Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (32 page)

“She had expensive perfume, and a beaver coat. I think beaver.”

She laughed gently. “Drugstore spray cologne. Macy’s Basement fake fur, about fifty-nine to sixty-five dollars, unless she hit a sale.”

“And the kid gloves, and the high patent leather boots?”

“Vinyl, both of them.” She looked at him for an uncomfortable minute, then examined the pillow she had found. “On second thought, I’m not sure that I would want to rest my head on this. It’s a little bit disgusting, isn’t it?”

“Why did you want me to describe that woman? You have your opinion of what she is; I have mine. There’s no way to prove either of our cases without having her before us.”

“I don’t need to prove anything. I don’t care if you think you’re right and I’m wrong. I felt very sorry for the girl. I noticed her.”

“I noticed her, too.”

“What color was her hair, her eyes? How about her mouth—big, small, full? And her nose? Straight, snub, broad?”

He regarded her bitterly for a moment, then shrugged and turned toward the window. He didn’t speak.

“You can’t describe what she really was like because you didn’t see her. You saw the package and made up your mind about the contents. Believe me, she was terrified of the storm, of those men, everything. She needed the security of the driver and people. What about me? Can you describe me?”

He looked, but she was holding the pillow between them and he could see only her hands, long, pale, slender fingers, no rings.

“This is ridiculous,” he said after a second. “I have one of those reputations for names and faces. You know, never forget a name, always know the names of the kids, the wife, occupation and so on.”

“Not this side of you. This side refuses to see anyone at all. I wonder why.”

“What face are you wearing tonight, Randy?” Mary Louise touching him. “Do you see me? Why don’t you look at me?”

Wind whistling past his ears, not really cold yet, not when he was standing still anyway, with the sun warm on him. But racing down the slope, trees to his right, the precipice to his left, the wind was icy. Mary Louise a red streak ahead of him, and somewhere behind him the navy and white blur that was McCone. Holding his own between them. The curve of the trail ahead, the thrill of the downward plummet, and suddenly the open-mouthed face of his wife, silent scream, add in the same instant, the ski pole against his legs, tripping him up, the more exciting plunge downward, face in the snow, blinded, over and over, skis gone now, trying to grasp the snow, trying to stop the tumbling, over and over in the snow.

Had his wife tried to kill him?

“Are you all right, Mr. Crane?”

“Yes, of course. Let me describe the last man I sold insurance to, a week ago. Twenty-four, six feet one inch, a tiny, almost invisible scar over his right eyebrow, crinkle lines about his eyes, because he’s an outdoor type, very tanned and muscular. He’s a professional baseball player, incidentally. His left hand has larger knuckles than the right…”

The woman was not listening. She had crossed the station and was standing at the window, trying to see out. “Computer talk,” she said. “A meaningless rundown of facts. So he bought a policy for one hundred thousand dollars, straight life, and from now on you won’t have to deal with him, be concerned with him at all.”

“Why did you say one hundred thousand dollars?”

“No reason. I don’t know, obviously.”

He chewed his lip and watched her. “Any change out there?”

“Worse, if anything. I don’t think you’ll be able to use this door at all now. You’d never get it closed. It’s half covered with a drift.”

“There must be a window or another door that isn’t drifted over.”

“Storm windows. Maybe there’s a back door; but I bet it opens to the office, and the ticket agent locked that.”

Crane looked at the windows and found that she was right. The storm windows couldn’t be opened from inside. And there wasn’t another outside door. The men’s room was like a freezer now. He tried to run the water, thinking that possibly cold water would work on the thermostat as well as snow, but nothing came out. The pipes must have frozen. As he started to close the door, he saw a small block-printed sign: “Don’t close door all the way, no heat in here, water will freeze up.” The toweling wouldn’t hold water anyway. He left the door open a crack and rejoined the woman near the window. “It’s got to be this door,” he said. “I guess I could open it an inch or two, let that much of the drift fall inside and use it.”

“Maybe. But you’ll have to be careful.”

“Right out of Jack London,” he said. “It’s seventy-two on the thermometer. How do you feel?”

“Coolish, not bad.”

“Okay, we’ll wait awhile. Maybe the wind will let up.”

