Orbit 9 Read online

  They were getting together, the three of them, all the time. I knew that Lenny was spending his evenings with Christine, and that Janet was with them much of the time when I was busy down in the basement workshop or out at the hospital. They said, Janet and Lenny, that they were trying to decipher the code that Karl Rudeman had used in making his notes. I didn’t believe them.

  They were talking about me, speculating on whether or not I was the one driving her crazy. I imagined the same conversation over and over, with Lenny insisting that I could have done that to her, and Janet, white-faced and frantic with indecision, denying it. Not while I had been with her, she would think. Not at a time like that.

  Then I would snap awake, and either curse myself for being a fool, or become frightened by the paranoid drift of my thoughts. And I would know that none of it was true. Of course Janet wouldn’t discuss what went on over there; I had practically forbidden her to do so. And Lenny wouldn’t talk about it under the happiest circumstances, much less now.

  Friday, driving to Chicago I began to relax, and after three hours on the road I was whistling and could almost forget the mess, could almost convince myself that I’d been having delusions, which was easier to take than the truth.

  I slept deeply Friday night, and Saturday I was busy, getting our exhibit set up and getting acquainted with others who were also showing tools and machinery. From four until the doors closed at eleven, the hall got fuller and fuller, the noise level became excruciating, the smoke-laden air unbreathable. Our cutting tool drew a good, interested response, and I was busy. And too tired for the late dinner I had agreed to with two other exhibitors. We settled for hamburgers and beer in the hotel dining room, and soon afterward I tumbled into bed and again slept like a child. The crowds were just as thick on Sunday, but by Monday the idle curiosity-seekers were back at their jobs, and the ones who came through were businesslike and fewer in number. I had hired a business student to spell me, and I left him in charge from four until seven, the slack hours, so I could have an early dinner and get some rest. But I found myself wandering the streets instead, and finally I stopped in front of a library.

  Karl Rudeman, I thought. How did he die? And I went in and looked up the clippings about him, and read the last three with absorption. When I went to dinner afterward, I was still trying to puzzle it out. He had had dinner with his family: his wife, parents, daughter, and son-in-law. After dinner they had played bridge for an hour or two. Sometime after that, after everyone else had gone to bed, he had left the house to roam through the fields that stretched out for a quarter of a mile, down to the river. He had collapsed and died of a heart attack at the edge of a field. Christine, awakening later and finding him gone, had first searched the house, then, when she realized that Karl was in his pajamas and barefooted, she had awakened her stepson-in-law and started a search of the grounds. Karl wasn’t found until daylight, and then the tenant farmer had been the one to spot the figure in orange-and-black striped pajamas. There was no sign of violence, and it was assumed that he had been walking in his sleep when the fatal attack occurred.

  Back to the exhibit, and the flow of evening viewers. Invitations, given and accepted, for drinks later, and a beaver flick. Lunch with a couple of other men the following day. A long talk with a manufacturer who was interested in procuring the order for the cutting tool, should there be enough interest to warrant it.

  The obscene movie had been a mistake, I knew as soon as the girl jerked off her slip and opened her legs. Suddenly I was seeing her, open-legged on the edge of the bed before a mirror.

  I pushed my way through a cluster of men at the back of the theater to get out into the cold November air again. I walked back to the hotel. A freezing mist was hanging head high, not falling, but just hanging there, and I gulped it in, thankful for the pain of the cold air in my throat. A prowl car slowed down as it passed me, it picked up speed again and moved on down the street. I had bought a stack of magazines and some paperbacks to read, but nothing in the room looked interesting when I took off my damp clothes and tried to persuade myself that I could fall asleep now.

  I had room service send up a bottle of bourbon and ice, and tried to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. My attention kept wandering, and finally I lay back on the bed, balancing my drink on my stomach, and thought about her.

  It was so easy, and gentle even. She didn’t suspect this time, not at all. She was saying, “… because they’re abstractions, you see. Emotions like fear, love, anger. First the physiological change in the brain, the electrochemical changes that take place stimulating those abstractions, and then the experience of the emotion.”

  “You mean to say he really believed that the feeling of anger comes after the chemical changes that take place?”

  “Of course. That’s how it is with a physiological psychologist. And you can see it operate; tranquilizers permit you to know intellectually but they don’t let you react, so you don’t experience the anger or fear, or whatever.”

  Lenny was sitting back in the green chair in the study, and she was behind the desk that was spread with snapshots and proofs.

  “Okay. What triggers those changes in the first place?”

  “Well, his specialty was sight, or vision, as he preferred to call it. Light entering the eye brings about a change in the chromophore in the first thousandth of a second, and after that the rest of the changes are automatic, a causal chain that results in the experiencing of a vision of some sort.”

  “I know,” Lenny said gently. “But what about the vision that doesn’t have an object in real space? The imaginary image? No light there to start the chain of events.”

  “A change brought about by electrochemical energy? The leakage of energy from cellular functioning? The first step is on a molecular level, not much energy is involved, after all. Lenny, it’s happening…”

  I got a jolt of fear then, along with the words spoken softly. Her hands clenched and a proof under her right hand buckled up and cracked. Before Lenny could respond, I pulled out and away.

