Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (39 page)

“Okay, Lenny,” I said. “I believe you. And I won’t see her any more for the next couple of weeks, whatever happens. And, Lenny, if I’d known—I mean, I didn’t realize that anything of my attitude was coming through. I didn’t really think about it one way or the other. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her… or you.”

He looked at me gravely and nodded. “I know that,” he said. He stood up and his face softened a bit. “It’s always people like you, the rationalists, that are most afraid of any kind of mental disorders, even benign ones. It shows.”

I shook my head. “A contradiction in terms, isn’t that? Benign mental disorders?”

“Not necessarily.” Then he moved his stool back down the bench and went back to work. And I stared at the sketches before me for a long time before they came back into focus. The rest of the afternoon I fought against going back to her and punishing her for complaining about me. I thought of the ways I could inflict punishment on her, and knew that the real ace that I would keep for an emergency was her fear of heights. I visualized strolling along the lip of the Grand Canyon with her, or taking her up the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, or forcing her up the face of a cliff. And I kept a rigid control of my own thoughts so that I didn’t go out to her at all. I didn’t give in all week, but I had her nightmares.

On Wednesday Janet suggested that I should let Lenny go to Chicago and I snapped at her and called her a fool. On Thursday Lenny made the same suggestion, and I stalked from the lab and drove off in a white fury. When Janet came home I accused them of getting together and talking about me.

“Eddie, you know better than that. But look at you. You aren’t sleeping well, and you’ve been as nervous as a cat. What’s the matter with you?”

“Just leave me alone, okay? Tired, that’s all. Just plain tired. And tired of cross-examinations and dark hints and suspicions.”

They were getting together, the three of them, all the time. I knew that Lenny was spending his evenings with Christine, and that Janet was with them much of the time when I was busy down in the basement workshop or out at the hospital. They said, Janet and Lenny, that they were trying to decipher the code that Karl Rudeman had used in making his notes. I didn’t believe them.

They were talking about me, speculating on whether or not I was the one driving
her
crazy. I imagined the same conversation over and over, with Lenny insisting that I could have done
that
to her, and Janet, white-faced and frantic with indecision, denying it. Not while I had been with her, she would think. Not at a time like that.

Then I would snap awake, and either curse myself for being a fool, or become frightened by the paranoid drift of my thoughts. And I would know that none of it was true. Of course Janet wouldn’t discuss what went on over there; I had practically forbidden her to do so. And Lenny wouldn’t talk about it under the happiest circumstances, much less now.

Friday, driving to Chicago I began to relax, and after three hours on the road I was whistling and could almost forget the mess, could almost convince myself that I’d been having delusions, which was easier to take than the truth.

I slept deeply Friday night, and Saturday I was busy, getting our exhibit set up and getting acquainted with others who were also showing tools and machinery. From four until the doors closed at eleven, the hall got fuller and fuller, the noise level became excruciating, the smoke-laden air unbreathable. Our cutting tool drew a good, interested response, and I was busy. And too tired for the late dinner I had agreed to with two other exhibitors. We settled for hamburgers and beer in the hotel dining room, and soon afterward I tumbled into bed and again slept like a child. The crowds were just as thick on Sunday, but by Monday the idle curiosity-seekers were back at their jobs, and the ones who came through were businesslike and fewer in number. I had hired a business student to spell me, and I left him in charge from four until seven, the slack hours, so I could have an early dinner and get some rest. But I found myself wandering the streets instead, and finally I stopped in front of a library.

Karl Rudeman, I thought. How did he die? And I went in and looked him up in the
New York Times
from May, and read with absorption. When I went to dinner afterward, I was still trying to puzzle it out. He had had dinner with his family: his wife, parents, daughter, and son-in-law. After dinner they had played bridge for an hour or two. Sometime after that, after everyone else had gone to bed, he had left the house to roam through the fields that stretched out for a quarter of a mile, down to the river. He had collapsed and died of a heart attack at the edge of a field. Christine, awakening later and finding him gone, had first searched the house; then, when she realized that Karl was in his pajamas and barefooted, she had awakened her stepson-in-law and started a search of the grounds. Karl wasn’t found until daylight, when the tenant farmer spotted the figure in orange-and-black striped pajamas. There was no sign of violence, and it was assumed that he had been walking in his sleep when the fatal attack occurred.

