Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (18 page)

Since there was no work for a biologist in this lifeless time, Lorin’s daily tasks varied with the requests for assistance from the others. Today he was to accompany Lucas Tryoll to the coast, follow it south to the tip of Florida, go inland, and return over the area of the Mississippi River taking pictures of the land. He was pleased and excited by the assignment.

They flew due east to the coast where New York City once had been. Manhattan was gone, as was Long Island. There was only a bay that reached far inland, and was twenty miles across. Most of the New Jersey coast had been swallowed by the ocean, and Delaware Bay was indistinguishable from the rest of the sea. A solid green roof of treetops hid the land almost to the edge of the ocean. There were no offshore islands.

“Spooky, isn’t it?” Tryoll said after several hours. “I still say we should have settled for the last time.”

Lorin looked at him quickly, but there was no humor on the man’s brooding face. Lorin remembered the last time they had arrived to find people turned savage, and animals even more savage. They had all been in the last stages of severe malnutrition and radiation sickness. He tried to recall a time that he preferred to this, and failed. Sickness, or overcrowding, or a wasteland of radioactivity, or glaciation… He touched Tryoll on the arm and pointed: there was no Florida, no islands as far as they could see, hundreds of miles out of unbroken deep blue-green water.

Tryoll turned the plane and followed the coast to the delta of the gargantuan river that emptied into the Gulf. From their height they could see the brown water-swirl pattern as the river flowed into and finally became part of the pale blue of the sea. The Mississippi was miles wide here, shallow, and brown with silt. They followed it north, and the scenery below them was the same as everywhere else: forests, no signs of life. There was a great, shallow inland sea over what had been Nebraska, Kansas, or Iowa. Lorin couldn’t tell where they were. Clouds were forming to the north of them when Tryoll turned eastward again, coming to mountains, and then heading north. There were only clouds under them now, gray concrete, rolling plains, but still the cameras worked, taking infrared movies through the dense layer, mapping the land that lay invisible under them. Once Tryoll said that they would have to land, and Lorin felt his heart thump with excitement. But Tryoll flew on grimly and Lorin knew that he’d risk crashing into the mountains or being iced by the storm rather than land and spend the night here in the silent forests.

When they put down at the camp site a hard rain was driving in, cold and stinging against their faces as they raced back to the ship. Lorin showered and changed into warm clothing, then went to dinner with Jan.

“We’re all going to sleep inside tonight,” she said. “Steve predicts an all-night rain, and possibly snow by morning.”

“Inside? But we have heat in the tent.”

“But if it snows… It will be more comfortable inside the ship on a night like this.”

Lorin put down his fork and took her hand between his. “Jan, please come back to the tent with me. Have you ever slept where you could hear rain in the night right over your head? Have you ever seen fresh white snow falling, covering everything with dazzling white?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“When we get back home we’ll be on the sixty-third floor again, with forty-seven floors over us. All we’ll ever see of rain is a dirty suspension of grime running off our windows, or down our clothes. Can you imagine what this rain will be like?”

“It might be ‘hot.’”

“You know it isn’t.” He resisted the pull of her hand as she tried to free it. “Jan, we’ve been through a lot together. Remember the wild cats?”

She nodded. “I still don’t see how domestic cats could change like that. But don’t you see the difference? You know I’m not a coward. I just don’t like the silence. I keep listening harder and harder for something, anything. It’s as if I know that something is out there, but I haven’t been able to listen hard enough to catch it yet, and I have to keep straining…”

He had tried and failed to understand how it was with them, the ones who found it eerie and alien. He said, “Jan, we have only one more week here, then back to make our reports and wait for reassignment. It could be months, or years before we’re alone like this again. Pretend we’re on vacation. Pretend it’s a vacation zone, will you.”

She made a derisive sound. Her hand in his yielded and relaxed though, and she said, “You’re playing dirty. You pushed that button on purpose, didn’t you?”

He laughed with her. He had done it deliberately. They had met in upper New York State Vacation Zone Number Eighty-two. He remembered the long lines of people, antlike on the concrete mountain paths, bunched at the overlooks, spread twenty-five feet apart everywhere else. They had met at one of the view spots—Lookout Nineteen.

