Orbit 14

by Damon Knight

  “You mean he died? He seemed too young for it; not much older than I am myself—certainly not as old as Mr. Freeling.”

  “He was stout,” Miss Fawn said with a touch of righteous disdain. “He didn’t get much exercise and he smoked a great deal.”

  “He worked very hard,” Forlesen said. “I don’t think he could have had much energy left for exercise.”

  “I suppose not,” Miss Fawn conceded. She was leaning against the door, her left hand toying with the gold pencil she wore on a chain, and seemed to be signaling by her attitude that they were old friends, entitled to relax occasionally from the formality of business. “There was a thing—at one time—between Mr. Fields and myself. I don’t suppose you ever knew it.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Forlesen said, and Miss Fawn looked pleased. “Eddie and I—I called him Eddie, privately—were quite discreet. Or so I flatter myself now. I don’t mean, of course, that there was ever anything improper between us.”

  “Naturally not.”

  “A look and a few words. Elmer knows; I told him everything. You are ready to give that orientation, aren’t you?”

  “I think I am now,” Forlesen said. “George Howe?”

  Miss Fawn studied a slip of paper. “No, Gordie Hilbert.”

  As she was leaving, Forlesen asked impulsively where Fields was. “Where he’s buried, you mean? Right behind you.”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “There.” She gestured toward the picture behind Forlesen’s desk. “There’s a vault behind there—didn’t you know? Just a small one, of course; they’re cremated first.”

  “Burned out.”

  “Yes, burned up, and then they put them behind the pictures— that’s what they’re for. The pictures, I mean. In a beautiful little cruet. It’s a company benefit, and you’d know if you’d read your own orientation material—of course, you can be buried at home if you like.”

  “I think I’d prefer that,” Forlesen said.

  “I thought so,” Miss Fawn told him. “You look the type. Anyway, Eddie bought the farm—that’s an expression the men have.”

  Forlesen went past row upon row of office doors looking for Hilbert’s, and climbed two flights of stairs before he found someone who looked as though she could direct him, a sharp-nosed woman who wore glasses.

  “You’re looking at me funny,” the sharp-nosed woman said. She smiled like a blindfolded schoolteacher who has been made to bite a lemon at a Halloween party.

  “You remind me a great deal of someone I know,” Forlesen said. “Mrs. Frost.” As a matter of fact the woman looked exactly like Miss Fawn.

  The woman’s smile grew somewhat warmer. “Everyone says that. Actually we’re cousins—I’m Miss Fedd.”

  “Say something else.”

  “Do I talk like her too?”

  “No, I think I recognize your voice. This is going to sound rather silly, but when I came here—in the morning, I mean—my car talked to me. I hadn’t thought of it as a female voice, but it sounded just like you.”

  “It’s quite possible,” Miss Fedd said. “I used to be in Traffic, and I still fill in there at times.”

  “I never thought I’d meet you. I was the one who stopped and got out of his car.”

  “A lot of them do, but usually only once. What’s that you’re carrying?”

  “This?” Forlesen held up the brown orientation booklet he had received from Miss Fawn. “A book. I’m afraid to read the ending.”

  “It’s the red book you’re supposed to be afraid to read the end of,” Miss Fedd told him. “It’s the opposite of a mystery—everyone stops before the revelations.”

  “I haven’t even read the beginning of that one,” Forlesen said. “Come to think of it, I haven’t read the beginning of this one either.”

  “We’re not supposed to talk about books here, not even when we haven’t anything to do. What was it you wanted?”

  “I’ve just been transferred into the division, and I was hoping you’d help me find my desk.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Forlesen. Emanuel Forlesen.”

  “Good. I was looking for you—you weren’t at your desk.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Forlesen said. “I was in the Bet-Your-Life room —well, not recently.”

  “I know. I looked there too. Mr. Frick wants to see you.”

  “Mr. Frick?”

  “Yes. He said to tell you he was planning to do this a bit later today, but he’s got to leave the office a little early. Come on.”

  Miss Fedd walked with short, mincing steps, but so rapidly that Forlesen was forced to trot to keep up. “Why does Mr. Frick want to see me?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell,” Miss Fedd said. “This is Mr. Frick’s door.”

  “I know,” Forlesen told her. It was a large door—larger than the other doors in the building, and not painted to resemble wood. Mr. Frick’s plaque was of silver (or perhaps platinum), and had the single word Frick engraved in an almost too tasteful script. A man Forlesen did not know walked past them as they stood before Mr. Frick’s plaque; the man wore a hat and carried a briefcase, and had a coat slung over his arm.

  “We’re emptying out a little already,” Miss Fedd said. “I’d go right in now if I were you—I think he wants to play golf before he goes home.”

  “Aren’t you going in with me?”

  “Of course not—he’s got a group in there already, and I have things to do. Don’t knock, just go in.”

