Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (20 page)

The crowd gave ground before her and he knew that the look of disgust that was on everyone else’s face was also on his. He managed to get people between himself and the yellow-clad woman. The noise was deafening. Every time the door to the inside offices opened, there was a surge toward it, and the cacophony increased. His headache returned, stronger than before.

He finally got to the outside door, but hesitated again. He took a deep breath; the fetid air in the room was better than the air out in the street would be. He went outside and was caught up immediately in the swell of people on the sidewalk. Three hours later he arrived at his own building, exhausted and panting. The elevators that went to his level were out of order, so he rode to the fiftieth floor and walked up the next thirteen flights of stairs, stumbling over the gray children who played there. Jan was not in the one-room apartment.

He waited for her all afternoon, listening to the neighbors above and below and on both sides of his small room. Children screamed and shrieked in play through the halls and on the stairs. Women shrilled and men cursed. Radios played out of synch, on different stations; airplanes overhead and traffic below competed with rising decibels; sirens, the blare of advertising trucks, the screech of the elevator again in service. He pressed his hands over his ears; his headache was blinding. Why didn’t she come home? The lights came on: neons, street lights, traffic lights; haze descended and haloed the lights. He fell asleep toward dawn.

That day he returned to the test center and waited along with all the others in the anterooms. Jan didn’t come through the doors from the inner rooms. On the third day he returned to work.

He was stopped at the door of the biology lab by his supervisor, who handed him an envelope and hurried away without speaking. Lorin opened it with shaking fingers, his heart thumping wildly. He was certain it was his test confirmation, and orders to report back to the test center.… He stared at the curt message:
Report for analysis 9
a.m
. Mon. Thurs. Fri., Rm. 1902 Psych Bldg
.

He didn’t enter the lab. He knew his bench would be occupied by someone else. He went to the psych center and was issued his yellow coverall, and shown his iron frame cot. The other men in the ward didn’t stir as he entered, no one looked up at him. He felt his cheeks burn with shame and he sat on the edge of his cot and waited for 9
a.m
. Thursday to come. He knew why Jan hadn’t returned, would never come back to him. He ground his hands into his eyes and tried to remember the test, what he had done wrong, how he had revealed insanity. When a sonic boom shook the building, he covered his ears and pushed hard against them, trying to think. He wished he could go for a walk, but the thought of walking in the center of a circle that moved with him everywhere he went, of seeing the disgust and loathing on the faces of those he approached… He sat on the edge of the cot and waited, and tried to remember, and when night came he lay down wearily and stared at the ceiling, trying to remember what he had done wrong, and he listened to the clamor of the city that never was still: traffic; voices singing, shouting, cursing, screaming; sirens; jets; foghorns; elevators; sound trucks; televisions; phonographs; buses; elevated trains… Nearby a jackhammer started, and an alarm went off. Lorin stuffed his fist into his mouth to keep from screaming, and lay staring at the ceiling trying to remember.

• • •

A Cold Dark Night with Snow

(Orbit 6 — 1970)

She knew when the car passed her that she had seen it and the four men inside it before, had seen it and paid no attention, for now, trying hard, she couldn’t remember when it had passed, only that it had. The car passed her and slowed down, in the back window, two faces turned, toward each other at first, choreographed precisely, nose to nose, then nose to window, eyes on her. She slowed to fifty, forty. One of the men looking at her said something, the other laughed. The car ahead had passed her doing sixty-five, and now it was keeping two cars’ lengths in front of her. She could out distance it. She was sure. If they let her get around them. Hers was a new Buick, less than a year old, the other one, she didn’t know what it was, only that it looked older, was dirty, very used looking. She should write down the license number. Groping in her purse she saw a third car appear in her rear view mirror. It was coming fast. Witnesses. She pushed the accelerator hard and whipped out into the other lane to pass; the car with the four men picked up speed also. Seventy, seventy-five, a truck was coming, a dazzling red speck in the brilliant sunlight. She jammed the gas pedal to the floor and pulled ahead of the older car, swung back in, and pulled away from it. The driver gave up and the car began to diminish in her rear view mirror, then was passed by the new one that was drawing up to her steadily. She didn’t want to drive so fast but she wanted the new car between her and the other one until she got to the next town or city, or telephone, in a pinch. She held seventy cautiously, slowing on curves and where the road vanished in a dip ahead of her, and presently the driver behind her became impatient and touched his horn, then pulled…

Maiya walks across the living room and sinks gracefully onto the couch. Her movements are fluid, her appearance almost boneless, a curve of lines without angles… No.

