted them. There was a look of wonder on Jan’s face.

“They are all edible,” she said. “That’s the same kind that we found down nearer the river. Do you know how much they cost back home?”

“Everything here is edible, and free,” Lorin said happily. “Not a poisonous plant, or spore, or virus, or bacterium. It’s a lovely world now, Jan.”

She squeezed his hand in reply, and he noticed that some of the stiffness had left her, and that she no longer was listening quite so hard. After a while she complained of tiredness and asked how much farther it was.

“Let’s have some lunch and rest,” Lorin said. They had been walking for over four hours. He lowered his pack and took out a plastic cover that he spread out for her to sit on. She rested with her back against one of the trees while he prepared their food: he boiled water over a tiny fire of nut skins, and to the pan of boiling water he added mushrooms and sliced needle nuts, and a handful of the green moss. Jan watched without speaking. When he handed her a cup of the soup she stared at it for several seconds, then said, “Didn’t you bring any of our dri-freeze food? Why this?”

“For fun,” Lorin said. “Try it.” He lifted his cup and sipped the broth and found it even better than he had expected. After a moment Jan tasted hers. They smiled at each other and finished the pot of soup without speaking again. For dessert Lorin peeled raw needle nuts and cut the sections apart. “All things to all men,” he said solemnly. “Fried in their own oil, they are better than potatoes; ground, they make a dandy flour…”

Jan looked troubled, and he stopped talking and took her hand. “You are having fun, aren’t you, honey? It isn’t so bad now, is it?”

She shrugged and glanced about her at the trees and the deepening gloom that filled the spaces between them. “I don’t like it; I don’t feel safe here, but as long as I don’t think about where we are, just remember that we are here together, then I’m all right. If you went away even for two minutes I might start screaming.”

“I won’t go away even for one minute,” he said. He turned her around and pointed to the tree that had been her backrest. “Look at the pattern it makes, honey. Like great scales overlapping, climbing up the tree in a spiral, getting smaller and smaller as they get near the top.” He rubbed his hand over the smooth glossy tree, and when Jan moved slightly away without touching it, he didn’t force the issue. There would be time. She began to roll up the plastic cover, not looking at him. “We’d better be getting on. Is it much farther?”

“Not much now,” he said. He repacked and they walked again. After another hour Jan began glancing at her watch from time to time, and a worried pucker appeared on her forehead.

“Lorin, do you remember exactly where the place is? Are you sure?”

“I think so,” he said. “It can’t be much farther now. Tired?”

“No, of course not, but we have to get back before dark.… Maybe we should start back now. I don’t think we’ll have time before it gets too dark in here.”

“Half an hour more, then if we don’t find the swamp, we’ll go back. I was sure I could go straight to it again.”

After the half hour was up Jan insisted they turn back. An hour later they both knew they couldn’t get out of the woods before night fell.

“Lorin, we can’t stay out here overnight. I won’t. I can’t!”

“Honey, it’s all right. There’s nothing here at night that wasn’t here in the daylight. I’ll be with you. I even have a tent we can pitch.”

Jan whirled about and stared at him unbelievingly. “You did it on purpose! You deliberately brought me out here too far to get back before dark! What will Doyle say? And the Directors when he reports it?”

“We got lost, that’s all. Who can say anything about that? We got lost.” Lorin caught her to him and pressed his face against her hair for a moment. He said softly, “I had to come out for one night, Jan. I had to bring you with me. I couldn’t help myself.” She didn’t relax in his arms, however, and he kissed her forehead, then got busy with the tent. He made a fire before the tent, and there was the light inside it. He started to cook their meal and presently Jan came out to help him; they sat before the crackling fire and ate, and Jan kept her gaze on the flames and didn’t look beyond the light at all. Later he made love to her, and after she was asleep, he left her side and stood in the dark forest for a long time, simply feeling happy.

The next day Lorin increased their distance from the ship, knowing instinctively which direction he wanted, not able to tell how he knew from hour to hour when he couldn’t see shadows or the sun’s position. But he knew. And slowly Jan grew to understand what he was doing.

When she balked, Lorin put his pack down and caught her arms. “You can’t help yourself, Jan. Don’t you see that? I love you too much to leave you behind, and I can’t go back again. Not now.”

She said, “We have three more days here. Then we have to go back, Lorin. You know that?”

“I know.”

She nodded; looking at his face, studying his eyes, his mouth, she said, “All right. I’m with you. I wouldn’t have come if you’d told me what you planned, but I am here, and I won’t spoil it for you.”

Arm in arm they walked again, whistling, singing, stopping to gaze in awe at a waterfall they found, laughing at each other’s clumsiness in crossing the brook that formed the falls. They found a cave and stepped inside it, and Lorin said thoughtfully, “It would make a good home when the tent wears out, or if it gets too small.”

