Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (22 page)

When the wind blew in a particular way in the old house, it sounded like a baby crying in great pain. Only when the wind came from the northwest over thirty miles an hour. They had searched and searched for the minute crack that had to be responsible and they had calked and filled and patched until it seemed that there couldn’t be any more holes, but it was still there, and now she could hear the baby cry.

Julia stared into the fire, trying to ignore the wail, willing herself not to think of it, not to remember the first time she had heard the baby. She gazed into the fire and couldn’t stop the images that formed and became solid before her eyes. She awakened suddenly, as in the dreams she had had during the last month or so of pregnancy. Without thinking, she slipped from bed, feeling for her slippers in the dark, tossing her robe about her shoulders hurriedly. She ran down the hall to the baby’s room, and at the door she stopped in confusion. She pressed one hand against her flat stomach, and the other fist against her mouth hard, biting her fingers until she tasted blood. The baby kept on crying. She shook her head and reached for the knob and turned it, easing the door open soundlessly. The room was dark. She stood at the doorway, afraid to enter. The baby cried again. Then she pushed the door wide open and the hall light flooded the empty room. She fainted.

When she woke up hours later, grey light shone coldly on the bare floor, from the yellow walls. She raised herself painfully, chilled and shivering. Sleepwalking? A vivid dream and sleepwalking? She listened; the house was quiet, except for its regular night noises. She went back to bed. Martie protested in his sleep when she snuggled against his warm body, but he turned to let her curve herself to fit, and he put his arm about her. She said nothing about the dream the next day.

Six months later she heard the baby again. Alone this time, in the late afternoon of a golden fall day that had been busy and almost happy. She had been gathering nuts with her friend Phyllis Govern. They’d had a late lunch, and then Phyllis had had to run because it was close to four. A wind had come up, threatening a storm before evening. Julia watched the clouds build for half an hour.

She was in her studio in the barn, on the second floor, where the odor of hay seemed to remain despite an absence of fifteen or twenty years. She knew it was her imagination, but she liked to think that she could smell the hay, could feel the warmth of the animals from below. She hadn’t worked in her studio for almost a year, since late in her pregnancy, when it had become too hard to get up the narrow, steep ladder that led from the ground floor to the balcony that opened to the upstairs rooms. She didn’t uncover anything in the large room, but it was nice to be there. She needed clay, she thought absently, watching clouds roll in from the northwest. It would be good to feel clay in her fingers again. She might make a few Christmas gifts. Little things, funny things, to let people know that she was all right, that she would be going back to work before long now. She glanced at the large blocks of granite that she had ordered before. Not yet. Nothing serious yet. Something funny and inconsequential to begin with.

Still thoughtful, she left the studio and went to the telephone in the kitchen and placed a call to her supplier in the city. While waiting for the call to be completed, she heard it. The baby was in pain, she thought, and hung up. Not until she had started for the hall door did she realize what she was doing. She stopped, very cold suddenly. Like before, only this time she was wide awake. She felt for the door and pushed it open an inch or two. The sound was still there, no louder, but no softer either. Very slowly she followed the sound up the stairs, through the hall, into the empty room. She had been so certain that it originated here, but now it seemed to be coming from her room. She backed out into the hall and tried the room she shared with Martie. Now the crying seemed to be coming from the other bedroom. She stood at the head of the stairs for another minute, then she ran down and tried to dial Martie’s number. Her hands were shaking too hard and she botched it twice before she got him.

Afterwards she didn’t know what she had said to him. He arrived an hour later to find her sitting at the kitchen table, ashen-faced, terrified.

“I’m having a breakdown,” she said quietly. “I knew it happened to some women when they lost a child, but I thought I was past the worst part by now. I’ve heard it before, months ago.” She stared straight ahead. “They probably will want me in a hospital for observation for a while. I should have packed, but… Martie, you will try to keep me out of an institution, won’t you? What does it want, Martie?”

“Honey, shut up. Okay?” Martie was listening intently. His face was very pale. Slowly he opened the door and went into the hall, his face turned up toward the stairs.

“Do you hear it?”

