Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (33 page)

“Mr. Crane, please wake up. Please!”

He jumped to his feet reaching for his carbine, and only when his hands closed on air did he remember where he was.

“Mr. Crane, I think I know what we can use to close up the hole. Let me show you.”

She pulled at his arm and he followed her. She led him into the ladies’ room. At the door he tried to pull back, but she tugged. “Look, stacks of paper towels, all folded together. They would be about the right size, wouldn’t they? If we wet them, a block of them, and if we can get them up to the hole, they would freeze in place, and the drift could pile up against them and stop blowing into the station. Wouldn’t it work?”

She was separating the opened package into thirds, her hands busy, her eyes downcast, not seeing him at all. Crane, slightly to one side of her, a step behind, stared at the double image in the mirror. He continued to watch the mirror as his hands reached out for her and closed about her throat. There was no struggle. She simply closed her eyes and became very limp, and he let her fall. Then he took the wad of towels and held it under the water for a few moments and returned to the waiting room with it. He had to clear snow from the approach to the door, and then he had to move the bench that was holding the door, carefully, not letting it become dislodged. He dragged a second bench to the door and climbed on it and pushed the wet wad of towels into the opening. He held it several minutes, until he could feel the freezing paper start to stiffen beneath his fingers. He climbed down.

“That should do it,” the woman said.

“But you’re dead.”

Mary Louise threw the sugar bowl at him, trailing a line of sugar across the room.

He smiled. “Wishful thinking,” he/she said.

“You’re dead inside. You’re shriveled up and dried up and rotting inside. When did you last feel anything? My God! You can’t create anything, you are afraid of creating anything, even our child!”

“I don’t believe it was our child.”

“You don’t dare believe it. Or admit that you know it was.”

He slapped her. The only time that he ever hit her. And her so pale from the operation, so weak from the loss of blood. The slap meant nothing to him, his hand meeting her cheek, leaving a red print there.

“Murderer!”

“You crazy bitch! You’re the one who had the abortion! You wanted it!”

“I didn’t. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was terrified. You made the arrangements, got the doctor, took me, arranged everything, waited in the other room writing policies. Murderer.”

“Murderer,” the woman said.

He shook his head. “You’d better go back to the ladies’ room and stay there. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Murderer.”

He took a step toward her. He swung around abruptly and almost ran to the far side of the station, pressing his forehead hard on the window.

“We can’t stop it now,” the woman said, following him. “You can’t close the door again now. I’m here. You finally saw me. Really saw me. I’m real now. I won’t be banished again. I’m stronger than you are. You’ve killed off bits and pieces of yourself until there’s nothing left to fight with. You can’t send me away again.”

Crane pushed himself away from the glass and made a halfhearted attempt to hit her with his fist. He missed and fell against the bench holding the door. He heard the woman’s low laugh. All for nothing. All for nothing. The bench slid out from under his hand, and the drift pushed into the room like an avalanche. He pulled himself free and tried to brush the snow off his clothes.

“We’ll both freeze now,” he said, not caring any longer.

The woman came to his side and touched his cheek with her fingers; they were strangely warm. “Relax now, Crane. Just relax.”

She led him to a bench, where he sat down resignedly. “Will you at least tell me who you are?” he said.

“You know. You’ve always known.”

He shook his head. One last attempt, he thought. He had to make that one last effort to get rid of her, the woman whose face was so like his own. “You don’t even exist,” he said harshly, not opening his eyes. “I imagined you here because I was afraid of being alone all night. I created you.
I created you.
”

He stood up. “You hear that, Mary Louise! Did you hear that? I created something. Something so real that it wants to kill me.”

“Look at me, Crane. Look at me. Turn your head and look. Look with me, Crane. Let me show you. Let me show you what I see…”

He was shaking again, chilled through, shaking so hard that his muscles were sore. Slowly, inevitably he turned his head and saw the man half-standing, half-crouching, holding the bench with both hands.

The man had gray skin, and his eyes were mad with terror.

“Let go, Crane. Look at him and let go. He doesn’t deserve anything from us ever again.” Crane watched the man clutch his chest, heard him moaning for Mary Louise to come help him, watched him fall to the floor.

She heard the men working at the drift, and she opened the office door to wait for them. They finally got through and the ticket agent squirmed through the opening they had made.

