Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (21 page)

“You too, honey. Now let’s go.”

Ullster was a mathematician, a theoretical mathematical physicist, to be precise. The newspaper said so when his move into the company was announced. Herman Ullster. No more was said. There was a big shake up; men were transferred to work in his department from other sections. Computer time was rearranged drastically. Ullster had seven programmers under him.

Coming home from the pool, Hank said, “They might insist that we move inside the complex soon.”

Her heart pounded and she was afraid to look at him, afraid he would see the excitement on her face. She waited a moment then said, “Is it official?”

“Not yet. Hadley was surprised when he learned that I’m still on the outside and working in Ullster’s section. He’ll take it up with them next week.”

His tight voice, gaze fixed on the road ahead of them, hands hard on the wheel, furious with them at the complex, furious with himself, for being told he would have to move, ordered to come inside the complex. She knew. But the complex!

Luxuriant apartments, some single houses, some duplexes, its own stores, restaurants, bowling lanes, swimming pools, putting greens…

She shopped in Goldwater’s for a dress to mark the occasion, a simple sleeveless linen, pale yellow. Fifty-nine ninety-five. She took it home and hid it.

Maiya, lovely in her pale lemon-colored dress that was superb with her rich tan and honey tone hair, self-possessed and cool, stands in the doorway and looks them over appraisingly as they enter the apartment and find seats. One, Morrison, president of the research corporation, doesn’t sit down. He studies her as carefully as she examines them. He nods. He motions to the group of men and two of them leave quietly, three others remaining.

“What’s your price?” Morrison asks.

“One percent in the company,” Maiya says easily. She moves to the table and gets a cigarette and waits for him to light it for her. He does and she blows a perfect smoke ring. “Plus fifty thousand cash within ten days.”

Maiya thought of Morrison whom she had seen at one time from a distance. Corpulent, a giant, with a head as big as a basketball and shining bald. He would fill the living room all by himself; she would be like a single wreath of pale smoke beside such a man. With one sweep of his hand he could disperse her, make her vanish forever, and he wouldn’t even notice that she had been there and was gone.

“Honey, I think this is what I want to do. I’ll have to start low, but that’s alright. I’ll have my degree in two years, and meanwhile I’ll be part of it. They’re doing research and making plans for the uses of the ocean floor and for the planets when the time comes. Food, fuel, medicines, who knows what they’ll come up with from research like this?”

Hank, twenty three,
ex-GI
, ex-many things, nothing. Starting salary $98.75 per week. Up to $135.45 after a year and a half. The apartment was $160 per month. Quitting school with only half a year to go. Stopping the flow of communication that he had maintained with Maiya since they married four years ago.

Maiya on the couch, waiting for the visitors, twenty-four, thinking about fifty thousand dollars. Not-thinking about Hank again and again, resolutely not-thinking about Hank. Fifty thousand dollars. He had lived in the Village on nothing, he said. Air, words, ideas? Handouts? What was fifty thousand to him? Not-thinking of Hank. She could go to New York or Miami, and… And what? Having money was what she thought of, no what she would do with it, where she would go with it. Having it and not-thinking of Hank.

Hank looking out the window during the night. “There’s a crazy moon. Look at it, honey. Big as a house out there.” Moonlight on the desert, blue light that almost let you see, like a half- remembered image from a fairy tale where you didn’t think about reality or unreality of a castle floating on water. Hank, naked at the window unreal in the same light, playing his guitar, singing softly: “…and what have you built, when you’ve built a bomb? You’ve built hurt and pain and suffering anon…”

“Hank, stop it and come to bed.”

Sometimes she didn’t know him, couldn’t think why she had married him, where they were going or why.

Not-thinking of Hank in bed with her. Especially not-thinking of Hank in bed with her.

Maiya weeps bitterly and can’t answer the questions, can’t speak. Dr. Whitman motions them angrily from the room and sits by her side and pats her shoulder awkwardly. “I know, my dear. Hank told me what a wonderful life you had together. You will have to be brave now. It isn’t going to be easy for you.” No!

Maiya jerked when somewhere a clock struck four. It was about time she returned to the kitchen and stood with her hand on the plug to the coffeepot. Hank’s papers. What if they wanted Hanks papers? She ran to the bedroom and yanked open the top bureau drawer and snatched notebooks and loose papers up in both hands. Where could she put them? She started for the bed, then stopped. But where? Bedroom, living room, kitchen, bath… She ran to the bathroom and started to tear up the papers into tiny pieces. Limericks, bits of verse, songs, letters. All very, very dirty. She flushed them down the toilet.

