Orbit 9 Read online

  * * * *

  The Mayor has declared war on the roaches, believing common cause will bring us together; restore esprit, order. The contraceptives have been burned in bonfires on Town Hall Square, people queue outside the compulsory strip shows, the city’s water supply is pumped full of aphrodisiacs—and still, it’s not enough. No one cares. No one, frankly, gives a damn. Anomie and entropy. The birthrate still declines, the city collapses into itself. Stronger measures are required, the Mayor declares from the top of the Town Hall steps (the sun on his skull, the smell of burnt rubber, burning plastic), We must actnow!

  Badges came last night, press-gang firemen, to bear Molly’s roach away to its execution. She locked the door and shoved things against it—bureaus, bookshelves, the stove—and when they finally broke through, attacked them with shishkebob skewers. She blinded three, ruined another’s hand, neatly burst the balloonlike testicles of the last. Holding her, kicking, screaming, against the wall (halls filled with inquisitive Citizens), they took the cage cover off and discovered that she had (predictably, perhaps) killed the roach herself—with a gold stickpin left behind by one of her lovers—to keep them from getting it.

  Molly, “The stars and the rivers

  and waves call you back.”

  * * * *

  And the citizens, when they return to their flats from gaping and gasping in the hall—what is it that they do? There, in that abject privacy. Contained by those colorful walls.

  <>

  * * * *

  Kate Wilhelm

  THE INFINITY BOX

  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, with Lenny in it, 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 outside a football field, shoulders that didn’t need padding to look padded. 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 futilely 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 DOA; 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, anything at all. “Hold out your arm,” I ordered. 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,” I ordered. 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.”r />
  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 he was willing to incorporate into his system.

  “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. He was at Cambridge, and from the Christmas cards that we got from them, they might never return. Then, again on the right, our house, set far back behind oak trees that made grass-growing 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, and to be avoided if possible. An immigrant from East Europe, Hungary or some place like that, he was bored and talked endlessly if encouraged. 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 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.

  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 had had it. 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.

  Every afternoon a woman from a nearby subdivision came to stay with the children and to straighten up generally until we got home. Mrs. Durrell was as mystified as we about the van and the newcomer.

  “Haven’t seen a sign of anyone poking about over there. Rusty says that they’re just moving boxes in, heavy boxes.” Rusty, eleven, probably knew exactly how many boxes, and their approximate weight. “The kids are down at the brook watching them unload,” Mrs. Durrell went on. “They’re hoping for more kids, I guess. Rusty keeps coming up to report, and so far, only one woman, and a lot of boxes.” She talked herself out of the kitchen, across the terrace, and down the drive to her car, her voice fading out gradually.

  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 w
ith 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, the kids to catch the schoolbus at the end of the lane, Janet to go to the hospital, and me to go to the lab eventually. 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.