“Miss! Miss? Are you all right?”

“Yes. I broke into the office, though.”

“My God, I thought… When we saw that the door had given under the drift, and you in here… alo—” The ticket agent blinked rapidly several times.

“I was perfectly all right. When I saw that the door wasn’t going to hold, I broke open the inner office and came in here with my sketchbook and pencils. I’ve had a very productive night, really. But I could use some coffee now.”

They took her to the diner in a police car, and while she waited for her breakfast order, she went to the rest room and washed her face and combed her hair. She stared at herself in the mirror appraisingly. “Happy birthday,” she said softly then.

“Your birthday?” asked the girl who had chosen to wait the night out in the diner. “You were awfully brave to stay alone in the station. I couldn’t have done that. You really an artist?”

“Yes, really. And last night I had a lot of work to get done. A lot of work and not much time.”

• • •

The Infinity Box

(Orbit 9 — 1971)

It was a bad day from beginning to end. Late in the afternoon, just when I was ready to light the fuse to blow up the lab, Janet called from the hospital.

“Honey, it’s the little Bronson boy. We can’t do anything with him, and he has his mother and father in a panic. He’s sure that we’re trying to electrocute him, and they half believe it. They’re demanding that we take the cast off and remove the suit.”

Lenny sat watching my face. He began to move things out of reach: the glass of pencils, coffee mugs, ashtray…

“Can’t Groppi do anything?” He was the staff psychologist.

“Not this time. He doesn’t really understand the suit either. I think he’s afraid of it. Can you come over here and talk to them?”

“Sure. Sure. We just blew up about five thousand dollars’ worth of equipment with a faulty transformer. Lenny’s quitting again. Some son of a bitch mislaid our order for wafer resisters… I’ll be over in half an hour.”

“What?” Lenny asked. He looked like a dope, thick build, the biggest pair of hands you’d ever see. Probably he was one of the best electronics men in the world. He was forty-six, and had brought up three sons alone. He never mentioned their mother and I didn’t know if she was dead, or just gone. He was my partner in the firm of Laslow and Leonard Electronics.

“The Bronson kid’s scared to death of the suit we put on him yesterday. First time they turned it on, he panicked. I’ll run over and see. Where’s that sleeve?” I rummaged, and Lenny moved stolidly toward a cabinet and pulled out the muslin sleeve and small control box. Once in a while he’d smile, but that was the only emotion that I’d ever seen on his face, a quiet smile, usually when something worked against the odds, or when his sons did something exceptionally nice—like get a full paid scholarship to MIT, or Harvard, as the third one had done that fall.

“Go on home after you see the kid,” Lenny said. “I’ll clean up in here and try to run down the wafers.”

“Okay. See you tomorrow.”

Children’s Hospital was fifteen miles away, traffic was light at that time of day, and I made it under the half hour I’d promised. Janet met me in the downstairs foyer.

“Eddie, did you bring the sleeve? I thought maybe if you let Mr. Bronson feel it—”

I held it up and she grinned. Janet, suntanned, with red, sun-streaked hair, freckles, and lean to the point of thinness, was my idea of a beautiful woman. We had been married for twelve years.

“Where are the parents?”

“In Dr. Reisman’s office. They were just upsetting Mike more than he was already.”

“Okay, first Mike. Come on.”

Mike Bronson was eight. Three months ago, the first day of school vacation, he had been run over and killed by a diesel truck. He had been listed D.O.A. Someone had detected an echo of life, but they said he couldn’t survive the night. They operated, and gave him a week, then a month, and six weeks ago they had done more surgery and said probably he’d make it. Crushed spine, crushed pelvis, multiple fractures in both legs. One of the problems was that the boy was eight, and growing. His hormonal system didn’t seem to get the message that he was critically injured, and that things should stop for a year or so, and that meant that his body cast had to be changed frequently and it meant that while his bones grew together again, and lengthened, his muscles would slowly atrophy, and when he was removed from the cast finally, there’d be a bundle of bones held together by pale skin and not much else.

