Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (37 page)

I called Janet at the hospital and told her, and she suggested that we have some literature printed up, ready to hand out, or to leave stacked for prospective buyers to pick up.

“We should have literature,” I called to Lenny, who nodded. “We can have a sketch of the machine, I guess,” I said to Janet.

“Don’t be silly. Let Christine take some pictures for you.”

“Our neighbor, Christine Warnecke, would probably take pictures for us,” I told Lenny. He nodded a bit more enthusiastically.

We scheduled the next two weeks as tightly as possible, planning for eighteen-hour days, trying to keep in mind the commitments we already had. We had to get a machine ready to take to Chicago, get it polished for photographs, get an assortment of programs for the computer, keep the running check on the wired suits in the hospital cases, finish installing a closed-circuit TV in a private school, and so on.

I was late for dinner, and when I got there Janet simply smiled when I muttered, Sorry. “I know,” she said, putting a platter of fried chicken down. “I know exactly what it will be like for the next few weeks. I’ll see you again for Thanksgiving, or thereabouts.”

I kissed her. While I was eating, the telephone rang. Christine, wondering if we’d like to see some of the work she’d done in the past few years. I remembered her offer to show us, but I shook my head at Janet. “Can’t. I’ve got to write up the fact sheet tonight and be ready for the printers. They can take it Thursday. Did you mention the picture to her?” Janet shook her head. “I will.” I took the phone.

“Hi, Christine. Sorry, but I’ve got things that I have to do tonight. Maybe Janet can. Listen, would you be willing to take a picture of a machine for us, Lenny and me? He’s my partner.” She said of course, and I told her that Janet would fill in the details and hung up. I shooed Janet out, and went downstairs. Hours later I heard her come back, heard the basement door open slightly as she listened to see if I was still there. I clicked my pen on my beer glass, and the door closed. For a couple of seconds I considered my wife, decided she was a good sort, and then forgot her as I made another stab at the information sheet.

By twelve thirty I had a workable draft. It would need some polish, and possibly some further condensation, but it seemed to be adequate. I went upstairs for a drink before going to bed. I didn’t turn on the living-room lights, but sat in the darkened room and went over and over the plans we had made. Tomorrow I’d get Christine over to take the pictures…

I suddenly saw her buttocks as she moved away from me, and her enormous eyes as she sat at the table and sipped coffee, and the very small hand with its wide band of gold. I closed my eyes. And saw the hand again, this time it opened and closed before my face, turning over and over as I examined it. I saw the other hand, and it was as if it were my own hand. I could raise and lower it. I could touch the right one to the left one, lift one to… my face. I stared at the room, the guest room in the Donlevy house. I had slept there before. Janet and I had stayed there years ago while paint dried in our house. I knew I was seated in the darkened living room, with a rum collins in my hand, knew Janet was sleeping just down the hall, but still I was also in that other room, seeing with eyes that weren’t my eyes.

I started to feel dizzy, but this time I rejected the thought of falling.
NO!
The feeling passed. I lifted the hands again, and got up. I had been in a deep chair, with a book on my lap. It slipped off to the floor. I tried to look down, but my eyes were riveted, fixed in a straight-ahead stare. I ordered the head to move, and with a combination of orders and just doing it, I forced movement. I forced her/me to make a complete turn, so that I could examine the whole room. Outside, I ordered, and walked down the hall to the living room, to the study. There were other thoughts, and fear. The fear was like a distant surf, rising and falling, but not close enough to feel, or to hear actually. It grew stronger as the walk continued. Dizziness returned, and nausea. I rejected it also.