Back to the exhibit, and the flow of evening viewers. Invitations, given and accepted, for drinks later, and a beaver flick. Lunch with a couple of other men the following day. A long talk with a manufacturer who was interested in procuring the order for the cutting tool, should there be enough interest to warrant it.

The obscene movie had been a mistake, I knew as soon as the girl jerked off her slip and opened her legs. Suddenly I was seeing
her
, open-legged on the edge of the bed before a mirror.

I pushed my way through a cluster of men at the back of the theater to get out into the cold November air again. I walked back to the hotel. A freezing mist was hanging head-high, not falling, but just hanging there, and I gulped it in, thankful for the pain of the cold air in my throat. A prowl car slowed down as it passed me, it picked up speed again and moved on down the street. I had bought a stack of magazines and some paperbacks to read, but nothing in the room looked interesting when I took off my damp clothes and tried to persuade myself that I could fall asleep now.

I had room service send up a bottle of bourbon and ice, and tried to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. My attention kept wandering, and finally I lay back on the bed, balancing my drink on my stomach, and thought about
her
.

It was so easy, and gentle even. She didn’t suspect this time, not at all. She was saying, “…because they’re abstractions, you see. Emotions like fear, love, anger. First the physiological change in the brain, the electrochemical changes that take place stimulating those abstractions, and then the experience of the emotion.”

“You mean to say he really believed that the feeling of anger comes after the chemical changes that take place?”

“Of course. That’s how it is with a physiological psychologist. And you can see it operate; tranquilizers permit you to know intellectually but they don’t let you react, so you don’t experience the anger or fear, or whatever.”

Lenny was sitting back in the green chair in the study, and she was behind the desk that was spread with snapshots and proofs.

“Okay. What triggers those changes in the first place?”

“Well, his specialty was sight, or vision, as he preferred to call it. Light entering the eye brings about a change in the chromophore in the first thousandth of a second, and after that the rest of the changes are automatic, a causal chain that results in the experiencing of a vision of some sort.”

“I know,” Lenny said gently. “But what about the vision that doesn’t have an object in real space? The imaginary image? No light there to start the chain of events.”

“A change brought about by electrochemical energy? The leakage of energy from cellular functioning? The first step is on a molecular level, not much energy is involved, after all. Lenny, it’s happening…”

I got a jolt of fear then, along with the words spoken softly. Her hands clenched and a proof under her right hand buckled up and cracked. Before Lenny could respond, I pulled out and away.

I didn’t know how she had found out, what I had done to give my presence away. But her knowledge had been as certain as mine, and the fear was named now. It was a directed fear and hatred that I had felt. She knew that something from outside had entered her. I sat up and finished my drink, then turned off the light. And I wondered what they had been finding in those notes… Half a bottle and hours later I fell asleep.

I dreamed that I was being chased, that I kept calling back over my shoulder, “Stop, it’s me! Look at me! It’s me!” But it didn’t stop, and steadily it gained ground, until I knew that I was going to be caught, and the thought paralyzed me. All I could do then was wait in rigid, motionless, soundless terror for it to reach out and get me.

The nightmare woke me up, and it was minutes before I could move. It was nearly daylight; I didn’t try to sleep any more. I was too afraid of having
her
dreams again. At seven thirty I called Janet.

“Hey,” she said happily. “I thought we’d never hear from you.”

“I sent some cards.”

“But you’ll be here before they will. How’s it going?”

“Fine. Boring after the first day. I went to a dirty movie last night.”

“I hope you had bad dreams. Serve you right.” Her voice was teasing and cheerful and happy, and I could see her smile and the light in her eyes.