A film of perspiration had broken out on her forehead and she blotted it with Kleenex moistened with skin freshener. What would they have thought of her?

Why were they coming?

What did they want from her?

She thought of the concrete road again and walked back to the living room and sat once more. It was so bright! On her way from the university where they had a housekeeping unit, to Mesa, Arizona, where Hank had his new job. Miles and miles of plains, desert, white bright sky, and the car with four men in it that kept edging closer and closer so that she couldn’t relax, couldn’t let down her guard for a moment. Everything connected to everything else. A skein of wool with millions of threads, so that it didn’t matter which one you followed, you ended back in the middle. Hank has said that, not Maiya. She shook her head violently. Not-thinking of Hank. The car followed closer going up the mountain roads. She couldn’t help it, she had to slow down. If only she knew exactly what it was she was running from. Maybe they weren’t even threatening her, just happen to be going in the same direction, at about the same speed.

“Honey, you know all my life I’ve wanted to make things, you know? Model cars when I was a kid, then string wires into bottles and make lamps, put tubes together and come up with a radio or a hi-fi. Like that. I like to take things and put them together and come up with something new and useful, and even pretty.” He got out of the army in California and walked across the country to New York where they met and married three weeks later. “No kids for a while, okay with you?”

She had nodded, relieved. No kids now, maybe never. She teased him about it, though: You’re the guy that wants to make things, but not kids.

Nothing that would hurt, he said. She knew she looked blank, and he had pushed her over backward in the bed and was on top of her with a scissor-lock… Not-thinking of Hank and her in bed together. God not that…

Hairpin curves, thirty miles an hour, the other car half a city block away. Almost see their expressions now, one in the back seat leaning over the front seat, his chin on his arms, looking ahead, looking at her.

Maiya is so young, so vulnerable. “I tried,” she says desperately. “I wanted him to stay on and go back to school. I wanted him to make something of himself. When he told me what he had planned, I was terrified. He was sick. He needed help. You have to understand that.”

Morrison, looming over her, blotting out the light, his voice everywhere in the room, says, “He was a traitor, an agent. And you were his accomplice.”

“NO!” she cries, and her innocence is so apparent that even Morrison is moved into retreating. He mutters to Jeffries, “She’s ok. Chalk it up as an accident, give her the usual pension. Let’s go.”

He was sick. Feverish, restless, pacing, in bed and up, again and again.

“Hank, what is the matter? What happened?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“How can I?” She pulled her robe on, chilled in the air-conditioned room. “At least tell me what happened.”

Hank, muttering like a drunk, or a sleep walker, some of the words coming through, not enough: “…doesn’t matter what you do, all ends up in the middle, all connected, wound around each other…”

She caught his arm and pulled him to a stop. “What happened?”

“Ullster is working on developing a mathematical approach to mental disease, and at the same time, on a mathematical approach to an electronic mind wave that would turn a man into a walking corpse in an instant.” Hank put his hand over hers on his bare arm. His hand was hot and dry. “We’re minting coins out there at the complex,” he said. “And each one of them has two heads.” His hand tightened on hers. “And I don’t know which mouth I’m feeding,” he said harshly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You been smoking pot or something?”

He flung her hand away and went to the window. “I know you don’t know. Would it matter if you did? Would it matter?” He almost cried when he said that.

She stood in the doorway staring at his silhouette against the pale light of the full moon on the desert floor. Then she turned and went back to bed. Much later she heard his soft voice and his guitar, but she didn’t get up.

She looked about suddenly. For a moment she thought she heard it again, only the elevator down the hall. She remembered the funny words he made up that night: “Oh, they’ll tell you the story of a little file clerk; They’ll say that one day he went all berserk, That he raided the files and made a high pyre. That he lay down on top to take his rest there…”

They caught up with her halfway down the mountain. When she got out of her car and faced them, she said, “What do you want? I’m out of gas, there wasn’t any place I could stop. Will you take me to the next town, to the complex where my husband works?”

One of them doubled over laughing. “No place to stop! You drove like hell through town after town, past cross road after crossroad. Honey, you didn’t want to stop.”