  I didn’t know how she had found out, what I had done to give my presence away. But her knowledge had been as certain as mine, and the fear was named now, not the fear of insanity. It was a directed fear and hatred that I had felt, directed at me, not the aimless, directionless, more-powerful fear that my presence had stimulated before. She knew that something from outside had entered her. I sat up and finished my drink, then turned off the light. And I wondered what they had been finding in those notes… Half a bottle and hours later I fell asleep.

  I dreamed that I was being chased, that I kept calling back over my shoulder, “Stop, it’s me! Look at me! It’s me!” But it didn’t stop, and steadily it gained ground, until I knew that I was going to be caught, and the thought paralyzed me. All I could do then was wait in rigid, motionless, soundless terror for it to reach out and get me.

  The nightmare woke me up, and it was minutes before I could move. It was nearly daylight; I didn’t try to sleep any more. I was too afraid of having her dreams again. At seven thirty I called Janet.

  “Hey,” she said happily. “I thought we’d never hear from you.”

  “I sent some cards.”

  “But you’ll be here before they will. How’s it going?”

  “Fine. Boring after the first day. I went to a dirty movie last night.”

  “I hope you had bad dreams. Serve you right.” Her voice was teasing and cheerful and happy, and I could see her smile and the light in her eyes.

  “How’s everything there?” I couldn’t ask about Lenny and Christine. If they had found out anything, they hadn’t told her. I’d know, if they had. We chatted for several minutes, then she had to run, and I kissed her over the wire and we both hung up at the same time, the way we always did. I was being stupid. Naturally they wouldn’t tell her. Hey, did you know that your husband’s been torturing this woman psychologically, that he raped her repeatedly, that he’s contemplating killing her? I jerked from the bed, shak
ing.

  I had a dull pain behind my right eye when I went down to breakfast. A wind was driving sleet through the streets like sheer white curtains, and I stopped at the doorway, shivering, and went back inside to the hotel dining room. I couldn’t think, and I knew that I had to think now.

  If Lenny deciphered the notebooks, and if Karl had known that she could be possessed—there, I thought with some satisfaction, I used the word. If he had known and put that in his notebooks, then Lenny was bright enough to know that the recurrence of her schizophrenia was more than likely due to a new invasion. I groaned. He wouldn’t believe that. I couldn’t even believe it. No one in his right mind would, unless he had done it and could prove it to himself… I gripped my cup so hard that coffee splashed out and I had to use both hands to return the cup to the saucer. Had Lenny gone into her too?

  The pain behind my eye was a knife blade now. Lenny! Of course. I tried to lift the coffee and couldn’t. I flung down my napkin and got up and hurried back to my room, as fast as I could get out of there. I paced, but no matter how I came to it, I ended up thinking that the only way Lenny could have accepted the thing was through experience. First Rudeman, then me, and now Lenny.

  He couldn’t have her. She was mine now. And I would never give her up.

  The pain was unbearable and I collapsed, sprawled across the bed, clutching my head. I hadn’t had a migraine in years. It was not knowing. Not knowing how much they had found out, not knowing what they were doing, what they were planning, not knowing if there was a way they could learn about me.

  I went to her abruptly, roughly. She dropped a pan of developer and moaned, and caught the sink in a dark room. “No!” she cried. “Please. No!”

  I tried to make her remember everything Lenny had said to her, tried to bring back his voice, but there was too much, it came too fast. She was too frightened, and intermixed were the revived thoughts of insanity, of Karl’s voice, Lenny’s words. Too much. She had to relax. I took her to the couch and made her lie down and stop thinking. I felt her fear, and hatred, and abhorrence, like a pulse beating erratically, with each beat the pressure increased, and then ebbed. She tried to break away, and we struggled, and I hurt her. I didn’t know what I had done, how I had managed it, but she groaned and wept and fell down again, and now my pain was also her pain. “Karl,” she whispered soundlessly, “please go. Please leave me alone. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Please.”

  I stayed with her for more than an hour, and then I tried to force her to forget. To know nothing about my presence. She struggled again, and this time she screamed piercingly, and for a moment the feeling of a plunge straight down was almost overwhelming, but everything stopped, and I could find nothing there to communicate with, nothing to probe. It was like being swallowed by a sea of feathers that stretched out in all directions, shifting when I touched them, but settling again immediately. She had fainted.

  I fell asleep almost immediately and when I awakened it was nearly two, and my headache was gone. I went to the exposition.

  That afternoon a man returned who had been at the stall for almost an hour on Saturday. He had a companion this time. “Hi, Mr. Laslow. Hendrickson, remember? Like you to meet Norbert Weill.”

  Of course, I knew who Norbert Weill was. If you had a home workshop, you had something of his in it. If you had a small commercial shop, you probably had something of his. If you had a hundred-man operation, you’d have something of his. He was about sixty, small and square, with muscles like a boxer’s. He grunted at the introduction, his handshake was a no-nonsense test of strength. “Hendrickson says it’ll cut through plastic, glass, aluminum, steel. Without changing nothing but the program. That right?”

  “Yes. Would you like a demonstration?”