Arm in arm they left the ship and ran to the little tent in the blinding rain. After changing from his wet things Lorin stood in the tent opening, watching the storm. “This will reinforce the cyclic theory. Back to the forest primeval. Doyle is bound to recommend this zone for exploitation. You can tell he’s eager to get back and report this find. An army of men will come and mine and timber and raise animals for meat. Let’s come back with them, Jan. There are things we could do.…”

“What? I’m a bacteriologist, and you’re a biologist. Can you locate ores, or handle cattle, or build a slaughterhouse? It will be mostly automated anyway. There won’t be any research done beyond what we do now in the preliminary probe. Lorin, do close the flap now. It’s getting cold in here.”

He knew it wasn’t, but he pulled the flap partially closed, and continued to look out toward the black trees blowing in the wind. Racing sheets of rain obscured everything, thinned to allow a view of the forest, and then came back redoubled in strength.

“We could learn to do something that would be useful here,” he said softly. Behind him he could hear Jan making the bed. The aroma of coffee filled the tent: she had been keeping herself busy, trying not to see out, trying to shut out the storm noises, and the feeling of aloneness. For a moment Lorin almost wished that he had not pressed her to stay out with him, wished that he had come back alone. The moment passed and he let the flap close the rest of the way and went to sit by her and sip coffee with her.

“Jan, try to see what I mean. We could have a good life here. You could have children who would have room to run and play in the forests, swim in the river…” She was staring at him wide-eyed, her face very pale. “You would get used to the quiet…” She shook her head.

“I would go mad,” she said finally. “Always listening for something that isn’t there. Later, after they get the town built, maybe after they get the town built, maybe then we could come back.…”

“How many other places like this have they already found? Five, ten? We don’t even know. Are we allowed to go to them?” His voice became bitter. “No one goes to them except the workers who get paid a bonus for ‘extraordinary conditions’ in the environment. No other people go. Too costly. It will always be like that, Jan. Always. The only way we can come back is as workers who really hate the place. We’d have to pretend.…”

“They’ll find a way around the energy exchange,” she said, but without belief.

“Never. There has to be an equal mass-energy exchange or the ship doesn’t make it. Period.”

“You’re not being reasonable,” Jan said, with a show of temper. “They wouldn’t let you abandon your profession now. You are doing valuable work. Anyone can come and do the rest after we locate the zones and check them out. Besides, we won’t go back to our old apartment. This trip qualifies us for one of the garden apartments, and a raise. What’s got into you, Lorin? You never talked like this before.”

“I never saw a zone like this before. I didn’t know there could be one like this. I thought all that talk was only talk. Why else give the men that kind of bonus for working in a place like this? Bonus! They should be charged for the privilege. Garden apartments! Two windows instead of one.”

“Lorin, not now, please. I’m too tired to argue with you. Even if you don’t have work to do every day, I do. That’s your trouble, no work of your own.” She crawled into the bed and pulled the cover up to her chin. “Are you coming?”

“In a minute. Just a minute.”

The rain and wind were abating. The storm was over. He went again to the flap and was struck by an icy blast of air when he opened it. He adjusted the pressure inside the tent, making an invisible wall between him and the cold air outside. A fine freezing mist was falling; he put his hand out and felt the needle-like sting. Suddenly he wished they hadn’t found this time zone at all. Earlier he had said there was a cyclic pattern, but not now, not since the Bok-Gressler-Harney Temporal Mass-Energy Exchange Theory had been proven empirically. The theory stated in mathematical terms that a body could move forward in time, giving the formula for the energy demanded for such a displacement. It was like being at the end of a rubber band, Lorin thought, standing with his hand out in the freezing mist. They were at the end of it and with every passing minute it was stretching farther, growing tauter. At the end of a preset interval it would snap back into place, and they’d be back there. Doyle could change the duration of their stay; he could shorten it as much as he chose, but he could not lengthen the interval in the future by even one second.

That was the first drawback. The second was that the mass had to be exactly the same for both directions. If there was any difference in mass when the snap came, the ship vanished. Finis. No one knew where it went. Some said a dimensional transference took place, but no accepted theory had been advanced yet.