  Forlesen opened the door. The room was very large and crowded; men in expensive suits stood smoking, holding drinks, knocking out their pipes in bronze ashtrays. The tables and the desk—yes, he told himself, there is a desk, a very large desk next to the window at one end, a desk shaped like the lid of a grand piano—the tables and the desk all of dark heavy tropical wood, the tables and the desk all littered with bronze trophies so that the whole room seemed of bronze and black wood and red wool. Several of the men looked at him, then toward the opposite end of the room, and he knew at once who Mr. Frick was: a bald man standing with his back to the room, rather heavy, Forlesen thought, and somewhat below average height. He made his way through the smokers and drink holders. “I’m Emanuel Forlesen.”

  “Oh, there you are.” Mr. Frick turned around. “Ernie Frick.” Mr. Frick had a wide, plump face, a mole over one eyebrow, and a gold tooth. Forlesen felt that he had seen him before.

  “We went to grade school together,” Mr. Frick said. “I bet you don’t remember me, do you?”

  Forlesen shook his head.

  “Well, I’ll be honest—I don’t think I would have remembered you, but I looked up your file while we were getting set for the ceremony. And now that I see you, by gosh, I do remember—I played prisoner’s base with you one day; you used to be able to run like anything.”

  “I wonder where I lost it,” Forlesen said. Mr. Frick and several of the men standing around him laughed, but Forlesen was thinking that he could not possibly be as old as Mr. Frick.

  “Say, that’s pretty good. You know, we must have started at about the same time. Well, some of us go up and some don’t, and I suppose you envy me, but let me tell you, I envy you. It’s lonely at the top, the work is hard, and you can never set down the responsibility for a minute. You won’t believe it, but you’ve had the best of it.”

  “I don’t,” Forlesen said.

  “Well, anyway, I’m tired—we’re all tired. Let’s get this over with so we can all go home.” Mr. Frick raised his voice to address the room at large. “Gentlemen, I asked you to come here because you have all been associated at one time or another, in one way or another, with this gentleman here, Mr. Forlesen, to whom I am very happy to present this token of his colleagues’ regard.”

  Someone handed Mr. Frick a box, and he handed it to Forlesen, who opened it while everyone clapped. It was a watch. “I didn’t know it was so late,” Forlesen said.

  Several people laughed; they were already fili
ng out.

  “You’ve been playing Bet-Your-Life, haven’t you?” Mr. Frick said. “A fellow can spend more time at that than he thinks.”

  Forlesen nodded.

  “Say, why don’t you take the rest of the day off? There’s not much of it left anyhow.”

  Outside, others who presumably had not been given the remainder of the day off by Mr. Frick were straggling toward their cars. As Forlesen walked toward his, feeling as he did so the stiffness and pain in his legs, a bright new car pulled onto the lot and a couple got out, the man a fresh-faced boy, really; the girl a working-class girl, meticulously made up and dressed, cheaply attractive and forlorn, like the models in the advertisements of third-rate dress shops. They went up the sidewalk hand in hand to kiss, Forlesen felt sure, in the time-clock room, and separate, she going up the steps, he down. They would meet for coffee later, both uncomfortable, out of a sense of duty; meet for lunch in the cafeteria, he charging her meal to the paycheck he had not yet received.

  The yellow signs that lined the street read yield; orange-and-black machines were eating the houses just beyond the light. Forlesen pulled his car into his driveway, over the oil spot. A small man in a dark suit was sitting on a wood-and-canvas folding stool beside his door, a black bag at his feet; Forlesen spoke to him but he did not answer. Forlesen shrugged and stepped inside.

  A tall young man stood beside a long, angular object that rested on a sort of trestle in the center of the parlor. “Look what we’ve got for you,” he said.

  Forlesen looked. It was exactly like the box his watch had come in, save that it was much larger: of red-brown wood that seemed almost black, lined with pinkish-white silk.

  “Want to try her out?” the young man said.

  “No, I don’t.” Forlesen had already guessed who the young man must be, and after a moment he added a question: “Where’s your mother?”

  “Busy,” the young man said. “You know how women are . . .

  Well, to tell the truth, she doesn’t want to come in until it’s over. This lid is neat—watch.” He folded down half the lid. “Like a Dutch door.” He folded it up again. “Don’t you want to try it for size? I’m afraid it’s going to be tight around the shoulders, but it’s got a hell of a good engine.”

  “No,” Forlesen said, “I don’t want to try it out.” Something about the pinkish silk disgusted him. He bent over it to examine it more closely, and the young man took him by the hips and lifted him in as though he were a child, closing the lower half of the lid; it reached to his shirt pockets and effectively pinioned his arms. “Ha, ha,” Forlesen said.

  The young man sniffed. “You don’t think we’d bury you before you’re dead, do you? I just wanted you to try it out, and that was the easiest way. How do you like it?”

  “Get me out of this thing.”

  “In a minute. Is it comfortable? Is it a good fit? It’s costing us quite a bit, you know.”

  “Actually,” Forlesen said, “it’s more comfortable than I had foreseen. The bottom is only thinly padded, but I find the firmness helps my back.”

  “Good, that’s great. Now have you decided about the Explainer?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Didn’t you read your orientation? Everyone’s entitled to an Explainer—in whatever form he chooses—at the end of his life. He—”

  “It seems to me,” Forlesen interrupted, “that it would be more useful at the beginning.”

