Orbit 9 Read online

  “Sir? Is anything wrong? Are you all right?”

  The waitress. She touched my arm warily, ready to jump back.

  “Sir?”

  “I… I’m sorry, Miss. Sleeping with my eyes open, I guess. I’m sorry.” She didn’t believe me. Behind her I saw another woman watching. She must have sent the waitress over. I picked up the check, but I was afraid to try to stand up. I waited until the girl turned and walked away, and then I held the top of the table until I knew my legs would hold me.

  I had the boy I’d hired relieve me for the rest of the day, and I walked back to my hotel, slowly, feeling like an old man. I started the hour-long walk making myself promises. I would never touch her again, I’d help Lenny find out the truth about her and do whatever could be done to cure her, and to get her and Lenny together. They needed each other, and I had Janet and the children, and the shop. Everything I had driven for was either mine, or within sight by now. Everything. She was a danger to me, nothing else. By the time I got to the hotel I knew the promises were lies. That as long as I could get inside that woman’s head, I would keep right on doing it. And now the thought had hit me that I wanted to be with her physically, just her and me, when I did it next time. It was a relief finally to admit to myself that I wanted to seize her body and mind. And I knew that I wanted everyone else out of her life altogether. Especially Lenny. Everyone who might be a threat, everyone who suspected that there was a mystery to be unraveled. The notebooks would have to be destroyed. If Karl had known, the knowledge must be destroyed. All of it. No one to know but me.

  I looked on her then as a gift from God or the Devil, but my gift. From the instant of our first meeting, when the shock of seeing her had rattled me, right through that moment, everything had been driving me toward this realization. I hadn’t wanted to see it before. I had ducked and avoided it. Pretending that she was abhorrent to me, making Janet and Lenny shield me from her, shield her from me. I walked faster and with more purpose. I had too much to do now to waste time. I had to learn exactly how to enter her without the panic she always felt as soon as she knew. And I had to find a way to make her rid herself of Lenny.

  I bought a bottle of bourbon, and some cheese and crackers. I had to stay in to plan my campaign, make certain of all the details this time before I touched her. I knew I would have to be more careful than I had been in the past. I didn’t want to destroy her, or to damage her in any way. I might have to hurt her at first, just to show her that she had to obey. That’s what always hurt her, having to fight with her. And no more tranquilizers. Karl had been right. She shouldn’t have drugs, not she. What else had he learned about her? How deep had his control been? The line from Pete’s letter came back to me: “He wound her up each morning…”

  The bastard, I thought with hatred. Goddamned bastard.

  It was almost five when I got to my room. There was a message from Lenny, to call him at her number. I crumpled up the note and flung it across the room. How much of the notebooks had he been able to get through? How much had he told her about what he had found there? I poured a generous drink and tried to think about Lenny and Karl, and all the time I kept seeing her, a tiny, perfectly formed figure, amazingly large dark eyes, doll-like hands…

  She would have called Lenny after my… visit. I cursed myself for clumsiness. I’d have her in an institution if I wasn’t more careful. Had she been able to get back to present after I ran out this time? I realized that that’s how I had always left her, in a panic, or in a faint. What if she, in desperation, jumped out a window, or took an overdose of something? I took a long drink and then placed the call. I was shaking again, this time with fear that she was hurt, really hurt.

  Lenny answered. “Oh, Eddie. Can you get Weill tonight? I can get in by ten fifteen in the morning. Can you find out if he can see us then?”

  I swallowed hard before I could answer. “Sure. He said to call anytime. Someone will be there. Is that all? I mean when I got the message to call you at… her house, I was afraid something had happened.”

  “No. It’s all right. Chris has decided to feed me, that’s all.” There was a false note in his voice. Probably she was nearby, listening. I fought the impulse to go out to her to find out.

  “Okay. If I don’t call back, assume that it’s set up.”

  “What’s wrong with you? You sound hoarse.”

  “Out in the rain. A bug. I’m catching that mysterious ‘it’ that’s always going around. See you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Take care of yourself. Get a bottle and go to bed.”

  “Sure, Lenny.”

  I stared at the phone after hanging up. He was suspicious. I could tell from his voice, from the way he hedged when I asked a direct question. Maybe not simply suspicious. Maybe they actually knew by now. Not that he could prove anything. To whom? Janet? A jury? I laughed and poured another drink, this time mixing it with water. “This man, ladies and gentlemen, entered the mind of this woman at will…”

  At breakfast the next morning I realized that I hadn’t eaten anything for a couple of days, and still didn’t want to then. I had coffee and toast, and left most of the soggy bread on the dish. Lenny met me at the hotel.

  “God, Eddie, you’d better get home and go to bed. We can close up the display. You look like hell.”

  “A bug. I’ll be all right. Maybe you could stay if I do decide to take off?”

  “Let’s close the whole thing. It’s just three more days.”

