Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (34 page)

It was our fault. If we had wanted friends we certainly could have found them in that small group of talented and intelligent people. But we were busy. Janet with her work at the hospital where she was a physical therapist, and I at my laboratory that was just now after fourteen years starting to show a bit of profit. It could have got out of the red earlier, but Lenny and I both believed in updating the equipment whenever possible, so it had taken time.

It was a warm day, early in September, without a hint yet that summer was gone. I had the windows open, making talk impossible. Janet and I could talk or not. There were still times when we stayed up until morning, just talking, and then again weeks went by with nothing more than the sort of thing that has to take place between husband and wife. No strain either way, nothing but ease lay between us. We had a good thing, and we knew it.

We were both startled, and a little upset, when we saw a moving van and a dilapidated station wagon in the driveway of the Donlevy house.

“They wouldn’t come back without letting us know,” Janet said.

“Not a chance. Maybe they sold it.”

“But without a sign, or any real estate people coming around?”

“They could have been here day after day without our knowing.”

“But not without Ruth Klinger knowing about it. She would have told us.”

I drove past the house slowly, craning to see something that would give a hint. Only the station wagon, with a Connecticut plate. It was an eight-year-old model, in need of a paint job. It didn’t look too hopeful.

Neither Pete Donlevy nor I had any inclination for gardening, and our yards, separated by the brook, were heavily wooded, so that his house was not visible from ours, but down at the brook there was a clear view between the trees. While Janet changed into shorts and sandals, I wandered down to have a look along with Rusty and Laura. They were both Janet’s kids. Redheads, with freckles, and vivid blue-green eyes, skinny arms and legs; sometimes I found myself studying one or the other of them intently for a hint of my genes there, without success. Laura was eight. I spotted her first, sitting on the bridge made of two fallen trees. We had lopped the branches off and the root mass and just left them there. Pete Donlevy and I had worked three weekends on those trees, cutting up the branches for our fireplaces, rolling the two trunks close together to make a footbridge. We had consumed approximately ten gallons of beer during those weekends.

“Hi, Dad,” Rusty called from above me. I located him high on the right-angled branch of an oak tree. “We have a new neighbor.”

I nodded and sat down next to Laura. “Any kids?”

“No. Just a lady so far.”

“Young? Old? Fat?”

“Tiny. I don’t know if young or old, can’t tell. She runs around like young.”

“With lots of books,” Rusty said from his better vantage point.

“No furniture?”

“Nope. Just suitcases and a trunk full of clothes, and boxes of books. And cameras, and tripods.”

“And a black-and-white dog,” Laura added.

I tossed bits of bark into the brook and watched them bob and whirl their way downstream. Presently we went back to the house, and later we grilled hamburgers on the terrace, and had watermelon for dessert. I didn’t get a glimpse of the tiny lady.

Sometime during the night I was brought straight up in bed by a wail that was animal-like, thin, high-pitched, inhuman. “Laura!”

Janet was already out of bed; in the pale light from the hall, she was a flash of white gown darting out the doorway. The wail was repeated, and by then I was on my way to Laura’s room too. She was standing in the middle of the floor, her short pajamas white, her eyes wide open, showing mostly white also. Her hands were partially extended before her, fingers widespread, stiff.

“Laura!” Janet said. It was a command, low-voiced, but imperative. The child didn’t move. I put my arm about her shoulders, not wanting to frighten her more than she was by the nightmare. She was rigid and unmoving, as stiff as a catatonic.

“Pull back the sheet,” I told Janet. “I’ll carry her back to bed.” It was like lifting a wooden dummy. No response, no flexibility, no life. My skin crawled, and fear made a sour taste in my mouth. Back in her bed, Laura suddenly sighed, and her eyelids fluttered once or twice, then closed and she was in a normal sleep. I lifted her hand, her wrist was limp, her fingers dangled loosely.

Janet stayed with her for a few minutes, but she didn’t wake up, and finally Janet joined me in the kitchen, where I had poured a glass of milk and was sipping it.

“I never saw anything like that,” Janet said. She was pale, and shaking.

“A nightmare, honey. Too much watermelon, or something. More than likely she won’t remember anything about it. Just as well.”