The nausea had to do with the way my eyes were focusing. Nothing looked normal, or familiar, if my gaze lingered on it. And there was movement where I expected none. I made her stop and looked at the study from the doorway. The desk was not the straight lines and straight edges that I had come to know, but rather a blur that suggested desk, that I knew meant desk, and that did mean desk if I closed my eyes, or turned from it. But while I looked at it, it was strange. It was as if I could look through the desk to another image, the same piece of furniture, but without the polish, without casters, the same desk at an earlier stage. And beyond that, a rough suggestion of the same desk. And further, wood not yet assembled. Logs. A tree on a forest floor. A tree in full leaf. As I looked at the tree, it dwindled and went through changes: leaves turned color and fell and grew again, but fewer; branches shortened and vanished and the tree shrank and vanished…

I jerked away, and in the living room my heart was pounding and I couldn’t catch my breath. I waited for the next few minutes, wondering if I were having a heart attack, if I had fallen asleep, wondering if I were going mad. When I could trust my hands to move without jerking, I lifted the drink and swallowed most of it before I put it down again. Then I paced the living room for several minutes. Nothing had happened, I knew. Overtired, imaginative, half asleep…I refused to believe it was anything more. And I was afraid to try it again to prove to myself that that was all there was to it. I finished the drink, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.

Christine turned up at the shop at four the next afternoon. She shook Lenny’s hand, businesslike and brisk, and thoroughly professional. He could have eaten her for breakfast without making a bulge. Her greeting to me was friendly and open. She looked very tired, as if she wasn’t sleeping well.

“If you don’t mind, Eddie, maybe Mr. Leonard can help me with the machine. I find that I work better with strangers than with people I know.”

That suited me fine and I left them alone in the far end of the lab. Now and again I could hear Lenny’s rumbling voice protesting something or other, and her very quiet answers. I couldn’t make out her words, but from his I knew that she insisted on positioning the machine on a black velvet hanging for a series of shots.

“It’s the contrast that I was after,” she said when she was through. “The cold and beautifully functional machine, all shiny metal and angles and copper and plastic, all so pragmatic and wholesome, and open. Contrasted by the mystery of black velvet. Like a sky away from the city lights. Or the bowels of a cave with the lights turned off. Or the deepest reaches of the mind where the machine was really born.”

Right until the last I was ready to veto the velvet, but she got to me. It had been born in such a black bottomless void, by God. “Let’s wait for proofs and then decide,” I said. I wondered, had she looked at the machine, through it to the components; through them back to the idea as it emerged from the black? I tightened my hand on my mug and took a deep drink of the hot murky coffee. We probably had the world’s worst coffee in the lab because Lenny insisted on making it and he never measured anything, or washed the pot.

“I’ll develop them later today and have proofs ready to show you tonight, if you want,” Christine said to us.

“You want to pick them up and bring them in with you in the morning?” Lenny asked. I said sure, and Christine left. I didn’t watch her walk away.

After dinner Janet and I both went over to her house to see the proofs. While I studied the pictures, Christine and Janet went to the kitchen to talk and make coffee. I finished and leaned back in my chair waiting for their return. Without any perceptible difference in my thoughts, my position, anything, I was seeing Janet through Christine’s eyes. Janet looked shocked and unbelieving.

I stared at her and began to see other faces there, too. Younger, clearer eyes, and smoother-skinned, emptier-looking. I turned my head abruptly as something else started to emerge. I knew that if I had tried, I would have seen all the personality traits, including the ugliness, the pettiness, everything there was that went into her.

“What is it?” Janet asked, alarm in her voice.

I shook my head,
her
head. She tried to speak and I wouldn’t let her. Without any warning I had crossed the threshold of belief. I knew I could enter her, could use her, could examine whatever was in her mind without her being able to do anything about it. I knew in that same flash that she didn’t realize what was happening, that she felt haunted, or crazy, but that she had no idea that another personality was inside her. I pulled away so suddenly that I almost let her fall down.

From the other room I heard Janet’s cry, followed by the sound of breaking glass. I hurried to the kitchen to find her standing over Christine, who was sitting on a stool looking dazed and bewildered and very frightened.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Janet shook her head. “I dropped a glass,” she said, daring me not to believe.