  “—may be a novelist, aged Ioremaster, national hero, warlock, or actor.”

  “None of those sounds quite right for me,” Forlesen said.

  “Or a theologian, philosopher, priest, or doctor.”

  “I don’t think I like those either.”

  “Well, that’s the end of the menu as far as I know,” his son said. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll send him in and you can talk to him yourself; he’s right outside.”

  “That little fellow in the dark suit?” Forlesen asked. His son, whose head was thrust out the door already, paid no attention.

  After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen’s son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom. “Well, what’s it going to be,” the small man asked, “or is it going to be nothing?”

  “I don’t know,” Forlesen said. He was looking at the weave of the small man’s suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos. “I wish I could talk to my wife.”

  “Your wife is dead,” the small man said. “The kid didn’t want to tell you. We got her laid out in the next room. What’ll it be? Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, national hero, aged loremaster, or novelist?”

  “I don’t know,” Forlesen said again. “I want to feel, you know, that this box is a bed—and yet a ship, a ship that will set me free. And yet . . . It’s been a strange life.”

  “You may have been oppressed by demons,” the small man said. “Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century. Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain.”

  “Those are the explanations?” Forlesen asked.

  “Those are some of them.”

  “I want to know if it’s meant anything,” Forlesen said. “If what I suffered—if it’s been worth it.”

  “No,” the little man said. “Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.”

  The Memory Machine

  Together we must rise to ever higher and higher platitudes.

  —Mayor Daley

  Say No More

  Then several miles to the southeast, an entire section of the country literally blew up, in a fiery eruption that shot a mile into the air. The conclusion, when it reached me, was terrific.

  —Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan

  I Was a Phosphorescent Stringer for the East Village Other

  Once he had awakened, at the sound of great batlike creatures flying overhead; he had seen them swooping low, coming in flat trajectories across the wasteland toward his pit in the earth. But they seemed unaware that he—and the shadow thing—lay in the hole. They defecated thin, phosphorescent stringers that fell glowing through the night and were lost on the plains . . .

  —“The Deathbird” by Harlan Ellison, Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1973

  Sitzmarks in the Sands of Time

  If voyages were to be made from the earth to any of the planets, or even to the moon, the distances are so great that starting from rest as the travelers would do, they would have to attain a high velocity in a very short space of time. … In interplanetary travel, where the travelers start from the earth at a velocity of zero, that is to say from rest, the acceleration must start and must be very rapid, so that the travelers will press, not with weight alone, but with a combination of weight and the force of positive acceleration against the base of the chamber in the projectile, or “ship,” as it may be termed. Now this pressure will be so enormous that, in or* der to reach a planet, or even to reach the moon in any reasonable time, it would probably be sufficient to kill the person, just as he would be killed by a fall—let us say, for instance, from the Washington Monument. On striking the earth, he would be killed by negative acceleration. … So since our readers like interplanetary stories, since they unceasingly ask for them in letters to us, and since there is any amount of science, mechanical, astronomical and other to be gleaned therefrom, we certainly shall be glad to continue to give them, even in face of the fact that we are inclined to think that interplanetary travel may never be attained.

  —“Acceleration in Interplanetary Travel” by T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., Amazing Stories, November 1929

  Radio receivers today are used largely for three types of entertainm
ent—from the receiver owner’s viewpoint. It is used to pick up certain programs which the listener wants to hear. Such programs as dramatic and comedy and news reports; to a lesser extent symphony programs. Second, it is used by housewives, evidently, as a sort of anaesthetic gadget while doing the routine, boring household tasks. The listener’s mind isn’t made so conscious of the dull job. The soap-opera programs are designed to catch that audience. Third, and by far the greatest use for radio, is as background music for some other occupation. Is your set on at the moment, for such a purpose? It may be a bridge game, a magazine or book, or the monthly bills that is in the forefront of your consciousness; the music is a very pleasant and unobtrusive background.

  Of those three functions, television can supply only one. It can’t be unobtrusive; you have to watch it. But you can’t watch it, if you’re doing housework, bills, playing bridge, or reading. And dialogue cast for television use is unintelligible unless you do watch; try following the sense of a motion picture sometime by closing your eyes and listening only to the sound accompaniment. Even the music sounds bad; it was paced to point up and emphasize the action, not to be listened to for itself alone.

  My own hunch is that too few people will buy the expensive, four hundred dollar television receivers to support the commercial advertiser’s very expensive show.

  —“Communication and Noncommunication” by John W. Campbell, Jr., Astounding Science Fiction, June 1945

  Hazardous Offplanet Duty Department (Hubba! Hubba! Division)

  . . Besides, you can see that the ladies hurried to answer the call. Miss McBride’s blond hair is somewhat uncombed and she is not completely dressed. She’s not wearing her . . .”

  “A gentleman wouldn’t notice,” Arthur bandied. “A sneaky gentleman would notice and never tell.”

  “. . . wearing her boots,” Dan finished, smugly.

  —“Earthquake” by William E. Cochrane, Analog, April 1973, p. 25