Maiya heard the steps in the hallway and stood up. They were on time.

Maiya admits them graciously, wordlessly and as they enter they murmur words of condolence…

The buzzer rasped at her. She fumbled with the lock, then got the door open.

“Mrs. Brewster, I’m Dr. Whitman. How do you do.” He stepped aside and the two other men entered. “Mr. Fields, our company attorney, and Jack Arcana, of course, you know already.”

She nodded and made a motion to close the door.

Mr. Fields said, “Mrs. Brewster, we’ve come to talk to you about the terrible accident at the complex, to explain what your rights are, and primarily to offer, to urge you to accept our help at this difficult time.”

Jack Arcana cleared his throat. “Maiya,” he said, “if there is anything we, Susan and I can do, you know…”

She looked at him and shook her head. She said dully, “Mary. My name is Mary.” Then she sat down and waited for them to tell her what to do.

• • •

April Fool’s Day Forever

(Orbit 7 — 1970)

On the last day of March a blizzard swept across the lower Great Lakes, through western New York and Pennsylvania, and raced toward the city with winds of seventy miles an hour, and snow falling at the rate of one and a half inches an hour. Julia watched it from her wide windows overlooking the Hudson River forty miles from the edge of the city and she knew that Martie wouldn’t be home that night. The blizzard turned the world white within minutes and the wind was so strong and so cold that the old house groaned under the impact. Julia patted the windowsill, thinking there, there at it. “It’ll be over soon, and tomorrow’s April, and in three or four weeks I’ll bring you daffodils.” The house groaned louder and the spot at the window became too cold for her to remain there without a sweater.

Julia checked the furnace by opening the basement door to listen. If she heard nothing, she was reassured. If she heard a wheezing and an occasional grunt, she would worry and call Mr. Lampert, and plead with him to come over before she was snowed in. She heard nothing. Next she looked over the supply of logs in the living room. Not enough by far. There were three good-sized oak logs, and two pine sticks. She struggled into her parka and boots and went to the woodpile by the old barn that had become a storage house, den, garage, studio. A sled was propped up against the grey stone-and-shingle building and she put it down and began to arrange logs on it. When she had as many as she could pull, she returned to the house, feeling her way with one hand along the barn wall, then along the basket-weave fence that she and Martie had built three summers ago, edging a small wild brook that divided the yard. The fence took her in a roundabout way, but it was safer than trying to go straight to the house in the blinding blizzard. By the time she had got back inside, she felt frozen. A sheltered thermometer would show no lower than thirty at that time, but with the wind blowing as it was, the chill degrees must be closer to ten or twenty below zero. She stood in the mudroom and considered what else she should do. Her car was in the garage. Martie’s was at the train station. Mail. Should she try to retrieve any mail that might be in the box? She decided not to. She didn’t really think the mailman had been there yet, anyway. Usually Mr. Probst blew his whistle to let her know that he was leaving something and she hadn’t heard it. She took off the heavy clothes then and went through the house checking windows, peering at the latches of the storm windows. There had been a false spring three weeks ago, and she had opened windows and even washed a few before the winds changed again. The house was secure.

What she wanted to do was call Martie, but she didn’t. His boss didn’t approve of personal phone calls during the working day. She breathed a curse at Hilary Boyle, and waited for Martie to call her. He would, as soon as he had a chance. When she was certain that there was nothing else she should do, she sat down in the living room, where one log was burning softly. There was no light on in the room and the storm had darkened the sky. The small fire glowed pleasingly in the enormous fireplace, and the radiance was picked up by pottery and brass mugs on a low table before the fireplace. The room was a long rectangle, wholly out of proportion, much too long for the width, and with an uncommonly high ceiling. Paneling the end walls had helped, as had making a separate room within the larger one, with its focal point the fireplace. A pair of chairs and a two-seater couch made a cozy grouping. The colors were autumn forest colors, brilliant and subdued at the same time: oranges and scarlets in the striped covering of the couch, picked up again by pillows; rust browns in the chairs; forest-green rug. The room would never make
House Beautiful
, Julia had thought when she brought in the last piece of brass for the table and surveyed the effect, but she loved it, and Martie loved it. And she’d seen people relax in that small room within a room who hadn’t been able to relax for a long time. She heard it then.