Maiya sits upright, tense, ready, anxious to help in any way. She is aware of the importance of the interview, and she is impatient with them when they query her about her fatigue… No.

Maiya walked into the kitchen and checked the coffee and finger sandwiches, wrapped in plastic cooling in the refrigerator. She looked at the tray and wondered: Should I offer them gin and tonic instead?

Should she offer anything? She bit her lip, then had to go to the bathroom to inspect her face and apply more of the pale, pale pink lipstick. She lowered her eyelids and tilted her head and put a trace of a smile on her lips only, her eyes remaining sad and knowing.

Maiya lets them talk around her, cool, distant, remote even, and when she answers one of the many questions, it is in a low voice that is tightly controlled. She give no hint of the tumult she is feeling… No.

She remembered that she hadn’t decided about the gin and tonic, and she took the bottle from the shelf and considered it. It was a hot day, but of course the apartment was pleasantly air- conditioned. They might be hot when they arrive. In air-conditioned cars? From air-conditioned offices? She paced the apartment. Kitchen. Hall. Living room. Bedroom. Bath. Closet. Kitchen. Full circle. She put the gin away and counted the cups on the tray. Eight. All her good cups. Too many. Four of them and her, possibly five of them. Probably five, but one at least would refuse coffee, gin too, if she decided on impulse to offer it. She might; she should be ready for the possibility that she would do just that, but that would mean having a second tray ready, and that would look gauche.

“It is gauche not to have wine with dinner, that’s why the rosé,” she said furiously to Hank.

“Honey who are you trying to kid? Jack and Susan will have beer before we eat, maybe they’ll want beer with dinner.”

She should have bought some beer. Even executives liked beer in hot weather. She yanked the plug from the coffee pot. She wouldn’t offer them anything.

Maiya admits them to the small, well-kept apartment and murmurs her appreciation…

She should have told them not to come, that they couldn’t come now or ever. She hadn’t dared. She looked out the window at the street seven stories below, white concrete glaring in the sunlight, green plants in pink planters, neat palm trees throwing shadows on the neat lawns. The shadows were like whirligigs. Child on a tricycle, in and out, in and out.

Although she drove with fierce concentration, now and then the other car began to grow in her mirror and she would realize she had let up on the gas, that she had slowed down to her customary sixty-five, and she would again do seventy or more and sigh when the other car began to fade out of sight. It swelled, the shrank, filled the mirror with its image, dwindled to a dot… The roads were so straight, so untraveled. Desert, plans, sunlight, white concrete ribbon, an occasional car or truck from the other direction. And the car behind her that threatened to catch up, to pass her, only to slow so that faces could turn to regard her through the rear window. But what could they do? It was daylight, on a public road that had no turnoffs anywhere, that just went on and on just to vanish into the sky white with the sun straight ahead.

The very small dab of a girl had got to the corner and turned carefully and was now pedaling back down the sidewalk, in and out of the shadows. Maiya pulled the drapes shut and immediately the room was softened, looked more spacious and felt cooler. Living room: couch, two Danish modern chairs, television-stereo console, two wooden chairs, ash-colored cocktail table, end tables, bare floor except for conversation rug, crescent shaped, flame colored (she had made it from a rug kit), two table lamps, white china bases, white shades, orange drape, ivory walls, black throws on the couch and chairs. Spotless, shining. Wax and furniture polish fragrant. Kitchen: gleaming black and white floor, chrome table legs, white cover, polished coffeepot, toaster, orange and black crockery. She poured a cup of the cooling coffee and returned to the living room with it. She didn’t have to let them in. She sat down on the black couch and sipped cooling coffee and wished she had been able to say no.