  “I’ll stay,” I said. What an ideal set-up that would have been. Him here, me back home, Janet working.

  I let Lenny do the talking at Weill’s office, and we got a good offer, not as much as we had hoped, but probably more than Weill had planned to make. We ended up saying that our lawyer would go over the contract and be in touch.

  “Let’s go to your room where we can talk without interruption,” Lenny said then, and neither of us mentioned Weill again. A few months ago, B.C., Before Christine, we’d have been arrested for disturbing the peace if we’d had this offer from someone like Weill, and now, we didn’t even mention it again.

  I lay down on my bed and let Lenny have the only chair in the room. My head was ringing and aching mildly, and my back and legs were stiff and sore. I didn’t give a damn about Lenny’s problems then.

  Lenny paced. “God, I don’t even know where or how to begin this,” he said finally. “Back at the beginning of Christine and Karl. She was such a good subject for his experiments that he based much of his research on her alone, using the other two for controls mostly. Then he found out that she was too good, that what she could do was so abnormal that he couldn’t base any conclusions on his findings on her. For instance, he trained her to see objects so small that they were too small to fall on the cones and rods in the retina. And he trained her to spot a deviation in a straight line so minute that it needs special equipment to measure. Same with a circle. She can tell the exact place that a circle deviates from sphericity, and again it needs sophisticated instruments to measure it. Stereo acuity. We lose it if the peripheral vision is flattened out, if we don’t have the cues. She doesn’t lose it. She can see things where there isn’t enough light to see them. She can see things that are too far away to see. Same with her color perception. You need a spectrometer and a spectrophotometer to make the same differentiation she can do with a glance.”

  He stopped and threw himself down in the chair and lighted a cigarette before he continued. “I’m getting pretty well into the notebooks. It’s tough going, very technical, in a field I know nothing about. And he knew nothing about physics, and used layman’s language, and a sort of shade-tree mechanic’s approach with some of the equipment he had to learn to use. Anyway, after a few years, he switched to a second code. He was paranoid about his secrets. A developing psychosis is written down there plain enough even for me to see. He was afraid of her.” Lenny put out the cigarette and looked at me. I was watching him, and now I shook my head.

  “What do you mean a
fraid? Her schizophrenia? Was she showing signs of it again?”

  “Will you forget that! She’s not a schizo! Pretend you look at this room and you see it as it’s been all through its history, with everyone who was ever here still here. Suppose you can’t stop yourself from straying in time, just the way you stray in space. If you were lost in a hotel like this one and had to knock on doors, or ask people the way to your room, that’s being lost in space. Lost in time is worse because no one answers until you find your own time. But those who are in your time see the search, hear your end of it, and wham, you’re in a hospital.”

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up, but the room was unsteady. I had to support my head on my hands, propped up on my knees. “So why isn’t she locked up?”

  “Because she learned how to control it most of the time. Maybe a lot of people are born able to see through time and learn as infants to control it, how to tell this present from all the other images that they see. Maybe only a few do it, and most of them never learn control. God knows something drives some children into autism that they never leave. She learned. But in periods of high stress she backslid. If she became overtired, or sick, or under a strain, she couldn’t hold the present in sharp enough focus. So they had her in and out of hospitals. And Rudeman became fascinated by her, and began to do his own line of research, using her, and he realized that she was seeing layers of time. Can’t you just see it? Him the famous physiological psychologist denying mind from the start, being forced finally to concede that there’s something there besides the brain. He struggled. It’s all there. He couldn’t accept, then he looked for a reasonable cause for her aberrations, finally he knew that she was somehow existing partly in another dimension that opened time just as space is opened to the rest of us.” Lenny’s sudden laugh was bitter and harsh. “He preferred to think he was going mad, that she was mad. But the scientist in him wouldn’t let it rest there. He devised one experiment after another to disprove her abilities, and only got in deeper and deeper. First understanding, then control. He taught her how to look at now. He forced her into photography as part of her therapy, a continuing practice in seeing what is now.”

  He couldn’t see my face. If he had found out that much, he must have learned the rest, I kept thinking. I couldn’t tell if he suspected me or not, but if he knew that someone was driving her back into that condition, he would go down the list of names, and sooner or later he would get to me. I knew he would stop there. Too many signs. Too much evidence of my guilt. He’d know. Janet would know. I remembered the toast that she had made that night in her house: to the good men. I wanted to laugh, or cry.

  “Christ, Eddie, I’m sorry. Here you are as sick as a dog, and I’m going on like a hysterical grandmother.”

  “I’m not that sick,” I said and raised my head to prove it. “It just seemed like as good a way as any to listen. It’s a pretty incredible story, you have to admit.”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t heard nothing yet. Chris thinks that Rudeman is haunting her. And why not? If you know you can see the past, where do you draw the line at what is or isn’t possible? She’s certain that he found a way to come back and enter her mind, and she’s having a harder and harder time holding on to the present. She thinks he’s having revenge. He always threatened her with a relapse if she didn’t cooperate wholly with him in his research.”