We didn’t discuss it. There wasn’t anything to say. Who knows anything about nightmares? But I had trouble getting back to sleep again, and when I did, I dreamed off and on the rest of the night, waking up time after time with the memory of a dream real enough to distort my thinking so that I couldn’t know if I was sleeping in bed, or floating somewhere else and dreaming of the bed.

Laura didn’t remember any of the dream, but she was fascinated, and wanted to talk about it: what had she been doing when we found her? how had she sounded when she shrieked? and so on. After about five minutes it got to be a bore and I refused to say another word. Mornings were always bad anyway; usually I was the last to leave the house, but that morning I had to drive Janet to work, so we all left at the same time. At the end of the lane when I stopped to let the kids hop out, we saw our new neighbor. She was walking a Dalmatian, and she smiled and nodded. But Laura surprised us all by calling out to her, greeting her like a real friend. When I drove away I could see them standing there, the dog sniffing the kids interestedly, the woman and Laura talking.

“Well,” was all I could think to say. Laura usually was the shy one, the last to make friends with people, the last to speak to company, the first to break away from a group of strangers.

“She seems all right,” Janet said.

“Let’s introduce ourselves tonight. Maybe she’s someone from around here, someone from school.”

I got tied up, and it was after eight when I got home, tired and disgusted by a series of mishaps again at the lab. Janet didn’t help by saying that maybe we had too many things going at once for just the two of us to keep track of. Knowing she was right didn’t make the comment any easier to take. Lenny and I were jealous of our shop and lab. We didn’t want to bring in an outsider, and secretly I knew that I didn’t want to be bothered with the kind of bookkeeping that would be involved.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Janet said. Sometimes she didn’t know when to drop it. “Either you remain at the level you were at a couple of years ago, patenting little things every so often, and leave the big jobs to the companies that have the manpower, or else you let your staff grow along with your ideas.”

I ate warmed-over roast beef without tasting it, and drank two gin and tonics. The television sound was bad and that annoyed me, even though it was three rooms away with the doors closed.

“Did you get started on Mike’s ham set yet?” Janet asked, clearing the table.

“Christ!” I had forgotten. I took my coffee and headed for the basement. “I’ll get at it. I’ve got what I need. Don’t wait up. If I don’t do it tonight, I won’t get to it for days.” I had suits being tested at three different hospitals, Mike’s, one at a geriatric clinic where an eighty-year-old man was recovering from a broken hip, and one in a veterans hospital where a young man in a coma was guinea pig. I was certain the suit would be more effective than the daily massage that such patients usually received, when there was sufficient help to administer such massage to begin with. The suits were experimental and needed constant checking, the programs needed constant supervision for this first application. And it was my baby. So I worked that night on the slides for Mike Bronson, and it was nearly two when I returned to the kitchen, keyed up and tense from too much coffee and too many cigarettes.

I wandered outside and walked for several minutes back through the woods, ending up at the bridge, staring at the Donlevy house where there was a light on in Pete Donlevy’s study. I wondered again about the little woman who had moved in, wondered if others had joined her, or if they would join her. It didn’t seem practical for one woman to rent such a big house. I was leaning against the same tree that Rusty had perched in. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular; images were flitting through my mind, snaps, scraps of talk, bits and pieces of unfinished projects, disconnected words. I must have closed my eyes. It was dark under the giant oak and there was nothing to see anyway, except the light in Pete’s study, and that was only a small oblong of yellow.

The meandering thoughts kept passing by my mind’s eye, but very clearly there was also Pete’s study. I was there, looking over the bookshelves, wishing I dared remove his books in order to put my own away neatly. Thinking of Laura and her nightmare. Wondering where Caesar was, had I left the basement light on, going to the door to whistle, imagining Janet asleep with her arm up over her head, if I slept like that my hands would go to sleep, whistling again for Caesar. Aware of the dog, although he was across the yard staring intently up a tree bole, where a possum clung. Everything a jumble, the bookshelves, the basement workshop, Janet, Caesar, driving down from Connecticut, pawing through drawers in the lab shop, looking for the sleeve controls, dots and dashes on slides…

I whistled once more and stepped down the first of the three steps to the yard, and fell…

Falling forever, ice cold, tumbling over and over, with the knowledge that the fall would never end, would never change, stretching out for something, anything to grasp, to stop the tumbling. Nothing. Then a scream, and opening my eyes, or finding my eyes open. The light was no longer on.