He stared at the puddle under the thermostat, and at the other a larger one across the room near the door, where the snowdrift had entered the room the last time. The drift had been only a foot high then, and now it was three or four feet. Could he move that much snow without anything to work with, if it came inside? He shouldn’t have started back to town. She had goaded him into it, of course. Had she suspected that he would get stranded somewhere, maybe freeze to death?

“Why don’t you come right out and say what you’re thinking?” Red pants, red ski jacket, cheeks almost as red.

“I’m not thinking anything. It was an accident.”

“You’re a liar, Randy! You think I guessed you were there, that I let go hoping to make you fall. Isn’t that what you think? Isn’t it?”

He shook his head hard. She hadn’t said any of that. He hadn’t thought of it then. Only now, here, stranded with this half-mad woman. Half-mad? He looked at her and quickly averted his gaze. Why had that thought come to him? She was odd, certainly, probably very lonely, shy. But half-mad?

Why did she watch him so? As if aware of his thoughts, she turned her back and walked to the ladies’ room. He had to go too, but he remembered the frozen pipes in the men’s room. Maybe she’d fall asleep eventually and he’d be able to slip into her rest room. If not, then he’d wait until morning. Maybe this night had come about in order to give him time to think about him and Mary Louise, to really think it through all the way and come to a decision.

He had met her when he was stationed in Washington, after the Korean War. He had been a captain, assigned to Army Intelligence. She had worked as a private secretary to Senator Robertson of New York. So he had done all right without her up to then. She had introduced him to the president of the company that he worked for now. Knowing that he wanted to become a writer, she had almost forced him into insurance. Fine. It was the right choice. He had told her so a thousand times. But how he had succeeded was still a puzzle to him. He never had tested well on salesmanship on aptitude tests. Too introverted and shy.

“You make other people feel stupid, frankly,” she had said once. “You are so tight and so sure of yourself that you don’t allow anyone else to have an opinion at all. It’s not empathy, like it is with so many good salesmen. It’s a kind of sadistic force that you apply.”

“Oh, stop it. You’re talking nonsense.”

“You treat each client like an extension of the policy that you intend to sell to him. Not like a person, but the human counterpart of the slick paper with the clauses and small print. You show the same respect and liking for, them as for the policies. They go together. You believe it and make them believe it. Numbers, that’s what they are to you. Policy numbers.”

“Why do you hang around if you find me so cold and calculating?”

“Oh, it’s a game that I play. I know there’s a room somewhere where you’ve locked up part of yourself, and I keep searching for it. Someday I’ll find it and open it just a crack, and then I’ll run. Because if it ever opens, even a little, everything will come tumbling out and you won’t be able to stop any of it. How you’ll bleed then, bleed and bleed, and cry and moan. I couldn’t stand that. And I can’t stand for it not to be so.”

Crane put his head down in his hands and rubbed his eyes hard. Without affect, that was the term that she used. Modern man without affect. Schizoid personality. But he also had a nearly split personality. The doctor had told him so. In the six sessions that he had gone to he had learned much of the jargon, and then he had broken it off. Split personality. Schizoid tendencies. Without affect. All to keep himself safe. It seemed to him to be real madness to take away any of the safeties he had painstakingly built, and he had quit the sessions.

And now this strange woman that he was locked up with was warning him not to open the door a crack. He rubbed his eyes harder until there was solid pain there. He had to touch her. The ticket agent had seen her, too, though. He had been concerned about leaving her alone with a strange man all night. So transparently worried about her, worried about Crane. Fishing for his name. He could have told the fool anything. He couldn’t remember his face at all, only his clothes.

All right, the woman was real, but strange. She had an uncanny way of anticipating what he was thinking, what he was going to say, what he feared. Maybe these were her fears too.

She cane back into the waiting room. She was wearing her black coat buttoned to her neck, her hands in the pockets. She didn’t mention the cold.

Soon he would have to get more snow, trick the fool thermostat into turning on the furnace. Soon. A maniac must have put it on that wall, the only warm wall in the building. A penny-pinching maniac.

“If you decide to try to get more snow, maybe I should hold the door while you scoop it up,” she said, after a long silence. The cold had made her face look pinched, and Crane was shivering under his overcoat.

“Can you hold it?” he asked. “There’s a lot of pressure behind that door.”

She nodded.

“Okay. I’ll take the waste can and get as much as I can. It’ll keep in the men’s room. There’s no heat in there.”

