Orbit 9 Read online

  Two things were now obvious to them. Murdock meant only good toward their city and he’d lost someone. His partner or his secretary; possibly both. The sergeant had no doubts as to what had happened to those two. It happened all the time in romantic, sun-drenched, moon-washed Florida. There was a simple, realistic and officially approved solution: pass it along to another department.

  He sent Murdock upstairs to the Bureau of Missing Persons.

  The office of the BMP was a whitewashed cinder-block cubicle filled with papers. File cabinets overflowed with them. Wire baskets spilled them onto the floor. A gigantic desk threatened to crumble under their weight. There were boxes and piles and shelves of them. Papers. If there was an order to them, Murdock couldn’t see it.

  In the midst of the stacks sat a small harassed clerkish-looking man with a black, pencil-thin mustache on his upper lip. It wiggled like a starved caterpillar when he spoke.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was sent up here by the desk sergeant,” Murdock said. “He told me you could help me.”

  “I can’t. Who’s missing?”

  “My partner.”

  “No shit? Yours too? It’s an epidemic. Bristol—that’s my partner—he’s gone. We’ve been trying to locate him for a week and a half now. The clerk stood up and made a sweeping gesture at the desk. A small pile of papers and photographs were swept to the floor. “You see this mess? Just look at it! Day after day thousands of missing person reports come into Florida. They’re filed from every state in the Union. Even this one. It seems like people are always running away, dropping out of sight. Have you noticed that?”

  “Yes,” Murdock started. “I . . .”

  “And you know where they end up?”

  “No,” Murdock said. “I . . .”

  “Half the time, they don’t. I have all these photographs and all these damn forms, descriptive forms, mind you, and they’re all catalogued and numbered and lettered and stamped and you know what’s wrong with them?”

  Murdock shook his head.

  “They don’t say which goes with what! I don’t know. You know who knows?”

  “Who?”

  “Bristol. He has a system. But the only person in the whole world who understands the Bristol System is Bristol and he hasn’t been in to work for a week and a half. We’ve been looking for him everywhere.” He stared at Murdock. “Now. Do you have a decent recent photograph of yourself? Full-face is best. Profile will do.”

  “What?”

  “For our files.”

  “But I’m not missing.”

  “Not now you’re not. But what about next week? Or even tomorrow? Or an hour from now?”

  Murdock found the thought chilling. He put it out of his mind.

  “Well, do you?” the clerk asked.

  “Do I what?”

  “Have a decent recent photograph of yourself? I haven’t got all day to fool around with you, mister.”

  “I don’t. Its my partner I’m trying to find. Not me.”

  “Stand over there. That’s right. Over against that blank wall.”

  Murdock gave up and backed over to the barren stretch of cinder blocks.

  The clerk opened a desk drawer. Papers tumbled in heaps to the floor. He opened another drawer and found what he was hunting for. It was a Swiftshutter camera with an automatic ellipse attachment, held together by a ragged piece of twine. Fondling it, he faced Murdock.

  “Smile.”

  Murdock tried one last time. “I just want. . .”

  “Smile, goddammit!”

  Murdock smiled.

  The clerk pressed a stud. The camera clicked, growled, farted and clicked again. Flipping open the slide, the clerk pulled out a print. It smelled faintly of urine.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Would you like copies made?”

  “Sure, sure,” Murdock mumbled.

  “Sixty-nine cents each. Here’s a form. Just enter the information in the spaces provided. Any lies will leave you open for a charge of perjury. That’s a very serious offense in this state. You have fifteen minutes to complete it, starting when I say go. Sit there.” He pointed to a school desk with a chair attached.

  Murdock sat.

  “Do you have a cryptostylus?” the clerk asked.

  “No.”

  “Here.” He held out the computer pen. “That’ll be one dollar.”

  Murdock gave him the goddamn dollar.

  The clerk unpocketed a turnip that looked like an old-fashioned railroad timepiece with a long thin golden chain. But it had too many studs. The clerk pressed one of the studs and the turnip began to tick. He put it to his ear, shook it and pressed another stud. It stopped ticking. Satisfied, he turned to Murdock.

  “All right. Ready? Go!”

  Murdock worked steadily but carefully, filling out the form to the loud tick-tick of the turnip.

  “Time!” the clerk called out. “Are you finished?”

  “I’ve been finished for five minutes.”

  “Okay, wise guy, we’ll be checking this against. . .” The clerk looked at the form, his lips moving as he scanned it. His mustache did the prone “. . . the Georgia State Police records. You’ll be hearing from us.”

  “Now will you help me find my partner?” Murdock said.

  “Jesus Christ, mister,” the clerk said. “Have a heart, willya? I can’t even find my partner. I explained all that to you earlier. What’s his name?”

  “Bristol?”