“Yes. Stay there.” He went upstairs, and when he came back down, he was still pale, but satisfied now. “Honey, I hear it, so that means there’s something making the noise. You’re not imagining it. It is a real noise, and by God it sounds like a baby crying.”

Julia built up the fire and put a stack of records on the stereo and turned it too loud. She switched on lights through the house, and set the alarm clock for six-twenty to be certain she didn’t let the hour pass without remembering Hilary Boyle’s news show. Not that she ever forgot it, but there might be a first time, especially on this sort of night, when she wouldn’t be expecting Martie until very late, if at all. She wished he’d call. It was four-thirty. If he could get home, he should leave the office in an hour, be on the train at twenty-three minutes before six and at home by six forty-five. She made coffee and lifted the phone to see if it was working. It seemed to be all right. The stereo music filled the house, shook the floor and rattled the windows, but over it now and then she could hear the baby.

She tried to see outside, the wind-driven snow was impenetrable. She flicked on outside lights, the drive entrance, the light over the garage, the door to the barn, the back porch, front porch, the spotlight on the four pieces of granite that she had completed and placed in the yard, waiting for the rest of the series. The granite blocks stood out briefly during a lull. They looked like squat sentinels.

She took her coffee back to the living room, where the stereo was loudest, and sat on the floor by the big cherry table that they had cut down to fourteen inches. Her sketch pad lay here. She glanced at the top page without seeing it, then opened the pad to the middle and began to doodle aimlessly. The record changed; the wind howled through the yard; the baby wailed. When she looked at what she had been doing on the pad, she felt a chill begin deep inside. She had written over and over,
MURDERERS. You killed my babies. MURDERERS
.

Martie Sayre called the operator for the third time within the hour. “Are the lines still out?”

“I’ll check again, Mr. Sayre.” Phone static, silence, she was back. “Sorry, sir. Still out.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Martie chewed his pencil and spoke silently to the picture on his desk: Julia, blond, thin, intense eyes and a square chin. She was beautiful. Her thin body and face seemed to accentuate lovely delicate bones. He, thin also, was simply craggy and gaunt. “Honey, don’t listen to it. Turn on music loud. You know I’d be there if I could.” The phone rang and he answered.

“I have the material on blizzards for you, Mr. Sayre. Also, Mr. Boyle’s interview with Dr. Hewlitt, A.M.S., and the one with Dr. Wycliffe, the NASA satellite weather expert. Anything else?”

“Not right now, Sandy. Keep close. Okay?”

“Sure thing.”

He turned to the monitor on his desk and pushed the “On” button. For the next half hour he made notes and edited the interviews and shaped a fifteen-minute segment for a special to be aired at ten that night. Boyle called for him to bring what he had ready at seven.

There was a four-man consultation. Martie, in charge of the science news department; Dennis Kolchak, political-news expert; David Wedekind, the art director. Hilary Boyle paced as they discussed the hour special on the extraordinary weather conditions that had racked the entire earth during the winter. Boyle was a large man, over six feet, with a massive frame that let him carry almost three hundred pounds without appearing fat. He was a chain smoker, and prone to nervous collapses. He timed the collapses admirably: He never missed a show. His daily half hour, “Personalized News,” was the most popular network show that year, as it had been for the past three years. The balloon would burst eventually, and the name Hilary Boyle wouldn’t sound like God, but now it did, and no one could explain the X factor that had catapulted the talentless man into the firmament of stars.

The continuity writers had blocked in the six segments of the show already, two from other points—Washington and Los Angeles—plus the commercial time, plus the copter pictures that would be live, if possible.

“Looking good,” Hilary Boyle said. “Half an hour Eddie will have the first film ready…”

Martie wasn’t listening. He watched Boyle and wondered if Boyle would stumble over any of the words Martie had used in his segment. He hoped not. Boyle always blamed him personally if he, Boyle, didn’t know the words he had to parrot. “Look, Martie, I’m a reasonably intelligent man, and if I don’t know it, you gotta figure that most of the viewers won’t know it either. Get me? Keep it simple, but without sacrificing any of the facts. That’s your job, kid. Now give me this in language I can understand.”