I wondered why she lied to me, but leaving them alone again, I knew why. I had always been the rationalist in the family. I refused to grant the existence of ghosts, souls, spirits, unseen influences, astrology, palmistry, ESP, anything that couldn’t be controlled and explained. I marveled at my absolute acceptance of what had happened. It was like seeing a puzzle suddenly take form and have meaning, like a child’s puzzle where animals are hidden in line drawings; once you locate them, you can’t lose them again. You know. I knew now. It happens once, you don’t believe it; twice, you still don’t believe. Three times, it’s something you’ve known all your life. I knew. My hands were shaking when I lighted a cigarette, but inwardly I felt calmer than I had felt before as I considered Christine. I wasn’t afraid of her any longer, for one thing. It was something I was doing, not something being done to me. I could control it. And she didn’t know.

I stubbed out the cigarette and sat down abruptly. Rudeman? Had he lived in her mind throughout their marriage? Is that what drew him to her, made him marry a girl twenty-five years younger than himself? Had he managed to keep her by this—control? I couldn’t use the word possession then. I wasn’t thinking of it as possession. It was more like having someone else’s mind open for inspection, a tour for the curious, nothing more.

If I talked to her now, made her see what had happened, quite inadvertently, she could probably get help, learn how to control it so that future intrusion would be impossible. If Rudeman had cared for her at all, hadn’t wanted to use her, he would have cured her, or had it done somehow. Maybe he had known, maybe that’s what those boxes of books were about, the years of experimentation. A little human guinea pig, I thought. Large-eyed, frightened, trusting. Completely ignorant of what was being done to it. And over the image of the frightened woman came the image of her slight figure as she walked away from me toward the woods, with her little fanny swinging gracefully, the rest of her body a mystery under concealing clothes.

The way she saw things, there wouldn’t be any mystery about anything. Into and through and out the other side. No wonder Rudeman had been fascinated. How did she manage to live with so many conflicting images? Did that explain her schizophrenia? Just a name they applied to a condition that was abnormal, without knowing anything about what it was actually? The questions were coming faster and faster, and the thought of her, sitting out there in the kitchen, with answers locked up under that skull, was too much.

What was she telling Janet? I started through the hall toward the kitchen, then stopped and went back. I couldn’t look at her yet. I needed time to accept all the way through what had happened between us. And I suddenly wondered what she saw when she looked at me, through me to all the things that I had always believed were invisible.

I couldn’t stand being in that house any longer. I grabbed the proofs and stuffed them back into the envelope. In the hallway I yelled out to Janet, “I’m going back through the woods. I’ll leave the car for you. Take your time.”

She stuck her head out from the kitchen. I thought she looked at me with suspicion and coldness, but her words were innocuous, and I decided that I had imagined the expression. “I won’t be much longer, honey. Be careful.”

It was dark under the oak trees, with the tenacious leaves still clinging to the twigs, rustling in the wind. The ground was spongy and water came through my shoes quickly, ice cold, squishing with each step. A fine film of ice covered the two logs; I cursed as I slipped and slid across, thinking of the black frigid water below. At our side of the brook I paused and looked back at the glowing windows, and for just an instant I entered her. No transition now, just the sudden awareness of what she was seeing, what she was hearing, feeling, thinking. She moaned and fear throbbed in her temples. She shut her eyes hard. I got out as fast as I had entered, as shaken as she had been. I hadn’t meant to do it. The thought and the act, if it could be called that, had been simultaneous. I rushed home, stumbling through the familiar woods, bumping into obstacles that seemed ominous: a log where yesterday the path had been clear, a hole covered with leaves—a trap to break an ankle in—a low branch that was meant to blind me, but only cut my cheek, a root that snaked out to lasso my foot, throwing me down face first into the ice-glazed leaves and dirt. I lay quietly for a minute. Finally I stood up and went on, making no attempt to brush off the muck. Muck and filth.

I still had a couple of hours of work to do that night. The following day Mike’s body cast was being changed, and I had to be on hand. He had his ham operator’s license, and Janet had said that the only problem now was that he didn’t want to stop to sleep or eat or anything else. He was doing remarkably well in every way. She had kissed me with tears in her eyes when she reported. In the morning I had to drop the pictures off for Lenny, scoot over to the hospital, return for the pictures, take them back to her… I changed my mind. I’d let Lenny deliver the proofs. In fact, I wouldn’t see
her
at all again. Ever.