  “Hey, that’s my partner’s name too!”

  “I meant your partner,” Murdock said with a sigh.

  “You’ve seen him?” the clerk asked eagerly.

  “No.”

  “Neither have I. And just look at this mess he left me with, the thoughtless bastard. Some people have no consideration.”

  Murdock backed away. As he sidled toward the doorway, the clerk said, “You can expect those copies in two to three weeks.”

  Murdock nodded and left.

  “C.O.D!” the clerk yelled after him.

  * * * *

  It wasn’t any use, Murdock thought. He felt infinitely weary. Nothing was of any use. He stepped into a public vidphone booth, slamming the door viciously behind him, and broke a nail punching 0 with his forefinger.

  “Yes, sir?” the operator sneered at him.

  “I want to put through a call to ...” He hesitated. It was right on the edge of his mind. Home. Yes. “. . . to Savannah, Georgia.”

  “Your bug number, please?”

  “What?”

  “Your number. What number are you calling, please?” She gave him a faint smile and started to unbutton her blouse.

  “MOrris 54692. Person-to-person to . . . to . . .” Hell, now he couldn’t even remember his wife’s first name. “To Mrs. S. Murdock.”

  “One moment please,” the operator said. As she faded out of sight, he glimpsed a flash of blue. She was wearing a blue bikini top under the white blouse.

  A One Moment Please sign appeared, slightly purple around the edges.

  He waited.

  The operator’s voice returned. The rest of her didn’t. The sign wavered, shimmering as the voice informed him, “We are ringing your party.”

  The screen went dead.

  He didn’t even bother trying again.

  He wasn’t sure what was happening, but he knew one thing. He had to get home. Back to the familiar things he knew and loved. Back to whatever-her-name-was and the kids, whosis and whatsis. Back as quickly as he could. Fly back. If that pilot was still waiting for him at the airfield he could fly directly back instead of waiting for the morning flight tomorrow in Fort Myers.

  If the pilot was waiting.

  Murdock wasn’t counting on it.

  His fingers worked frantically at the pentadodecahedron as he hurried to Loshun Mall. The bicycle was leaning against the wall where he’d left it. A parking ticket fluttered from the high handlebars.

  He stared at the little white card, then ripped it off and tore
it into quarters. He tore the quarters into dimes and dropped the change into a litter basket, then climbed onto the bike and pedaled like hell back to the airfield.

  The Piper Yamacraw sat beside the candy-striped hangar, a large patient bird squatting on a barren nest. No one was in sight.

  Murdock pedaled anxiously around the hangar. He found Dallas in back, playing quoits with the kid.

  He swung off the bicycle and let it fall. His fingers strove into his pocket and fisted around the pentadodecahedron.

  The pilot grinned amiably at him. “Back to Fort Myers now, Mr. Murdock?”

  “Savannah!” he answered. “Can you fly me to Savannah?”

  “Sure . . .”

  “All right, then, let’s go.”

  The kid shouted after them, “Look out for the peripheral crosswinds, suckers!”

  * * * *

  Murdock merely muttered, grunted and mumbled in response to the pieces of travelogue the pilot gave him. He gazed out the window at the gray mush of cloud cover that hid the Okefenokee. He nodded abstractedly as he was told that they’d follow the coast up from Brunswick. He didn’t bother to ask which when Dallas told him one of those islands below was St. Simon’s and another Sapelo. He just didn’t give a damn.

  But when Dallas said, “That’s Skidaway, and there’s Tybee up ahead,” he squinted to pick them out. Tybee marked the mouth of the Savannah River.

  Almost home.

  There was the island, and there was the river spilling itself into the sea. Upriver, the long thin strip of Cockspur Island sat stolidly, with Fort Pulaski standing vigil at one end. Then the pine islands and the grassy marshes cut by twisting ribbons of creeks and rivers. And there the high bluff where Oglethorpe had established his colony in 1733—the site that had become the city of Savannah.

  There. The bluff.

  There.

  Murdock stared at the vast grassy space atop the bluff. It stretched out for miles, open and empty, sloping into the marshlands, fading into piney woods. Empty. Nothing.

  “Savannah,” Murdock said softly.

  “Huh?” Dallas said.

  “Savannah. It’s . . . gone?”

  The only reply Murdock got was a slight shrug.

  “It can’t be gone,” he said. He stared at the ground. “Can you land here?”

  “Sure can.”

  The plane dipped one wing. Banking, it began to circle. Murdock saw nothing but grassy vastness.

  “Maybe we . . . took a wrong turn somewhere?” he suggested.

  “Nope,” Dallas said. “Savannah, Georgia. This is it.”