Jan stiffened again at his words, and her tension stayed with her for the next hour, fading gradually as the cave was left behind. Lorin didn’t refer to it again, but he made a mental map, locating the cave on it for future reference.

On the third day Jan knew he wasn’t going to take her back at all. She sat down on a boulder and kicked the deep mat of needles and nuts. “I won’t go any farther. You could kill them all by this, and you know it. If we turn back right now, and don’t waste any time, we can make it before the snap takes them back.” She kicked a nut viciously. “You would murder them all without a thought?”

“I left a complete list with weights on it for Doyle to substitute,” Lorin said. “He’s no fool. He’ll be careful when he knows he has to make substitutions. They’ll be all right.”

“And if they die, won’t that be even better for you? Then no one would ever discover this time zone. You know they never double check if they lose a ship. They assume that it was a bad time and let it go at that. Is that what you hope for?”

He hadn’t thought of it consciously, but with her words, he knew that the thought had been there. He jerked the pack up and slung it over his shoulder. “All right, so that’s what I hope for. You know who will get to come to a zone like this? Those who hate it. Like Doyle, and you. They’ll come here and sweat out the minutes until they can leave again, living only for the bonus that’s waiting for them, afraid all the time, wishing the zone would burn up, or sink into the ocean, dumping filth here, taking what’s good and clean, leaving their filth behind. Can you imagine what this place right here will look like in ten years? When they finish with it, it’ll be as bad as the fire-bombed ruins we found on the third probe. I don’t care if Doyle and the others live or die. If they’re careful they’ll get back. But are they alive, will they ever be again? Alive in hell?”

He started to walk. She had to follow; she had no choice but to follow, and he would make her forget the other world, the other time that was like a fading nightmare.

A searing pain hit the back of his head, and he clutched it, staggering, thinking she had thrown something. The pain deepened and he fell, and abruptly there was only blackness.

He heard, from a great distance, “He’s okay. He’ll wake up in a moment. Negative.”

He waited without moving, trying to remember, and there was a blank. Hands were fumbling about the back of his head and he opened his eyes warily. A nurse smiled at him. “I’m just removing the electrode wires. Relax a few minutes, and then you can get up.”

“The test is over?”

“That’s right.” She finished, and wheeled a portable psych machine away to the corner of the room. She returned and placed coolly professional fingers on his wrist for a moment. “You can sit up now, if you want.”

“How did I do?”

“Dr. Doyle will be in in a moment. He’s talking to your wife now, I think.”

Lorin sat up and the pain in his head made him blink. He touched the back of his scalp gingerly. The nurse laughed. “The electrodes are still there. Just below the skin. We don’t take them out, so if you ever need a good psychoanalysis, you’re all set. Compliments of the house.” She laughed to show that she joked, and after a bad moment he grinned back at her. Although he couldn’t find the thin platinum wires with his fingertips, he would be wired the rest of his life, ready to be plugged into a psych machine and played like a record. He stood up carefully, but there was no dizziness, and the headache was fading. He looked at the clock over the door. He had been there four hours.

Dr. Doyle came in and shook his hand enthusiastically. “You go home and get some rest now, Lorin. We’ll call you in a day or two, after we analyze the results. If you don’t hear by Monday, report back to your regular job and wait. We never know what kind of bugs we’re going to find that will delay us.” He shook Lorin’s hand again and was gone before Lorin had a chance to ask him a single question.

The nurse ushered him from the room to another room where more nurses were busy at desks. He went to a desk with an information sign over it and asked for his wife.

“I really couldn’t say,” the nurse said, without looking up.

“But we both took the tests. She should be through now too…”

“Not my department. You’d better go on home and wait for her.” The nurse opened a ledger and started to run her finger down columns of figures.

Lorin tried to get back inside the test room, but the door was locked now. None of the nurses knew anything about the tests, and finally he went to the door marked “Exit.” It opened only halfway and he squeezed through into an anteroom that was a bedlam of confusion and noise. He tried to open the door again, but it wouldn’t open at all from this side. Someone caught his arm: “My husband, tall, heavy, bald, did you see him? Is he in there? He went in two weeks ago.…” Lorin shook his head. “Is Dr. Doyle in there?” someone else yelled. Someone else was holding a snapshot before his eyes; he thought it was of a woman. The press of people was so thick that he couldn’t go straight to the street door, but had to squeeze through openings, to be forced backward, to inch forward again painfully. He saw an opening and stepped into it, relieved at the lessening of the pressure of bodies. Then he saw why there was the open space. A psycho in the telltale yellow coverall. Revolted, he turned back to the crowd. The psycho followed him. It was a woman. She screamed at him, “Stop! Tell me what happens in there! What do they do? What did they do to me?”