Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (23 page)

Dr. Wymann? He would have known. He wouldn’t have let them do anything to her baby!

At the foot of the stairs she listened to the baby crying. Please don’t, she thought at it. Please don’t cry. Please.

The baby wailed on and on.

That was the first pregnancy, four years ago. Then last year, a repeat performance, by popular demand. She put her hands over her ears and ran back to the fireplace. She thought of the other girl in the double room, a younger girl, no more than eighteen. Her baby had died too in the staph outbreak. Sleeping, waking up, no reason, no sound in the room, but wide awake with pounding heart, the chill of fear all through her. Seeing the girl then, short gown, long lovely leg climbing over the guard rail at the window. Pale yellow light in the room, almost too faint to make out details, only the silhouettes of objects. Screaming suddenly, and at the same moment becoming aware of figures at the door. An intern and a nurse. Not arriving, but standing there quietly. Not moving at all until she screamed. The ubiquitous needle to quiet her hysterical sobbing.

“Honey, they woke you up when they opened the hall door. They didn’t say anything for fear of startling her, making her fall before they could get to her.”

“Where is she?”

“Down the hall. I saw her myself. I looked through the observation window and saw her, sleeping now. She’s a manic-depressive, and losing the baby put her in a tailspin. They’re going to take care of her.”

Julia shook her head. She had let him convince her, but it was a lie. They hadn’t been moving at all. They had stood there waiting for the girl to jump. Watching her quietly, just waiting for the end. If Julia hadn’t awakened and screamed, the girl would be dead now. She shivered and went to the kitchen to make coffee. The baby was howling louder.

She lighted a cigarette. Martie would be smoking continuously during the taping. She had sat through several tapings and knew the routine. The staff members watching, making notes, the director making notes. Hilary Boyle walked from the blue velvet hangings, waved at the camera, took his seat behind a massive desk, taking his time, getting comfortable. She liked Hilary Boyle, in spite of all the things about his life, about him personally, that she usually didn’t like in people. His self-assurance that bordered on egomania, his women. She felt that he had assigned her a number and when it came up he would come to claim her as innocently as a child demanding his lollipop. She wondered if he would kick and scream when she said no. The cameras moved in close, he picked up his clipboard and glanced at the first sheet of paper, then looked into the camera. And the magic would work again, as it always worked for him. The X factor. A TV personality, radiating over wires, through air, from emptiness, to people everywhere who saw him. How did it work? She didn’t know, neither did anyone else. She stubbed out her cigarette.

She closed her eyes, seeing the scene, Hilary leaving the desk, turning to wave once, then going through the curtains. Another successful special. A huddle of three men, or four, comparing notes, a rough spot here, another there. They could be taken care of with scissors, Martie, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, mooching along to his desk.

“Martie, you going home tonight?” Boyle stood in his doorway, filling it.

“Doesn’t look like it. Nothing’s leaving the city now.”

“Buy you a steak.” An invitation or an order? Boyle grinned. Invitation. “Fifteen minutes. Okay?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Martie tried again to reach Julia. “I’ll be in and out for a couple of hours. Try it now and then, will you, doll?”

The operator purred at him. He was starting to get the material he had asked Sandy for: hospital statistics, epidemics of flu and flu-like diseases, incidence of pneumonia outbreaks, and so on. As she had said, there was a stack of the stuff. He riffled quickly through the print-outs. Something was not quite right, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. Boyle’s door opened then, and he stacked the material and put it inside his desk.

“Ready? I had Doris reserve a table for us down in the Blue Light. I could use a double Scotch about now. How about you?”

Martie nodded and they walked to the elevators together. The Blue Light was one of Boyle’s favorite hangouts. They entered the dim, noisy room, and were led to a back table where the ceiling was noise-absorbing and partitions separated one table from another, creating small oases of privacy. The floor show was visible, but almost all the noise of the restaurant was blocked.

“Look,” Boyle said, motioning toward the blue spotlight. Three girls were dancing together. They wore midnight-blue body masks that covered them from crown to toe. Wigs that looked like green and blue threads of glass hung to their shoulders, flashing as they moved.

