Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (40 page)

“I think he’ll make the offer without all that, if we’re both on hand to discuss it. Outright sale of this machine, an advance against royalties. Could come to quite a bundle.”

“Christ! I just don’t… Eddie, can you get away from that place for a couple of hours? I’ve got to have a talk with you. Not about this goddam machine, something else.”

“Sure. Look, plan to fly up on Friday. It’ll take an hour, no more. A couple of hours for the talk with Weill. A couple more with me, then fly back. Six hours is all. Or less maybe. You can afford to take one lousy day off.”

“Okay. I’ll call your hotel and let you know what time I’ll get in.” He sounded relieved.

“Hey, wait a minute. What the hell is going on? Is it one of the suits? The closed-circuit TV giving trouble? What?”

“Oh. Sorry, Eddie. I thought I said personal. Nothing at the shop. Everything’s fine. It’s… it’s something with Chris. Anyway, see you Friday.”

I didn’t go back to the booth, but instead found a small coffee shop in the exposition building and sat there smoking and thinking about Lenny and Christine, and Janet and me, and Mr. Weill, and God knows what else. This was it, I thought, the break we’d been waiting for. I didn’t doubt that. Money, enough for once to do the things we’d been wanting to do. A bigger shop, more equipment, maybe some help, even a secretary to run herd on books. And neither Lenny nor I cared. Neither of us gave a damn.

Sitting there, with coffee in front of me, a cigarette in my fingers, I probed Christine to see what was happening. She was talking in a low voice. Her eyes were closed. Going into her was like putting on distortion lenses, putting scrambling devices in my ears. Nothing was in clear focus, no thoughts were coherent all the way through. She was on something, I realized. Something that had toned down everything, taken off all the edges, all the sharpness.

“I used to walk on that same path, after… I saw the fields sown, the tractors like spiders, back and forth, back and forth, stringing a web of seeds. And the green shoots—they really do shoot out, like being released, a rubber band that is suddenly let go, but they do it in slow motion. It was a wheat field. Pale green, then as high as my shoulders so that I was a head floating over the field, only a head. Magician’s best trick. Float a head. Then the harvesters came and the snow fell. And it was the same walk. You see? And I couldn’t tell which was the real one. They were all real. Are real. All of them are. The tranquilizers. He said I shouldn’t take them. Have to learn how to find which one is now and concentrate on it. No tranquilizers.”

She sighed, and the images blurred, fused, separated again. She turned off a tape recorder, but continued to lie still, with her eyes closed. Her thoughts were a chaotic jumble. If she suspected that I was there, she gave no indication. She was afraid to open her eyes. Trying to remember why she had walked along that path so many times after Karl died out there. In the beginning, the hours of training, hours and hours of testing. Then the experiments. Afraid of him. Terribly afraid. He had cleared the world for her, but he might scramble it again. So afraid of him. If she took the capsules and went to bed, it didn’t matter, but now. Afraid to open her eyes. Lenny? Isn’t it time yet? It’s been so long—days, weeks. Snow has fallen, and the summer heat has come and gone. I know the couch is under me, and the room around me, and my finger on the switch to the recorder. I know that. I have to repeat it sometimes, but then I know it. Mustn’t open my eyes now. Not yet. Not until Lenny comes back.

I smelled burning filter and put out the cigarette and drank coffee. What would she see if she opened her eyes now? Was that her madness? A visual distortion, a constant hallucination, a mixture of reality and fantasy that she couldn’t tell apart? She turned her head, faced the back of the couch.

Very slowly I forced her to sit up, and then to open her eyes. It was much harder than before. She kept slipping away from me. It was as if there were so many other impulses that mine was just one, no more powerful than any of the others. Finally she opened her eyes, and the room began to move. There was no sequence, no before and after, or cause and effect. Everything was. Winter, with a fire in the fireplace, summer with fans in the windows, company talking gaily, the room empty, children playing with puzzles, a couple copulating on the couch, a man pacing talking angrily… They were all real. I knew we/I had to get out of there, and there was no place to go. I was afraid of the outside world even more than the inside one. I was afraid to move. The couch vanished from behind me. The room was moving again. And I knew it would vanish, and that I would fall, like I had fallen a thousand times, a million times.