At Mike’s door I motioned for Janet to stay outside. One more white uniform, I thought, he didn’t need right now. They had him in a private room, temporarily, I assumed, because of his reaction to the suit. He couldn’t move his head, but he heard me come in, and when I got near enough so he could see me, his eyes were wide with fear. He was a good-looking boy with big brown eyes that knew too much of pain and fear.

“You a cub scout?” I asked.

He could talk some, a throaty whisper, when he wanted to. He didn’t seem to want to then. I waited a second or two, then said, “You know what a ham radio set is, I suppose. If you could learn the Morse code, I could fix a wire so that you could use the key.” I was looking around his bed, as if to see if it could be done, talking to myself. “Put a screen with the code up there, where you could see it. Sort of a learning machine. Work the wire with your tongue at first, until they uncover your hands anyway. ’Course not everybody wants to talk to Australia or Russia or Brazil or ships at sea. All done with wires; some people are afraid of wires and things like that.”

He was watching me intently now, his eyes following my gaze as I studied the space above his head. He was ready to deal in five minutes. “You stop bitching about the suit, and I start on the ham set. Right?” His eyes sparkled at that kind of language and he whispered, “Right.”

“Now the parents,” I told Janet in the hall. “He’s okay.”

Bronson was apelike, with great muscular, hairy forearms. I never did say who I was, or why I was there. “Hold out your arm.” He looked from me to Dr. Reisman, who was in a sweat by then. The doctor nodded. I put the sleeve on his arm, then put an inflatable splint on it, inflating it slightly more than was necessary, but I was mad. “Move your fingers.” He tried. I attached the jack to the sleeve wire and plugged it in, and then I played his arm and hand muscles like a piano. He gaped. “That’s what we’re doing to your son. If we don’t do it, when he comes out of that cast he’ll be like a stick doll. His muscles will waste away to nothing. He’ll weigh twenty-five pounds, maybe.” That was a guess, but it made the point. “Every time they change the cast, we change the program, so that every muscle in his body will be stimulated under computer control, slightly at first, then stronger and stronger as he gets better.” I started to undo the splint. The air came out with a teakettle hiss. “You wouldn’t dream of telling Dr. Thorne how to operate on your boy. Don’t tell me my business, unless you know it better than I do.”

“But… Did it hurt?” Mrs. Bronson asked.

“No,” Bronson said, flexing his fingers. “It just tingled a little bit. Felt sort of good.”

I removed the sleeve and folded it carefully, and at the door I heard Mrs. Bronson’s whisper, “Who is he?” and Janet’s haughty answer, “That’s Edward Laslow, the inventor of the Laslow Suit.”

Enrico Groppi met me in the corridor. “I just came from Mike’s room. Thanks. Want a drink?” Groppi was an eclectic—he took from here, there, anything that worked.

“That’s an idea.” I followed him to his office, left word for Janet to meet me there, and tried not to think about the possibility that the suit wouldn’t work, that I’d built up false hopes, that Mike would come to hate me and everything I symbolized…

I drove Janet home, leaving her car in the hospital lot overnight. That meant that I’d have to drive her to work in the morning, but it seemed too silly to play follow the leader back the county roads. To get home we took the interstate highway first, then a four-lane state road, then a two-lane county road, then a right turn off onto a dirt road, and that was ours. Sweet Brier Lane. Five one-acre lots, with woods all around, and a hill behind us, and a brook. If any of us prayed at all, it was only that the county engineers wouldn’t discover the existence of Sweet Brier Lane and come in with their bulldozers and road-building equipment and turn us into a real development.

Our house was the third one on the narrow road. First on the left was Bill Glaser, a contractor, nice fellow if you didn’t have to do more than wave and say hi from time to time. Then on the right came the Donlevy house that had been empty for almost three years while Peter Donlevy was engaged in an exchange program with teachers from England. Then, again on the right, our house, set far back behind oak trees that made growing a lawn almost impossible. Farther down and across the lane was Earl Klinger’s house. He was with the math department of the university. And finally the lane dead-ended at the driveway of Lucas Malek and his wife. He was in his sixties, retired from the insurance business. We were on polite, speaking terms with everyone on the lane, but the Donlevys had been our friends; with them gone, we had drawn inward, and had very little to do with any of the neighbors. We could have borrowed sugar from any of them, or got a lift to town, or counted on them to call the fire department if our house started to burn down, but there was no close camaraderie there.