Maiya leans back wearily, her slender white neck barely able to support her head, her hands thin, but quiet on her lap, patience and suffering evident on her pale face, etched in violet under her eyes.

“My dear,” Dr. Whitman says gently, “we know you’ve been through a lot. We’ll try to be brief. Can you tell us what happened now?”

“I don’t know,” she says in a low voice shutting her eyes against the nightmare that is out there. “An accident. Hank was working so hard, studying…”

Books. She hurried to the bedroom and dragged the carton of books from the closet where she had put it and took the top six books without noticing what they were. She put them on tables in the living room, picked one up and put it on the couch, opened, face down. The room looked cluttered suddenly. She picked up the three magazines that were on the cocktail table and took them to the bedroom and left them on top of the carton. The
House Beautiful
opened when she put it down and she stared at a double spread: a pool seen through a window wall, a fire in a fireplace that filled a second wall, low couches, plants that reached the high ceiling, lots of brass… “Goddammit, will you get it through your head. We can’t afford a bigger apartment now. We can’t afford this apartment. I am a file clerk! Not a junior executive! How much room do we need?”

“You’ve been going to school for years now, learning engineering. You aren’t going to be a file clerk all your life. It makes a difference where you live, how people think about you. If we invite Mr. And Mrs. Morrison…”

“We aren’t going to invite Mr. And Mrs. Morrison. They wouldn’t come if we did. Look, doll, don’t push too hard. Okay?”

“But you will go back to school when the term starts, won’t you?”

“I don’t think so, honey. I want time out. I want to think and rest and think some more.”

“You see,” Maiya says softly, looking into Dr. Whitman’s face, “he was very ambitious, and very brilliant.” She looks beyond him to Mr. Morrison and Mr. Jefferies, the security man. “He could understand everything,” she says and closes her eyes again. But not before he sees the quick glance that the two men exchange.

No! No! NO!

Fool, she whispered fiercely. Stop it. You don’t know anything!

Maiya took her cup back to the kitchen, washed and dried it and hung it on the turntable rack for eight cups and saucers. She stared at the cups and gave the rack a turn, sending them out and around. Black and orange, black and orange.

The other car was gaining slowly. Why couldn’t she lose it? A foolish thought. Where could she lose it? Straight road, white concrete ribbon with false water slicks and heat swirls rising, plains and desert, everything aglare and painful against her eyes, no turnoffs for twenty-five miles or more. She forgot how far it was to the next town. She wished she could study a road map. Say twenty-five miles, less than half an hour away. The car could pull around then and slow down and they could ogle her if they chose, it wouldn’t matter. But if it was fifty miles, she would have to stop for gas first. There would be a solitary station along the road; a wide board shack with two pumps outside, ancient cans of oil behind the sand-pitted windows, sign to the Ladies Room, Gents Room, and the sun burning down on it all. She would stop for gas and they would go on by, and presently she would leave the crummy station, not rushing because they were ahead of her now. One-room station, with Ladies and Gents and nothing else, not even a snack bar, nothing. She could tell the man there:

“They’re following me, pulling around and slowing down when they can, and…” And what? They were probably physicists going back to White Sands after a fishing trip. Or a group of doctors homeward from an A.M.A. meeting. Even doctors could look sinister through a back window, smiling at their own jokes about broken legs, or deliveries, or kidney removal.

“Hank, what is this?” She held out a plastic tube of pink capsules.

“Oh that. The superintendent sent me over to see Doc Whitman today. He gave me those, help me sleep temporarily.”

“Sleeping pills? You didn’t tell me you were still having trouble.”

“Nothing serious. They’re mild. He kidded me about them, said it’s what they give to children who’re due for tonsillectomies, that mild.”

“Ever since the transfer. Since you started in Dr. Ullster’s department. Don’t you like it there?”

“Honey, knock it off, huh? Come on, let’s go swimming.”

“You used to tell me about the work, what was going on there, what you were doing. You never say anymore.”

“I told you, it’s classified. I took an oath.”

“But me?”