“I have a reputation,” Boyle said, lighting a cigarette from his old one. “No one thinks anything of it if I show up in here three-four times a week.”

He was watching the squirming girls, grinning, but there was an undertone in his voice that Martie hadn’t heard before. Martie looked at him, then at the girls again, and waited.

“The music bugs the piss right out of me, but the girls, now that’s different,” Boyle said. A waitress moved into range. She wore a G-string, an apron whose straps miraculously covered both nipples and stayed in place somehow, and very high heels. “Double Scotch for me, honeypot, and what for you, Martie?”

“Bourbon and water.”

“Double bourbon and water for Dr. Sayre.” He squinted, studying the gyrating girls. “That one on the left. Bet she’s a blonde. Watch the way she moves, you can almost see blondness in that wrist motion…” Boyle glanced at the twitching hips of their waitress and said, in the same breath, same tone of voice, “I’m being watched. You will be too after tonight. You might look out for them.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Not government, I think. Private outfit maybe. Like FBI, same general type, same cool, but I’m almost positive not government.”

“Okay, why?”

“Because I’m a newsman. I really am, you know, always was, always will be. I’m on to something big.”

He stopped and the waitress appeared with their drinks. Boyle’s gaze followed the twisting girls in the spotlight and he chuckled. He looked up at the waitress then. “Menus, please.”

Martie watched him alternately with the floor show. They ordered, and when they were alone again Boyle said, “I think that immortality theory that popped up eight or ten years ago isn’t dead at all. I think it works, just like what’s-his-name said it would, and I think that some people are getting the treatments they need, and the others are being killed off, or allowed to die without interference.”

Martie stared at him, then at his drink. He felt numb. As if to prove to himself that he could move, he made a whirlpool in the glass and it climbed higher and higher and finally spilled. Then he put it down. “That’s crazy. They couldn’t keep something like that quiet.” Boyle was continuing to watch the dancing girls.

“I’m an intuitive man,” Boyle said. “I don’t know why I know that next week people will be interested in volcanoes, but if I get a hunch that it will make for a good show, we do it, and the response is tremendous. You know how that goes. I hit right smack on the button again and again. I get the ideas, you fellows do the work, and I get the credit. That’s like it should be. You’re all diggers, I’m the locator. I’m an ignorant man, but not stupid. Know what I mean? I learned to listen to my hunches. I learned to trust them. I learned to trust myself in front of the camera and on the mike. I don’t know exactly what I’ll say, or how I’ll look. I don’t practice anything. Something I’m in tune with… something. They know it, and I know it. You fellows call it the X factor. Let it go at that. We know what we mean when we talk about it even if we don’t know what it is or how it works. Right. Couple of months ago, I woke up thinking that we should do a follow-up on the immortality thing. Don’t look at me. Watch the show. I realized that I hadn’t seen word one about it for three or four years. Nothing at all. What’s his name, the guy that found the synthetic RNA?”

“Smithers. Aaron Smithers.”

“Yeah. He’s dead. They worked him over so thoroughly, blasted him and his results so convincingly, that he never got over it. Finis. Nothing else said about it. I woke up wondering why not. How could he have been that wrong? Got the Nobel for the same kind of discovery, RNA as a cure for some kind of arthritis. Why was he so far off this time?” Boyle had filled the ashtray by then. He didn’t look at Martie as he spoke, but continued to watch the girls, and now and then grinned, or even chuckled.

The waitress returned, brought them a clean ashtray, new drinks, took their orders, and left again. Boyle turned then to look at Martie. “What, no comments yet? I thought by now you’d be telling me to see a headshrinker.”

Martie shook his head. “I don’t believe it. There’d be a leak. They proved it wouldn’t work years ago.”

“Maybe.” Boyle drank more slowly now. “Anyway, I couldn’t get rid of this notion, so I began to try to find out if anyone was doing anything with the synthetic RNA, and that’s when the doors began to close on me. Nobody knows nothing. And someone went through my office, both here at the studio and at home. I got Kolchak to go through some of his sources to look for appropriations for RNA research. Security’s clamped down on all appropriations for research. Lobbied for by the AMA, of all people.”