“How’s everything there?” I couldn’t ask about Lenny and Christine. If they had found out anything, they hadn’t told her. I’d know, if they had. We chatted for several minutes, then she had to run, and I kissed her over the wire and we both hung up at the same time, the way we always did. I was being stupid. Naturally they wouldn’t tell her. Hey, did you know that your husband’s been torturing this woman psychologically, that he raped her repeatedly, that he’s contemplating killing her? I jerked from the bed, shaking.

I had a dull pain behind my right eye when I went down to breakfast. A wind was driving sleet through the streets like sheer white curtains, and I stopped at the doorway, shivering, and went back inside to the hotel dining room. I couldn’t think, and I knew that I had to think now.

If Lenny deciphered the notebooks, and if Karl had known that she could be possessed—there, I thought with some satisfaction, I used the word. If he had known and put that in his notebooks, then Lenny was bright enough to know that the recurrence of her schizophrenia was more than likely due to a new invasion. I groaned. He wouldn’t believe that. I couldn’t even believe it. No one in his right mind would, unless he had done it and could prove it to himself… I gripped my cup so hard that coffee splashed out and I had to use both hands to return the cup to the saucer. Had Lenny gone into her too?

The pain behind my eye was a knife blade now. Lenny! Of course. I tried to lift the coffee and couldn’t. I flung down my napkin and got up and hurried back to my room, as fast as I could get out of there. I paced, but no matter how I came to it, I ended up thinking that the only way Lenny could have accepted the thing was through experience. First Rudeman, then me, and now Lenny.

He couldn’t have her. She was mine now. And I would never give her up.

The pain was unbearable and I collapsed, sprawled across the bed, clutching my head. I hadn’t had a migraine in years. It was not knowing. Not knowing how much they had found out, not knowing what they were doing, what they were planning, not knowing if there was a way they could learn about me.

I went to her abruptly, roughly. She dropped a pan of developer and moaned, and caught the sink in a dark room. “No!” she cried. “Please. No!”

I tried to make her remember everything Lenny had said to her, tried to bring back his voice, but there was too much, it came too fast. She was too frightened, and intermixed were the revived thoughts of insanity, of Karl’s voice, Lenny’s words. Too much. She had to relax. I took her to the couch and made her lie down and stop thinking. I felt her fear, and hatred, and abhorrence, like a pulse beating erratically; with each beat the pressure increased, and then ebbed. She tried to break away, and we struggled, and I hurt her. I didn’t know what I had done, how I had managed it, but she groaned and wept and fell down again, and now my pain was also her pain. “Karl,” she whispered soundlessly, “please go. Please leave me alone. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Please.”

I stayed with her for more than an hour, and then I tried to force her to forget. To know nothing about my presence. She struggled again, and this time she screamed piercingly, and for a moment the feeling of a plunge straight down was almost overwhelming, but everything stopped, and I could find nothing there to communicate with, nothing to probe. It was like being swallowed by a sea of feathers that stretched out in all directions, shifting when I touched them, but settling again immediately. She had fainted.

I fell asleep almost immediately and when I awakened it was nearly two, and my headache was gone. I went to the exposition.

That afternoon a man returned who had been at the stall for almost an hour on Saturday. He had a companion this time. “Hi, Mr. Laslow. Hendrickson, remember? Like you to meet Norbert Weill.”

Of course, I knew who Norbert Weill was. If you had a home workshop, you had something of his in it. If you had a small commercial shop, you probably had something of his. If you had a hundred-man operation, you’d have something of his. He was about sixty, small and square, with muscles like a boxer’s. He grunted at the introduction, his handshake was a no-nonsense test of strength. “Hendrickson says it’ll cut through plastic, glass, aluminum, steel. Without changing nothing but the program. That right?”

“Yes. Would you like a demonstration?”

“Not here. In my shop. How much?”

“I can’t discuss that without my partner, Mr. Weill.”

“Get him, then. When can he make it?”

So it went. In the end I agreed to call Lenny, then get in touch with Weill again at his Chicago office. Lenny didn’t sound very enthusiastic. “Let him have the machine in his own shop for a couple of weeks after you close down there. Then let him make an offer.”