Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (24 page)

“Why did you bring this up with me?” Martie asked. Their steaks were before them, two inches thick, red in the middle, charred on the outside. The Blue Light was famous for steaks.

“A hunch. I have a standing order to be informed of any research anyone does on my time. I got the message that you were looking into illnesses, deaths, all that.” Boyle waved aside the sudden flash of anger that swept through Martie. “Okay. Cool it. I can’t help it. I’m paranoid. Didn’t they warn you? Didn’t I warn you myself when we talked five years ago? I can’t stand for you to use the telephone. Can’t stand not knowing what you’re up to. I can’t help it.”

“But that’s got nothing to do with your theory.”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Martie. What you’re after is just the other side of the same thing.”

“And what are you going to do now? Where from here?”

“That’s the stinker. I’m not sure. I think we work on the angle of weather control, for openers. Senator Kern is pushing the bill to create an office of weather control. We can get all sorts of stuff under that general heading, I think, without raising this other issue at all. You gave me this idea yourself. Weather-connected sickness. Let’s look at what we can dig out, see what they’re hiding, what they’re willing to tell, and go on from there.”

“Does Kolchak know? Does anyone else?”

“No. Kolchak will go along with the political angle. He’ll think it’s a natural for another special. He’ll cooperate.”

Martie nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll dig away. I think there’s a story. Not the one you’re after, but a story. And I’m curious about the clampdown on news at a time when we seem to be at peace.”

Boyle grinned at him. “You’ve come a long way from the history of science teacher that I talked to about working for me five years ago. Boy, were you green then.” He pushed his plate back. “What made you take it? This job? I never did understand.”

“Money. What else? Julia was pregnant. We wanted a house in the country. She was working, but not making money yet. She was talking about taking a job teaching art, and I knew it would kill her. She’s very talented, you know.”

“Yeah. So you gave up tenure, everything that goes with it.”

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t give up for her.”

“To each his own. Me? I’m going to wade through that goddam snow the six blocks to my place. Prettiest little piece you ever saw waiting for me. See you tomorrow, Martie.”

He waved to the waitress, who brought the check. He signed it without looking at it, pinched her bare bottom when she turned to leave, and stood up. He blew a kiss to the performing girls, stopped at three tables momentarily on his way out, and was gone. Martie finished his coffee slowly.

Everyone had left by the time he returned to his office. He sat down at his desk and looked at the material he had pushed into the drawer. He knew now what was wrong. Nothing more recent than four years ago was included in the material.

Julia slept deeply. She had the dream again. She wandered down hallways, into strange rooms, looking for Martie. She was curious about the building. It was so big. She thought it must be endless, that it wouldn’t matter how long she had to search it, she would never finish. She would forever see another hall that she hadn’t seen before, another series of rooms that she hadn’t explored. It was strangely a happy dream, leaving her feeling contented and peaceful. She awakened at eight. The wind had died completely, and the sunlight coming through the sheer curtains was dazzling, brightened a hundredfold by the brilliant snow. Apparently it had continued to snow after the wind had stopped; branches, wires, bushes, everything was frosted with an inch of powder. She stared out the window, committing it to memory. At such times she almost wished that she was a painter instead of a sculptor. The thought passed. She would get it, the feeling of joy and serenity and purity, into a piece of stone, make it shine out for others to grasp, even though they’d never know why they felt just like that.

She heard the bell of the snowplow at work on the secondary road that skirted their property, and she knew that as soon as the road was open, Mr. Stopes would be by with his small plow and get their driveway. She hoped it all would be cleared by the time Martie left the office. She stared at the drifted snow in the back yard between the house and the barn and shook her head. Maybe Mr. Stopes could get that, too.

While she had breakfast she listened to the morning news. One disaster after another, she thought, turning it off after a few minutes. A nursing home fire, eighty-two dead. A new outbreak of infantile diarrhea in half a dozen hospitals, leaving one hundred thirty-seven dead babies. The current flu-epidemic death rate increasing to one out of ten.