She held the doorknob until he was ready, and when he nodded, she turned it and, bracing the door with her shoulder, let it open several inches. The wind pushed, and the snow spilled through. It was over their heads now, and it came in the entire height of the door. She gave ground and the door was open five or six inches. Crane pulled the snow inside, using both hands, clawing at it. The Augean stable, he thought bitterly, and then joined her behind the door, trying to push it closed again. At least no blast of air had come inside this time. The door was packing the snow, and the inner surface of it was thawing slightly, only to refreeze under the pressure and the cold from the other side. Push, Crane thought at her. Push, you devil. You witch.

Slowly it began to move, scrunching snow. They weren’t going to get it closed all the way. They stopped pushing to rest. He was panting hard, and she put her head against the door. After a moment he said, “Do you think you could move one of the benches over here?”

She nodded. He braced himself against the door and was surprised at the increase in the pressure when she left. He heard her wrestling with the bench, but he couldn’t turn to see. The snow was gaining again. His feet were slipping on the floor, wet now where some of the snow had melted and was running across the room. He saw the bench from the corner of his eye, and he turned to watch her progress with it. She was pushing it toward him, the back to the wall; the back was too high. It would have to be tilted to go under the doorknob. It was a heavy oak bench. If they could maneuver it in place, it would hold.

For fifteen minutes they worked, grunting, saying nothing, trying to hold the door closed and get the bench under the knob without losing any more ground. Finally it was done. The door was open six inches, white packed snow the entire height of it.

Crane fell onto a bench and stared at the open door, not able to say anything. The woman seemed equally exhausted. At the top of the door, the snow suddenly fell forward, into the station, sifting at first, then falling in a stream. Icy wind followed the snow into the room, and now that the top of the column of snow had been lost, the wind continued to pour into the station, whistling shrilly

“Well, we know now that the drift isn’t really to the top of the building,” the woman said wearily. She was staring at the opening.

“My words, almost exactly,” Crane said. She always said what he planned to say. He waited.

“We’ll have to close it at the top somehow.”

He nodded. “In a minute. In a minute.”

The cold increased and he knew that he should get busy and try to close the opening, but he felt too numb to cope with it. The furnace couldn’t keep up with the draft of below-zero air. His hands were aching with cold, and his toes hurt with a stabbing intensity. Only his mind felt pleasantly numb and he didn’t want to think about the problem of closing up the hole.

“You’re not falling asleep, are you?”

“For God’s sake!” He jerked straight up on the bench and gave her a mean look, a guilty look. “Just shut up and let me try to think, will you?”

“Sorry.” She got up and began to pace briskly, hugging her hands to her body. “I’ll look around, see if I can find anything that would fit. I simply can’t sit still, I’m so cold.”

He stared at the hole. There had to be something that would fit over it, stay in place, keep out the wind. He narrowed his eyes, staring, and he saw the wind-driven snow as a liquid running into the station from above, swirling about, only fractionally, heavier than the medium that it met on the inside. One continuum, starting in the farthest blackest vacuum of space, taking on form as it reached the highest atmospheric molecules, becoming denser as it neared Earth, almost solid here, but not yet. Not yet. The hole extended to that unimaginable distance where it all began, and the chill spilled down, down, searching for him, wafting about here, searching for him, wanting only to find him, willing then to stop the ceaseless whirl. Coat him, claim him. The woman belonged to the coldness that came from the black of space. He remembered her now.

Korea. The woman. The village. Waiting for the signal. Colder than the station even, snow, flint like ground, striking sparks from nails in boots, sparks without warmth. If they could fire the village, they would get warm, have food, sleep that night. Harrison, wounded, frozen where he fell. Lorenz, frostbitten; Jakobs, snowblind. Crane, too tired to think, too hungry to think, too cold to think. “Fire the village.” The woman, out of nowhere, urging him back, back up the mountain to the bunkers that were half filled with ice, mines laid now between the bunkers and the valley. Ordering the woman into the village at gunpoint. Spark from his muzzle. Blessed fire and warmth. But a touch of ice behind the eyes, ice that didn’t let him weep when Lorenz died, or when Jakobs, blinded, wandered out and twitched and jerked and pitched over a cliff under a fusillade of bullets. The snow queen, he thought. She’s the snow queen, and she touched my eyes with ice.