“That’s something else. People were too loose with classified data,” Martie said. “This isn’t in the universities any more. They don’t know any more than you do.”

Boyle’s eyes gleamed. “Yeah? So you had a bee, too?”

“No. But I know people. I left Harvard to take this job. I keep in touch. I know the people in the biochemical labs there. I’d know if they were going on with this. They’re not. Are you going to try to develop this?” he asked, after a moment.

“Good Christ! What do you think!”

Julia woke up with a start. She was stiff from her position in the large chair, with her legs tucked under her, her head at an angle. She had fallen asleep over her sketch pad, and it lay undisturbed on her lap, so she couldn’t have slept very long. The fire was still hot and bright. It was almost eleven thirty. Across the room the television flickered. The sound was turned off, music continued to play too loud in the house. She cocked her head, then nodded. It was still crying.

She looked at the faces she had drawn on her pad: nurses, interns, Dr. Wymann. All young. No one over thirty-five. She tried to recall others in the OB ward, but she was sure that she had them all. Night nurses, delivery nurses, nursery nurses, admittance nurse… She stared at the drawing of Dr. Wymann. They were the same age. He had teased her about it once. “I pulled out a grey hair this morning, and here you are as pretty and young as ever. How are you doing?”

But it had been a lie. He was the unchanged one. She had been going to him for six or seven years, and he hadn’t changed at all in that time. They were both thirty-four now.

Sitting at the side of her bed, holding her hand, speaking earnestly. “Julia, there’s nothing wrong with you. You can still have babies, several of them if you want. We can send men to the moon, to the bottom of the ocean, but we can’t fight off staph when it hits in epidemic proportions in a nursery. I know you feel bitter now, that it’s hopeless, but believe me, there wasn’t anything that could be done either time. I can almost guarantee you that the next time everything will go perfectly.”

“It was perfect this time. And the last time.”

“You’ll go home tomorrow. I’ll want to see you in six weeks. We’ll talk about it again a bit later. All right?”

Sure. Talk about it. And talk and talk. And it didn’t change the fact that she’d had two babies and had lost two babies that had been alive and kicking right up till the time of birth.

Why had she gone so blank afterward? For almost a year she hadn’t thought of it, except in the middle of the night, when it hadn’t been thought but emotion that had ridden her. Now it seemed that the emotional response had been used up and for the first time she could think about the births, about the staff, about her own reactions. She put her sketch pad down and stood up, listening.

Two boys. They’d both been boys. Eight pounds two ounces, eight pounds four ounces. Big, beautifully formed, bald. The crying was louder, more insistent. At the foot of the stairs she stopped again, her face lifted.

It was a small hospital, a small private hospital. One that Dr. Wymann recommended highly. Because the city hospitals had been having such rotten luck trying to get rid of staph. Infant mortality had doubled, tripled? She had heard a fantastic figure given out, but hadn’t been able to remember it. It had brought too sharp pains, and she had rejected knowing. She started up the stairs.

“Why are they giving me an allergy test? I thought you had to test for specific allergies, not a general test.”

“If you test out positive, then they’ll look for the specifics. They’ll know they have to look. We’re getting too many people with allergies that we knew nothing about, reacting to antibiotics, to sodium pentothal, to starch in sheets. You name it.”

The red scratch on her arm. But they hadn’t tested her for specifics. They had tested her for the general allergy symptoms and had found them, and then let it drop. At the top of the stairs she paused again, closing her eyes briefly this time. “I’m coming,” she said softly. She opened the door.

His was the third crib. Unerringly she went to him and picked him up; he was screaming lustily, furiously. “There, there. It’s all right, darling. I’m here.” She rocked him, pressing him tightly to her body. He nuzzled her neck, gulping in air now, the sobs diminishing into hiccups. His hair was damp with perspiration, and he smelled of powder and oil. His ear was tight against his head, a lovely ear.

“You! What are you doing in here? How did you get in?”

She put the sleeping infant back down in the crib, not waking him. For a moment she stood looking down at him, then she turned and walked out the door.

The three blue girls were gone, replaced by two zebra-striped girls against a black drop, so that only the white stripes showed, making an eerie effect.