“Help me!” I cried to the pacing man, and he continued to pace although the room was certainly fading. And the children played. And the couple made love. And the fans whirred. And the fire burned. And I fell and fell and fell and fell…

I sat in the coffee shop and shook. I was in a sweat, and I couldn’t stop the shaking in my hands. I didn’t dare try to walk out yet. No more! No more. I shook my head and swore, no more. I’d kill her. She had learned what to do, what not to do, and through my stupidity and blundering, I’d kill her.

“Sir? Is anything wrong? Are you all right?”

The waitress. She touched my arm warily, ready to jump back.

“Sir?”

“I… I’m sorry, Miss. Sleeping with my eyes open, I guess. I’m sorry.” She didn’t believe me. Behind her I saw another woman watching. She must have sent the waitress over. I picked up the check, but I was afraid to try to stand up. I waited until the girl turned and walked away, and then I held the top of the table until my legs steadied.

I had the business student I’d hired relieve me for the rest of the day, and I walked back to my hotel, slowly, feeling like an old man. I started the hour-long walk making myself promises. I would never touch her again, I’d help Lenny find out the truth about her and do whatever could be done to cure her, and to get her and Lenny together. They needed each other, and I had Janet and the children, and the shop. Everything I had driven for was either mine, or within sight by now. Everything. She was a danger to me, nothing else. By the time I got to the hotel I knew the promises were lies. That as long as I could get inside that woman’s head, I would keep right on doing it. And now the thought had hit me that I wanted to be with her physically, just her and me, when I did it next time. It was a relief finally to admit to myself that I wanted to seize her body and mind. And I knew that I wanted everyone else out of her life altogether. Especially Lenny.

I bought a bottle of bourbon, and some cheese and crackers. I had to stay in to plan my campaign, make certain of all the details this time before I touched her. I knew I would have to be more careful now. I’d have her in an institution if I wasn’t more careful. Had she been able to get back to the present after I ran out? I realized that that’s how I had always left her, in a panic or in a faint. What if she in desperation jumped out a window or took an overdose of something? I didn’t want to destroy her, or to damage her in any way. I might have to hurt her at first, just to show her that she had to obey. And no more tranquilizers. Karl had been right. What else had he learned about her? How deep had his control been? The line from Pete’s letter came back to me: “He wound her up each morning…”

The bastard, I thought with hatred. Goddamned bastard.

It was almost five when I got to my room. There was a message from Lenny, to call him at
her
number. I crumpled up the note and flung it across the room. How much of the notebooks had he been able to get through? How much had he told her about what he had found there? I poured a generous drink and tried to think about Lenny and Karl, and all the time I kept seeing her, a tiny, perfectly formed figure, amazingly large dark eyes, doll-like hands…I took a long drink and then placed the call. I was shaking again, this time with fear that she was hurt, really hurt.

Lenny answered. “Oh, Eddie. Can you get Weill tonight? I can get in by ten fifteen in the morning. Can you find out if he can see us then?”

I swallowed hard before I could answer. “Sure. He said to call anytime. Someone will be there. Is that all? I mean when I got the message to call you at… her house, I was afraid something had happened.”

“No. It’s all right. Chris has decided to feed me, that’s all.” There was a false note in his voice. Probably she was nearby, listening. I fought the impulse to go out to her to find out.

“Okay. If I don’t call back, assume that it’s set up.”

“What’s wrong with you? You sound hoarse.”

“Out in the rain. A bug. I’m catching that mysterious ‘it’ that’s always going around. See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Take care of yourself. Get a bottle and go to bed.”

“Sure, Lenny.”

I stared at the phone after hanging up. He was suspicious. I could tell from his voice, from the way he hedged when I asked a direct question. Maybe not simply suspicious. Maybe they actually knew by now. Not that he could prove anything. To whom? Janet? A jury?

At breakfast the next morning I realized that I hadn’t eaten anything for a couple of days, and still didn’t want to then. I had coffee and toast, and left most of the soggy bread on the dish. Lenny met me at the hotel.

“God, Eddie, you’d better get home and go to bed. We can close up the display. You look like hell.”