  Lenny’s big face registered despair and hopelessness. He spread his hands and said, “After you swallow half a dozen unbelievable details, why stop at one more? But, damn it, I can’t take that, and I know something has driven her back to the wall.”

  I stood up then and looked through the drawer where I had put the bourbon. Then I remembered that it was in the bathroom. When I came back with it, Lenny took the bottle and said, “When did you eat last?”

  “I don’t remember. Yesterday maybe.”

  “Yeah, I thought so. I’ll have something sent up, then a drink, or you’ll pass out.”

  While we waited I said, “Look at it this way. She sees things that no one else sees. Most people would call that hallucinating. A psychiatrist would call it hallucinating. She thinks her dead husband is haunting her somehow. What in hell are you proposing to do, old buddy?”

  Lenny nodded. “I know all that. Did you know that Eric is color blind?” I shook my head. Eric was his middle son. “I didn’t know it either until he was tested for it at school. A very sophisticated test that’s been devised in the past twenty-five years. Without that test no one would have suspected it ever. You see? I always assumed that he saw things pretty much the way I did. I assume that you see what I see. And there’s no way on this earth to demonstrate one way or the other that you do or don’t. The mental image you construct and call sight might duplicate mine, or it might not, and it doesn’t matter as long as we agree that that thing you’re sitting on is a bed. But do you see that as the same bed that I see? I don’t know. Let me show you a couple of the easy tests that Karl Rudeman used.” He held up a card and flashed it at me. “What color was it?”

  I grinned. I had expected to be asked which one it was. “Red,” I said. “Red Queen of Hearts.”

  He turned the card over and I looked at it and nodded, then looked at him. He simply pointed again to the card. It was black. A black Queen of Hearts. I picked it up and studied it. “I see what you mean,” I said. I had “seen” it as red.

  “Another one,” he said. “How many windows are in your house?”

  I thought a moment, then said, “Twenty-one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just counted them.” I was grinning at him and his simple-minded games. But then I started to think, how had I known, how had I counted them? I had visualized room after room, had counted the windows on the walls that I had drawn up before that inner eye. The bellboy rang and came in with a cart. I tipped him and we sat down to eat sandwiches and drink coffee. “So?” I asked, with my mouth full. “So I visualized the windows. So what does that mean?”

  “It means that that’s how you remember things. If you had an eidetic memory, you would have seen the walls exactly as they were when you memorized them, and you could have counted the books in your line of vision, read off the titles even. The question is: are you looking into the past? No answer yet. That’s what Chris can do. And that’s how she sees the past. That clearly. And she sees the anomalies. You see what you expect—a red Queen of Hearts. She sees what is. But, as you say, no psychiatrist would believe it. Rudeman didn’t for years, not until he did a lot of checking.”

  I was wolfing down the sandwiches, while he was still working on the first one. I felt jubilant. He didn’t know. She didn’t know. Karl haunting her! That was as good a thing for her to think as anything else.

  “Okay,” I said, pouring more coffee. “I see that she’d have a problem with a psychiatrist. But what’s the alternative, if she’s as— sick—or bothered as she seems to be?”

  “The answer’s in the notebooks,” Lenny said. “She knows it. She tried to find it at the farmhouse, but it was impossible to work there. And now she’s afraid of Rudeman all over again. She believes that somehow she caused his death. Now she has to pay.”

  The strong waves of guilt I had got from her. But why had he wandered out in the fields barefoot and in pajamas?

  “What scares me,” Lenny said, “is the slowness of getting through those notes. Bad enough while he was sane, but immeasurably harder as his psychosis developed, for the last seven or eight years. It’s like trying to swim in a tar pit. By the end it was bad enough that he was certifiable, I guess. He knew the contents of those notebooks would invalidate all the work he had done in the past. Chris doesn’t want to talk about it, and all I know for sure is what I’ve been able to dig out of that code he used.”

  “Psychotic how?”

  “Oh, God! I don’t know what name they’d put on it. In the beginning he thought she was a puppet that he could manipulate as he chose. Then gradually he became afrai
d of her, Chris. Insanely jealous, mad with fear that she’d leave him, terrified that someone would find out about her capabilities and begin to suspect that there was more. Just batty.”

  “So what do you intend to do?”

  “That’s what I came up here to talk to you about. I’m going to marry her.” I jerked my head around to stare at him in disbelief. He smiled fleetingly. “Yeah, it’s like that. Not until next year sometime. But I’m taking her on a long, long trip, starting as soon as we can get the books we’ll need ready. That’s why I want to wrap up a deal with Weill as fast as we can. I’ll need my share. We can handle the shop however you want—keep my bench waiting, or buy me out. Whatever.”

  I kept on staring at him, feeling very stupid. “What books?” I asked finally, not wanting to know, but to keep him talking long enough for me to try to understand what it would mean to me.