The cost was beyond comprehension, but not so great that trips couldn’t be made in the endless search for raw materials that sustained the world, and food to keep the people on the right side of starvation. Doyle’s team had trained together for three years before their first probe, and there had now been seven probes for them, each one costing upward of five hundred million dollars. With an estimated four billion years in Earth’s future to explore, an infinite reserve seemed available to mankind. Even as he had talked to Jan about returning to work in this time zone, Lorin had known that he was talking nonsense. His training made him valuable only where he was now. Economics dictated that he would never see this world again once he had left it. He pulled his hand inside the tent and pressed it to his cheek. His fingers tingled and started to hurt. Slowly he got into bed beside Jan.

The next morning the trees were sheathed in silver. Emerging from the tent, Lorin caught his breath and stared at them. They were like intricately wrought silver columns reflecting the milky sunlight. At the breakfast meeting when Doyle checked their assignments, he asked to be allowed to take soil samples from deep in the woods. He would bring out cores for testing. Permission was granted and he slung his pack over his shoulder as soon as he could leave the meeting and tramped through the mossy ground-cover that was brittle with ice. Inside the woods, the trees were convex, obsidian wall sections topped with etched glass branches that gleamed and sparkled and became prisms where the sun shone through them. The tangle of vines and shrubs was a fantastic exhibition of twisted glassware bent into impossible designs, with impossible joinings. As Lorin worked collecting his soil samples, the ice broke and fell; the ice from the shrubs and vines hit with soft tinkles of melody; the upper branches of the trees dropped their sheaths with crashes of thunder that reverberated throughout the forest.

And there was another sound, a soft plop, plop on all sides of him. The needles of the giant evergreen trees developed in clusters of fives, and at the base of each fan a nut had grown and ripened. The needle clusters had been pointed slightly upward before the freeze; now they drooped and the nuts rolled loose and fell to the ground.

Lorin picked up one of the nuts and found it surprisingly heavy. It was a rich, golden tan, about as big as a golf ball, and the covering was suede-like, soft, slightly rough, indented to form five sections. He peeled one of the sections back, exposing snow-white meat. He finished peeling it, saving the skin for testing, and saw that the meat was in five wedges, not divided, but clearly marked. Probably as it dried and shrank, there would be oil, and the sections would be separated. He cut a thin slice off, smelled it, and finally bit into it. The meat was crisp and tender, slightly salty, completely satisfying. He ate it and gathered more of them.

He didn’t return for lunch, but worked through until it began to grow dark under the dense trees. All about him the tinkle of dropping ice, the less frequent explosions of thunderous sheets crashing to ground, and the ceaseless plop, plop of nuts falling was like an orchestra heard in rehearsal. When he went back, his step was light, and his face peaceful. He approached the ship in darkness and outside the door he paused for one last look at the deeper shadow of the woods behind him. He could hear Doyle’s voice from the other side of the ship’s doorway; the door was open.

“No need to delay any longer. Further testing and probing would merely confirm what we all know now.…” There was the less forceful voice of Tryoll, his words indecipherable. Doyle said, “Tomorrow night, at the latest. Just long enough to finish the tests that have been started…”

Lorin felt rooted for a long time. One more day only. Slowly he entered the ship where Doyle met him. He made his weight exchange carefully, and watched as Doyle checked it and checked and okayed the specimens he took inside. Lorin took the discarded material to the side of the ship and left it there with the rest: a growing pile of trash, boxes of junk that couldn’t be used any longer for any purpose, some of it poisonous, radioactive, indestructible. He felt a surge of anger at the pile of refuse, and wished they could at least bury it. But that was no answer. Buried, it would still be poisonous, obscenely out of place on this pristine world.

Jan refused to stay outside with him again. “I keep waking up and listening,” she said. “In here, at least, there are the sounds of machinery, and other people. Something. I don’t like it out there, Lorin. I simply can’t get used to it. I am frightened, cut off…” She shrugged helplessly and he didn’t urge her. He decided to sleep in the tent alone. The others looked at him uneasily; no one understood his behavior. They would all be glad when they were away from this silent, dead world, back making their reports, sleeping in their beds again, getting ready for another probe. Lorin waved and walked to the tent.