Martie’s gaze wandered to the window wall. The room was on the sixty-third floor; there were few other lights to be seen on this level, and only those that were very close. The storm had visibility down to two hundred yards. What lights he could see appeared ghostly, haloed, diffused, toned down to beautiful pearly luminescences. He thought of Boyle trying to say that, and then had to bite his cheek to keep from grinning. Boyle couldn’t stand it when someone grinned in his presence, unless he had made a funny.

His part of the special was ready for taping by eight, and he went to the coffee shop on the fourteenth floor for a sandwich. He wished he could get through to Julia, but telephone service from Ohio to Washington to Maine was a disaster area that night.

He closed his eyes and saw her, huddled before the fire in the living room glowing with soft warm light. Her pale hair hiding her paler face, hands over her ears, tight. She got up and went to the steps, looking up them, then ran back to the fire. The house shaking with music and the wind. The image was so strong that he opened his eyes wide and shook his head too hard, starting a mild headache at the back of his skull. He drank his coffee fast, and got a second cup, and when he sat down again, he was almost smiling. Sometimes he was convinced that she was right when she said that they had something so special between them, they never were actually far apart. Sometimes he knew she was right.

He finished his sandwich and coffee and wandered back to his office. Everything was still firm, ready to tape in twenty minutes. His part was holding fine.

He checked over various items that had come through in the last several hours, and put three of them aside for elaboration. One of them was about a renewal of the influenza epidemic that had raked England earlier in the year. It was making a comeback, more virulent than ever. New travel restrictions had been imposed.

Julia: “I don’t care what they say, I don’t believe it. Who ever heard of quarantine in the middle of the summer? I don’t know why travel’s being restricted all over the world, but I don’t believe it’s because of the flu.” Accusingly, “You’ve got all that information at your fingertips. Why don’t you look it up and see? They banned travel to France before the epidemic got so bad.”

Martie rubbed his head, searched his desk for aspirin and didn’t find any. Slowly he reached for the phone, then dialed Sandy, his information girl. “See what we have on tap about weather-related illnesses, honey. You know, flu, colds, pneumonia. Stuff like that. Hospital statistics, admittances, deaths. Closings of businesses, schools. Whatever you can find. Okay?” To the picture on his desk, he said, “Satisfied?”

Julia watched the Hilary Boyle show at six-thirty and afterward had scrambled eggs and a glass of milk. The weather special at ten explained Martie’s delay, but even if there hadn’t been the special to whip into being, transportation had ground to a stop. Well, nothing new there, either. She had tried to call Martie finally, and got the recording:
Sorry, your call cannot be completed at this time.
So much for that. The baby cried and cried.

She tried to read for an hour or longer and had no idea of what she had been reading when she finally tossed the book down and turned to look at the fire. She added a log and poked the ashes until the flames shot up high, sparking blue and green, snapping crisply. As soon as she stopped forcing her mind to remain blank, the thoughts came rushing in.

Was it crazy of her to think they had killed her two babies? Why would they? Who were they? Weren’t autopsies performed on newborn babies? Wouldn’t the doctors and nurses be liable to murder charges, just like anyone else? These were the practical aspects, she decided. There were more. The fear of a leak. Too many people would have to be involved. It would be too dangerous, unless it was also assumed that everyone in the delivery room, in the OB ward, in fact, was part of a gigantic conspiracy. If only she could remember more of what had happened.

Everything had been normal right up to delivery time. Dr. Wymann had been pleased with her pregnancy from the start. Absolutely nothing untoward had happened. Nothing. But when she woke up, Martie had been at her side, very pale, red-eyed.
The baby is dead, he’d said. And, Honey, I love you so much. I’m so sorry. There wasn’t a thing they could do.
And on and on. They had wept together. Someone had come in with a tray that held a needle. Sleep.

Wrong end of it. Start at the other end. Arriving at the hospital, four-minute pains. Excited, but calm. Nothing unexpected. Dr. Wymann had briefed her on procedure. Nothing out of the ordinary. Blood sample, urine. Weight. Blood pressure. Allergy test. Dr. Wymann.
Won’t be long now, Julia. You’re doing fine.
Sleep. Waking to see Martie, pale and red-eyed at her side.