Martie called at nine. He’d be home by twelve. A few things to clear up for the evening show. Nothing much. She tried to ease his worries about her, but realized that the gaiety in her voice must seem forced to him, phony. He knew that when the wind howled as it had done the night before, the baby cried. She hung up regretfully, knowing she hadn’t convinced him that she had slept well, that she was as gay as she sounded. She looked at the phone and knew that it would be even harder to convince him in person that she was all right, and, more important, that the baby was all right.

Martie shook her hard. “Honey, listen to me. Please, just listen to me. You had a dream. Or a hallucination. You know that. You know how you were the first time you heard it. You told me you were having a breakdown. You knew then that it wasn’t the baby you heard, no matter what your ears told you. What’s changed now?”

“I can’t explain it,” she said. She wished he’d let go. His hands were painful on her shoulders, and he wasn’t aware of them. The fear in his eyes was real and desperate. “Martie, I know that it couldn’t happen like that, but it did. I opened the door to somewhere else where our baby is alive and well. He has grown, and he has hair now, black hair, like yours, but curly, like mine. A nurse came in. I scared the hell out of her, Martie. She looked at me just like you are looking now. It was real, all of it.”

“We’re going to move. We’ll go back to the city.”

“All right. If you want to. It won’t matter. This house has nothing to do with it.”

“Christ!” Martie let her go suddenly, and she almost fell. He didn’t notice. He paced back and forth a few minutes, rubbing his hand over his eyes, through his hair, over the stubble of his beard. She wished she could do something for him, but she didn’t move. He turned to her again suddenly. “You can’t stay alone again!”

Julia laughed gently. She took his hand and held it against her cheek. It was very cold. “Martie, look at me. Have I laughed spontaneously during this past year? I know how I’ve been, what I’ve been like. I knew all along, but I couldn’t help myself. I was such a failure as a woman, don’t you see? It didn’t matter if I succeeded as an artist, or as a wife, anything. I couldn’t bear a live child. That’s all I could think about. It would come at the most awkward moments, with company here, during our lovemaking, when I had the mallet poised, or mixing a cake. Whammo, there it would be. And I’d just want to die. Now, after last night, I feel as if I’m alive again, after being awfully dead. It’s all right, Martie. I had an experience that no one else could believe in. I don’t care. It must be like conversion. You can’t explain it to anyone who hasn’t already experienced it, and you don’t have to explain it to him. I shouldn’t even have tried.”

“God, Julia, why didn’t you say what you were going through? I didn’t realize. I thought you were getting over it all.” Martie pulled her to him and held her too tightly.

“You couldn’t do anything for me,” she said. Her voice was muffled. She sighed deeply.

“I know. That’s what makes it such hell.” He pushed her back enough to see her face. “And you think it’s over now? You’re okay now?” She nodded. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t care. If you’re okay, that’s enough. Now let’s put it behind us…”

“But it isn’t over, Martie. It’s just beginning. I know he’s alive now. I have to find him.”

“Can’t get the tractor in the yard, Miss Sayre. Could of if you hadn’t put them stones out there in the way.” Mr. Stopes mopped his forehead with a red kerchief, although he certainly hadn’t worked up a sweat, not seated on the compact red tractor, running it back and forth through the drive. Julia refilled his coffee cup and shrugged.

“All right. We’ll get to it. The sun’s warming it up so much. Maybe it’ll just melt off.”

“Nope. It’ll melt some, then freeze. Be harder’n ever to get it out then.”

Julia went to the door and called to Martie, “Honey, can you write Mr. Stopes a check for clearing the drive?”

Martie came in from the living room, taking his checkbook from his pocket. “Twenty?”

“Yep. Get yourself snowed in in town last night, Mr. Sayre?”

“Yep.”

Mr. Stopes grinned and finished his coffee. “Some April’s Fool Day, ain’t it? Forsythia blooming in the snow. Don’t know. Just don’t know ’bout the weather any more. Remember my dad used to plant his ground crops on April’s Fool Day, without fail.” He waved the check back and forth a minute, then stuffed it inside his sheepskin coat. “Well, thanks for the coffee, Miss Sayre. You take care now that you don’t work too hard and come down with something. You don’t want to get taken sick now that Doc Hendricks is gone.”

“I thought that new doctor was working out fine,” Martie said.