  “Not here. In my shop. How much?”

  “I can’t discuss that without my partner, Mr. Weill.”

  “Get him, then. When can he make it?”

  So it went. In the end I agreed to call Lenny, then get in touch with Weill again at his Chicago office. Lenny didn’t sound very enthusiastic. “Let him have the machine in his own shop for a couple of weeks after you close down there. Then let him make an offer.”

  “I think he’ll make the offer without all that, if we’re both on hand to discuss it. Outright sale of this machine, an advance against royalties. Could come to quite a bundle.”

  “Christ! I just don’t… Eddie, can you get away from that place for a couple of hours? I’ve got to have a talk with you. Not about this goddam machine, something else.”

  “Sure. Look, plan to fly up on Friday. It’ll take an hour, no more. A couple of hours for the talk with Weill. A couple more with me, then fly back. Six hours is all. Or less maybe. You can afford to take one lousy day off.”

  “Okay. I’ll call your hotel and let you know what time I’ll get in.” He sounded relieved.

  “Hey, wait a minute. What the hell is going on? Is it one of the suits? The closed-circuit TV giving trouble? What?”

  “Oh. Sorry, Eddie. I thought I said personal. Nothing at the shop. Everything’s fine. It’s… it’s something with Chris. Anyway, see you Friday.”

  I didn’t go back to the booth, but instead found a small coffee shop in the exposition building and sat there smoking and thinking about Lenny and Christine, and Janet and me, and Mr. Weill, and God knows what else. This was it, I thought, the break we’d been waiting for. I didn’t doubt that. Money, enough for once to do the things we’d been wanting to do. A bigger shop, more equipment, maybe some help, even a secretary to run herd on books. And neither Lenny nor I cared. Neither of us gave a damn.

  Sitting there, with coffee in front of me, a cigarette in my fingers, I probed Christine to see what was happening. She was talking in a low voice. Her eyes were closed. Going into her was like putting on distortion lenses, putting scrambling devices in my ears. Nothing was in clear focus, no thoughts were coherent all the way through. She was on something, I realized. Something that had toned down everything, taken off all the edges, all the sharpness.

  “I used to walk on that same path, after… I saw the fields sown, the tractors like spiders, back and forth, back and forth, stringing a web of seeds. And the green shoots—they really do shoot out, like being released, a rubber band that is suddenly let go, but they do it in slow motion. It was a wheatfield. Pale green, then as high as my shoulders so that I was a head floating over the field, only a head. Magician’s best trick. Float a head. Then the harvesters came and the snow fell. And it was the same walk. You see? And I couldn’t tell which was the real one. They were all real. Are real. All of them are. The tranquilizers. He said I shouldn’t take them. Have to learn how to find which one is now and concentrate on it. No tranquilizers.”

  She sighed, and the images blurred, fused, separated again. She turned off a tape recorder, but continued to lie still, with her eyes closed. Her thoughts were a chaotic jumble. If she suspected that I was there, she gave no indication. She was afraid to open her eyes. Trying to remember why she had walked along that path so many times after Karl died out there. In the beginning, the hours of training, hours and hours of testing. Then the experiments. Afraid of him. Terribly afraid. He had cleared the world for her, but he might scramble it again. So afraid of him. If she took the capsules and went to bed, it didn’t matter, but now. Afraid to open her eyes. Lenny? Isn’t it time yet? It’s been so long—days, weeks. Snow has fallen, and the summer heat has come and gone. I know the couch is under me, and the room around me, and my finger on the switch to the recorder. I know that. I have to repeat it sometimes, but then I know it. Mustn’t open my eyes now. Not yet. Not until Lenny comes back.

  I smelled burning filter and put out the cigarette and drank coffee. What would she see if she opened her eyes now? Was that her madness? A visual distortion, a constant hallucination, a mixture of reality and fantasy that she couldn’t tell apart? She turned her head, faced the back of the couch.

  Very slowly I forced her to sit up, and the
n to open her eyes. It was much harder than making her respond had been before. She kept slipping away from me. It was as if there were so many other impulses that mine was just one of a number, no more powerful than any of the illusory ones that kept holding up images for her to scan and accept, or reject. Finally she opened her eyes, and the room began to move. There was no sequence, no before and after, or cause and effect. Everything was. Winter, with a fire in the fireplace, summer with fans in the windows, company talking gaily, the room empty, children playing with puzzles, a couple copulating on the couch, a man pacing talking angrily… They were all real. I knew we—I had to get out of there, and there was no place to go. I was afraid of the outside world even more than the inside one. I was afraid to move. The couch vanished from behind me. The room was moving again. And I knew it would vanish, and that I would fall, like I had fallen a thousand times, a million times.

  “Help me!” I cried to the pacing man, and he continued to pace although the room was certainly fading. And the children played. And the couple made love. And the fans whirred. And the fire burned. And I fell and fell and fell and fell…

  I sat in the coffee shop and shook. I was in a sweat, and I couldn’t stop the shaking in my hands. I didn’t dare try to walk out yet. No more! No more. I shook my head and swore, no more. I’d kill her. She had learned what to do, what not to do, and through my stupidity and blundering, I’d kill her.