Who screamed?

Everything was quiet, the gentle sound of the water on rocks, a rustling of a small creature in the grasses at the edge of the brook, an owl far back on the hill. There was a September chill in the air suddenly and I was shivering as I hurried back to my house.

I knew that I hadn’t fallen asleep. Even if I had dozed momentarily, I couldn’t have been so deeply asleep that I could have had a nightmare. Like Laura’s, I thought, and froze. Is that what she had dreamed? Falling forever? There had been no time. During the fall I knew that I had been doing it for an eternity, that I would continue to fall for all the time to come.

Janet’s body was warm as she snuggled up to me, and I clung to her almost like a child, grateful for this long-limbed, practical woman.

We met our new neighbor on Saturday. Janet made a point of going over to introduce herself and give her an invitation for a drink, or coffee. “She’s so small,” Janet said. “About thirty, or a little under. And handsome in a strange way. In spite of herself almost. You can see that she hasn’t bothered to do anything much about her appearance—I mean she has gorgeous hair, or could have, but she keeps it cut about shoulder length and lets it go at that. I bet she hasn’t set it in years. Same for her clothes. It’s as if she never glanced in a mirror, or a fashion magazine, or store window. Anyway, you’ll see for yourself. She’ll be over at about four.”

There was always work that needed doing immediately in the yard and on the house or the car, and generally I tried to keep Saturday open to get some of it done. That day I had already torn up the television, looking for the source of the fuzzy sound, and I had replaced a tube and a speaker condenser, but it still wasn’t the greatest.

Janet was painting window shades for Laura’s room. She had copied the design from some material that she was using for a bedspread and drapes. She had baked two pies, and a cake, and a loaf of whole-wheat bread. The house was clean and smelled good and we were busy. Janet always baked on Saturday, froze the stuff and got it out during the week, so the kids hardly even knew that she was a working mother. They were happy kids.

Then Christine came along. That’s the only way to put it. That afternoon she came up through the woods, dressed in brown jeans, with a sloppy plaid shirt that came down below her hips and was not terribly clean. Laura ran down to meet her, and she was almost as big as Christine.

“Hi,” Janet said, coming out to the terrace. “Mrs. Rudeman, this is Eddie. And Rusty.”

“Please, call me Christine,” she said, and held out her hand.

But I knew her. It was like seeing your first lover again after years, the same shock low in the belly, the same tightening up of muscles, the fear that what’s left of the affair will show, and there is always something left over. Hate, love, lust. Something. Virtually instantaneous with the shock of recognition came the denial. I had never seen her before in my life, except that one morning on the way to work, and certainly I hadn’t felt any familiarity then. It would have been impossible to have known her without remembering, if only because of her size. She was possibly five feet tall, and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. It was impossible to tell what kind of a figure she had, but what was visible seemed perfectly normal, just scaled down, except her eyes, and they looked extraordinarily large in so tiny a face. Her eyes were very dark, black or so close to it as to make no difference, and her hair, as Janet had said, was beautiful, or could have been with just a little attention. It was glossy, lustrous black, thick and to her shoulders. But she shouldn’t have worn it tied back with a ribbon. Her face was too round, her eyebrows too straight. It gave her a childlike appearance.

All of that and more passed through my mind as she crossed the terrace smiling, with her hand out. And I didn’t want to touch her hand. I knew that Janet was speaking, but I didn’t hear what she said. In the same distant way I knew that Laura and Rusty were there, Laura waiting impatiently for the introductions to be over so she could say something or other. I braced myself for the touch, and when our fingers met, I knew there had been no way I could have prepared myself for the electricity of that quick bringing together of flesh. For God’s sake, I wanted to say, turn around and say something to Rusty, don’t just stand there staring at me. Act normal. You’ve never seen me before in your life and you know it.