“Yep. For some people. You don’t want him to put you in the hospital, though. The treatment’s worse than the sickness any more, it seems.” He stood up and pulled on a flap-eared hat that matched his coat. “Not a gambling man myself, but even if I was, wouldn’t want them odds. Half walks in gets taken out in a box. Not odds that I like at all.”

Julia and Martie avoided looking at one another until he was gone. Then Julia said incredulously, “Half!”

“He must be jacking it way up.”

“I don’t think so. He exaggerates about some things, not things like that. That must be what they’re saying.”

“Have you met the doctor?”

“Yes, here and there. In the drugstore. At Dr. Saltzman’s. He’s young, but he seemed nice enough. Friendly. He asked me if we’d had our… flu shots.” She finished very slowly, frowning slightly.

“And?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking that it was curious of him to ask. They were announcing at the time that there was such a shortage, that only vital people could get them. You know, teachers, doctors, hospital workers, that sort of thing. Why would he have asked if we’d had ours?”

“After the way they worked out, you should be glad that you didn’t take him up on it.”

“I know.” She continued to look thoughtful, and puzzled. “Have you met an old doctor recently? Or even a middle-aged one?”

“Honey!”

“I’m serious. Dr. Saltzman is the only doctor I’ve seen in years who’s over forty. And he doesn’t count. He’s a dentist.”

“Oh, wow! Look, honey, I’m sorry I brought up any of this business with Boyle. I think something is going on, but not in such proportions, believe me. We’re a community of what?—seven hundred in good weather? I don’t think we’ve been infiltrated.”

She wasn’t listening. “Of course, they couldn’t have got rid of all the doctors, probably just the ones who were too honest to go along with it. Well, that probably wasn’t many. Old and crooked. Young and… immortal. Boy!”

“Let’s go shovel snow. You need to have your brain aired out.”

While he cleared the path to the barn, Julia cleaned off the granite sculptures. She studied them. They were rough-quarried blocks, four feet high, almost as wide. The first one seemed untouched, until the light fell on it in a certain way, the rays low, casting long shadows. There were tracings of fossils, broken, fragmented. Nothing else. The second piece had a few things emerging from the surface, clawing their way up and out, none of them freed from it, though. A snail, a trilobite-like crustacean, a winged insect. What could have been a bird’s head was picking its way out. The third one had denned animals, warm-blooded animals, and the suggestion of forests. Next came man and his works. Still rising from stone, too closely identified with the stone to say for certain where he started and the stone ended, if there was a beginning and an end at all. The whole work was to be called The Wheel. These were the ends of the spokes, and at the hub of the wheel there was to be a solid granite seat, a pedestal-like seat. That would be the ideal place to sit and view the work, although she knew that few people would bother. But from the center, with the stones in a rough circle, the shadows should be right, the reliefs complementary to one another, suggesting heights that had been left out, suggesting depths that she hadn’t shown. All suggestion. The wheel that would unlock the knowledge within the viewer, let him see what he usually was blind to…

“Honey, move!” Martie nudged her arm. He was panting hard.

“Oh, dear. Look at you. You’ve been moving mountains!” Half the path was cleared. “Let’s make a snowman, right to the barn door.”

The snow was wet, and they cleared the rest of the path by rolling snowballs, laughing, throwing snowballs at each other, slipping and falling. Afterward they had soup and sandwiches, both of them too beat to think seriously about cooking.

“Nice day,” Julia said lazily, lying on the living-room floor, her chin propped up by cupped hands, watching Martie work on the fire.

“Yeah. Tired?”

“Um. Martie, after you talked with Hilary, what did you do the rest of the night?”

“I looked up Smithers’ work, what there was in the computer anyway. It’s been a long time ago, I’d forgotten a lot of the arguments.”

“And?”

“They refuted him thoroughly, with convincing data.”

“Are you certain? Did you cross-check?”

“Honey, they were men like… like Whaite, and… Never mind. They’re just names to you. They were the leaders at that time. Many of them are still the authorities. Men like that tried to replicate his experiments and failed. They looked for reasons for the failures and found methodological bungling on his part, erroneous conclusions, faulty data, mistakes in his formulae.”