  Murdock kept staring at the red river, the bluff, the bottoms, the wide flat of Hutchinson Island and the marshes that decades ago had been rice paddies. There was the point where the Talmadge Bridge should have stood. There was the narrow lip at the foot of the bluff that should have been River Street. There, outlying from the townsite were the swamplands that had been drained and filled for the ever-expanding suburbs. But there weren’t any suburbs. No suburbs, no city. Nothing.

  Grass bowing gently in the breeze.

  It must be a mirage, he told himself. He wasn’t convinced.

  The wheels of the Yamacraw touched the grass, moved away, touched again and began to roll across the bumpy ground.

  “It’s gone,” Murdock said dully. “It’s really gone. My home, my wife, my poor children. My home. For God’s sake, Dallas,” he pleaded, “what’s happening here?”

  The plane jolted to a stop.

  “Perspective causes parallel lines to converge,” the pilot said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Murdock snarled in sudden fury. He turned to glare at the man. And failed.

  The pilot was gone.

  Murdock sat for a moment, feeling the anger drain out and numbness seep in.

  Then he slowly opened the door of the plane, put a careful foot on the step and lowered himself to the ground.

  The grass was thick with weeds and the wind was picking up, blowing across the river. It carried the salty scent of marshes. There was no one in sight. No one to question. No one to blame.

  Murdock pinched his nose and turned in a full circle.

  Nothing. The plane had disappeared while his back was turned.

  There had to be an explanation. There had to be a rational explanation. Had to be.

  Nothing. Nothing except Murdock. Nothing except himself.

  He turned his back to the bluff, turned to face the wind. He began walking.

  Before he’d gone far, he sat down and removed his shoes. The grass was soft. He stood up and started to run. After a short distance, he’d winded himself, but he kept on going.

  The sun went down and it got dark and cool. Dew formed. His socks were sopping wet. He stripped them off and stuffed them into his shoes, then threw the shoes over his shoulder and kept on going.

  Toward. Not away.

  <>

  * * * *

  Kit Reed

  ACROSS THE BAR

  In her youth Maud Constable had talked longingly about the days when she would be a venerable widow with beautiful white hair; she would live like a small gem in an exquisitely furnished setting well away from spilled cereal and greasy fingerprints, and in solitude she would perfect her poetry. She secretly knew she would never really be any better than she was but she used this fiction to prepare herself for the eventual loss of her children to adult life and for the unbearable prospect of outliving her husband.

  At seventy-five she was in fact a venerable widow with beautiful white hair, she had an exquisitely furnished apartment in which the walls were white and everything else was rococo and, while she would not admit it, her poetry had in fact grown richer, but the days tasted flat in her mouth and she opened her doors to everybody who came, welcoming dirty feet and fingerprints and fifteen-year-old runaways and assorted deadbeats sleeping curled up in corners, secretly hoping that eventually, one of these mornings, somebody might even spill a bowl of cereal, so that it would be more or less like old times.

  When the telegram came, she thought at first that it must be for Anderson, who lived in the dinette, and she went in and cleared her throat to wake him, saying: “Greetings . . But when he extended a hand from under the walnut table and took the wire and read it, he scrambled out in a hurry, saying, “Read it again, honey, it’s for you.”

  Her hands were trembling so that she couldn’t make out any of the print but she already had the wire by heart:

  GET AFFAIRS IN ORDER.

  NEED YOU FOR SPACE PROBE.

  And in the next minute the man from NASA was at the door to explain. Errol and Stanley took Maud into the bedroom to dress for the interview, while Anderson cleared Billy and the cats off the couch so the man from NASA would have a place to sit down. In a minute or two Errol and Stanley opened the bedroom door and Maud sailed out in black, she had put on something that could pass for a cassock, and her white hair made an aureole under the Spanish veil. She looked a little tremulous but her chin was firm, and as she sat down with the man from NASA she gave the others such a look that they cleared the room so she and the man from NASA could be alone.

  “Of course,” Darrel said at the party Anderson gave to celebrate. “It’s the most logical thing in the world.”

  Mary del Val stopped doing her nails. “But NASA.”

  “They’ve been talking about it for years,” Darrel said, “but there wasn’t a poet alive who could pass the physical.”

  Mary said, “But Maud.”

  Darrel overrode him. “The only person who ever said anything decent in space was Yuri what’s-his-name, you know, ‘I am iggle.’ It’s her patriotic duty as a poet.”

  “Maud’s a hundred and twelve if she’s a day.”

  “I happen to be seventy-five,” Maud said, giving Mary a stuffed grape leaf. “Besides, that’s just the point.”

  Mary sniffed. “Sweetie, you’ll disintegrate.”

  “Oh, but I’ll keep on sending, righ
t up to the end. ‘Deathsong in the Stars.’ “

  “Heroic.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “I didn’t think it was bad,” Maud said. “Not half bad at all.”

  Mary put an arm around her. “Well all right, but we’re going to miss you.”