“A bug. I’ll be all right. Maybe you could stay if I do decide to take off?”

“Let’s close the whole thing. It’s just three more days.”

“I’ll stay,” I said. What an ideal set-up that would have been. Him here, me back home, Janet working.

I let Lenny do the talking at Weill’s office, and we got a good offer, not as much as we had hoped, but probably more than Weill had planned to make. We ended up saying that our lawyer would go over the contract and be in touch.

“Let’s go to your room where we can talk without interruption,” Lenny said then, and neither of us mentioned Weill again. A few months ago, B.C., Before Christine, we’d have been arrested for disturbing the peace if we’d had this offer from someone like Weill, and now, we didn’t even mention it again.

I lay down on my bed and let Lenny have the only chair in the room. My head was ringing and aching mildly, and my back and legs were stiff and sore.

Lenny paced. “God, I don’t even know where or how to begin this,” he said finally. “Back at the beginning of Christine and Karl. She was such a good subject for his experiments that he based much of his research on her alone. Then he found out that she was too good, that what she could do was so abnormal that he couldn’t base any conclusions on his findings on her. For instance, he trained her to see objects so small that they were too small to fall on the cones and rods in the retina. And he trained her to spot a deviation in a straight line so minute that it needs special equipment to measure. She can tell the exact place that a circle deviates from sphericity, and again it needs sophisticated instruments to measure it. Stereo acuity. We lose it if the peripheral vision is flattened out, if we don’t have the cues. She doesn’t lose it. She can see things where there isn’t enough light to see them. She can see things that are too far away to see. Same with her color perception. You need a spectrometer and a spectrophotometer to make the same differentiation she can do with a glance.”

He stopped and threw himself down in the chair and lighted a cigarette before he continued. “I’m getting pretty well into the notebooks. It’s tough going, very technical, in a field I know nothing about. And he knew nothing about physics, and used layman’s language, and a sort of shade-tree mechanic’s approach with some of the equipment he had to learn to use. Anyway, after a few years, he switched to a second code. He was paranoid about his secrets. A developing psychosis is written down there plain enough even for me to see. He was afraid of her.” Lenny put out the cigarette and looked at me.

“What do you mean afraid? Her schizophrenia? Was she showing signs of it again?”

“Will you forget that! She’s not a schiz! Pretend you look at this room and you see it as it’s been all through its history, with everyone who was ever here still here. Suppose you can’t stop yourself from straying in time, just the way you stray in space. If you were lost in a hotel like this one and had to knock on doors, or ask people the way to your room, that’s being lost in space. Lost in time is worse because no one answers until you find your own time. But those who are in your time see the search, hear your end of it, and wham, you’re in a hospital.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up, but the room was unsteady. I had to support my head on my hands, propped up on my knees. “So why isn’t she locked up?”

“Because she learned how to control it most of the time. Maybe a lot of people are born able to see through time and learn as infants to control it, how to tell this present from all the other images that they see. Maybe only a few do it, and most of them never learn control. God knows something drives some children into autism. She learned. But in periods of high stress she backslid. If she became overtired, or sick, or under a strain, she couldn’t hold the present in sharp enough focus. So they had her in and out of hospitals. And Rudeman became fascinated by her, and began to do his own research, using her, and he realized that she was seeing layers of time. Can’t you just see it? Him the famous physiological psychologist denying mind from the start, being forced finally to concede that there’s something there besides the brain. He struggled. It’s all there.” Lenny’s sudden laugh was bitter and harsh. “He preferred to think he was going mad, that she was mad. But the scientist in him wouldn’t let it rest there. He devised one experiment after another to disprove her abilities, and only got in deeper and deeper. First understanding, then control. He taught her how to look at
now
. He forced her into photography as part of her therapy, a continuing practice in seeing what is now.”

He couldn’t see my face. If he had found out that much, he must have learned the rest, I kept thinking. I couldn’t tell if he suspected me or not, but if he knew that someone was driving her back into that condition, he would go down the list of names, and sooner or later he would get to me. I knew he would stop there. Too many signs. Too much evidence of my guilt. He’d know. Janet would know. I remembered the toast that
she
had made that night in her house: to the good men. I wanted to laugh, or cry.